A Final Farewell

Yesterday was the end-of-the-year luncheon at the school where I worked until mid-April. It's a tradition at these annual luncheons to say farewell to staff and faculty who are leaving, and people who have worked there more than 10 years have the option to have a short speech given in their honor, and to make remarks themselves.

Some of the 30-plus people who left this year chose not to attend, but I wanted an opportunity to say goodbye to everyone so I went. I sat with my librarian pals and when my name was called, I marched up to the stage and got my engraved tankard, which I'm sure I will never use. I worked there 14 years so I could have had a speech, but I chose not to, and I didn't make one, either. I didn't want to make everyone sit there and endure reminiscences about my career. But I did wave from the stage and say thanks and I think that was enough. Less is more.

I also visited the library for the first time since I left. There have indeed been a lot of changes, and more are coming, because at least one of the librarians told me she's not happy with the current shelf organization. I could have adapted if we'd done all this when I was there, but I'm happy not to have to deal with it. I still feel a sense of ownership over the space. I found myself walking around, picking up bits of paper and neatening things. (I must say, the person who took the job in my stead doesn't appear as meticulous as I am, and this makes me secretly happy, because I am an egotistical bitch and I want to be missed.)

On my way home I passed a planter filled with violas (above). This planter, outside a shop on a street where I used to walk Olga, has historically been a deathtrap for plants. It gets baked by the sun and it's infrequently watered. But the violas look like they're prospering. They're tough plants.

I found more cat art on my way home.

Here, with that tadpole-like graffiti I've been seeing around the neighborhood.

And then there was this...

...a dose of realism to go with the cartoons!

Anyway, by the time I got home I was exhausted so I'm once again behind on blogland but I'll catch up today.

Birds and More Dumpster-Diving

I bought some "robin insect mix" bird food at Waitrose and the birds are crazy for it. It's a mixture of seed and mealworms, and it seems to have an advantage over the suet balls in that the bigger birds -- pigeons and parakeets -- don't monopolize the feeders like they do with suet. The little birds come in swarms and though they throw a lot of the seeds on the ground, the pigeons stay below to mop them up, so they get fed too.

I filled that entire feeder and it was empty by the end of the day. And the lid stayed on, so squirrels weren't to blame! I saw lots of coal tits, blue tits, great tits and robins. I even made a video so you could see how busy it was:

It's a bit shaky, for which I apologize -- I took it from a distance using my big camera and zoom lens, and that thing is heavy, and it makes even the slightest inadvertent quiver look like an earthquake. (Here's a stabilized version if the shaking bothers you. I don't care for it because the stabilizing software gives the video a shimmery effect, but at least it's not moving around as much.)

It was also rainy and downright cold yesterday. I went out at 2 p.m., taking my neighbors' cast-offs to the charity shop, and it was 56º F (or 13º C) on the high street. The low at night was supposed to be 49º F (or 9º C). Is it winter?! I'd put away all our jackets and blankets and we've had to take some of them out again. It's supposedly going to warm up over the next few days and I'm hoping that's true.

I confess I did survey our trash bags to see what else the neighbors discarded in their move. I retrieved some new-looking clothing, a couple of plastic and glass refrigerator containers that I can use for my slide project, and a few other odds and ends. Any bags containing food or kitchen debris I just closed right back up again. Now I can sleep soundly knowing what's going out in the trash really is trash.

Of course, just as I pulled the bags from the bins and opened them up, someone drove up in a blue minivan and went into the apartment above us -- not the neighbor moving out, but perhaps the one moving in? I said hello as he passed. Way to make a great impression, right?!

Dumpster-Diving, Hungry Foxes and a Huge Cat

Our passionflowers are awakening from their winter slumber. The first blossom appeared the other day and there are plenty more buds. This vine really needs a trim job. Frankly I'm impressed it survives at all, since it's crammed into the same pot as our olive tree (where it grew of its own accord from a seed).

Yesterday I took out the trash and found a bunch of stuff in the bin, apparently discarded by our departing upstairs neighbors. Some of it was in a nice reusable fabric bag from John Lewis, so I grabbed it and brought it inside to salvage the bag. I found another reusable Waitrose bag and some rather fancy clothing -- pleather pants, a heavy pleated skirt, a jacket, some trainers (running shoes), even some earrings in a red box from Valentino. Who throws away earrings?! I couldn't put all that stuff back in the trash, so I folded it up and put it in a bag for the charity shop.

Also...

...a perfectly good Raggedy Andy. I don't really want a Raggedy Andy for myself, so right now he's in the charity bag too. I did wash him to brighten him up and I think he may find another home.

I shudder to think what's in the other trash bags in our bins, but I'm not going to dig through them too. Let's maintain some semblance of dignity.

