A Heath Walk

I felt like I needed to get out of the house yesterday and get some exercise, so I took a long walk on the West Heath, Sandy Heath and Hampstead Heath Extension. It's a route I often took with Olga, so there were canine ghosts around every bend in the path. It made me sad, but I also found myself laughing at memories of how wild she'd get chasing squirrels and running with her Kong tightly gripped in her jaws.

The pond on Sandy Heath was thinly layered with ice, and there were signs warning people not to try to walk on it. Surely no one would be that clueless.

Here's the Pitt House Gateway, where I photographed Olga many times. According to a plaque on the gate, it dates from around 1766, when it was built as an improvement to the residence of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham.

And here's St. Jude on the Hill, a prominent church on the north side of Hampstead Heath Extension.

The weather was cold and wintry but at least it didn't rain on me. I listened to my iTunes and wished the world could be as simple as pop music suggests, when The Mamas and The Papas told us to "go where you wanna go, do what you wanna do, with whoever you wanna do it with."

I passed this house with a blue plaque, which I don't recall ever seeing before -- but it's on a side street I don't often walk so I've probably just missed it. Michael Ventris was an architect and classicist who deciphered Linear B, an ancient Greek script, and then died young in a car crash.

Back home again, I downloaded the videos from the Garden Cam, and what a boring week it was! I got no nighttime videos at all, perhaps because it was so cold that the animals weren't out moving around. (The coldest temperature the camera recorded was 29º F, at 9:20 a.m. on Jan. 4. I'm sure it was colder at night, but if there was no movement to trigger the camera I'd have no record of it.) My daytime videos were mostly pigeons. I had one brief glimpse of Pale Cat and two brief glimpses of a fox, perhaps Q-Tip:

But really, there wasn't even enough to compile into a video. Let's hope the coming week gives us some better footage.

Goretti and Global Madness

Yesterday morning was truly miserable weather-wise. It was cold and rainy, but thank goodness not snowy -- although one of my coworkers said she would have preferred snow to the blustery rain. We got some wind but nothing too severe. I don't know of any downed trees or other damage comparable to what Storm Goretti brought to other parts of England.

I put an extra strap of duct tape around the avocado and hoped for the best.

Tonight is supposed to be our last freezing night for a while. I think I can unwrap the avocado tomorrow and give the poor thing a week or two of fresh air, sunlight and moisture. I'll probably have to wrap it up again before winter is officially over, but coming from Florida, I find this perfectly normal winter gardening. We cover and uncover plants all the time in the American South, depending on what the weather does. Dave finds this rather mysterious and labor-intensive, but that's beause he's from Michigan, where no amount of covering will protect a plant from winter so they don't even bother.

Anyway, I did walk to work despite the weather, mostly because the Jubilee Line wasn't running. I had actually planned to take the tube but walking was forced upon me! (I could have ridden a bus but that takes ages. It's faster to walk.) On the positive side, the parent organization at the school gave us all hot chocolate when we arrived.

Bonus points to the first person who can figure out what this is!

I feel like I should be writing something about the madness engulfing the USA's current government, but I'm just not sure what to say except this is NOT normal! And Americans can't allow it to become normal. This period of aggression against our allies, violence against our own citizens and others who are legally entitled to reside in the USA, international land and resource grabs, and glorified toxic masculinity is an outlier. We just have to get through it and survive it, which is not a foregone conclusion, and then we have an opportunity to right the ship. To the government and people of Denmark and Greenland and the rest of our NATO allies, I humbly apologize as an American citizen for my country treating you so awfully. I don't think this will last forever. Just treat us like we have gone temporarily insane -- keep your distance, try to avoid our flailing limbs and ravening jaws, and try not to take too much offense at the outbursts we seem unable to control.

The thing I don't understand about Trump's rhetoric on Greenland is, America already controls it -- jointly, through NATO. We (and Europe) are already responsible for its defense, there's an American military base there, and we are in a position to negotiate the use of its natural resources as needed. What does occupying it achieve?

As for the murder of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, it reminds me of the Kent State shooting in Ohio in 1970. Harmless protesters and trigger-happy, nervous gunmen are never a good mix, and the ICE agents shouldn't be there in the first place. Who are these guys who work for ICE? Who could do that in good conscience?

