Squirrels, Hedgehogs and a Box Turtle

Look! We do have at least one squirrel wandering around our garden! This one was nibbling on our walnut tree yesterday, and I've seen it around a few other times recently -- but only by itself. Whatever squirrelpocalypse has befallen our other garden rodents apparently hasn't touched it yet.

I spent yesterday morning in the garden, reading and mowing the grass. I'm reading a book that I love called "Only This Beautiful Moment" by Abdi Nazemian, about three generations of an Iranian family. The action takes place in Tehran and Los Angeles, and at least two of the men are gay, which is an interesting theme. You don't read much about homosexuality in Iranian (or Iranian-American) culture. I've been enjoying it.

As for mowing the grass, we're doing "No-Mow May" again, but I've started it early -- so the area in back around the teasels we're not mowing at all. In fact, I may not mow it all summer. That's at least a third of the lawn, so the territory to be mowed is reduced significantly! Hopefully this will boost our population of friendly bugs.

In the afternoon I tried to get Olga interested in a walk, but she wasn't having it. She'd gone out that morning, so she was content to lie in the sun on her dog bed. I went by myself to Sweet Corner for a coffee and then walked around the cemetery and the neighborhood beyond. It's very strange to walk in the cemetery without Olga, but I must say it's easier and faster.

This smug-looking balloon was lying on the playing fields just beyond the cemetery. I think it was an escapee from a children's party, which I could hear going on in a nearby clubhouse.

And I passed this "hedgehog crossing" sign, which may be unofficial. I'd be impressed if there are hedgehogs in that area. I've lived in England 14 years and I've still never seen a wild hedgehog. There's a railroad line and some woods nearby, so maybe that's enough wilderness to sustain a population, or maybe it's just wishful thinking.

On the way home I popped into Waitrose thinking I'd buy a foxglove for our patio planter, but they didn't have any. They did have a Tiarella (foamflower) though, so I bought it to replace the one we lost over the winter.

And here's the princess, back home and sleeping underneath her blanket. She was really crashed last night, but this morning she seems bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. In fact, she's giving me the stare-down right now, expecting her morning walk. Must be off!

If you'd like some happy supplemental reading, check out the story of Rockalina, the half-a-century-old rescued box turtle, who hadn't been outdoors since 1977 but can now once again feel grass beneath her feet. (That's a gift article link so it should work even if you're not a Washington Post subscriber.)

A Wandering Fox

Thanks for your many ideas yesterday about how to gain some leverage with students to get them to return overdue library books. We do use a few methods of mild coercion, mainly not giving them yearbooks until their library accounts are clear. We don't charge late fees and we don't bill for lost books through our finance department, because both options are bookkeeping nightmares. And we don't withhold grades, perhaps because that's an academic punishment that seems too punitive. But a yearbook is a purely social thing, so we can use that -- and we do, but unfortunately that opportunity doesn't arise until the end of the year, so in the meantime there's a lot of procrastinating.

I kept myself busy yesterday, finishing "Freewater," another Newbery medal winner. Remember how I read all the Newbery winners several years ago? Well, there have been a few awards since then, so I decided to update my Newbery page on the school website by reviewing the newest medal-winning books. I've done all of them now except this year's, which hopefully I'll get to soon.

A few months ago blogger Mitchell wrote about his cousin's daughter (is that a second cousin?) who is an artist and printmaker. I was taken by one of her designs depicting a fox -- certainly appropriate for our English garden where we see foxes all the time. I ordered one of her woodblock prints and waited. And waited. And waited.

A few days ago I wrote her to ask if she'd received my order. Turns out she'd not only received it -- she'd already shipped it, and the postal service showed it had been delivered. Very strange! I'd had it sent to work, so yesterday I dropped in to search the parcel room and the mail area, and there -- happily -- I found the print, sitting atop the staff mailboxes on a shelf where it wasn't visible and where I would never have thought to look.

Ta-da! Isn't it great? Now I just have to get a frame for it. I think I'll hang it in our bedroom, above my bedside lamp.

