A Dark Season

Well, I am getting a late start this morning, aren't I? Dave cooked some short ribs last night and I made a pumpkin pie, and those activities combined generated more dishes than our dishwasher could handle. This morning I had to unpack the first load and start the second before I sat down to blog. I hate having to clean the kitchen when I first wake up.

I passed the doorway above on my way home from work last week. I loved those colored lamps in the entrance hall. At this time of year I notice light fixtures, lit windows and that kind of thing because it's almost always dark. I realized last week that I was leaving home in the dark every morning and returning home after dark every evening. It's kind of bizarre to go a full week without seeing your house in daylight!

I should show you my pumpkin pie:

Pretty fab if I do say so myself! I did not make the crust. It's a roll of shortbread pastry dough that I fitted into the pie pan because, at least in my grocery store if not in all of the UK, ready-made pie shells are apparently unheard of. The staff members I asked looked at me as if I had two heads, wanting such a thing.

I was inspired to make the pie because, as with our recent cranberry sauce encounter, we had an ancient can of pureed pumpkin to use up. If not now, when?

It turned out pretty well, though Dave overdid it on the whipped cream! The black specks in the pie are cloves. The recipe called for ground, and we didn't have any pre-ground so I put whole ones into our spice grinder. What emerged was a bit more gravelly than powdery, but it works.

Also yesterday, I downloaded the wildlife cam. It's been a rainy week, and you can see water droplets on many of the passing animals, if not outright rain coming down. High points include:

-- First, Guy Fox and then Q-Tip pass the camera.
-- At 00:28, we hear that weird sound that I thought was an owl, but now I'm just not sure.
-- At 00:33, weather.
-- At 00:42, a photo-bombing pigeon.
-- Then various foxes mill around, each on his or her own, until 02:16 when Blackie the cat huddles beneath our garden bench.
-- At 03:16, Pale Cat crosses the screen then comes right back the other way, huddling watchfully atop the bench.
-- At 03:52, a wet cat (Tabby, I think).
-- At 03:58, a daytime shot of Q-Tip back by the fence, scratching and preparing to jump over. (Not sure why the camera didn't capture his jump. When do these foxes sleep?)
-- At 04:19, Mystery Cat is back, also looking rather damp.

Holiday Overload

This sleepy fox, cozied up to a mug of tea, adorns the window of the paint-your-own-ceramics shop on the high street. A suitably wintry image! I'm not sure how any of our garden foxes would react to a snazzy star-spangled sweater.

Every so often this studio puts unclaimed or rejected work out on the street for people to take home. I usually don't take any of it but it always disappears, so someone does. I did snag a plate not too long ago, bearing the obviously smudged image of a stick-figure family, because I figured I could put it beneath a houseplant.

Yesterday was madly busy. We had a steady stream of high-school science classes coming through the library, picking out their winter reads. Every year the 10th Grade students read a science-related book over the holiday break and report back to their teachers in January with a review. They also give us a little sign with a condensed version of their review which we can post on the shelf next to the book. It's always amusing to see the kids trying to find the smallest, least-threatening-looking book possible. As far as I can tell, that's pretty much their sole criteria, even though we consistently try to explain that a small book about a boring subject is far harder to read than a big book about an interesting one.

At about 1 p.m., the school Christmas tree (which was supposed to arrive on Tuesday morning) was finally delivered, and it lives in the library. So I had to whip that thing into shape. I tested our two strands of lights, and both worked, so I wrapped the tree in the lights and decked it out with ornaments. Some high schoolers, taking pity on me, asked if they could help, which I thought was very kind. And then I turned on the tree and one of the light strands simply will not come on. I have no idea why.

After all that plus a stint in the Lower School, I was ready to go home -- but no! It was time for our annual faculty/staff holiday party! The library was cleared, food and drink brought in, and I stayed for another hour or so chatting to co-workers and mingling. (Dave cleared out before the party.)

And then I had a Christmas panto to attend last night. This is something the school's faculty/staff LGBTQ+ affinity group does every year -- we go to a bawdy gay panto down by Charing Cross. This year's theme was "Beauty and the Beast" and it was quite fun, as usual. Let's just say my new mug would have fit right in.

