FlorAqua in Six Minutes

Before I get going with my post today, I want to say to all my commenters that I am reading every single one of your comments, and I apologize for not responding or acknowledging them individually. It's just too busy around here and I don't have internet unless I'm at Dunkin' Donuts! (Which, as Catalyst pointed out the other day, is now called just Dunkin'.) But by all means keep them coming, because they provide a little morsel of normalcy in this bizarre holiday season. (More on that in a moment.)

Yesterday my brother wanted to take his daughters to The Florida Aquarium, a somewhat exotic outing for them since they live in Jacksonville and don't get to visit it regularly. I'm not sure Jacksonville has anything comparable. And although I've been to the aquarium it's been at least a decade, if not two, so it sounded exotic to me too. Dave and I decided to tag along.

Here's my speedy (yet hopefully peaceful) six-minute version of our visit:

It's a little like a screen saver, isn't it? I don't know the names of all the fish, or didn't make note of them, but we start with an alligator snapping turtle from beneath, followed by a tank of long-nosed Florida gar, an alligator, an otter and a couple of roseate spoonbills. (The sound effects are from Apple, by the way -- I had to put new sound over the video or you'd just hear the racket of dozens of people talking. I used jungle sounds for the first segment, which covers birds and creatures of fresh-water wetlands, and then ocean waves for the rest.)

Other notable creatures include one of the luckiest spiny Florida lobsters in the world at 1:55; a couple of scorpionfish at 2:08; a tank of red-saddled anthias at 2:27, with a spotted garden eel watching cautiously from the sand; a big hogfish at 2:49; paddlefish at 3:42; archerfish at 3:59; and lionfish casting dramatic shadows at 4:52.

So it was a fun visit, and my brother heads back to Jacksonville with his family today.

Meanwhile, Dave agreed to cook last night for my stepsister, her husband and my stepmother. We stopped at Publix ("where shopping is a pleasure" -- really!) and picked up some ingredients for beef bourguignon, which he put together last night. It was delicious.

Unfortunately -- and this is where things get bizarre -- my 81-year-old stepmother has been showing signs of some health issues for the past several days. Last night it became apparent that she needed to see a doctor, and sooner rather than later. So right after dinner we popped her in the car and took her to the emergency room. She has been admitted to the hospital for some tests and treatments, so that has cast a bit of a pall over our remaining family togetherness. I got about four hours of sleep, I think -- partly owing to continuing jet-lag -- and my poor stepsister and her husband probably got even less.

I also heard that my New York photography pal Allan Ludwig has died, which I'm sorry about. He and I were part of a Flickr group that used to photograph graffiti and street art in New York City. My Flickr account is still full of pictures from that time, if you go back to its earliest years. Here's a photo from 2007 of some of our Flickr group, with Allan and me in the front row. I didn't know until I read his obituary that he'd written a Pulitzer-nominated book! Hidden talents are all around us.

A Day in Pictures

Dave and I got moving early yesterday before the rest of my family was up and about (since we're five hours ahead of everyone in terms of internal biology). We went to the Three Coins Diner, a favorite breakfast spot of mine that I've mentioned on the blog before.

Here's Dave about to go inside, those three fluffy pancakes calling his name. One good thing about the Three Coins is we never have to wonder whether or not it's open -- because it always is.

This guy sits beside the cash register. Very old Tampa, with its cigar-industry references. Cuesta-Rey cigars used to be made in Tampa.

After his pancakes and my broccoli-cheese omelette, we headed back to Lutz, passing this ridiculously colorful building on the way. How could I not stop for pictures?

Talk about positive energy! I think it's a screen-printing company.

Back at my stepmother's, we were met by my brother and his family, who drove down from Jacksonville and are staying at a hotel downtown. All of us spent the day together, chatting and exploring the docks and lakefront. We got lunch from the Publix deli and ordered pizzas for dinner. There's not a whole lot of cooking going on this Christmas. I'm not even sure my family is having a Christmas meal -- my stepsister and her husband are planning a party instead. I think Dave and I are on the fence about whether we want to stay for that or head down to see his parents in Bradenton.

Elvis, my brother-in-law and stepsister's cat, is indifferent...

