Meandering Through Mayfair

I was back down in Westminster yesterday, this time to meet up with my friends Chris and Gordon for lunch and do a bit of paperwork. Gordon is one of our referees for citizenship, so like Sally he had to sign a paper attesting that Dave and I are who we claim to be. We got that out of the way and had a good vegan lunch at Mildred's, which is possibly one of the most popular vegan restaurants in London. We got the lunchtime prix fixe menu, which was very good.

Then I went for a wander through Soho and Mayfair, taking photos all the way. I've photographed this dramatic lamp shadow (above) before, way back in 2014. This time a bird flew into the shot and placed itself just so, as if the shadow were some kind of laser beam blasting that pigeon from above.

In Mayfair, echoes of mid-century media at the Time & Life Building, now the home of Hermés. I wonder if the passing teens and 20-somethings know (or care) why the building is called that.

This little pub, the Coach & Horses, used to be crowded on all sides with buildings, but now the ones behind it have been torn down for some grand project or other. It makes the pub seem even more oddly isolated.

At Berkeley Square, home of the famous nightingale, I re-created yet again my photo from April 2000, which I first blogged about and re-created back in 2011. It's hard to believe that more time has elapsed between that blog post and now (14 years) than between the first photo and the post (11 years). The scene hasn't changed much.

I popped in to a Pret and ordered a coffee and some chocolate-covered almonds, and waited with other patrons in a rather disorganized group as the coffees were produced. When the barista called "white Americano" I stepped forward to take it -- not because I am a white Americano but because that really is my usual coffee order -- but she said it was with hot milk and thus belonged to a nattily dressed older gent behind me. I stepped aside and said to him jokingly, "I didn't take a sip from it, I swear."

"I wouldn't have minded if you did," he said to me, rather suggestively. Whoa! Was I hit on by a nattily dressed older gent in Berkeley Square? I believe so.

Hedonism Wines was bursting with springtime color, adorned with huge clusters of tulips, trees of Easter eggs and larger, graffiti-covered eggs down below. As the sign says in the window, "Have an eggcellent day!"

From there I walked to the Bond Street stop, took the Jubilee Line back up to St. John's Wood and stopped at school to scan the documents Gordon and Sally had signed. I uploaded all our supporting docs last night, so now the application is complete except for our "biometric meeting" on April 30. After that, it's just a matter of waiting.

The wisteria around the corner from the school, which I've photographed in years past, is once again in full, flourishing bloom. It smells heavenly.

Back to the Eye

Yesterday I got out for a little adventure in London, thanks to a friend at work and a family with kids at our school. The family wound up with four spare tickets for a river cruise and a visit to the London Eye, and they gave the tickets to my friend and co-worker. He invited me and two more guys along.

I've been to the London Eye several times, but it's been ages. I've just spent about 20 minutes going through old blog posts and trying to figure out when I was last there. I think it was July 2012, when I went twice -- once with Dave's parents and once with our friend Kellee.

So I was due for another visit. But first, the river cruise:

We sat on the top deck of the boat and got a look at sights along the river from the Houses of Parliament to just beyond Tower Bridge. Our helpful guide Jordan pointed everything out and told bad jokes along the way. I wondered if he ever gets sick to death of doing the same spiel over and over, and trying to get a laugh out of foreign tourists who may not even understand everything he's saying. (The older Asian couple sitting next to me clearly had no idea, though the man made a video of the entire journey on his phone.)

I texted another friend and told him what we were doing. "You tourists!" he texted back, with a laughing-face emoji.

The guide insisted that we wave at everyone on the bridges as we passed beneath them, and of course the people on the bridges waved back. This was funny because I'd just been walking over one of those bridges shortly beforehand, and a boat passed beneath me and I pointedly did not wave. What a crank I am. I did wave, a bit half-heartedly, from the boat. When in Rome.

From the boat we walked the short distance -- just a few steps, really -- to the Eye and jumped the queue with our VIP tickets. Soon we were in one of the glass pods making the roughly half-hour circuit around the wheel. I wonder what would happen if someone did lean against those doors? Surely they wouldn't just pop open. I didn't test them.

