Rainy Walk and Coughing Fox

Free picture frame, anyone? Kind of a peculiar way to offer it up, and I'm afraid the rain hasn't done it any favors, but it's there if you want it. I also found a free chair (below) that I left behind.

I came across these treasures on an unexpected walk to work yesterday morning. I realized that I once again needed a computer cable adapter, this time to download the video from the garden cam to my new Mac. Remember how it only has two ports and my devices don't fit them? Also, Dave couldn't find his headphones and thought they were at work, and I had a couple of other things to drop off at the office. So I took a walk.

I got the adapter, dropped off the stuff and couldn't find Dave's headphones. And because I wasn't on a timetable I could make it a leisurely walk, stopping to take pictures now and then, even though it was raining lightly. I remember a photography teacher of mine telling me years ago to get out in all weather, because pictures on a rainy day could be just as interesting as those in sunshine and they offer all sorts of possibilities.

When I got back home, I went on Amazon and ordered my own cable adapter, which I should have done last week.

So that was the morning.

In the afternoon I spent time catching up on blogs and reading The New Yorker. Yes, I'm finally trying to work through my massive backlog of New Yorkers. I've been off the magazine entirely for several months but I intend to catch up. We'll see how that goes. Right now I'm reading an issue from August!

Here's what the garden cam yielded from the past week or so. At 0:24 we get a good look at a fox stretching, and at 0:43 we see one scratching and then hear the poor thing having a coughing fit. Wonder what brought that on? I suppose foxes get respiratory illnesses too, especially in this weather. At the one-minute mark we briefly see Pale Cat and then Tabby comes by at 1:29.

In the afternoon I did some springtime pruning. It seems a bit early but the roses are already putting out new growth so it was time. I pruned them back as well as the buddleia.

I haven't heard a thing from the tree man about clearing that ivy at the back. I think we've been ghosted. If I want it done I may have to do it myself. Which will be interesting, since we don't own a ladder.

We have crocuses, but as you can see, the squirrels are already gnawing the flower heads off!

Daffodils

I just now took this photo in order to have something to put on the blog! I don't know why I haven't been more inspired to take pictures lately. A lot going on, I suppose. But for what it's worth, here are our daffodils, coming more fully into bloom as they usually do in February. (My hand is in the photo because the flowers flop in the rain, and it's raining AGAIN this morning.)

I had a really solid night's sleep last night, which felt amazing. I was exhausted. We've had some family drama that has consumed about 98 percent of my brain over the last couple of days. It's not anything I feel comfortable blogging -- at least, not yet -- but I talked to my siblings last night via Zoom and I think it's all going to work out OK. It's related to my stepmother's estate, and it's been an emotional roller coaster. Fingers crossed, we've arrived at a good place.

My next-door neighbor on the right -- the good neighbor who we almost never hear anything from, and whose wall we share -- is having some work done on her house. A huge scaffold has been built in both the front and the back, and I'm hearing some guys clambering around on it now. I think it's roof work. If it keeps out the rain, I'm all for it.

Meanwhile, I have no idea what's going on upstairs. It's been weeks since I've seen or heard anyone from the family that moved in after the Russians left last summer. Their car is still in the driveway but if they're home they're very quiet. I don't think they're around. Also, the apartment listing is still up, though it does say it's "under offer" and perhaps that's real-estate code for "unavailable." I can't tell what's happening. The mysteries abound.

I am looking forward to a quiet day at home, doing some reading and not much else.

Iguanas

Well, this has been a dispiriting week. My stepmother's death has knocked all of us on our backs, for a variety of reasons. I'm sick of hearing and thinking about Jeffrey Epstein and his disgusting cult of exploitation, and I'm sick of rain and grayness and winter. I'm in one of those moods.

Did you see the story about the iguana cull in Florida? Iguanas, which are not native to Florida but like a lot of exotic reptiles have run wild in many areas, do not react well to cold. When the temperature dips too far, their nervous systems shut down and they literally fall out of the trees where they live. They're not dead, just in a cold-induced torpor -- they reawaken when the temperatures warm up again. Meanwhile, it rains iguanas.

Apparently it's been so cold in Florida that iguanas have been dropping left and right, and the authorities have encouraged people to collect the poor helpless critters so they can be "humanely" euthanized. I understand that they're an exotic species competing with native creatures for limited resources, but still, this seems patently unfair to me. Talk about kicking someone when they're down! It's very effective as a public policy, though, and more than 5,000 iguanas have so far been killed.

See? Dispiriting.

It's also been a long week at work. Fortunately next week we only have a few days with students and then it's parent-teacher conference time, which means the library will be pretty quiet. Maybe I can do some back-office stuff and some shelf-organizing. And then Dave and I are off to Spain!

(Photo: A colorful window at Roche Bobois on Finchley Road.)

June

This is my stepmother, June, 40-plus years ago with our dogs Moldy and Mildew. Yes, those were their names. I could do a whole post on unusual dog names, but for now I want to focus on June, who died Tuesday night in Florida.