...as is his companion, Ozzy. They are the softest, plushest cats I've ever encountered in my life!

Sunshine State

Well, here I am, safe and sound on the other side of the Atlantic. Above you see the view out my window as we flew over the Florida coast at Cape Canaveral. That's the Kennedy Space Center directly below, where the Apollo moon missions used to blaze upward and hold the country spellbound, where Challenger met its sad fate but many other shuttle missions launched successfully. Back when we did those sorts of things, you know?

It was a loooooong flight -- more than ten hours, I think. Are planes flying more slowly these days? When we checked in, Dave and I upgraded to premium economy seats, which cost us more but gave us more cabin space and little perks like a meal on real china and a glass of champagne upon boarding. It was the smartest thing we could have done. We were much, much more comfortable as a result. I stood up only once during the whole flight, and didn't feel too awfully confined. I did have a rather rambunctious little boy sitting directly behind me, leading to occasional unexpected squeals, bumps and thumps, but you can't have everything.

Of course there was a kid from the school where we work on our flight, with his family. This seems to be de rigueur when we travel.

On the plane I finished "All the Colours of the Dark," which I enjoyed, and watched a very interesting movie called "Nightbitch," starring Amy Adams, about the trials of being a young mother. I was attracted to it because I like her, and I figured she wouldn't make a crappy movie, and indeed it turned out to be smart and surprisingly surreal. I also managed to leave my glasses case on the plane (but fortunately not the glasses themselves). Oh well.

My stepsister and her husband picked us up at the airport, where Phoebe the Flamingo still presides over the terminal:

We drove up to Lutz, north of Tampa, where we're staying in my stepmother's guesthouse. We've seen her and my nephew and we all went to dinner last night. I slept surprisingly well. Today my brother shows up with his family.

At the moment I am, of course, at Dunkin' Donuts, which you will remember is my blogging redoubt while I'm in Lutz. The guesthouse doesn't have WiFi and, more critically, it doesn't have a coffee machine. Fortunately, Dunkin' Donuts opens at 5 a.m. -- which of course is 10 a.m. by my own body clock, well past the time I would normally require coffee!

I do have one more thing to post from London, which I meant to include in yesterday's post but forgot:

This one-minute snippet of garden-cam footage shows both how miserable the weather was last Thursday, and what happened when I put a hard-boiled egg out for the foxes. You see the egg in the first shot, sitting back by the flowerpots and center-left of the screen. It vanishes in the next clip as a fox trots by -- we don't actually see the fox eat it, but I'm sure that's what happened! And then, at 0:35, we see proof that the foxes are making that weird call I've been hearing in the garden -- one trots by and makes the noise as it goes.

I thought about bringing the garden cam to Florida to see what's wandering around my stepmother's yard, but in the end, I just didn't have the energy for that!

Burlington Arcade

Yesterday I went into Westminster to pick up a couple of last-minute things for Christmas. I know I said I wasn't doing gifts, but I decided it would be in poor taste to show up in Florida utterly empty-handed. So I got some swanky chocolates from Fortnum & Mason that everyone can share. I bought a box for my family and a box for Dave's, along with a tiny Christmas pudding for wherever we happen to be on that day -- I think at my stepmother's. The bill was something like £112. Insanity!

Oh well. I'm sure Christmas is what keeps Fortnum & Mason afloat the rest of the year.

Across Piccadilly from the shop was this brightly lit shopping arcade, Burlington Arcade, that runs to Burlington Gardens and thus to Bond Street. I took a look inside.

There's a "Twelve Days of Christmas" decorating motif going on -- I believe those are the "twelve drummers drumming" above. I barely looked at the shops because I wasn't really in the market for any of the finery that's on sale there.

At the other end I wound up on Bond Street and saw...

...a very trendily-dressed woman and her cotton-ball of a dog, who was sporting a special Santa hat and collar. This is the kind of thing you see on Bond Street.

From there I headed to the Tate Britain, because I wanted to see the Lee Miller exhibit currently on show. Miller was a model and surrealist photographer associated with Man Ray in the 1920s, who then became a fashion and war photographer in her own right. The Tate show covers her early surrealism, her fashion work for Vogue, and her years as a war correspondent, including some heart-wrenching images of post-Holocaust concentration camps and the destruction in Europe.

