Rain and an Old Movie Memory

I take back all my skepticism about yesterday's rain. It turned out to be exactly what we needed -- a full day of steady, soaking drizzle -- almost 16 mm worth, according to our local weather site. It was by far the rainiest day we've had in months. I couldn't even begin to think about going outside until about mid-afternoon, when I spotted this discarded tin while walking Bailey. (I did not try to salvage it!)

Here's where Bailey spent most of her day -- perched on the end of the couch, where she can easily see outside and be entertained (or tormented) by passing wildlife.

I caught up on answering blog comments and read a New Yorker. And I wrestled with yet more demands from my stepmother's bank. They're now arguing that the notary seals and the apostilles have to have the same date, so they want me to go back and re-sign and re-notarize all the beneficiary forms I've already submitted. I'm going to call them today because a) this is bullshit, and even a simple Google search would tell them that a notary seal and an apostille don't need to be completed on the same day to be valid; and b) this imposes a hardship on me because I'd have to spend another £300 (about $400) on notaries, in order to inherit less than $2,000 -- my tiny share of her accounts. It's enough to make a person crazy. I really do believe they're acting in bad faith, and this is a disgraceful way to treat family members who have endured the death of a parent.

On a brighter note, I'm kicking around the idea of transcribing my childhood journals into a private blog -- not for anyone to read, but for me to be able to search when I want to remember something. I did this many years ago for my adult journals, and it helps me rapidly look up memories (like the encounter with Gloria Steinem I related recently). I'd have to edit them pretty heavily because they're full of gibberish and childhood in-jokes between me and my brother that no one else would understand, but it could be done. I took one volume down yesterday and read a few entries. Here's a sample, from when I was 13:

July 2, 1980

Last night I typed a card for the Andeker, which Dad drank on Monday. We also got ready to send off for the cans we need from that guy in Arkansas. We packed up the Fischer's Light and the 16-ounce Pabst Blue Ribbon and a letter telling him we wanted the Old German can and the Boh can. Boh is short for Bohemian, which is the can he's sending us. I also told him about our extra Puerto Rican cans and our extra Andeker. I told him to write back if he's interested. So maybe we'll get a reply! Jim also let me take home the Beer Can Bible to read.

I scoured that dingy bathtub today. What a pain! I never did get all the rust off. I got a lot of it off, though. At least it looks like a bathtub, and not a 16th-Century washtub!

We went to a movie with Mom tonight called "The Empire Strikes Back," which is a "Star Wars" sequel. I even saved my ticket stub! There was one creature in the movie which Mom really liked, named Yoda. He was a Muppet creation, and Frank Oz did the voice. (I knew there was a reason why he sounded like a cross between Fozzie Bear and Grover!) He really fools you, because he looks so real. All the Muppets do, and whenever I watch them, I keep forgetting that. I don't think I'll ever get the fact that Kermit the Frog isn't real through my thick skull. (Good grief, I must really be tired. I just insulted myself!)

A few essential notes, in order for that to make sense:
-- My stepbrother and I, at the time, collected beer cans. We would have our parents buy any unusual beer we spotted in a store, which my dad then wound up drinking before giving us the can. We traded these cans with people around the country as members of the Beer Can Collectors of America (BCCA), and we typed up notecards noting the source, condition and brewery of every can. It may seem like needless work but it taught me to type!

-- The well water where I grew up was heavy in iron and would routinely stain our fixtures, appliances and dishes rust-red.
-- Of course I knew the Muppets weren't real, but my point was that they seem very animated!

And here's the ticket stub for "The Empire Strikes Back." You gotta love the fact that going to the movies in 1980 cost two dollars!

Black Backgrounds

One thing I am learning about myself in retirement is that my natural waking-up time is about 7 a.m. I always thought I was a very early riser -- like 5:30 a.m. or so -- but apparently not! And maybe even this will change over time.

That's one of the cosmos in our garden, above. I've been experimenting with photographing flowers from behind -- a new way to see them. One of my commenters asked several posts back how I get that black background. It's easy -- I place the flower against a shadowy or shady part of the garden, set the exposure for just the flower, and the background naturally stays very dark. I don't even need to adjust it in processing.

Here's the same trick used on our bluebeard (Caryopteris), to less absolute effect. In looking up past pictures of the bluebeard I came across this post -- look how green the garden was in September 2023. So different from this year!

It's raining out there now, actually, though it's a very light rain -- maybe too light to do much. We are still in dire need of several days of good, long, soaking rain.

I spent yesterday morning trimming and neatening plants on the patio. I trimmed The Monster, the next door neighbor's climbing rose, and I cut blackberry out of the rock garden and dying leaves out of Barb the banana. She has mites again, which happens in very dry summers, so she's looking a bit ragged. I have two bags of garden waste sitting out at the curb now, waiting for collection.

