More Patio Cleanup Amid Slow Inevitability

I took this photo on Hampstead Heath the other day. I believe those are red soldier beetles -- so named because British soldiers, aka "redcoats," used to wear that color.

Dave got launched on his journey to Boston yesterday morning. He was conflicted about going, partly because of Olga's health, but he'll be back on Saturday so it's not a long trip. Meanwhile, I am loving having the house to myself. The first thing I did was clean our end tables, so Dave's pile of debris has been temporarily tamed!

Meanwhile I waited for British Gas to come and do our annual gas inspection. The guy was supposed to show up between 8 a.m. and 12 p.m. He finally rolled up at 12:30, pushing the window a bit, but fortunately I was still home -- I had to get the dog to the vet at 2 p.m.

Getting there was a challenge in itself, even though the vet's office is literally around the corner. Olga has no stamina these days. I had to carry her halfway there and halfway back. The vet listened to her heart and said once again that it sounds fine -- she's convinced Olga doesn't have heart failure. Although Olga looks a little rounder to me, the vet said she isn't accumulating fluid. She did witness Olga's coughing, which she prompted by massaging her throat, and prescribed an anti-inflammatory to treat that. She's going to do an ultrasound Thursday, which doesn't require anesthesia and shouldn't stress Olga out, and perhaps that will reveal what's going on.

I also got some information about having a vet come to our home to provide euthanasia. If we have to go that route -- more "when" than "if" -- I'd like Olga to pass on her bed in the garden, where she spent so many sunny hours.

Of course this is a somber situation, but I am surprisingly calm about it. It's a bit like witnessing my mother's final years, albeit on a smaller scale. By the time my mother died, so much of her personality had already vanished in the fog of dementia that her physical death was easier for me to process. Likewise, much of Olga's energy and vitality have already departed. She seems to be fading by the day, and I know it's not something I can stop or prevent. I do, however, need to understand it, for some reason. I need to know what's going on medically.

I continued my cleanup of the patio by dumping this large, underused pot and replanting our tomato and a toadflax in it. The tomato, of course, is an annual so at the end of summer we'll pull it out and then the toadflax will be there for next year. That tomato was in a small pot and needed more room, so this will make it happy.

I also reorganized the patio to give a little more room to our cafe table, and trimmed and weeded some other stuff here and there.

Here's our white hydrangea, growing in a pot in the garden. I found this plant back in 2022 and it was in sad shape, but it has bounced back beautifully.

In the evenings I'm going to watch movies Dave doesn't want to see. Last night was a repeat viewing of "Condominium," a very '70s tale about coastal construction and hurricanes in Florida. It was a popular TV movie but I don't think it was ever remastered for video distribution or streaming. The version I have -- which I bought as a bootleg DVD about 20 years ago -- is a fuzzy transfer from an old videotape of an Australian TV broadcast. The same version is now on YouTube, minus a chunk of the opening credits, which unfortunately deprives YouTubers of most of the groovy disco theme music. (Part 2 has the credits mostly intact.)

Old Dog Blues

This is what happens when you're sitting in the garden after lunch and wondering, "What would it look like to take a photo through the bottom of my water glass?"

As you can see, I clearly did not have enough to do yesterday. I read an entire New Yorker and part of my current book, Edmund White's exploration of Paris called "The Flâneur." But otherwise I mostly just sat with the dog, who seems to be struggling a bit. I am taking her back to the vet today after all, to get her breathing evaluated and perhaps some medicine to help her breathe easier. Even though the vet said last week that her heart is OK, I'm convinced she's slowly developing heart failure -- she's occasionally coughing and breathing heavily, seems to be retaining some fluid, and doesn't want to move around much. I remember with our other old dog, Ruby, that we got some medicine to make the heart pump more strongly and that did her a world of good, so I'm hoping for the same for Olga.

It's astonishing to me now that we walked all the way through the neighborhood housing estate less than a month ago, because now I can barely get her to walk out the front door. I'm hoping I can get her to the vet without having to carry her. She's a lot of dog to carry.

In a stunningly unfortunate example of bad timing, Dave is leaving this morning for a conference in the USA. He'll be gone all week. We had a talk yesterday about Olga and the fact that I may have to make decisions if she worsens while he's gone, though I think it's unlikely things will get that desperate that quickly. (Knock on wood!) Anyway, he told me to do whatever I have to do.

Ugh.

On a brighter note, I went into town yesterday evening to meet up with some visiting friends, Alan and Greg, who I haven't seen in years. I went to high school with Alan, and aside from our 20th reunion in 2004, I haven't seen him much since graduation in 1984. And I went to college with his husband Greg, who I definitely haven't seen since 1987 or so. Greg and I were involved in the LGBTQ+ student group on campus. It's just a fluke that these two guys I knew independently of each other wound up getting married.