I keep wondering what will happen if I take that stuff to the charity shop and it appears in the window, and the neighbors walk past and see it. Would they be surprised? Would they be angry? Is it a gross violation of their privacy for me to pull their stuff out of the trash and try to give it a second life? Hmmmm...the ethics of dumpster-diving.

I realized yesterday that Dave's birthday is coming right up in 11 days. Yikes! I have some ideas for things to get him but I haven't moved on any of it and I guess I need to do that. I was going to make us a dinner reservation but when I asked him about it last night he seemed unenthusiastic about going out. This is a bit of a surprise, coming from him, but it may stem from his recent medication changes and the fact that he hasn't been feeling all that great. I told him to tell me if he wants to move ahead on that and I'll arrange something.

Maybe I could give him Raggedy Andy?

(That's a joke.)

I cobbled together another wildlife video with the almost two weeks' worth of footage I've collected. We start with some nice daytime images of one of our foxes, including at 0:14 where it is clearly hunting. (And it ate something, so whatever it hunted it apparently caught!)

-- At 0:56, Pale Cat walks by.
-- At 1:09, a fox gives us a quick drive-by.
-- At 1:17, two little bouncy birds. (Dunnocks?)
-- At 1:25, I put down some pork chop trimmings for the foxes.
-- A couple of hours later, at 1:36, Crooked Tail shows up and spends the next 15 minutes eating the pork. (Don't worry, I condensed the footage so you don't have to watch all the chewing, which isn't all that interesting.) By the way, sorry this part of the video is so dark. That branch in front of the camera was reflecting infrared light back at the lens. I trimmed it the next day and the images got much better.
-- At 3:51, the next night, the foxes are back, first Q-Tip and then Crooked Tail.
-- At 4:17, who is this cat?! I've never seen this creature before. It's huge. Is it pregnant or merely overweight? Henceforth to be known as Huge Cat.
-- At 4:39, an amusingly hyperactive squirrel.
-- At 5:11, the proverbial early bird. (Not getting a worm.)
-- At 5:24, GET OFF THE CAMERA!
-- At 5:35, a little bird lands and spreads its wings to sunbathe. Another bird shows up and they have quite a violent tussle!
-- At 5:50, another treat for the foxes, fish skin this time.
-- At 6:01, an hour and a half later, Crooked Tail shows up and eats it.
-- At 7:02, Sharpie shows up but the fish skin is long gone.
-- At 7:54, Huge Cat is back, also entranced by the smell of the fish.
-- At 8:28, a quick drive-by from Q-Tip.
-- At 8:43, more spazz squirrels.

Tiny Dramas All Around

In the garden yesterday, I noticed that a minuscule blossom from our olive tree had fallen into the middle of a seed head on the clematis. That's a design worthy of a jeweler, isn't it? Or a fireworks display.

Dave wasn't feeling well yesterday so he stayed home from work. The school year is basically over anyway -- his last classes were Monday -- so "work" at this point is just a matter of tidying up the department and filing and that kind of thing. Instead he stayed home and camped out in his chair. He plans to go in today.

In the morning I heard a lot of thumping around above us and on the stairs and realized our upstairs neighbor is moving out of the Russians' flat. Apparently his family is back in Israel so he's downsizing to a smaller flat closer to his office. I'm sorry to see him go because he's been a terrific neighbor, and I told him so. He said another family is scheduled to move in at the beginning of July. We'll see what that's like.

In the afternoon I took a long walk and spent some time looking at the bugs in the butterfly garden at the cemetery:

You'll see some thick-legged flower beetles, Oedemera nobilis, which I have often likened on this blog to David Bowie in his Aladdin Sane costume. And at 0:14, if you look at the left-hand flower, you'll see a white crab spider (Misumena vatia) that has grabbed some poor fly, or possibly two poor flies. I left the natural sound in the video, so you'll hear birdcalls and wind as well as the shouts of some teams on the athletic field adjacent to the cemetery. Summer sounds!

I didn't see any butterflies in the butterfly garden, oddly, but I did find this Angle Shades moth (Phlogophora meticulosa) in our living room yesterday morning. Maybe it flew in when we had the light on the night before. I gently put it outside on a buddleia. Hopefully it promptly moved where it would be better camouflaged.

Dahlias and a Rodent Houdini

Our first dahlia blossom of the year has appeared -- one of the "Bishop's Children" variety. It was a race between that one and this:

Remember how I said the "Iron in the Fire" dahlia appeared to have died over the winter? Well, I think that (above) is "Iron in the Fire," which means the dahlia that died was actually the purple one -- "Dalaya Dark Aruna." (You can see them both here.) I'm not broken-hearted either way, and I guess we won't know for sure until the flower opens, but that bud sure looks more like an orange flower than a purple one.