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, in the afternoon I met up with my friends Colin and Shannon to see "The Brightening Air" at the Old Vic, a play about an Irish family in the 1980s. I enjoyed it a lot -- it was very well-acted and dealt with lots of family drama in a humorous and yet poignant way. I took the photo at top not far from the theatre, when I got a coffee at Pret and sat in a nearby park waiting to meet my friends. A colorful, sunny day out in London!

Rose Geranium

I have just learned via Picture This, my handy plant app, that this is called a "rose geranium." I had no idea. It's one I found discarded several years ago and brought back to life, but it looks a little stressed these days -- I think its pot is too small or maybe it needs some fresh soil.

I like the Picture This app and I recently went ahead and paid the roughly £25 annual subscription to unlock all its features, like a diagnosis tool for plant illnesses. This is pretty unheard of for me -- I have never paid subscription fees for an app -- but why not? I think I'll use it, and I suppose the app developers are entitled to some income.

So, what a week! Dear God. The end of the school year is always a busy time for us, but this year is giving me even more agita than usual. I finished the inventory and we have 28 missing books -- which is not great, even out of a total count of about 27,000 volumes. We know of about five additional missing books that were checked out to a high school department, for use by students with research projects. Hopefully some of them will come back before the end of the year when people are cleaning out classrooms, lockers and offices.

I am still having a terrible time getting overdue books back from students. I write them e-mails, I talk to them personally, I e-mail their parents and school advisers, and still nothing happens. No one can seem to resolve the situation. It's not as if the kids don't have the money to pay for the book. They just can't follow through, for whatever reason. We've long blamed pandemic-related developmental delays in executive functioning for problems like this, and maybe that still is partly the problem. I'm trying to take it lightly -- I can't be ultimately responsible for what other people do or don't do.

I suppose I've been complaining about this for ten years. But the lassitude really does seem worse this year.

This weekend should be pretty chill. I'm going to a play this afternoon because a friend offered me a spare ticket -- "The Brightening Air" at the Old Vic, about an Irish family in the 1980s -- so that will be the big excitement for the day.

Our Flat, Staged

I came across this picture while cleaning out our old paperwork. The room looks familiar, right? And yet not quite?

Well, that's because it's our flat, but before we moved in eleven years ago. It's also before the previous family moved in, because we saw their decor and it wasn't this. I'm guessing it was taken in 2010 or so, if not before. These photos were then used to list the flat for rent. Yes, you too could live here!

What's up with the very '80s glass and steel table and stereo equipment? And all that white furniture -- you can certainly tell this was long before Olga. I note that they took down all the terrible drapes before taking the photos.

Just for comparison, here's the living room now. (We also took down the terrible drapes, as has been discussed in previous posts.)

The dining room was very sparse -- more like an ironing room, from the looks of things.

Here's what it looks like now.

The old photo of the bedroom has the most furniture of any of the shots. I guess some previous occupant was in the process of moving out, but hadn't quite yet.

Here's the bedroom now. Those armoires came with the flat but they're not in the older photo, so I'm not sure when they came on the scene. Note that the carpet is the same. 🙄 And here we do have some unsightly drapes.

The kitchen looked very white. I could not figure out what that dirigible-shaped thing is on the left. Dave thinks it's a speaker for a phone, like a docking station, sitting on top of the microwave. (Addendum: He's right. It is in fact a Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin Air speaker.)

Here's the kitchen now. We had it painted yellow and all of the appliances have been replaced over the years.

And finally, this is what the garden used to look like! It was so empty.

Here it is today. That hazel tree on the right has gotten huge, despite several trims, as has the Japanese maple and some of the other plantings in the back. Overall it feels much more private and secluded, I'd say.

Anyway, just thought you'd enjoy this look at the flat before we lived in it -- particularly if you're into before-and-after real estate shots!

Bouquet

When I was at Tesco last weekend, I bought this Easter bouquet to brighten up the living room -- a mixture of lilies, iris and chrysanthemums. Yesterday evening the sun was hitting it just right and a photo was in order!

