Two-Cat Morning

Olga had an exciting walk yesterday morning. We rounded a corner on the housing estate and saw this cat sitting atop a wall. It was giving off some serious Clint Eastwood "Make My Day" vibes, and Olga tried her best to intimidate it into moving, but it just sat atop that wall and glared.

Even after I dragged Olga past it, she couldn't quite give up. See the cat, peering out from behind that brick wall on the left, still taunting us?

And then we saw another cat, running across the asphalt path and leaping into a garden. It's a sign of Olga's age that she's peering through the fence and, little does she know, the cat is right above her, in the shadows.

Remember my recently rescued slides? Well, my mission to make those old images public has sort of paid off. I got a message from a guy on Flickr who wanted to buy the slides of Torquay. Apparently he runs a local history forum online and wanted to post them there. I told him I want to keep the actual slides -- because they're part of a larger group from the same family -- but I sent him the images for free so he could put them on the forum.

That's exactly why I try to salvage images like that and put them online -- so they become a sort of community historical resource.

I've been griping about the Russians and their endless hammering and sawing, but they're going to get a taste of their own medicine. Our bathroom and kitchen renovations are about to begin. The contractor called me yesterday and said they're going to come today to install an extractor fan in the bathroom, which should help with dehumidifying after we take showers -- and next week they're going to begin the major work. That means replacing the bathtub and the flooring and repairing the walls in the hallway where they've been damaged by that slow leak from the shower pipes.

Our shower is going to be out of commission for five days (which probably means ten days). Fortunately we can shower at work -- there are staff facilities -- but I'll still be glad when this ordeal is over.

Here's a bonus cat, sighted on my walk home yesterday evening:

Paulownia

When I was walking Olga yesterday morning I noticed that this Paulownia tree near our flat has burst into bloom once again. It's commonly called a princess tree, empress tree or foxglove tree, because its individual flowers look something like foxglove blossoms. Apparently the Latin name comes from this Russian grand duchess, who sounds like a piece of work.

I stopped by later to take some pictures. It's planted on a gated housing estate but fortunately the gates were open so I could walk right up to the tree for a closer look.

I'd grow one of these if I had space! Apparently they're invasive in some places but this one seems to be keeping to itself.

Speaking of Russians who are a piece of work, some of you wondered in yesterday's comments what our Russian neighbors could possibly be up to, doing more renovations in their relatively small flat. Believe me, we often wonder the same thing. Mr. Russia recently told me they're rebuilding the staircase again -- even though they did it just a couple of years ago -- and he also asked about a space beneath their stairs that he wants to turn into a storage cabinet. He wanted to make sure cutting into it wouldn't invade our flat somehow. (It shouldn't because it's above our ceiling.)

So this is the thing. I think they just renovate and renovate and when they come to the end of a job, they start again on what they've already done. I know they've re-floored their kitchen a couple of times, for example. They seem to have a manic compulsion about home improvements. I have some suspicions about why this might be the case, mostly related to personal and familial happiness (or lack thereof), but of course I don't really know.

I think my big Canon camera may be dead. I've been having trouble with it for a while, giving me error messages when it tries to connect to my lens. I got it to work on Sunday long enough to take some pictures in the garden, but now I'm getting an error message when I turn it on and it won't let me offload the photo card. Hmmmm.

I'll switch out the card and see if that helps, but I've used that camera heavily -- almost daily -- since I bought it in 2012. I guess I've gotten my money's worth. I'm sure I could pay to have it reconditioned, but I'm thinking more and more it may be time to just use my phone. (Which I've been doing pretty constantly for the last month or so anyway.)

Mowing and Mom

Dave and I debated doing "No-Mow May" again, like we did a couple of years ago. But in the end I mowed the lawn yesterday. I'm just too neat to let it go entirely. What I did do is leave several patches of daisies (above) and dandelions, as well as the bluebell, preserving an unmowed grassy area with flowers for pollinators. I don't want to give the garden over entirely to the bugs, but I can certainly share it.