And there, among the wartime pictures, was this one:

Yes, that's the Burlington Arcade, taken during or after the Blitz. I was mesmerized by many of Miller's photos, like the one of four rats sitting on a piece of wood in Paris, their tails hanging down in parallel lines, looking composed and almost elegant as one would expect of Parisian rats. Or the one of René Magritte and his dog LouLou, which reminded me of Paul Simon's song, "René and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War." I thought, "That's it! That's the dog!"

Anyway it was an interesting exhibit and I'm glad I fit it into my schedule before we depart for Florida today.

I came home and gave Dave his gift, which I bought on my errand to Covent Garden a few days ago. I got him an Apple watch, largely because I want him to be able to track his heart rate. But it does a lot of other cool things too, like measure the quality of one's sleep and, of course, provide all the communication you could ever want with the world at large. It's right out of Dick Tracy, for sure.

Last night we watched "Being Charlie," the movie Rob Reiner made with his son about addiction. It was modeled on their family experiences and was quite powerful, but as you'd expect, also quite sad. The lead character, Charlie, seemed so angry and nihilistic -- a perception perhaps heightened by recent events. I was struck by a scene when Charlie said to his father, "I don't hate you." Which makes what ultimately happened all the more mystifying.

Ernesto and Peter Arnett

Ernesto, the ceramic skull I bought in Cozumel years ago, is slowly being overtaken by the jungle in the living room. He probably doesn't mind. He's from a pretty jungly place.

It rained all day yesterday, so I didn't leave the house except to go out in the back garden a couple of times. I downloaded the footage from the garden cam and it was boring, so I deleted it all. Once again I didn't have the camera in a good position.

Later, I boiled an egg that had come to us in the carton with part of the shell missing. The only thing between the innards of the egg and the outside world was a sort of thin membrane, which I decided made it risky to eat. So I took it out to the foxes and reset the camera. Maybe we'll get some footage of them having a feast, though the last time I gave them a boiled egg a magpie ate it. (The egg looked fine, once cooked and peeled, and I have no doubt a fox could digest it just fine!)

I hope to take a walk some time today, but maybe not down Billy Fury Way. Remember how Olga and I walked there occasionally, even though it's a fairly grimy footpath? Well, the paper has an awkwardly headlined story -- "Seven-Week Lights Blackout in Drug-Hit Path" -- about how none of the streetlights there are working at the moment. I might go there in daylight, but I think I'd want a dog with me, not that Olga was ever a very fierce protector.

The orchid in the kitchen is blooming like crazy, underneath the yellowish overhead light. You can see the rain on the window. It was that kind of day.

I also saw in the news that Peter Arnett died. I actually have a Peter Arnett story, from my own reporting career in Florida. In the late '80s and early '90s, I worked at the newspaper in Lakeland, east of Tampa. A magazine called the Washingtonian reported that Arnett, who was representing CNN in Baghdad during the first Iraq war, was going to marry his more youthful girlfriend, a fellow journalist who had attended college in Lakeland and whose parents still lived there. So I got sent out to interview the parents.

It was a rather awkward story to write, because 1) It was basically just gossip column fodder, and 2) It's always risky to write about what someone is "going to do," rather than wait until they've done it, and 3) Arnett and his alleged bride-to-be were both in the Middle East, so I couldn't talk to either person directly involved in the relationship. I had to rely on the parents for information. I churned something out and it ran in the paper and that was that...

...except that Arnett never did marry the woman. He wound up going back to his wife, from whom he had been separated. By that time I was gone from Lakeland and the world had moved on. C'est la vie.

Anyway, it wasn't the brightest spot in my journalism career and apparently I didn't even save a clipping of the story. About fifteen years later, when I was working for The New York Times Co. in Manhattan, we paired with Google to have the archives of all of our smaller newspapers, including the Lakeland paper, digitized and made available online. It used to be that stories like this one I wrote would come up with a Google search. But then the Times sold the papers and I believe the new owners took their archives offline, because I can't find any of that stuff out there now. Again, c'est la vie.