I made a video to give you the London Eye experience:

There are three clips spliced together. We begin with the Houses of Parliament and pan along the north shore of the river; we then look east toward the City of London and gradually southward to Elephant & Castle and west to show an adjacent pod on the wheel; and finally we pick up at Elephant & Castle again and look west along the river toward Vauxhall before ending back at Parliament and Westminster Bridge.

I paired the footage with a song from my iTunes, "How Do You Feel" by Wave System, which was just the right length. Its copyright holder apparently permits its use on YouTube. I had to put some music with the video to eliminate the conversational chatter within the pod, which was fairly loud because there were several little kids. (Don't lean on the doors, kids!)

Anyway, after this adventure I bade adieu to my friends and walked northward through Trafalgar Square (which was closed off for filming of some kind) and Soho all the way to Baker Street. I passed All Souls' Church (top photo) which was decorated with a special cross for Easter week.

And now, Olga wants a walk of her own!

A Spiny Surprise

I got the surprise of my life yesterday morning while watering our houseplants. Another one of our cacti is blooming -- and this one has never bloomed before! It's the left-hand cactus in this post. What's funny is, I had always imagined that if this cactus ever bloomed, the flowers would be pink. It's like I manifested them.

It's only blooming on the side that faces a sunny window, which is interesting. I feel a little bad that it's putting so much effort into flowers when there are no pollinators around, but I get to enjoy them, at least. (When I crane my neck to see them on the opposite side of the plant!)

I had a busy morning yesterday doing all the predictable things that I do around here -- cleaning the house and mowing the lawn and plant caretaking. I intended to go through our old paperwork and shred some of it, because seriously, we are saving things that are of no use to anyone. I discovered that while fishing around for documents for our citizenship application. But I just didn't have the heart to immediately tackle that project.

I will say this about computers -- it's great to go paperless and have so much stored digitally, as many things are nowadays.

Of course I would never throw away my elementary school annuals, which I came across in my rummaging. Here's my fourth grade class. Can you find me? Hint: I had the biggest forehead in the room.

What's funny is, I still remember many of these kids' names. Not all of them, but many. I don't know who that kid in the second row is with the bowl haircut, looking like Cousin Oliver from "The Brady Bunch." And I don't know why Gary wrote that I have a bad temper. He was a pal so I'm sure it was a joke. Mrs. Herb, my teacher, didn't have her photo taken so she drew herself in, with eyelashes weirdly on the bottom of her eyes.

Oh, and Melissa's last name was not "Mouse," despite being from Florida and thus potentially related to Mickey. I'm not sure she was even in my class -- her photo's not there, in any case.

My tax preparer got back to me with our completed US return yesterday. I looked it over but it was huge -- 50-something pages with worksheets and supplemental material, far bigger than any return I ever prepared myself. That accountant knows how to parse everything properly. I could really only skim through it to make sure it basically made sense, and it did. So I signed it and Dave signed it, and it's been filed and we've paid what we owe (not too much).

Next, we get to do our UK taxes! Woo hoo! (Sarcasm, in case that wasn't clear.)

Dahlias

Yesterday was my appointed day for the dahlias' annual spring reveal. I hauled them all out of the shed where they'd spent the winter, dry in their pots. There are eight of them altogether, and my plan was to repot them so they'd all have fresh soil for this year's growing season.

Unfortunately, I didn't have enough compost to repot them all completely. So I repotted five of them, and the other three I simply took away the top couple of inches of soil and gave them a fresh layer, figuring at least some of the nutrients from the new compost would filter down into the older soil below. It will be interesting to see if it makes a difference as they grow and bloom.

I once again realized that I have too darn many dahlias. Five of them I grew from seed -- I planted a bunch of seeds and that's how many sprouted, so I didn't have much choice in the matter. Another one grew of its own accord in another plant's pot, presumably a seed that somehow got away. The other two I bought as mature plants.

By the way, when you dig up a dormant dahlia, this is what they look like -- a thick knot of tubers. If I did this the way the experts recommend, I'd wash all the soil off that ball, neatly trim away anything shriveled or dead and repot the tubers in entirely fresh dirt. But I'm going the easy route, so I just brushed them off. If I lost a few dahlias it wouldn't kill me.