Yesterday turned out to be a beautiful day, sunny and warm-ish. In addition to mowing I did some weeding, trimming and other garden tasks. (Anything to get out of the house, because the Russians were doing construction again and I couldn't stand that dentist's-drill sound of their sanders or saws or routers or whatever.)

I got all of my rescued slides from Camden Market uploaded to Flickr -- if you're interested in viewing the whole batch, they're here. I discovered with the help of someone on Flickr that one of the photos -- the one of the woman walking past the tulip beds at the end of this post -- was in the wrong cardboard frame. (Several of the slides in the bin had come loose from their frames, and I tried to reunite them based on the handwritten descriptions.) So the caption I gave it in that post is incorrect. Fortunately, by some miracle, I had the empty frame that it belonged in, so now I know the picture actually shows "Torquay Gardens -- Diana" and not Kew Gardens. Whew!

Anyway, here's the whole garden after my mowing job.

And here's another look at our pink spider azalea. Some of the flowers have these white edges. I think there are actually two azalea plants in this pot. They seem happy together, so we're letting them remain conjoined twins.

I watched a peculiar movie yesterday afternoon: "The Sterile Cuckoo" from 1969 with Liza Minnelli. Somehow this movie had entirely escaped my radar until recently. I was on YouTube and came across the song "Come Saturday Morning," by the Sandpipers -- and that song is from this movie, so I decided I had to check it out.

Minnelli plays an energetically quirky college student named Pookie and the movie tells of her relationship with another student, a taciturn young man. At first she seems harmless enough but by the end you're not sure whether she's entirely sane. Or, as Vincent Canby put it in The New York Times back in 1969, "'The Sterile Cuckoo' documents the breakdown of a desperate personality, but disguises it as a tale of first love, gone slightly awry."

(Although "Come Saturday Morning" became a hit song, Canby also carped about "the relentlessly sentimental background music that fills the soundtrack every time they wander through a meadow.")

The title was a complete mystery to me, but apparently it comes from a poem Pookie writes in the original novel -- never mentioned at all in the movie.

Anyway, that's probably more than you wanted to know about "The Sterile Cuckoo." It was an interesting cinematic experience, with lots of good nostalgia value. Minnelli cries very convincingly.

I also talked to my brother in Florida via Facetime, since I couldn't communicate with my mom on Mother's Day. We have enrolled her in Hospice, which basically means she will be shifted toward palliative care rather than any continued attempts at rehabilitation. Her dementia is quite advanced at this point, and her physical health is weakening. She briefly stopped eating not long ago, but she's started again. I'm considering flying to Florida this summer for another visit, even though in all likelihood she will remember nothing of my presence. We'll see.

Seeds, Dock and Eurovision

This house is on the route Olga and I walk most mornings. I've photographed it in past years but I couldn't resist doing it again, with that purple feather boa draped across its shoulders. Olga looks like she thinks it's hilarious, but I think she's actually giving me a frustrated "WHY ARE WE STOPPING?" yawn.

It's been cloudy and cold -- about 50º F (10º C) when I walked the dog yesterday morning. Still, I finally got all my seeds planted. I started sunflowers, a small tray of foxgloves and six daturas. (Yes, I know, I was on the fence about doing daturas again but I'd gathered the seeds so why not?) Oh, and cosmos, which I put in a large pot at the corner of the patio.

I'm glad to have all that done. Those seed packets were taunting me from the hall table and the sunflowers were definitely at least two years old -- and maybe the foxgloves too -- so I'm not even sure they're all viable. If not, no great loss.

I also weeded a bagful of dock from our flower beds. I'm pretty tolerant of most weeds but for some reason I can't abide dock, and it's very hard to pull. It has a taproot and you have to dig it out or the plant just comes back. I think I (and my trowel) did a pretty good job removing most of them. Then again, I've done this in previous years, and yet every spring there are a million dock plants.

