Round Rock and Wobbly Dog

Olga, who gets me up at 4:30 every morning in this house with no curtains, has just been out on the deck guarding against foxes. They're all around us at dawn -- I saw one posing on the garden wall a few houses down, and another running across our deck while Olga and I walked on the pebbly beach. Of course I didn't have my camera handy.

That's yesterday's sunrise in the photo above, which gave a pretty good indication what the day's weather would be like:

Despite the sunny skies I stayed inside for much of the morning, reading David Szalay's book "All That Man Is," which I am loving. I read his book "London and the South-East" a few years ago and loved that one too. He's really good at exploring the identities and compulsions of men, for better or worse.

When Dave woke up and started moving around (about 11 a.m.!) I went for a walk on the beach.

I found an almost perfectly spherical pebble. In fact at first I thought it was a musket ball or some similar piece of antiquated ammunition -- but no, just a rock.

I found numerous interesting rocks, in fact. And an empty wine bottle, with no note inside (sadly), which I brought back to the house and put in the trash.

We got good news yesterday afternoon -- the Home Office has approved our citizenship applications. Woo hoo! All we need to do now is attend a swearing-in ceremony, where we plead allegiance to King Charles III and his descendants, and get our citizenship certificates. And then we're done. We never have to worry about visas and biometric residence permits and all that junk ever again. And we can vote!

Of course we'll still be American citizens too. I wouldn't renounce that, as tormented as I am about the direction of American politics these days. As I've said before, we'll only be in trouble if the UK and USA get in a conflict with each other -- which despite Trump's bluster still seems unlikely.

Olga scared us to death yesterday evening. She was climbing down from the couch, which for her always involves a deep stretch, and I think she lost her grip on the smooth floor and stretched a bit too far. When she got her hind legs off the couch she couldn't stand up, and she flopped over and had what looked like a seizure. She went rigid and her eyes shifted rapidly from side to side. She was fine again in about 30 seconds, but I really thought she might be dying right in front of me. Maybe it was a momentary recurrence of her vestibular disease, or she simply got dizzy from all the blood rushing to her head when she over-stretched.

In any case, she seems OK now and as I write this, she saw a fox walk past and ran out onto the deck to challenge it.

See that brown moth on my chair? I found it in the kitchen, tucked into the seam between the refrigerator and freezer doors. Not a very good place for a moth. I captured it and brought it outside, where it sat on my chair for a while before fluttering away. Olga is fascinated by foxes but she couldn't muster any interest in a moth.

This was my view as I had last night's martini and listened to my iTunes. The hummingbird hawk-moth came back again.