Out and About in Chelsea

Blogger is on the fritz again today. It seems many people are unable to load photos, given what I'm seeing in the community forums. I couldn't load them myself in the usual way, so I'm uploading them to Flickr and then embedding them here, which seems to be working. Hopefully you all can see them too.

Blogger seems creakier and creakier these days! Or maybe we're just having a run of bad luck.

I was out and about in Chelsea yesterday, which is why I was largely absent from the blogosphere. I met up with my friend Sally for lunch and a visit to the Saatchi Gallery, where the Royal Photographic Society mounted its International Photography Exhibition. The show is just about to end, so I wanted to be sure to see it this week.

Before my rendezvous with Sally in Sloane Square, I wandered from Victoria through Chelsea taking pictures. It was my first real photo walk with the new camera, and it felt good to experiment with that. Above are the rail yards leading to Victoria Station with Battersea Power Station (actually on the other side of the Thames, invisible from this perspective) in the background.

It was a bright, sunny morning, perfect for good shadows and colors. I inadvertently had my camera set to take JPGs rather than RAW images, and I much prefer RAW, which are higher resolution, so I need to change that. This camera seems quite fiddly with all of its controls -- it's really easy to hit a button and change something without meaning to, in the process of taking it in and out of the bag, for example. There's a "lock" function to prevent that and I need to use it more.

Anyway, all this will become clearer the more pictures I take.

The exhibit was interesting. My only complaint is that some of the photos on display are clearly part of a series, but the series itself wasn't shown -- so we were seeing just part of the whole. I guess that's always a challenge with gallery shows, where wall space is limited.

We had lunch at Ottolenghi, and then coffee at a cafe on nearby Duke of York Square. The guy above was painting en plein air in Sloane Square.

I was worried how Bailey would cope with my absence all day, but when I got home the house wasn't demolished. She was very excited to see me when I came in the door. But I was greeted with a bizarre mystery -- there was a dead bird, a little blue tit, on the floor of our bedroom! I can only imagine that it flew into the house through one of the windows, which we leave cracked open for ventilation, and then Bailey killed it. It's just bad luck that it came inside on a day when I wasn't home to free it right away. We haven't had a bird in the house in years so this was truly a freak thing, unless Bailey somehow drew it inside with her supernatural powers. Is she a canine Lorelei, luring not fishermen but birds to their death?

In the evening I called my stepmother's bank and pleaded my case regarding their most recent demands. To my surprise, the woman on the phone agreed with me that the date of the apostilles is not an issue. She suggested that the "business office" was having trouble keeping track of all the relevant documents because of the way they'd been scanned as a single batch by the notary, and she suggested re-scanning them into individual packets, one for each account. So I did that -- even though I had to buy a fancier version of Adobe Acrobat to make it work -- and I resubmitted everything. Fingers crossed this puts an end to their shenanigans, but I'm not holding my breath.

Bailey is getting spayed today, assuming her false pregnancy has subsided. We shall see.