Nothing Much Yet

We are supposedly in the midst of Storm Goretti, which is wreaking havoc elsewhere in England but doesn't seem to be doing much here. We're getting some wind, and I was worried about the avocado's big fabric "bubble" and whether it would be shredded, but in its protected location on the patio it's only slightly rocking. Later this morning snow is possible but I'm not seeing any yet.

The artwork above is on the window of an estate agent's office on the high street, in this building:

I noticed before Christmas that they hadn't yet put out their annual winter lights, but now they're up, so I  guess they finally got around to it. Better late than never, right?

Starlings

I remember wondering in the past if starlings migrate, and here's the answer. Not entirely! We still have some hanging around in our garden, though they seem fewer than in summer. I don't see the starling squabbles on the bird feeder that I see in warmer months.

According to a quick Google check, starlings in the UK and in warmer parts of Europe tend to stay put, while starlings from colder areas like Scandinavia and Russia migrate south. They are a "partially migratory" species.

So there you have it. I knew that was keeping you up at night.

Not much happened yesterday, aside from being super-busy at work. We've had lots of books coming back and I've had old displays to take down and new ones to put up, just to get past all the Christmas/holiday stuff.

I had to abandon my walk to work yesterday morning because the sidewalk was so icy and slippery. I found my feet sliding around a few times and though I didn't fall, I also didn't want to take the risk. I hopped onto the tube about a third of the way to school, but I did walk home last night after the ice had melted.

Free boots, anyone? With a sort of icy castle/princess theme?

The Weather Warms

This was the sky yesterday morning as I prepared to go to work. It was still cold -- about 22º F (or -5.6º C) -- but you can see a thin layer of clouds beginning to drift past the moon. Those clouds built up over the next few hours until we had snow right around lunchtime.

Fortunately, as the clouds increased, it got warmer, so "Operation Guacamole" began to wind down. When I went to work I reluctantly left the heater running inside the avocado's shroud, because of the extreme chill, and all morning I had visions of the house burning down in my absence. But I came home at lunch and disconnected all the electrics, wound up the extension cord, and left the avocado covered but without supplemental heat. The snowfall was minor -- maybe half a centimeter -- and melted quickly, and it didn't freeze last night. I think we've passed the critical period. All the low temperatures in the coming week are in the 30s, though some hover right around freezing. With more snow possible, I'll leave the shroud on the tree.

Blogger Meike made an interesting observation in the comments yesterday -- that my attention to the avocado might be "a bit of an Olga replacement, caring for a tree like you did for your dog." There may indeed be some transference going on there, but I also think, as Ms. Moon said, protecting the tree simply became a challenge for me. I enjoyed trying to figure it out.

Remember the envelope of photo negatives I retrieved from my stepmother's house -- the ones labeled "Stephen's pictures"? Well, I got them scanned, and here are some of the results. That's my stepbrother, above, in the living room of the apartment where he lived before his mom married my dad. It would have been 1975 or so. I see Phoebe Snow's first album leaning up against the record cabinet, and that came out in 1974, which helps date the picture. And of course Jim is giving us "Fonz" thumbs, so we know it's from the era of "Happy Days."

Here's my stepmother's mother and grandmother, whose family nickname I cannot for the life of me figure out how to spell. It's pronounced like "yeah," the informal word for yes, but repeated twice with Ms replacing the letter Y. So "Meahmeah," or something close to that. That's my stepsister on the floor to the right.

Here's the real mystery -- my stepsister on the beach with some man who none of us can identify. Even my stepmother said she doesn't know who he is. As my stepbrother said, "It was the '70s, when rando hairy guys in Speedos could jump into any picture."

Anyway, although they are labeled "Stephen's pictures," I'm certain I didn't take that last one, and I doubt I took any of them. Maybe my stepmother just assumed they were mine because the negative format matched my camera. But they are from right around the time when I first met my step-family, and I visited the apartments in both of those first two pictures.

Remember how I pledged to do "Dry January"? Well, between running "Operation Guacamole" and having a very busy day at work, I was in sore need of a glass of red wine last night. Let's call it "Slightly Damp January."

Crystal Blue Skies and Aging Celebrities

Here's how it looked on the St. John's Wood High Street yesterday around lunchtime, when I went to Snappy Snaps to drop off some negatives to be scanned. I was captivated by all that bright reflected light on the pavement. Our skies have been crystal clear for several days, which is why it's been so cold -- no insulating layer of cloud cover. That's supposed to change today, when we enter a period of cloudiness, rain and possible snow.