I also finished "Our Evenings," Alan Hollinghurst's latest novel. I liked it the least of all Hollinghurst's books, to be honest. I loved his earlier works like "The Swimming Pool Library" and "The Line of Beauty," and I even liked his previous book "The Sparsholt Affair," which seemed to get mixed reviews from some readers. But this one felt dry and rather tedious, all the way to the somewhat abrupt ending.

In the afternoon I took the dog out for a walk. We passed a residential building near the railroad tracks with some remarkable graffiti on the side. HOW did they DO that?! They must have been hanging off the side of the building with ropes. Whether you admire graffiti as an art form or not, you gotta acknowledge the skill required to produce pieces like those -- and to be able to keep the letters uniformly sized and styled at such close range. I believe they say "Leak SMT" and "Alks."

The dog seemed sore yesterday after our long Heath walk on Sunday, and still a bit wobbly on her back legs, poor girl. Doesn't stop her from streaking across the garden after squirrels, though!

Upper-Body Workout

This little garden spider wove an elaborate web among the purple heart plants just inside our back door. I felt a little bad for it, because surely there won't be many passing insects there. (I hope not, anyway!) I was going to move it outside but the next time I looked it was gone. Maybe it made the move on its own. Either that or the dog ate it.

Speaking of the dog, Bailey and I had more adventures on the Heath yesterday, including swimming in the duckweed pond on Sandy Heath. (Well, I didn't -- she did.) That black dot by the big clump of irises in the distance is a labrador retriever who was swimming toward us. As you can see Bailey is on full alert and ready to plunge toward the other dog -- I held her back on her long lead.

Walking her with that lead is a workout. I've been musing lately about going back to the gym, because even though I walk a lot I want to keep my upper body in shape. After yesterday, I'm thinking I don't need the gym at all! I am seriously sore this morning from managing Bailey on that leash!

We visited the old Pitt House gate, also on Sandy Heath...

...and Bailey was constantly patrolling and lunging after squirrels. Things get a bit dicey when she runs into copses like the one above -- the lead can easily get tangled in the trees. When she ran into one especially dense thicket, I took her off the lead for a moment in order to untangle it -- and like a rocket she was gone, chasing squirrels with wild abandon. I ran after her thinking I would never catch her, calling her name (which she ignored), and caught up with her only when she paused at the base of a tree containing a terrified squirrel.

Now we know that she does not come when her name is called -- at least not when there are squirrels around.

A Bird's-Eye View

Another late start to blogging, mostly because I didn't sleep well last night and thus stayed in bed later than usual. I woke up around 1:30 a.m., rolled over and began feeling a sharp pain in my chest -- which of course had me concerned right away. I got out of bed and walked around, and felt fine standing or sitting up, but then when I returned to bed I got the same pain again. I reasoned that it couldn't possibly be my heart, or it would be constant, right? But in an abundance of caution I called the NHS medical advice line, which fortunately for me is a 24-hour operation, and they seemed to believe it wasn't an emergency but they're going to have a doctor call me later today. (Of course, it being the weekend, my regular GP's practice is closed.)

I did eventually go back to sleep, but not before reading the news. I saw that Robin Morgan died -- her ground-breaking anthology "Sisterhood is Powerful" was a popular book among some of my women friends in college. It seems significant that she died just a few days after Gloria Steinem. It's been a tough week for second-wave feminism.

Here's a view of our garden that we don't often see. Our upstairs neighbors, Ian and Sarah, had us over last night for some snacks and drinks on their terrace, so we got a bird's-eye perspective on our growing space. You can see some dry sticks to the right of the bird-bath -- that's one of our big buddleias, which pretty much died in the drought. I cut it back yesterday, even though it's the wrong time of year, in the hopes that it will leaf out again, but we shall see. I think we may have lost it entirely. You can also see the whitish-silvery look of the dahlias, in a row to the left of the central flower bed. They're that color because once again they've become afflicted with powdery mildew. It's just something that seems to happen to them late in the season.

Here's our patio from above. A regular jungle, isn't it? There's the avocado on the left, the tree fern bottom center, the banana top center, a bay tree upper right, the Brugmansia on the patio table in the middle and the neighbor's climbing rose, aka "The Monster," at right.

There really is a patio down there somewhere.

And here's the view to the north out one of their attic skylights, looking up the street. I've never seen any of these perspectives so it was neat to see the neighborhood and the garden from a new angle!

An Anemone and More Bureaucracy

When I was walking Bailey on Thursday we passed a house where someone had thrown away several pink anemone plants, or at least cuttings from them. Why anyone would do this I have no idea, but I broke off a stalk with some flower buds on it and brought it home, and stuck it in some water, and yesterday morning was rewarded with this flower.