This did not come as a surprise. You may remember that when we went home at Christmas we discovered she was desperately ill and she went right into the hospital while we were there. She got some treatment and seemed to improve, and more treatments were planned, but she then declined very quickly. I won't go into great detail to protect her privacy and that of the family, but I will say that she had a bladder tumor that went untreated for a long-ish time, and that led to kidney and other complications.

My relationship with June was always a bit complex. I suspect this is true for any boy whose father marries another woman. My parents divorced in 1974 and my father married June in 1976, and my mother was never subtle about feeling wronged. In fact for about ten years she walked around in a rage. I was always fiercely loyal to her, and I couldn't get beyond the feeling that June was an interloper. This was neither true nor fair, which I came to see as I got older, but it colored all my interactions with her when I was a child.

She was younger than my mother and brought two children of her own into the family, a son and daughter by her previous husband. I've always thought of them as my stepbrother and stepsister and in fact I still call them that, but my father did adopt them so they're really just my brother and sister. Again, my terminology was affected by my mother's anger.

June was an interesting personality. She could be quite blunt and forceful, especially when dealing with us kids, and when I was young she hurt my feelings more times than I can count. But I think she never meant to be hurtful, and I didn't quite realize until adulthood that even her own natural children felt the same sting. She wasn't treating any of us any different. She was the oldest of seven kids in a large military family and she learned to make herself heard.

At a vacation condo on Longboat Key, 1980

She was a good cook and somehow cajoled my father into participating in a gourmet cooking group in the 1980s. (I think my father's participation exclusively involved eating.) She loved needlework and in her leisure hours could always be found on the end of the sofa in her living room, needlepointing or cross-stitching, sometimes at a frame with a large magnifying light. She made so much needlepoint and cross-stitch that she ran out of places to hang it all. She loved clothes and sparkly accessories and even had fur coats -- in Florida!

She was generous at the holidays and Christmases at Dad's always came with a big pile of presents -- far more than my brother and I got from our practical and somewhat abstemious mother. She loved playing cards and taught us all canasta, spades, hearts and other games, which we inevitably played after dinner on our annual weeklong beach vacations to Longboat Key. She was more fun than my mom, of that I have no doubt, and that's what my dad needed in his life.

Needlepoint at the beach, 1981

She was also a career woman. She started as a teacher and a typist -- which is how she met my dad, typing the manuscripts for the textbooks he wrote with a university colleague. She moved on to sales, first as a distributor of Foster-Grant sunglasses and then pharmaceuticals. She and my father occasionally got sent on sales trips to places like Bermuda or San Juan, which seemed very exotic to us. (We kids never got to go.)

June with Manny the chihuahua, 2015

In her later years she loved going on cruises, and I mean she LOVED them. My father wasn't big on traveling as he got older, so she would go cruising with her mother, my step-grandmother, and they traveled the world multiple times over. June went everywhere, sometimes two or three or more times. You may remember that after my father died, she bought us all a cruise. Last year she was on a worldwide cruise for six months, though I'm not sure how often she got off the ship.

June and her friend Marianne in Hyde Park, 2023

When Dave and I moved to London we met up with her a couple of times as she passed through town on her travels.

At times like this, it's a drag to live overseas. My brother and step-siblings are all gathered in Florida ironing out arrangements, and although I've told them I can come if I'm needed, I think it's likely that I will stay in England until they've nailed down dates for services. Then I can go back for those, and help with whatever still needs to be done.

So, how am I feeling about this? That's a good question. I'm mostly just stunned by the rapidity of her decline. I suppose I'm sad, but as I said, our relationship was complicated. We were friendly and even affectionate with each other, but the feelings, for me, were always a bit guarded. Maybe I never completely got over the sense that loving June would betray my mother.

Trendy Bates and a New Lamp

The weather was super-dreary yesterday, with cloudy skies and spitting rain. Even so, I had a moment at work in the morning when I thought, "I have to get out of here!" So I took a quick walk down the St. John's Wood High Street, and on my way back I passed these flats with their unusual windows.

Never mind what led to my moment of desperation. Let's just say I spent a lot of my walk thinking about how happy I am that I only have to survive my work environment for two more months. And not even that, because we have two weeks of break time during those two months. Deep breaths!

On the high street, at the Oxfam used book shop, I came across this Penguin boxed set of H.E. Bates novels. I haven't read anything by Bates in ages, but I liked the few books that I picked up in charity shops soon after we came to London (despite the dubious racial references). So I bought these. I might not read them all but we'll see.

I have no idea who that woman on the box is. The covers of all the books also feature attractive young women who probably have nothing to do with the plots. This set was published in 1973, and I guess Penguin was trying to make Bates trendy.

(By the way, if you click that link above, you can also read possibly my earliest blog reference to our avocado tree, describing the planting of the seed that produced it. So that tree will be 14 years old this summer!)

And remember those tiny teasel seedlings that were growing inside the seed head? Well, I carefully tugged them free and put them into their own soil in a seed tray. More teasels for the garden! (We don't really need more teasels but I couldn't watch those seedlings inevitably die, stuck in their spiny pod.)