Green Man Lover

I just awoke from the most glorious night's sleep. I must have really needed it, because I woke up about 5 a.m. and thought, "Oh, it's break, I don't need to get up now!" And then I fell back asleep and slept soundly another two hours -- and let me tell you, that two hours made a huge difference.

So yes, it's break. Woo hoo! Yesterday was busier than I expected it to be, with several visiting classes and lots of last-minute checkouts. I got a bottle of wine from the head librarian, which I thought was very kind considering I kvetch about her regularly. I really need to just grow up and not be such a whiny baby. I also chatted with a couple of co-workers who are leaving either now or in mid-January, having taken the buyout as I did. One woman asked me if I'd had any second thoughts and I told her none at all. "Me either!" she said. "People keep asking me what I'm going to do, and I tell them, I'm going to museums!" Pretty much my plan too.

I compiled the database stats for November and worked a short shift in the Lower School library, and then left work about 2 p.m. I walked home and spent the afternoon reading. Dave was at a doctor's appointment so it was a good time to catch up on blogs and continue working my way through "All the Colours of the Dark," which I'm enjoying but which is HUGE (576 pages hardback). I'd like to have it done by Saturday so I don't have to take it to Florida.

I found this funny graffiti on Finchley Road. According to Wikipedia, the Green Man is "a motif in architecture and art, of a face made of, or completely surrounded by, foliage, which normally spreads out from the centre of the face. Apart from a purely decorative function, the Green Man is primarily interpreted as a symbol of rebirth, representing the cycle of new growth that occurs every spring."

There is also a folkloric Green Man: "By at least the 16th century the term 'green man' was used in England for a man who was covered in leaves [and] foliage including moss as part of a pageant, parade or ritual." This evolved into a sort of pagan figure, though the roots and significance of the Green Man in that context are debated. There are lots of pubs called "The Green Man."

I'm not sure which type of Green Man we're loving, here. Could be any or all of them, I guess.

(Top photo: Our white hellebores, blooming away!)

Fog

I got up at about 4 a.m. this morning to get some water, and this is what it looked like out the front window. Remember the estate agent's office that I mentioned in Monday's post, the one that glows blue at the top of the street? You can see it up the hill on the left. That building across the road has been under renovation for some time. God only knows what they're doing to it.

Sometimes when I look out at the street in the silent, unmoving early hours, I'll see a fox running down the pavement. While the city sleeps, the foxes are in charge.

Well, this has been a dispiriting couple of days, hasn't it? To put it mildly. The shooting at Brown, the shooting in Australia, the heartbreaking family tragedy of the Reiners. I loved "All in the Family" when I was a young teenager, though I wasn't permitted to watch it when I was a small child -- my parents thought it was too mature. Rob Reiner, just like his character Michael Stivic, represented a liberal sensibility that I always valued and I will miss him. I can't imagine the degree of parental anguish he and his wife must have felt in dealing with their son's addictions, not to mention the torment and alienation of the son himself. And I hate the fact that Reiner died with Trump in office. He deserved to see the end of this reign of destructive narcissism.

Today is our last day with students -- and it's just a half-day, so I'll be home in the early afternoon. And then we're on Winter Break! Woo hoo! Dave and I have a couple of days to get ready for traveling -- laundry and that kind of thing -- and then we're off to Florida.

I made our end-of-the-year charitable donations yesterday. Same cast of characters as usual: the ACLU, Planned Parenthood and the Southern Poverty Law Center. I'm also going to support Hope Not Hate in the UK, a sort of British equivalent to the SPLC.

And I wore my London Christmas sweater to work yesterday, even though it's overly warm and the lights no longer work. I'm always glad to get another use out of it. Hard to believe I bought it 11 years ago! Here's the little video Dave and I made back then to show it in action, which I apparently never embedded on my blog, though I did link to it:

What a time capsule that video is. Look how tiny our houseplants are! That's the avocado tree in the background by the window, now much taller than I am. And of course Olga on the floor behind me, gnawing on her Kong.

Anyway, I'd say I've gotten my money's worth out of that sweater.

Near-Death Experience

I had to be at work early yesterday, because we did some schedule shuffling so the library could stay open an extra hour and a half. It's time for end-of-the-semester exams, so in theory students need extra library time to study. I haven't heard yet whether any students actually took advantage of those longer hours, but anyway, at least I didn't have to do the later shift. I was out at 4 p.m.