After all that, I'm feeling a bit shell-shocked this morning. I'm looking forward to a quiet weekend of staying home and reading!

Luna and Cat

I woke up about 3:30 a.m. and went out to the kitchen for water, and noticed light pouring into the living room from the full moon.

The back garden was lit up as well. Plenty of light for fox photography with the garden cam if they came around last night! We'll know this weekend when I download the images from the cam.

And of course I couldn't let such a gorgeous moon go to waste without getting a proper photo of it!

Blogger Mitchell posted a video a few days ago that brought tears to my eyes (in a good way!) when I watched it last night. Have you ever seen videos by Playing for Change, an organization that virtually unites musicians around the world to perform together? I heard about them 15 years ago, after attending one of their concerts with my blog pal Barbara, who some of you might remember from Blogland. (I haven't spoken to Barbara in years, not since she stopped blogging, but I still see her husband on Facebook.) Anyway, Mitchell found a Playing for Change version of "Peace Train" that features Yusuf Islam/Cat Stevens himself as well as many other musicians, and it's very poignant, considering the state of the world today. When I heard that unforgettable voice again it gave me chills. The video is on Mitchell's post here (below the pictures of his adorable cats).

And just for the heck of it, here's a link to my personal favorite Playing for Change video, the Indian folk song "Chanda Mama." Both of these are well worth watching and show that music really does unite us, in the face of all our other differences.

And Vulgar Hilarity Ensued

This woman was in front of me on the escalator as I came home from my Christmas lights expedition on Tuesday night. Someone's been to IKEA!

Now, you know I usually run a family-friendly blog here at Shadows & Light. I try to keep profanity to a minimum, not because I don't use it in real life (I do) but because I'm a believer in being polite. Some people are bothered by four-letter language, and I generally tend to think it's best to try to avoid offending my readers. Or anyone, for that matter.

This is one reason why I'm so mystified by the right-wing's refusal to respect gender identity, for example. If someone says they're a woman or a man, who am I to argue? Isn't it a simple kindness to acknowledge their truth? At a bare minimum, human rights considerations aside, it's the polite thing to do.

And this is one reason I just can't tolerate Donald Trump. He relishes angering people; he draws power from it. A disturbing number of his followers do too. A huge amount of public policy is being made just to "own the libs" and infuriate Democrats. How is that the way to run a country? How is it acceptable to have a leader who declares any segment of the population "garbage"? (Which, by the way, is Nazi-speak in its rawest form.)

So yes, I like to be polite. That ability is part of what makes us human.

But having said all that, I found the funniest thing on my walk to work yesterday morning:

I'm trying to imagine the circumstances that led to this mug being discarded on the street. Was it a gag gift at a "hen do"? Regardless, I sent Dave a picture immediately and we both had a good laugh.

Reader, I kept it.

Probably not something I can use "in polite society," as my mother would have said.

London Christmas Lights

Yesterday after work I followed up on my vague plans to go out and take pictures of holiday lights. When Dave and I were returning from Gatwick Airport on the train over the weekend, I saw that the top of The Shard was lit up with colorful lights for Christmas. I hadn't seen that before, though it may well happen every year, and it made me think I should go check out other Christmas illuminations.

So here's the result -- a four-minute video of Christmas lights, London-style:

It begins on Bond Street, where we check out the decorations on shops including Montblanc, Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Dior. (Don't ask me what the green blob is atop the Dior store because I'm not sure.) We then proceed to Savile Row, the home of high-end tailors, where the lights depict scissors snipping ribbon.

Then on to Regent Street, draped with angels as it was last year, and then to Carnaby Street, which has again used those weird "Skylab" lights. At least this year they're more colorful.

We see an exterior shot of Liberty of London, followed by perpetually-crowded Oxford Street, including a bus offering a Christmas Lights tour! Notice the passengers wearing their Santa hats. Then we take an invisible tube ride to the City, where a bus passes the columned Royal Exchange before we join the hordes on London Bridge, looking out over the river at the illuminated Tower Bridge and the top of The Shard.