Also yesterday, my replacement bedside lamp arrived via eBay. This is an identical match to the one the painters broke. Some of you mentioned in comments that they should have paid for it, and I suppose that's true, but it wasn't much money -- about £30 with shipping. It wasn't worth it to dicker with them. I just wanted to move past it!

I'm a Nigerian Prince

I got a notification from Ancestry shortly before Christmas that my DNA report had been updated. Apparently they do this from time to time, as they gather more and more information about global DNA and better refine their data.

You may remember that I first did this DNA analysis nine years ago, and it hasn't changed significantly since then. I am still overwhelmingly English -- and now they can even break down what parts of England I'm from. I have additional Scottish, Welsh and German ancestry, and traces from Ireland, Sweden, and West Africa.

It's that West Africa bit that fascinates me most. I have no idea what the story is there. I do have plenty of family from the South in the years before the Civil War, so it's not impossible that at least one of my ancestors had some African blood. Things like that certainly happened back then, as we all know from Thomas Jefferson's history with Sally Hemings.

What's interesting is how the source of my African DNA changes from one report to another. Initially, Ancestry said only that it was West African, and reported it as a "low confidence" result, so I considered it a fluke or a throwback to some distant primordial past.

But with each report it's become more specific -- the second report pinpointed Mali and a few other adjacent countries as the source. The third eliminated Africa entirely and folded in Norway and Iceland. (It seems to have dispensed with low-percentage results.) The fourth report brought me back to Africa with DNA more specifically linked to Ivory Coast and Ghana, but got rid of that Norwegian connection.

The newest version shifts my African roots to Nigeria. And as you can see above, it's very specific, right down to certain ethnic groups.

I have no idea how accurate this is, but as I said, it's not impossible. The accuracy seems more likely the more specific we get, and this is pretty darn specific. I'm not aware of any stories in my family about ancestors with African connections, but of course that's not the kind of thing anyone talked about back then. In American society, certainly before the Civil War but even afterwards, there were social benefits to "passing" for white.

I can see how it might happen. Let's use Sally Hemings again as an example. She was one-quarter African, but still enslaved, and she was having children by Jefferson, so they would be 1/8 African (assuming the Jeffersons had no African ancestors of their own). With each successive generation there's a greater likelihood that those descendants would marry further into white European-American culture. That kind of intermarriage could seemingly lead, in modern times, to results like mine. (I'm not saying I'm a descendant of Hemings and Jefferson, just that I could be a descendant of that kind of coupling, which was surely not rare.)

It's pretty fascinating. I wish my brother would take a similar test. I'd be interested to see if his revealed anything more, though obviously the DNA he inherited would be somewhat different from the DNA I inherited. He could be less African than me -- or more.

The "journeys" on my mother's side remain very accurate. My maternal grandmother was from southeastern North Carolina, which is shown as a "hot spot" on the map above, and my maternal grandfather's people were New Englanders and New Yorkers.

And on the paternal side, Ancestry zeroes right in on the ancestral home of my father's people in northern Arkansas.

Pretty fascinating stuff!

Trees, Pre and Post

Well, I finally got Lightroom working on my new computer. It took the "nuclear option" -- erasing the program entirely, as well as all of its past photo catalogs and the application that controls it, Creative Cloud. I tried to "uninstall" them but even the uninstall program gave me an error message, so I wound up just dragging anything that made reference to Lightroom or Creative Cloud into the trash and hitting delete. Then I was able to log in to Adobe using my regular log in and download a new, updated copy of both Creative Cloud and Lightroom (which is apparently now referred to as "Lightroom Classic").

I have all the photos backed up in both unedited and edited form, and of course I still have my old, creaky computer (for the time being) so I haven't lost anything. I can't imagine why I would need the old photo catalogs anyway. I think I'm fine moving forward.

It was such a relief to get that problem solved.

Otherwise, I spent the day doing stuff around the house -- more neatening up after our painting job, mainly. I re-hung parts of our bedroom curtains so they wouldn't droop so badly. We do intend to get better window coverings at some point. And I caught up on my blog reading, though I'm still behind on answering comments. Argh!

I never did post a picture of last week's tree-trimming job near the back wall, so here it is, in case you were curious. The tree guy removed a ton of ivy from this elder tree, but not all of it -- he kept the stems so we'd have some greenery at the top. I actually think it looks pretty good -- a bit bald and naked, like a new haircut, but it will grow out more naturally.

Here are some before shots from a few years ago, when we had a different tree-trimming crew neaten up this area. As you can see, the new look above is a big change.

Here's the tree on the other side, absolutely loaded with ivy, as well as a climbing rose. This is what I want the guy to come back and clean up, because as I've said, he's already cut the main stem of the ivy and it's all going to die. I'd like him to remove the greenery -- I don't mind if he leaves the bare stems that are adhering to the tree trunk, because I know they'd be hard to strip off. I just don't want all those dead leaves and branches hanging there. The rose can stay, though it probably needs some pruning.

He hasn't called me back yet. I get the impression he's not that interested in doing this second job, and it would indeed be difficult. But I hope he follows through. We shall see.

(Top photo: Some graffiti on the "Black Path" near the railroad tracks.)