Here are some things that are blooming at the moment: Our aquilegia (above)...

...a fancy variegated deadnettle...

...and the candytuft, which persists every year despite the fact that Olga wipes her face on it every evening after she eats. (This is a tough plant -- it's one of the few smaller plants in the garden that's been here longer than we have.)

We've had a few failures, though. I already mentioned our struggling tree fern -- the jury's still out on that one. The foam flower (Tiarella), which looked so healthy in its pot last summer, and which I was so proud of having saved from its crowded, overshadowed location in the flowerbed, failed to come up this spring and when I examined the pot it was completely empty. Not sure what happened there.

Dave got launched successfully yesterday morning and he sent me a text last night that he'd landed safely in Michigan -- in Romulus, the township that includes the Detroit airport. Earlier he'd texted me "Jolan tru," which I did not understand at all -- I replied "Covfefe," thinking he'd simply done some sloppy typing. It turns out that he was about to take off on his connecting flight from Minneapolis, and "Jolan tru" is Romulan (as in "Star Trek") for "goodbye." Dave is officially nerdier than I am when it comes to "Star Trek."

I spent yesterday evening watching "All the President's Men," a movie I have seen a hundred times and could watch a hundred more. It makes me nostalgic for journalism, conversations with demanding editors and smart newsroom repartee. My grandfather and my uncle, both staunch Republicans who lived in Washington, hated The Washington Post for its relentless reporting on Nixon and Watergate -- I'm pretty sure my grandfather called it the Pinko Post, or something like that. I wonder what they'd make of Trump if they were alive. Trump's dogged insistence on loyalty isn't so different from Nixon's "enemies list," and his insecurity and paranoia are very Nixonian as well.

Green Goddess

Dave and I went all the way down to Greenwich yesterday, in South London, and yet somehow I managed not to take a single photo until we were back on our street walking home from the tube. This California lilac (Ceanothus) is such a vivid cloud of blue in this front garden, especially against the electric green of the euphorbia and the maple in the background.

So, yes, we ran our errand, in which our friend Sally signed the papers with the annotated and then mysteriously glued photos of us to submit with our citizenship application. I have another meeting with another friend on Wednesday to get his form signed, and then I'll upload everything. From there, it's just a matter of waiting.

I had a fairly lazy morning, sitting in the sun in the garden with Olga. I finished Bob Mortimer's entertaining book "The Satsuma Complex" and read part of a New Yorker. Once again, I'm about six issues behind on those, so some catching up is in order.

Then we hopped on the tube ("Don't hop on the tube -- it's dangerous," Dave would say) and went down to North Greenwich, from which we caught a bus to the Green Goddess pub in Blackheath. Sally and Mike met us there and we marveled that we haven't seen each other in person in TWO YEARS, which is just ridiculous. If you'd asked me I'd have said a year. I had no idea it had been twice that.

(Of course the name of the pub made me think of Green Goddess salad dressing, which I used to love but haven't had in years. I'm not sure it's even a thing in England. My mom used to buy all manner of Wish-Bone salad dressings, bright orange French and dark orange Russian and pale orange Thousand Island, and nowadays Dave and I just use oil and vinegar.)

Anyway, we had a pint and then another pint and discussed all manner of things, from what's new on TV to Trump and Keir Starmer and the politics around transgender issues. One of the bartenders was getting a graduate degree in gender studies so Mike called her over to give her opinions, and the conversation got very involved. Dave, who wasn't drinking because of his Crohn's, looked on gamely while the rest of us got buzzed. We were there about three hours.

And then Dave and I hopped back on a bus ("Don't hop on the bus -- it's dangerous") and came home, where Olga was eagerly awaiting us. She is prone to dizzy spells when she gets up suddenly and runs around with excitement, and she had such a spell in the back garden upon our return, so I had to sit with her for a moment until she calmed down and walked back inside, and then she was totally fine. Old dogs!