Our own anemones are having an off year, partly because of the drought and partly because they've been relentlessly trampled by the dog. In fact, I'm not sure they're all going to survive. But at least we now have this one flower and maybe we'll get a few more. Maybe the stalk will even root, though I doubt it.

Yesterday morning as I walked Bailey we got caught in an absolute downpour, the likes of which I haven't seen around here in a while. It didn't go on long but it really came down -- we got 1.8 mm of rain yesterday and I think it all fell in the span of about ten minutes. Anyway, Bailey and I ran part of the way home and then ducked into a doorway on Finchley Road for shelter and watched passing traffic in the deluge.

Apparently I'm going to have to get back in the habit of carrying around an umbrella, or at least looking at the weather forecast. This is a good thing, though. Maybe our drought is gradually easing.

Then I got a terrible jolt when the mail came. My stepmother's bank sent me a letter outlining the documents I needed to re-submit to claim my portion of her estate, and in addition to everything I've already submitted, including the recent apostilles, they asked for a "US Transfer Certificate" from the IRS. Now, I'd never heard of this -- and when I looked online, it seemed obvious that this document does not apply to my stepmother. It's needed when a US citizen or non-citizen taxpayer dies while living overseas. My stepmother lived and died in Florida! In addition, the IRS clearly says the certificate is not needed if a decedent's estate is being administered in the USA -- as in this case, by my stepsister. So what the heck was this bank talking about?!

I was tied in knots about this all morning, because if I'm required to get this document, it will mean waiting up to 18 months (!) according to the IRS, not to mention notarizing and certifying a whole raft of additional paperwork. And it MAKES NO SENSE. Some idiot at the bank either just looked at my London address and assumed my stepmother died here, or doesn't understand what the Transfer Certificate is for.

Finally, the clock ticked around to afternoon when I could call the bank in the USA, and I did. I explained the situation and the helpful Miriam "put in an expedited ticket" to get the "business office" to re-examine their demand for the Transfer Certificate. I'm supposed to call again next week to get the verdict.

And then we had the whole Blogger commenting situation. Like many of you, I couldn't comment on my own blog and I couldn't comment on anyone else's. I spent a bunch of time clearing my cookies and trying different browsers and my phone and restarting my computer, all to no avail. Eventually it became clear that this problem was bigger than me, so I left a complaint with Blogger, as did a bunch of other people, and these were consolidated into a single thread in the help center which tracked the problem. Now it appears to be fixed, insha'allah.

But bloody hell -- it was one of those days. By the time Dave got home yesterday evening I was in dire need of a martini (or possibly two) and a couple of episodes of "Keeping Up Appearances."

Daily Minutiae and Gloria Steinem

I had a productive morning yesterday. I got my documents for my stepmother's estate sorted out and sent off (again), and I packaged up and returned Dave's oversized clothing from Land's End. It feels good to get those two tasks off my plate.

While out and about I took my new camera and experimented a bit, shooting urban scenes like the one above. That's the shop where the Croatian sausage poster used to hang. Now the windows are covered with gigantic vaping advertisements, which are much less interesting (and hidden when the often-graffitied security gate is down).

Remember the graffiti knight that I posted a couple of days ago? Here's the full piece, which reads ALIEN -- the graffiti writer's street name. I love that little knight, who seems very apropos because Dave and I are now watching "Game of Thrones" (we're on season five).

Later, I went through our bank statements with a fine-toothed comb, just to verify that there's been no funny business other than the Avori transaction I mentioned yesterday -- and there hasn't. There were a bunch of purchases I had to quiz Dave about, and we found one item he bought that never arrived, so he's got to chase that down today. I'm not going to contest the Avori thing. I'm convinced it's something Dave bought that he just doesn't remember.

I teased him that I'm going to take away his bank card. He's way too susceptible to seeing something on social media and ordering it on a whim. He's already famous (in our household) for buying political books that he sees touted on talk shows and then never reading them. Now that extends to t-shirts with quirky phrases, though I can't complain too much because I've been the happy beneficiary of some of those impulse buys ("Rat is Short for Ratthew")! And in his defense, some of what he was buying recently were new clothes for work, and he does need those.

I don't mind if he buys things he's going to use. I just want us to think twice about whether or not we need them, and then to make sure they arrive.

When I walked Bailey to the cemetery I found three of these ceramic florist pots -- the ones on the far right above -- in the rubbish bin, and against my better judgement I brought them home and cleaned them up. I need them like I need a hole in the head, but at the same time they seem too nice to throw away. My pet peeve about these decorative pots is that they don't have drainage holes, so you can't put a plant directly into them. It needs to be in a smaller pot, which then sits inside the planter. They proliferate like crazy. That's just a tiny sample of all the ones we have lying around the house.