And now they have a 16-year-old son, Derek, who I met for the first time. We had a great dinner full of reminiscing at a Brazilian place in Chinatown -- yes, there's a Brazilian place in Chinatown, for some reason -- and we exchanged stories and memories and probably bored poor Derek to death.

As Sandy Denny sang, "Who knows where the time goes?"

The Patio Table

This is one of my favorite roses in our garden. It starts out bright orange, like this, and after a few days the blossoms gradually fade to a sort of dusky pink. So we wind up with flowers of multiple shades between orange and pink, all on the same bush, before they drop their petals. And the insects like them because the flowers are open with accessible centers.

Yesterday morning, bright and early, after I gave all the houseplants their weekly watering, I decided to assemble our new patio furniture. Remember, it was delivered Friday, in a disturbingly compact box? Well, I opened the box and pulled out all the bits, and there weren't as many as I feared -- basically two chair backs, two seats, four pairs of legs, a tabletop, three table legs and a center brace. And a ridiculous number of nuts, washers, screws and little plastic things you put on top of the bolts so the ends aren't exposed. And a mini wrench and screwdriver. And two cushions.

I spread it all out on the floor in the foyer and went to work.

Olga supervised from a comfortable spot on the dining room carpet.

It took an hour or maybe an hour and a half, but the process went smoothly and with no major gaffes. At the end I wound up with this:

That was yesterday evening, when Dave and I had our French onion soup on the patio for dinner. (Yes, Dave made French onion soup, on a nearly 90º day -- I tried my best not to question the lengthy use of the stove and the oven in such weather, but I did point out that it was an interesting choice. He said he was trying to use up all our surplus onions, so points to him for wasting nothing. It was good.)

Anyway, patio table done, I got to work on some garden projects -- mowing the grass, staking up some plants and trying to widen some of our paths so that we can move around without too much hindrance. Around this time of year I start to get impatient with having to shoulder my way through undergrowth like Henry Stanley. Olga, meanwhile, lazily enjoyed the sun on the grass:

She's lying by my feet now, watching squirrels, as I blog from our garden bench.

Here, by special request, is the "beaded farmyard" as I mentioned yesterday -- sheep, frog and pig. (I guess a frog isn't a typical farmyard resident, at least not in any formal sense, but whatever.) I bought the tiny pig and the frog in Botswana -- the pig was a gift for my father, because he collected them. I reclaimed it after he died.

It's much cooler today, with an expected high of 81º F (or 27º C). I'm going to do my best to catch up on some reading.

Beaded Sheep

I was sitting in the garden on Thursday when this speckled wood butterfly passed through. It fluttered around the roses before settling on our fig tree, and obligingly sat with its wings spread so I could take pictures.

It looks like we have new upstairs neighbors. I don't know anything about them yet -- I've only met the man, and apparently there are (or will eventually be) kids as well. He got some stuff delivered yesterday and the driver left it with us, so I met him when he came to pick it up -- a fortyish guy, nice enough. Strangely, the real estate listing for the flat is still up, though it does say that it's "under offer." Maybe the broker leaves it up for a while just to attract eyes to their other listings.

I would love to know if the Russians are really getting £5,200 a month for it. But of course that's not something one can ask, is it?

It was very warm yesterday -- about 89º F. Today is supposed to be slightly cooler and by next week our highs will be back down in the 70's. I ordered a new patio table and chairs, and they were delivered yesterday in a disturbingly flat box that seems to indicate a lot of assembly is required. I'll probably be working on that today.

When I was near Hampstead Heath on Thursday, I passed a house with a box of stuff sitting outside, free for the taking. Included was this little sheep, made of beads strung on stiff pieces of wire. Of course I grabbed it, because who could resist? Besides, I have a couple of other beaded animals that I got while in Botswana -- a frog and a pig -- and this goes with them quite well. A beaded farmyard!

I finished "The Man with the Golden Arm." Good, but not for the faint-hearted. I'm glad I read it, but literally everything that happens in that book is depressing.

As I was sitting in our garden and typing this post, some small creature ventured behind me -- a squirrel, probably. Olga streaked to the corner of the garden and chased it over the wall, then promptly got very dizzy and staggered back to where I was sitting before awkwardly collapsing on her haunches. She thinks she's very fierce.

Highgate in the Heat

We are supposedly in the middle of a heat wave, but to me it doesn't feel that uncomfortable. It's warm -- about 30º C or 86º F yesterday -- but we've had much worse. I took a walk over to Highgate yesterday and I debated whether or not I should go, given the heat, but it turned out not to be a problem.

I wanted to see a show of paintings by an artist named David Evans at a Highgate art gallery. I read about it in the paper a couple of months ago and made a mental note of it, and I didn't have a chance to follow up on it until now. (The gallery is only open on Thursdays and weekends.)