Here's a bluebell that has chosen to grow right in the middle of our lawn. A vulnerable position but somehow it made it to maturity without getting bulldozed by the dog.

Dave and I took Olga to the cemetery yesterday afternoon, where a blooming tree is putting on quite a show right behind the posh grave of the Neresheimers.

Last night we went to a Eurovision party at the home of some co-workers. Yes, it's the gayest night on international television, and as usual we had a ball watching all of the fun and terrible acts. I enjoyed the campy fiery number from Poland, Albania (sort of a Balkan "Partridge Family" thing going on there) and the boy-band entry from Slovenia, and my genuine favorite was the Boy George-ish disco bit from Belgium. But unfortunately Sweden won yet again.

The two weirdest entries were Finland and Croatia, and they show how weird can sometimes work and other times go awry. Finland was a fan favorite and came close to winning; Croatia, on the other hand, was just weird. Why were they all in their underwear at the end?!

Another Slide Rescue

One more story about old slides and then I swear I'll shut up about them for a while. You know how I like to rescue damaged images that might otherwise go in the trash. Here's an extreme example.

I told you before how on my first trip to Camden Market I found two slides on the floor and acquired them. Well, what I didn't tell you is there was also a third slide, one that was so damp, bent and crumpled that I left it behind. That slide pulled at my memory enough that when I went back to the market the second time, I looked to see if it was still there.

And it was -- which says something about how thoroughly and frequently the floors get cleaned.

Anyway, I retrieved it from under the table where it was lying with some other scraps of paper and trash, and for just a pound bought it and a handful of images in much better condition from the slide box. I couldn't even view it because it was so filthy, so I had no idea what the picture was.

I brought it home, took it out of the cardboard frame and gave it a gentle wipe-down with a Q-tip. I read online that a tiny amount of rubbing alcohol on a swab can be used to clean a grimy slide, so I also tried that, but it definitely removes photographic emulsion so I wouldn't recommend it.

Here's what I wound up with:

Yikes! As you can see, it's pretty badly damaged. First step was color correction.

Looks like it was taken somewhere in Germany. I'm basing that on the word "Reisen" on the bus, which is German for "travel." Looks like a '60s vehicle, and definitely a '60s or '70s building.

One good thing about this picture is that the whole lower half can be cropped out. It's just an expanse of concrete floor. That saves the trouble of trying to repair about half the photo.

My Adobe Lightroom skills are pretty rudimentary. I'm entirely self-taught, and I didn't try for a perfect restoration. That would take ages, if it were even possible. But in about half an hour I was able to roughly patch that big white spot and take out some of the bigger fibers and other bits of debris.

I'm sure with more attention to detail I could do a much better job, but this at least lets us see more or less what the photographer intended. It's not a bad picture, given the interesting architectural shapes.

Processing it through Waterlogue hides the damage even more.

Here's a more vivid version, if you like more color.

Anyway, it was fun to experiment with this and see what could be done with a picture that was otherwise almost certainly headed for the dustbin!

Azaleas and Library Drama

Our neighbor down the street has this amazing Ceanothus, or California lilac, growing in the front garden. I love the way it's consuming the gatepost like a big blue amoeba.

I have another post to write about old slides, but let's take a break from that subject today. Instead, I want to show you our azaleas:

This little miniature azalea is such a great color. It's sort of buried in our flowerbed amidst a lot of other stuff -- like the blue forget-me-nots -- but I'm always happy to see it bloom each year.

We're also getting flowers on the pink spider azalea that I got for free when Homebase gave away all its plants during the first lockdown in early 2020. At first we kept it in a pot behind the garden bench, but it never bloomed there. So we moved it to the middle of the garden, where there's more light, and it has rewarded us with flowers. Ta-da!