Finally, we stop for some mulled wine along the river (yours is virtual!) before taking a look at the Christmas market on the south bank of the Thames. The photo at top shows a pub near the market, beside the HMS Belfast warship.

The music is "Christmastime is Here" by the Vince Guaraldi Trio, taken from the "Charlie Brown Christmas" soundtrack. (Fortunately the copyright holders allow its use on YouTube.)

The Red Ribbon

Here's the scene at the cafe on the corner. Very Christmasy! I really should go out after work and take some pictures of holiday lights. That's perhaps the one good thing about darkness falling at 4:30 p.m. -- we have lots of time in the evening to enjoy light displays!

Yesterday was World AIDS Day, despite the refusal of the Trump Administration to recognize it. I've written before about AIDS and the impact it had on my life as a young gay man. Men of my generation, even if we didn't catch the virus, were indelibly scarred by it. (Men just a couple of years older bore the brunt of the plague, with huge numbers of them dying young.) So yesterday...

...I wore my red ribbon on my lanyard at work, as I always do on December 1. I wonder if the kids even know what it means. I did hear one student talking to the head librarian about a project she's doing on HIV and AIDS, so there is still awareness out there, for which I'm thankful.

Last night I re-read the Barbara Kingsolver essay about the Canary Islands that I saved many years ago, from her book "High Tide in Tucson." It was much as I remembered it -- a very evocative depiction of the landscape and the flora and fauna. But she didn't mention those spiny cacti once, and that was my clearest memory of the whole piece! She focused on the moister, more fog-bound environment of the laurel forests on La Gomera. Funny how the brain deceives. (I have since learned those "cacti" are actually a type of Euphorbia, and thus not cacti at all.)

Petrified Cranberry Sauce

This may look like some semi-tropical scene from Tenerife, but as you know by now, it's just our bird feeder with our resident, noisy parakeets. They and/or the squirrels have figured out how to remove the lid, so that top suet ball always disappears faster than the others. I could try to wire it down but I should really just get a new feeder. That one was here when we moved in and it has certainly done its duty over the past 11-plus years.

Yesterday was very quiet. I did laundry, including Dave's new pink shirt. I had visions of it staining everything else in the load pink but it didn't. I don't think that's really an issue anymore, is it? I think fabric and dye technology has improved beyond that. But I do still separate lights and darks, just like my mother taught me.

I pretty much caught up in Blogland and also managed my media, a never-ending task!

We've had an ancient can of cranberry sauce in the pantry for a while now. I have no idea when we bought it, but it expired in July 2024. Still, canned cranberry sauce won't really go bad, will it? I told Dave I was determined to eat it, and I opened it up and put it in my grandmother's special cranberry sauce dish, just as we always did during the holidays at home. Last night I had it with dinner (chicken) and it's perfectly fine.

And I put up our Christmas lights on the fiddle-leaf fig. This is as good as decorating gets around here. Merry Christmas!

Finally, I downloaded the weekly haul from the Garden Cam. We had very few videos this week, possibly because in the middle of the week I moved the camera to film the patio right outside our back door. I thought it would be interesting to see what critters venture close to the house. Answer: both Pale Cat and Q-Tip.

I first had the camera in the garden, where we see a couple of passing foxes and Pale Cat.
-- At 0:41 we get a peaceful garden scene of a pigeon, a flock of starlings and a squirrel rummaging through the fallen leaves. That lasts about a minute and it's my favorite part of this video.
-- After that, more foxes, including one moving very slowly at 1:45. I can't tell if it's injured or just being cautious and smelling the smells. It looks healthy when standing still.
-- At 2:05 the action moves to the patio, where Pale Cat wanders past.
-- At 2:25 a cautious fox spies the newly relocated camera and clearly doesn't like it.
-- At 2:43 an industrious squirrel buries a hazelnut. (Note to self: dig up nut so it doesn't grow!)
-- At 3:02, a daytime "Loch Ness" view of a passing fox's back, in the middle of the afternoon.

Now I've moved the camera back to the rear of the garden. I'd like to get more evidence of just how many foxes we're dealing with, and that's the only place I've ever obtained footage of two at once.