This morning, Dave is off to Michigan. He has to be at the airport at 9:30 a.m. and he hasn't even begun to pack. I'll miss him but I'm glad I'm staying home.

Silent Squirrel Spring

I snapped this picture as I left school yesterday afternoon, headed to a pub with Dave and a colleague. The peak of spring! That apartment building behind the trees is the same one I showed at the very beginning of my walking-home video a few weeks ago.

And we are now on Spring Break! Woo hoo! I sort of let it creep up on me, partly because I don't have any big plans. I'm going to hang out with the dog while Dave flies back to the states to work with his sister on clearing out his parents' Michigan house. The parents themselves are staying in Florida and will be advising from afar. I would help them except someone needs to stay with Olga.

Dave is leaving Sunday. Today we have plans to see our friends Sally and Mike, because I have to have Sally sign one of our referee forms for our citizenship application. If I'd known I had to get a physical signature on a piece of paper I'd have chosen someone closer -- Sally and Mike live down in Charlton, which is the other side of the city from us! We surely know several hundred British people between here and there. But I wanted to have at least one referee who wasn't associated with the school and Sally is a good choice in that respect.

This whole process seems a bit retro. We had to get passport photos taken, and I'm to write our names and birth dates on the back of the photos before gluing them to the forms for Sally to sign, one form for each of us. My question, of course, is how will the Home Office know I've written our names on the back of the pictures if they're glued to a form? But that's what the directions say to do, even specifying that I am to use glue -- so that's what I'm doing.

This is a courtyard outside the Lower School library. As I stand at the desk checking books in or out, this is my view. That windowsill used to be covered with potted plants but they've all been removed -- I think they got too messy.

Speaking of which, I brought home one of the library Thanksgiving cactuses that seems to be suffering. It has mealybugs and needs some TLC. Another Spring Break project! I also need to get our dahlias out of the shed and get them going. I want to repot them all in fresh soil.

Dave and I have noticed that we have almost no squirrels this spring. I have no idea why that is. We usually have plenty of them, crashing through the trees, digging up our plants and eating the neighbor's camellias, but I've only seen a few scattered individuals here and there. I wonder if wandering local cats have done them in? Or has a neighbor been waging a squirrel purge? Our squirrels are the invasive gray variety, and killing them is not only legal but sometimes encouraged -- the law only says it must be done humanely. Who knows?

Somewhere Between Easy and Hard

One of our geraniums has an early flower, and I'm seeing lots of buds elsewhere on the plant. There are actually two plants, one grown from a cutting taken from the other, and they both need bigger pots and fresh compost. A project for another day.

More inventory yesterday. I finished the 700s, which is art, music and sports, including one of our most heavily used sections -- graphic novels. There are 5 books missing, four graphic novels and one on sports psychology. The kids do not care about Rembrandt.

As I was scanning, some high school boys were sitting next to me and they asked what I was doing, so I explained inventory and why we do it. They couldn't believe I had to scan every book in the library, but I told them I thought it was fun -- I could let my mind wander as I did this fairly automatic task and there was always a bit of mystery and suspense involved in seeing what had been lost. "As long as I can think about things, I'm never bored," I said.

One of their friends came in later and they told him what I was doing. He said it looked "tedious." Oh well. I guess they are not destined to be librarians.

I got a chuckle when one of them began telling the others about an economics test he'd just taken. He described it as "somewhere between easy and hard."

Some of you asked yesterday about specific Dewey decimal ranges in our collection. Sue in Suffolk wondered what we had in 942.64, which is Suffolk history and geography. As you can see, Sue, we have nada. We go straight from 942.3 (Southwest England) to 942.7 (Northwest England and the Isle of Man). I think this is mostly a matter of cataloguing, though, because we do have books about Sutton Hoo and probably other Suffolk-related topics that are tucked away in other categories.

And Andrew asked about 994, which is geography and history of Australia. Here we do have some success, both with big books for the high school and adult crowd, and skinnier ones for the younger kids.

Last night Dave and I watched another old episode of "Bewitched," from 1964, and who should turn up playing a bit part as an airline stewardess but Raquel Welch! She had one or two lines and never even faced the camera. Talk about a missed opportunity!