I took the tube down to Covent Garden to run a Christmas errand. That's the big tree outside the central market, above. I can't say what my errand was on the off-chance that the person it was for will read my blog (very, very unlikely). But all will be revealed soon enough.

I walked over from Piccadilly Circus and stayed at Covent Garden just long enough to run my errand and walk around a bit to take in the holiday vibe. Then I got back on the tube at Covent Garden station -- which is never that convenient to use as it involves elevators -- and came home.

Dave was away last night on an errand of his own -- a job interview for a moonlighting gig as the conductor of a community wind band in the City of London. I think I mentioned this before. He's excited about the possibility to work with some skilled adult musicians and program some more challenging music, but he's one of at least four candidates trying for the job, so who knows how it will shake out. Anyway, I was on my own for dinner so I had leftovers and watched "The Ice Storm," one of my favorite movies. I've seen it a couple dozen times and it still makes me cry.

One of our plants, a maidenhair fern that I transplanted from another pot where it grew of its own accord, had a near-death experience a couple of weeks ago. I have been experimenting with slightly altering my plant-watering schedule, from every week to every ten days or so. I always feel like I give the plants too much water in the winter, when they're not actively growing.

Well, all the plants were fine with the schedule change except the maidenhair fern, which loves water and is potted in that terrible compost I bought last spring. It's very porous and the water runs through quickly, and maidenhair ferns like to be damp. So basically the plant dried out and I didn't notice until it was positively crispy.

I watered it thoroughly and kept it watered over the next week or two. I thought I'd killed it until I saw those tiny fiddleheads appearing at the base (above). Looks like it's bouncing back.

There's a second, smaller fern in the same pot, also bouncing back.

Whew!

Olga's Star

This is the real estate office just up the hill from our flat. It's always the brightest-lit place in a little row of shops that includes a small grocery (once a newsagent) and a cleaning supply store (once a mysterious place of uncertain purpose called The White Room). When I look out the dining room window at night, the estate agent's office is there, about half a block away, shining like a blue beacon. It's comforting.

I got out and took a walk yesterday morning. My original purpose was to get bread, because Dave forgot it when he ordered groceries. But I'd spent the whole morning indoors, partly reading a new book called "All the Colours of the Dark" by Chris Whitaker, and I felt the need to get some fresh air. I extended my route to the store by roaming up to the cemetery and then northward through Child's Hill Park and back home -- a little more than an hour of walking.

I found this intriguingly decorated car along the way. I'd love to see it lit up. Is the asymmetrical application of the wrapping paper intentional?

And then there was this weirdness:

Like all my walking routes, this one made me miss Olga, who often accompanied me through the same streets in her younger years. I haven't talked much about Olga on the ol' blog recently, but I feel her absence every day. It's hard to believe it's been five months already, and I still question her last days and whether I could have done anything differently. I'm not sure those doubts will ever go away.

Dave and I are still talking about getting another dog, but now that we're planning our Italy trip for next summer, we may wait until after that. I'm still in a mourning stage, I think. I don't want another dog, I want my old one back! Maybe that's a sign that it's still too early.

I was walking Olga last January on the high street when I found that little light-up star, shown above in our dining room window, lying on the pavement. One of the charity shops had thrown it out, I think -- probably a bit of Christmas decor that never sold. It still worked, so I brought it home and put it on our mantel, and this season I've put it in the window and turned it on. It's quite a sophisticated little thing -- it even has a timer so that it shines only when it's dark out. It's probably supposed to make me think of Baby Jesus, but instead it makes me think of Olga.

A Skiing Flamingo

I restocked the bird feeders yesterday morning and the parakeets and starlings were on the suet balls within minutes. In fact, I don't think I made it back inside before they showed up. Maybe it's hard to find food at this time of year. Anyway, I saw six parakeets on the feeder at once, which might be an all time record.

They're quite aggressive with each other and there's always a lot of snapping and jockeying for position. The one above kept nipping the tailfeathers of one of its pals, and held on even when the other bird took flight! Fortunately it promptly let go and the feather didn't come out.