I spent yesterday almost entirely indoors. It poured rain in the morning, which was fantastic. It's cooler out there than I'd like it to be but I'm so happy for the moisture. I stayed on the couch reading about Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee, and in the afternoon I watched "A Summer Place," which is definitely a melodrama but better than I remember. I learned that the real-life house used in the film -- which was in Monterey, California, and not Maine as specified in the plot -- burned down last year. A shame.

Apropos of nothing, here's a quote I came across yesterday from author Michael Chabon, who wrote "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh" and "Wonder Boys" and "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" and "Telegraph Avenue," all of which I enjoyed:

"Every morning I wake up and in the seconds before I turn my phone on to see what the latest news is, I have this boundless sense of optimism and hope that this is the day that he's going to have a massive stroke, and, you know, be carted out of the White House on a gurney."

Let's just say that struck home.

And here's the sight that greeted me when I looked out the window yesterday afternoon. I don't know if you can see what's going on there, but that squirrel is head-down in the plastic interior tube of that bird feeder. Having emptied the peanut feeder, Houdini-squirrel found a way to unlock the lid of this one, which is supposed to be squirrel resistant. I can't turn my back for a minute!

A Model World

I haven't said much about my slide project lately, except that it's continuing. Here's a more thorough update: I've finished scanning my third bag of loose slides, the one on the left in this photo, and I've just started sorting the loose slides in the green middle bag. Then there are the boxes to go through. I'm trying to devise a way to consolidate those boxed slides while not mixing them together or allowing them to lose their context, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, yesterday I came across multiple slides of something that looked like an amusement park of miniatures. Above you can see a couple of rocket launchpads and lots of little vehicles leading up to and around them. For a sense of scale, there's a person standing behind and to the left of the rockets -- you can see he (and the buildings behind him) are much larger.

The sign on the right-hand building in the background says "Børneteater," which means Children's Theater in Danish. So that gives us a hint where we are.

These slides were all mixed in with a bunch of others, so as I came across them I set them aside in a special pile, and soon found that I had a dozen. They're from 1969.

When I looked more closely, it became obvious that these aren't just miniatures -- they're miniatures made with Legos! Yes, these photos do indeed show the first Legoland amusement park, the year after it opened in Billund, Denmark, in 1968.

The photos vary in quality. It took me a moment to figure out what I'm looking at here -- not a real ship out a window, but a Lego ship (a model of a ferry named the Winston Churchill) in a display case.

This is a model of Marselisborg Palace in Aarhus, Denmark, the summer home of the Danish royal family.

There's a model city, complete with a church with a wedding in progress -- you can see the little Lego people standing in the doorway.

There's a city of the future, featuring architecture worthy of the Jetsons.

And there's a sort of Western-themed area called "Legoredo," which despite the name does not appear to be made with Legos.

The photo quality is dubious overall, but it's nice to be able to add these images to the public record of the history of Legoland.

This Lego portrait, like the ship above, was apparently housed indoors and the photo didn't work out too well. The slide is also significantly discolored. But who knows if there are any images of this portrait elsewhere in the world? I might have the only one! (Google can't find any others, at least.)

Here's a fun short film about Legoland made by British Pathé studios in 1968, the year before all these pictures were taken. You'll see a lot of the same constructions depicted above and how they were made -- not to mention an "American Indian" in full feathered headdress, presumably in Legoredo.

I'm not a huge devotee of Legos, but I still found all this interesting.

Squirrel-Proof

Dave and I have recently marveled at how quickly the peanuts disappear in our "squirrel-proof" peanut feeder, and now you can see why. Turns out, it's not squirrel-proof at all -- at least not to a young, smallish squirrel.

As you can see, I've already had to wire on the lid because otherwise the squirrels will unscrew it.

Here's the escape:

You don't suppose it will ever get stuck in there, do you? I'm not sure how I would solve that problem.

We're reconsidering all our bird feeders -- both their placement and their structure. I'm putting out fewer suet balls, even though the birds love them, because they bring rodents, and I took one feeder down entirely because it got mobbed by pigeons. The others get mobbed by pigeons too, but they're built in such a way that the smaller birds also enjoy them.

I spent yesterday chilling at home. It felt so good, after such a busy week, to lie on the couch and do nothing. I got all my pictures organized and archived and I started a new book, "Dream Lovers," a biography of Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee written about 30 years ago by their son. I have no idea what possessed me to buy this book. I read about it somewhere -- probably around the time Dee died in February 2025 -- and it sounded interesting. I have a soft spot for big, colorful '50s and '60s melodramas, like "Imitation of Life" and "Peyton Place," and of course Dee and Troy Donahue in "A Summer Place." Maybe this will inspire me to watch "A Summer Place" again. I haven't seen it since we lived in New Jersey many moons ago. Probably not the best use of my time, but hey, I'm retired now!