I don't have much news. I was busy as all get-out yesterday, re-shelving a couple of cartloads of books, covering new ones and spending an hour in the Lower School. Barely a moment to breathe! But none of it was very interesting or yielded any blog-worthy stories.

Today I'm hoping to get back to inventory once again. I've been wearing my pants with a hole in the knee in preparation -- since kneeling for inventory always ruins my pants, why ruin a second pair? I'll just completely demolish the ones that are already damaged, even though I might look like a hobo in the meantime. I want the kids to look at me and say, "Gee, someday I want to be a prosperous librarian like him."

Fungus Among Us

I tweaked my blogroll again yesterday, restoring the blogs of a few bloggers who had died. The comments from all my readers made me reconsider removing them. After all, if I died, I would hope my blog would live on in one way or another, and I suppose that happens when living bloggers preserve the links. So yes, Mage and Miss Edna have returned.

That's our broom plant, above, which I don't believe has bloomed in recent years. I'm glad some things in our garden are thriving because there's a fair amount of doom and gloom out there this year. I think two of our landlord's roses have given up the ghost, or are in the process of doing so, including one of my favorites, and I am at a loss how to prevent it. We've watered and fertilized and pruned but they still seem determined to expire.

Also, our canna lily is showing no signs of life, but that is a minor tragedy. I bought that thing for Dave for his birthday five years ago and never expected it to live this long. England is really no place for an outdoor canna lily.

The pot where I planted that sprig of ginger from our kitchen has sprouted a crop of mushrooms. It's a stir-fry!

St Clement Kills the Toaster

In Britain the Easter weekend is bracketed by two holidays -- Good Friday and Easter Monday -- when many businesses are typically closed. Yesterday was Easter Monday, so it's back to routines today. It was a quiet Easter Monday around here, mostly involving gardening and reading.

I was sorry to hear about the death of the pope. I am not Catholic so I have no direct personal stake in the pope or his theology, but I thought Pope Francis did an excellent job embodying the positive aspects of Christian love and trying to open the church to communities that had been marginalized and underserved. Of course he took a lot of heat for this, and the polarizing impulses that we see sweeping politics are also dividing the church.

It's interesting how this polarizing tendency is being felt all around the globe in a variety of contexts. Is it all because of the Interwebs and social media, where we find people (and algorithms) to fuel our more extreme views, stoking them like a white-hot oven? Or does it have something to do with a quintessential difference in the way progressives and conservatives think, and the way those differences are felt more strongly and loudly in our media-saturated modern society? Who knows.

Anyway, RIP Francis. You were the right Pope at the right time.

Our hideous camellia is blooming. As you can see, when the blooms are fresh they're not bad, though this one is already beginning to brown just a touch on its outer edges. The plant only becomes hideous when those old blossoms are still hanging there weeks later, brown and droopy. I think white flowers in general are uninteresting so this is not a bush I would choose to plant.

Dave fertilized the roses, the citrus and the tree fern yesterday. I have more plants that need repotting but I am out of compost, so for the time being everything is just going to have to cope.

In the afternoon I went to toast our last St. Clements hot cross bun, and when I turned on the toaster it flipped the circuit breaker. What?! I reset the breaker and tried again, and the same thing happened. I was concerned the outlet was to blame, so I moved the toaster to another outlet, and this time when I turned it on I could see an arc of electricity at the bottom of the heating elements. (And it tripped a different breaker.) Clearly it had a short of some kind, so I took it right down to the council electronics recycling bin on the high street and threw it in. So much for that. A replacement toaster is on the way, and I ate my St. Clements bun untoasted.

Here's Olga brutalizing our candytuft plant in her evening face-wiping ritual:

I cleaned out the blog list in my sidebar yesterday, shedding about ten old blogs that were mostly inactive. Either the bloggers had died or had gone silent, and a few are still blogging but for whatever reason I found myself unlikely to read them anymore. It happens. Relationships evolve (or devolve) and we go our separate ways, hopefully with best wishes all around. No harm, no foul.

(Top photo: Colorful doors on Oxford Street, last week.)