The sun has been wonderful, even though it's hardly been sunbathing weather.

These cranes are part of the St. John's Wood Square development, which is going up behind these buildings. I've mentioned it before here and here -- it's on the site of an old military barracks and stable, which have been torn down.

The negatives I'm having scanned are from an envelope I found at my stepmother's labeled "Stephen's pictures." I don't remember taking them but they match the film format of my old camera, so they could be mine. They appear to be pictures taken at my stepmother's old apartment in Tampa, where she lived when she met and married my father -- probably from 1975 or early '76.

With these clear skies and low temperatures, my domestic engineering campaign known as "Operation Guacamole" has been underway at full capacity. It's 22º F out there right now (-5.5º C) and has been for several hours -- and will be for several more. This is a killing freeze. But the chicken-coop heater is chugging away inside the avocado's shroud, given an extra boost by the halogen lamp, and the temperature inside the wrapping is allegedly somewhere 50º F and 66º  F, at least according to the readout on the heater. I'm skeptical of the accuracy of that readout, and I'm sure it's much colder in the farther reaches of the shroud, but at least it's not freezing in there.

The next step is preparing for snow. Last night I taped panels of bubble wrap between the layers of the shroud over the parts of the tree where snow is likely to settle. This is just an extra step to prevent snow from contacting the leaves. On the highest parts of the tree I had to tape the panels on the outside, and even then it was quite a clumsy job because even standing on a chair I can't reach the top of the avocado. But I did my best.

At night it glows, illuminating the living room. It's not unpleasant -- kind of like a weird garden sculpture. By the time precipitation comes the air temperature should be above freezing, so I'll disconnect and remove all the electrics for safety.

Honestly. I am insane.

On another topic: Five years ago today, I did a post called "Who's Still Alive?" in which I discussed aging show-business figures. I named 17 of the oldest I could come up with. In the five years since, all those people have died except four: Eva Marie Saint, who is now 101; Dick Van Dyke, who is 100; Mel Brooks, who is 99; and the relatively youthful Tina Louise, who is 91. (Tina was included mainly for humor's sake, because I posted about her early in my blogging career and that post got a lot of hits. I pledged to mention Tina Louise every day, and for a few days thereafter I did!)

Ravenous Squirrels and a Toasty Tree

This photo may not be very clear. What I'm trying to show is two different squirrels simultaneously hanging upside down from two different bird feeders, one to the right in the sun and one to the left in the shade, way back by the garden shed. Believe it or not, we do also successfully feed birds, but our squirrels are ravenous.

Here are some close-ups:

Little monsters!

I know the question on the tip of all your tongues, though, is did my chicken-coop warmer arrive? Is the avocado tree still struggling in the icy grip of winter or is it toasty and tropical in its fabric shroud?

I am happy to report that the warmer is indeed here and seems to be functioning well. It arrived in a box marked entirely with Chinese characters, thus betraying its origins, but fortunately the directions inside were in English. There really aren't many directions. Plug in, turn on.

Here it is hanging from the tree, inside the shroud. It's basically just a miniature fan and a heating coil. Although this angle makes it look like the heater is nestled among the leaves, it's actually hanging about a foot below them. It emits a gentle heat -- the coil never glows. When I tested it yesterday evening, the temperature inside the shroud rose to about 20 degrees warmer than the outside air.

So I'd call that a success, as long as it doesn't burn the house down. (I'll unplug it before we go to work. I think the tree can survive with no extra heat through the day, when the exterior temperatures will creep above freezing.)

What a production, right?

Otherwise, yesterday was uneventful. I stayed inside and read about the Lusitania, and read blogs, and scanned some family photos that I retrieved from my stepmother's house. Here I am lighting birthday candles:

There are nine candles on that cake, but I look older than nine in the picture, don't I? Maybe it's not my cake. Why would I be lighting my own birthday candles? If the cake belonged to my younger brother or sister, I'd be 12, which seems more likely -- in fact I'm not sure construction on that house had even been finished by my ninth birthday. I do remember that shirt -- I think it was a hand-me-down from my stepbrother but I liked it, presaging my adult enthusiasm for shirts with colorful prints.

And now, winter break has come to an end. Off to work!