In the decades before he died in 1988, Evans owned a classical music record store in Kensington and made fanciful and highly detailed watercolors of city life -- nightclubs, concert halls, traffic jams -- as well as landscapes, portraits, drawings and collages. The show is small but I'm glad I went as I loved his large colorful paintings, which seemed both very '60s and timeless. I bought the catalog for £15.

To get to Highgate I took the overground to Hampstead Heath and walked from there, after fortifying myself with a coffee from Starbucks.

I crossed the Heath and walked up Parliament Hill to check out the view. That's looking southeast toward Canary Wharf (L) and the city (R). That view has changed a lot in the 14 years we've lived in London. If you look at the last picture in this post you'll see what it looked like back then -- there was a lot more open space, rather than the wall of buildings we see now.

I also passed that yellow house in the top photo. I was taken by the painter's orange overalls. That road had so much traffic I only had a chance to take two shots and I'm glad that one worked out.

I found this six-spot burnet on knapweed on the Heath -- the first one I've seen this summer.

After checking out the show and wandering up and down the Highgate high street, I walked back across the Heath to home -- about two and a half miles. It felt good to get some exercise and cross something off my list of things to do.

I've been posting so many pictures of Olga sleeping that I thought I'd show you a more lively video. This was yesterday morning, as she sniffed around where the foxes tend to wander in the back of the garden. The old beast still has some bark in her, though as you can see, she is a bit wobbly!

A Better Day

This bug may look intimidating, but it's harmless. It's a hornet-mimic hoverfly (Volucella zonaria), which as its name suggests, makes a career out of looking like a scary hornet. Supposedly that helps keep away predators. It's the biggest hoverfly species in the UK.

Here it is next to another, much smaller type of hoverfly. I've seen this hornet-mimic hoverfly in the garden for several days now, usually around this dusty miller plant (Senecio), but I didn't have my camera handy until yesterday.

I promise I won't turn this blog into daily updates about Olga, but she seemed to have a better day yesterday. We have not scheduled another vet appointment. We got some medication from our vet visit earlier this week that's supposed to help blood flow to her brain, which might help her balance -- so we'll try that first. Despite my desire for more specific diagnostics, I don't want Olga to spend her last days or weeks going back and forth to the vet, if we can help it.

I think we've entered a phase when she's going to have good days and bad days, and that's just how it is.

She spent most of yesterday snoozing in the garden...

...with me either beside her on a blanket or sitting on that bench in the background. I've been reading more of "The Man with the Golden Arm" and it's growing on me. I'm about 160 pages in -- basically halfway through. I have developed an attachment to the characters, which helps, because this is a very character-driven book, as opposed to plot-driven. The more I read it, the more I focus on the people and their motivations instead of the card games and boozing.

Olga's Twilight

Our "Stargazer" lilies are blooming once again. I'm putting "Stargazer" in quotes because, although that's what we've been calling them ever since we planted them many years ago, I'm suddenly not convinced that's what they are. Stargazers are supposed to point upward -- hence the name -- but ours do not. They also don't have any speckles on the petals, which I think are a Stargazer thing. When I search this lily with my "Picture This" plant-identifying app, it says it's Lilium brownii var. viridulum, which seems possible.

This little ant doesn't really care what kind of lily it is, as long as there's sweet sticky stuff on the flower.

Despite my good news yesterday about Olga's checkup, she is still struggling. We took our walk yesterday morning, but then in the afternoon she got kind of agitated and seemed unable to get comfortable, and she kept making strange coughing/panting sounds. A couple of times she got suddenly weak or dizzy and collapsed at my feet. She did the same this morning -- I got her out of bed, she ate some breakfast and came out to the garden and wandered around, did her business, and then suddenly seemed unable to walk further. She lay down abruptly next to where I was sitting and didn't move for ten or fifteen minutes.

I think we're going to take her back to the vet tomorrow. I'd like some more precise diagnostics than I've gotten so far. The vet says her heart and lungs sound fine, but we've had nothing more than a superficial (it seems to me) physical exam. No blood tests, no x-rays. Maybe I'm thinking like an American, but if we're going to make decisions about Olga's care, it would be nice to have more specific information.

The bottom line, though, is that Olga is coming to the end of her life. I understand that much. Of course this isn't a surprise -- she's about 15 years old. It's entirely possible this is all merely old age, in which case we just have to deal with it. We'll take care of her until she seems like she's no longer enjoying herself. On the other hand, if it's something treatable, we need to know so we can address it. Right?

"If I lie with my face in the sun, then I am sunbathing."

I started a book yesterday that I think I might hate -- "The Man with the Golden Arm," by Nelson Algren. It's a famous book from 1949 about drug addiction. I'm about 60 pages in and so far I'm a bit overwhelmed by all the references to card sharps and wise guys and dive bar culture. Everything seems rough and bleak and smoky and gray. I don't know what I expected but I think it may all be too macho for me. I find nothing more boring than cards and gambling, except possibly fishing and auto racing.