And finally, the orange rhododendron in the middle of the garden is blooming as well. As you can see, the foliage has a bronze tint.

I'm having ongoing battles with the mob of about 25 ninth-grade boys that take over the library's fiction section each day at lunch and break time. I occasionally catch them eating illicit snacks, and as I inventoried fiction yesterday I found tons of crisp packets, lollipop sticks and candy wrappers behind the books -- not to mention a fresh wad of chewed gum. Yesterday one of them left a crumpled-up assignment behind the books, with his name on it! So there's no uncertainty about the culprits. I'm taking steps to disperse that group.

I finished the inventory -- all except the professional development books, which won't take long. I'm skipping the DVDs and the reference section. Reference includes that vast collection of literary criticism books -- the ones my boss wants to sell -- and they're squirreled away in various cabinets so it's just too hard to dig them all out and scan them. And the DVDs -- well, as one of my co-workers said, "Who cares?"

It looks like we're missing about 25 books, but I'm not too concerned. Kids probably simply borrowed them without checking them out, and I suspect a lot will come back before the end of the year.

I did find this interesting gem while inventorying (and simultaneously weeding) the biography section:

This is a 1977 biography of "Bloody Mary" Tudor, which we've had in the library since 1979. It wasn't in great condition and hadn't been checked out in 13 years, and someone had taken a pink highlighter pen to its pages. And then I found this note inside the back cover:

I did a Google search and darned if that's not correct! OOPS! I wonder if someone at J. M. Dent & Sons lost their job over that little gaffe?

Apparently the artist, whose name is given here as Antonio Moro but who is also called Anthonis or Antonis Mor, did paint a portrait of Queen Mary. But it's this one, not the one on the cover of the book. (To be fair, the women do look quite similar, and both were married to Philip II of Spain.)

Anyway, given the book's age and condition and the inaccuracy of the cover, I weeded it!

Slide-O-Rama

Time for another round of rescued slides, these purchased on my trip to Camden Market last weekend. First up, an image from (I believe) the early 1960s labeled "St. Marychurch Village from Town Hall."

St. Marychurch is near Torquay in Devon. Here's the same street today. The building on the left, which was the H. T. Franks camera shop, is now a financial adviser's office; the one on the right, called "The Tudor," is now "Bygones Victorian Experience."

"The Badminton Group: Warwick, Rita, Diana, Peggy, Audrey, Eve, Peter." No date, but also probably from the early '60s, based on the type of slide and its similarity to others that are dated.

How to terrify your child! This slide isn't labeled but it was in a box marked "Germany."

Holland, 1965 -- I have a couple shots of this garden and they held their color really well.

"Sandra in St. James' Park, May 1962." Taken somewhere in this area, I think.

"Jenny & Tony, Holy Trinity, N'wood -- 1/7/61."

N'wood is Northwood, in northwest London, and Holy Trinity is here. The date means July 1, as the British put the day before the month.

I saw many slides in this particular assortment from a couple of weddings, and they were ALL out of focus, some of them laughably so. I don't know whether the photographer had his/her camera set wrong and got no decent pictures, or maybe all the sharp ones had already been bought by someone else. I do like this one, though. Jenny looks like she's having the time of her life, and maybe she was.

"Selfridges, 1961" -- this is a companion to the Regent Street picture in my last slide post. It's the same style slide, probably taken on the same night. It has a similar surreal quality and if you look closely you can see there's an Alice in Wonderland theme with playing cards across the front of the building. Here's a clearer shot by another photographer on Flickr.

There's no information at all on this slide, but it looks like a good place for a roadside picnic!

And finally, "Kew Gardens*, May 19th, 1962 -- Tulips near Palm House." Maybe that's Sandra again? Or is it the woman second from left in the badminton picture above? Hmmmm...

*Actually, this picture shows "Torquay Gardens -- Diana." It was in the wrong frame and thus had the wrong description, but I was later able to return it to the correct one.