I once took a bag of them to our local florist, and he said he couldn't re-use them for plants that he sells, but he agreed to take them for plants he gives to charity. I wonder if he was just reluctant to admit he'd sell them on, but whatever.

I was sorry to see that Gloria Steinem died -- a hero for our age. I'm sure I've mentioned the time I went to Feinstein's, a supper club in New York, with my co-worker Ann and we found ourselves sitting at a table next to Steinem's. Here's the original entry from my journal in March 2004:

An amazing evening! Not only did Ann and I see a great show by Rita Moreno, in which she sang "I'll Be Seeing You" and other great jazz standards, but we were seated at a table next to Marlo Thomas, Elaine May, Gloria Steinem and a fourth woman who looked familiar to both of us but who neither of us could identify. Amazing! A New York moment! Rita looked great, too, in a slinky black and white sleeveless dress -- and she's 72! I had arugula and golden beet salad, red snapper and a rum bread pudding for dessert. Altogether $163 -- but worth every penny!

We later realized the fourth woman was Letty Cottin Pogrebin, another co-founder of Ms. magazine. I think they were all friends with Moreno. There was a blizzard that evening and the club was practically empty, so it seemed like a very intimate celebrity encounter, even though we never spoke to them. Moreno, though, came to our table and chatted with us. She's 94 now!

Addendum: It appears my blog (and possibly all blogs) may not be accepting comments at the moment. This is a widespread problem, based on what I see on Blogger's help forums. I've reported it, as have others. Sorry everyone, and stay tuned!

Legalese

Is it possible to have too many pictures of sunflowers? I say no.

I just woke from the weirdest dream. Somehow Dave and I were going to get married -- and of course we already are, so maybe this was taking place in the past. But I suddenly realized in the dream that I was already married, to a friend from college, and then realized I was also married to a former boyfriend. So I had not one but two husbands already! This was not a good feeling. I felt literally sick at the thought of all the paperwork and legalese I would have to endure to get me out of this fix before I could marry the person I really wanted. And then, thank goodness, I woke up married to the right person after all.

Dreams are so strange. I have noticed that on nights when I don't have a glass of wine or two with dinner, my dreams are more vivid. Or maybe I just remember them better. I didn't drink at all yesterday (given the pub outing the day before), and I think that contributed to my weird dream state. Maybe my REM sleep is better when I'm completely sober.

My dread of legalese may stem from the fact that I'm still wrestling with my stepmother's estate. Remember how I had to get some bank documents notarized a few weeks ago in order to get the bank to release the money I'm entitled to as a beneficiary of her accounts? Well, I submitted the forms and waited, and waited, and waited. I finally called the bank on Tuesday and asked what's up, and they said the notary stamp by itself was not sufficient -- I also needed an apostille (basically a certificate verifying the identity of the notary, as I understand it). So I'm getting that now, but I felt like saying (sarcastically), "Well, thanks for contacting me and telling me that!" My siblings and I have a theory that the bank is making this as difficult as possible so they can hold onto her money as long as possible.

I also called our own bank over a £45 transaction on our account from June that neither Dave nor I recognize. I got them to tell me a little more about it and we still don't recognize it, so I think I'm going to dispute it. It's on Dave's card, which may get cancelled but c'est la vie. I'm surprised it took me this long to notice it but with all our traveling and other excitement this summer I plead distraction. It's from a company called Avori, and there appear to be three such firms -- one focusing on foot and skin care, one on bedding, and one on hair care devices -- and neither of us have any memory or evidence of purchasing anything there. Dave even e-mailed the most likely Avori and they said they have no record of a transaction from him. So that's weird.

It's also weird that there's been no suspicious activity since on our accounts. You would think a scammer, having gotten away with one transaction, would pull more. But that doesn't appear to have happened. I do think it's possible that Dave ordered something online, possibly from a retailer who trades under a different name, and then forgot about it. There's just no way to know for sure.

In the afternoon I took the dog to the cemetery, where we found this mysterious backbone lying in the grass. Finding bones in a cemetery is always disconcerting, but this is clearly from an animal of some type. Of course Bailey promptly tried to roll on top of it and I pulled her back at the last minute, which is why she's rolling off to the side in the photo above. Google tells me the bones are from an ungulate like a sheep or deer. What either would be doing in Hampstead Cemetery is anybody's guess.

We passed this truck on our walk home. Someone didn't plan their lettering very well, did they?

And on Tuesday night, when I was at the concert, Dave sent me this hilarious picture of Bailey crashed out on our couch. She clearly wasn't anxious about my absence!