In mid-morning I made a rare trip to the post office to mail a letter. I haven't used snail mail in an age and didn't have a stamp -- didn't even know how much one would cost, to be honest. Fortunately that problem was easily solved with some spare change retrieved from our dusty coin bowl.

There was some kind of holiday market on West End Green and I briefly wandered through, but I'm not really buying gifts this year so I didn't purchase anything. I did, however, stop in at the plant shop to buy...

...a wreath for our front door. Pretty nice, huh? I thought it was festive without all the red-ribbons-and-pine that we traditionally see at Christmas. Something different.

At a nearby bulk foods store I picked up a felted skiing flamingo. Because everybody needs one! Don't ask me why the bulk foods store was selling flamingoes because I haven't a clue. As far as I could see they had no other felted items on hand.

Oh, and I impulsively got both a flu shot and a Covid booster. I happened to walk past a pharmacy that was advertising them, and thought, "Why not?" After all we're going to be traveling soon and I'll be visiting some older and vulnerable people in Florida, so it would be good to take precautions. I probably should have done it weeks ago but I just didn't think that far ahead. Normally our school provides flu shots for staff and faculty but if we were offered one this year I missed it somehow, and the flu is going around.  My Covid arm is sore this morning -- the flu arm less so -- but otherwise I feel pretty normal.

I asked the pharmacist whether it was a good idea to get both shots at once. "It's recommended, actually," he said. OK then.

The rest of the day was filled with minor tasks. I trimmed some dead stuff out of the garden, raked some leaves and filled a yard waste bag. I watered all the houseplants. I cleaned and vacuumed.

And I edited this week's garden cam footage! The resulting video is very short. I had quite a few clips but most of them weren't very good. I'd returned the camera to the back of the garden, but I put it in a bad place -- too close to a pile of leaves, which reflected back so much light that everything beyond it was lost in darkness. Also, there's a very intrusive stick in the way -- in real life it looks like nothing, but on the camera it looks HUGE.

So, anyway, bad positioning aside, here's what we've got:

-- We start out with Pale Cat, who wanders around and then jumps the back wall. This is how all the animals get in and out of the garden, by jumping over the walls or fences.
-- At 00:23, we have a wary fox, followed by a couple more.
-- At 01:18, a squirrel is packing dry leaves into its mouth and running off with them. Building a nest, I guess?
-- At 01:48 we get a great view of a fox. I came out the back door and startled it lurking in some shrubbery. It ran to the back of the garden and stopped right in front of the camera, stared at me for a long while and then jumped over the fence.
-- At 02:08, another fox goes by, then wanders off behind the shed.

Yellow and Blue

See -- this really is the darkest time of the year. Almost all my pictures for the last couple of weeks, it seems, have been taken at night! (Or indoors.)

I took the one above at the beginning of December. I suspect that tree has a lot fewer leaves on it now.

And these people have a bright blue light on their porch. It reminds me of those '70s "black light" bulbs that would illuminate special psychedelic posters. Remember those? When I was a kid, my neighbors had a black light and I remember being told we couldn't look straight at it or it would blind us. Sounds like parental scaremongering but we believed it at the time.

Those neighbors, including my friend Theresa who died several weeks ago, always had the coolest stuff. Anything I learned about pop culture as a small child, I learned from them. They had transistor radios and we listened to "Seasons in the Sun" by Terry Jacks, and "Billy Don't Be a Hero" by Paper Lace, songs that were frightening because they were about dying which I could barely conceive of at the time. They had the Parker Brothers game "Masterpiece" which was about art, and which I then asked for (and got) for Christmas. My favorite character was "Bitsy" Rich Wong Dobrowski Keyes. They had stickers and toys and fun stuff and their house was utter chaos, while mine was cool and organized and somewhat dusty. I loved visiting them but I gotta admit I was always happy to get back to staid normalcy at the end of the day.

And here it is, a Saturday morning in 2025, fifty-one years later, and Theresa is dead and Becky is dead and I barely know where all that time went. How did it get to be the future?!

Can You Stand More Holiday Lights?

Yesterday after work I went back to check out the "selfie booth" on the St. John's Wood high street. I was right -- it does light up at night, and quite impressively too.

And as long as I was at it I checked out some other holiday lights in the neighborhood.

Here's the high street from the other end, showing the street lighting and the Christmas tree.

And here's nearby Eyre Court, a large apartment building that has a big ol' decorated tree in the front garden. The tree is a permanent feature. I wonder whose job it is to string up those lights every year? They must have a cherry-picker to get to the top!

I had another busy day yesterday, but I did at least have a chance to write back to the reader who sent me a letter. Hopefully I can get my response mailed to her today. I spent time with two classes in the Lower School, including one where a girl in first grade asked me to read a specific book to her, which was cute. (Usually I'm just the guy behind the desk and the teacher is the reader, but I was happy to comply!)

I also covered and/or put spine labels on about 40 new books, including this one:

I'm imagining the author on a camping trip with a young relative, and the kid making up those characters from what he sees in front of him. I didn't read it to get a sense of the action. Does someone build a new Cabin Head out of Tree Head? It looks like there's also a Bush Head, a Flower Head and a...Rock Head?

Dave and I started the show "Pluribus" last night on Apple. It seems very promising! It's by Vince Gilligan, the same guy behind "Breaking Bad," and it grabbed our attention right away. I'm also slowly watching "The House of Guinness" on Netflix. Dave isn't as impressed by that show so I have to watch it after he's fallen asleep. We finished "Down Cemetery Road," which I liked but I must confess I do not understand the title at all. It's supposedly taken from a Philip Larkin poem. Maybe I need to read the poem more closely.

Killing the Bishop

I got out yesterday for a bit of daylight by taking a walk at lunchtime. It left me with less time to respond to blog comments, but I felt better. I was feeling a bit airless after a whole morning of work, including an hour-long meeting designed to formulate our departmental statement of purpose, or something like that.

I am so ready for retirement.

I found the chessboard above behind the church in St. John's Wood, near the high street. A woman and her much older companion -- her mother, maybe? -- were walking in front of me, and the older woman impetuously stuck out her foot and kicked over the bishop. The other woman set it right again. I thought it was a funny thing to do, but maybe she was trying to see how heavy the pieces are. (Not very.)

Something tells me the time to see this glittery, spangly feature is at night. I imagine people stand in there and take selfies. It's probably elaborately lit. Maybe I'll go back and check it out later.

And LOOK! THE BROKEN-DOWN BENCH IS GONE! It's only been seven months, and after the addition and subtraction of various combinations of warning cones and hazard tape. I was going to post something about it on Nextdoor, hopefully goading the authorities into action, when I found that they'd finally taken care of the problem.

I just joined Nextdoor, which serves as a sort of message board for local news and announcements. I've been reading mostly about missing cats, stolen cars and porch pirates. Yesterday I saw a vigorous debate about foxes and whether they're charming wildlife or hazardous pests. I'm not weighing in on that argument, but you all know I love my foxes.

This Way to Disillusionment

I pass this tastefully decorated house in St. John's Wood on my walk home from work. I'm sure I've photographed it in previous years because I remember the deer, but I can't find that picture now. I don't remember the big bow, so maybe that's new. (Or maybe my memory is questionable -- much more likely.)

Another killer of a day at work. The less said the better.

Here's our library Christmas tree, decorated by yours truly. It's a real tree -- you can see the needles on the floor. Not exactly a wildly innovative decorating job, but I'd call it thorough. I wish the colored lights were working. We do have some lights decorating the shelves behind it to the left, as you can see. I suppose in a fit of creative frenzy (which I am unlikely to have) I could wrap those around the tree, but it's hard with the ornaments already on.

My co-worker Staci had to go to the American embassy yesterday to deal with some passport stuff. When she got off the tube at the station, she found arrows directing pedestrians to various locations:

But wait -- what's that sticker on the embassy arrow?

When Staci came back to the office she showed me her photo and we both had a good laugh, and she gave me permission to blog it. The Instagram account basically shows all the locations those stickers have been deployed. Many of Trump's erstwhile followers are beginning to feel this way, it seems. What happens when cults die?

Flat Quirks and a Mutant Camellia

The hideous camellia has a weird, sort of mutant knot of flowers hanging from one of its branches. This is not the time of year for the camellia to bloom. It has no other blossoms. I wonder what triggered these flowers to go for it at this dark, insectless time of year?

I had a crazy day at work yesterday. I had to cover a couple of stacks of new books -- it seemed like 100 volumes, but about 25 is probably a more reasonable estimate. Many of them were novels-in-verse that are going to be used for Middle School classes today, so there was no time to waste. Do you ever read novels-in-verse? In other words, works of fiction that are written in a poetic style but follow a plot? They're not my favorite thing but they're big right now, particularly among books for young people. The cynic in me thinks they're popular because in this era of fragmented attention spans they can be read rather quickly.

Anyway...I also had to inventory the books for those classes and put them on a spreadsheet (my favorite thing!) and today we'll have to manage checking them out. It will be slightly more complicated than checking out normal books but the reasons for that are uninteresting even to me so never mind.

Plus, of course, all my regular daily duties including lots of re-shelving. When I write it all out it doesn't sound like much. Am I being whiny? Maybe.

I also received an unexpected and thoughtful letter from a blog reader, responding to one of my recent posts. I was so surprised that this person took the trouble not only to write me, but to write three pages, print them out and snail-mail them. It shows their level of passion about the subject at hand. Never mind the details but I will write them back once I've had a chance to compose my thoughts.

The other night I was closing our bedroom drapes, as I always do, and clipping them closed with the clothespin that always dangles from one side. We've done this every night for more than a decade because otherwise the drapes gape open slightly. It made me laugh at the persistence of this silly problem, and I got to thinking about the other quirks of living where we do.

There's our bedroom door, which will not stand open unless propped by some object. We use a pot that I made in pottery class about a quarter-century ago. It fits perfectly into that little space between the carpet edge and the door and holds it just right.

And there's the door to "the hole," the closet underneath the stairs going up to the flat owned by the Russians. It sticks because of repeated paint jobs, and it has a ridiculously small knob -- so small that it's impossible to grip, making it impossible to open the door. So we keep a bread knife handy on an adjacent table, to trip the latch and get the door open.

There are other issues -- the bathroom door that won't fully close because it doesn't fit the frame, and won't fully open because there's a radiator in the way; the sink that's too small to be truly usable.

I suppose every house has little oddities like these -- too minor to repair, but not optimally functional?

Colorful Lights at Harvard and Yale

I noticed yesterday while wandering around the garden (between intermittent periods of rain) that the red hellebores are just beginning to bud. Signs of life in a mostly dormant period for plants!

I had another quiet day yesterday, thank goodness. I cleaned in the afternoon and spent the rest of the day mostly on the couch. I finished a good chunk of "Super Sad True Love Story," which I'm really enjoying. I've already mentioned how prescient this book is, envisioning the United States as an authoritarian dystopia -- where the only civilian job opportunities are in security, consumer credit, retail or media -- at war with Venezuela. Well, the dystopia has morphed into a civil conflict, with the government fighting its own people. It sounds dark, and it is, but weirdly the book is also funny.

One line really stood out for me. A Korean-American character writes to her friend: "This country is so stupid. Only spoiled white people could let something so good get so bad."

Dave, meanwhile, conducted the high school band's winter concert yesterday, so he was busy. I often don't attend the winter concert. I usually wait until the final concert of the school year in late spring.

Oh! We made our summer vacation plans for next year. Believe it or not -- and this will surely mark me as the senior citizen I am slowly becoming -- we are going on a cruise. We've booked a trip that takes us through the lake country of northern Italy and then down the Adriatic coast of the Balkans, around to Sicily and up the west coast of the "boot." Dave has never been to Italy and he loves the idea of a cruise, with his hotel room basically following him around. I chose South America a few years ago, so it's his turn. (I've been to Italy but I haven't seen the parts we're visiting, for the most part, so I'm excited too.)

I thought you might like another "holiday lights" video, this one from our neighborhood. Nothing as grand as what we saw in my earlier London lights video, but still nice, with music once again by the Vince Guaraldi Trio. Among other things, we see the colored doorway lights of Harvard and Yale Courts, the apartment buildings behind our flat, as well as "snow" paintings on the windows of the veterinary practice where we used to take Olga, and the Christmas tree on West End Green.

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.