Luzon, Great Britain, Honshu, (Blank)

The other night I was getting ready for bed, turning out lights and checking doors and windows and that kind of thing, and I happened to glance across the street. One of our neighbors has a large TV, and they'd paused it in their dark living room with their curtains open, with the result that this face was looming in the darkness. I thought it made a pretty cool, if mysterious, picture. Anybody recognize the show? I don't.

Today I actually have something to blog about because I participated in a social event last night. I know! Rare enough these days! Who has the energy after a long day at work? And honestly, I wasn't all that excited about it, but a co-worker asked me to come and in retrospect I'm glad I did.

It was our school's annual quiz night, sponsored by the parents for themselves, faculty and staff. (No kids -- wine was on the tables!) Our team of eight did pretty well, mainly because one of our group was a complete quiz dominatrix, and we came in third out of eleven teams. Our main rival team came in second, and a team of alumni came in first, which made us all feel pretty good!

Here are some of the sample questions:

1. Which Egyptian city is the name of a Greek god spelled backwards?
2. Which ocean is at the eastern end of the Panama Canal?
3. Complete this series: Luzon, Great Britain, Honshu, ______.

The first one's not hard, but I'm including it here because it was my one distinct victory of the entire evening: Suez. I got other answers too, but usually concurrent with other team members.

The second one seems easy, but it's a trick question. The Panama Canal crosses the isthmus of Panama at a downward angle, and the easternmost terminus is actually in the Pacific. If you look at it on a map, you'll see what I mean. I suppose the giveaway here is the word "ocean," because the other end of the canal is in the Caribbean Sea, not the Atlantic. We actually left this one blank because it was in a round where we got docked for wrong answers and we weren't sure.

The third one was a complete mystery, because we weren't sure what we were measuring. Was it the size of the islands, the locations, some characteristic or what? We put Madagascar, thinking we might be going up in geographic size -- and that's roughly correct but there would be others in the series in between, so that's not the answer they were looking for. Turns out the islands are listed in order of increasing population, with the fourth and most populous one being Java.

So, anyway, that was a lot of fun. I walked home late and got in about 11 p.m. and immediately solved a household mystery.

Dave and I have occasionally noticed silvery slug tracks in the living room. They've been on the carpet, on the floor and even on the sofa. I have scoured the room trying to find that slug or snail, without success, but last night when I came in and turned on the light -- BAM! There it was, on the floor, caught in the act! I scooped it up and threw it out the back door. I'm impressed it's been able to survive in our dry house, but I suppose it stayed on (or under) the plants. Now it's back where it belongs, and probably relieved, if slugs are capable of feeling relief.

Primroses

Another sign that the garden is waking up from its winter slumber -- our primroses are blooming!

I haven't bought a primrose in ages. These are both hardy plants that have come back for us year after year.

Other than that, I've got nothing today. Yesterday was a grind. I am just running every second of every day. I swear I don't know what happened to my job -- it used to be so chill! Now I am just never caught up.

Daffy

The garden is a bit daffodil-crazy at the moment, with daffies on all sides!

Many of these are miniature ones that I collected here and there. I remember getting one pot of bulbs out of the trash in the cemetery while walking Olga, and another came in a big floral arrangement that had been purchased for a special occasion at school.

I like the miniature ones because they seem to clump together and bloom really well, though maybe that's just because of the way we planted them.

While walking around the garden taking these pictures yesterday morning, I discovered this big, sleepy bumblebee tucked into the trumpet of one of our regular-sized daffodils. It didn't seem to want to move. It was pretty chilly yesterday morning so hibernating may have been the sensible thing to do until the sun warmed things up.

It's encouraging to have both flowers and bees coming out. I have a bamboo pole wired to the trunk of the avocado to support whatever winter covering may be needed to protect it, and I'm thinking I might be able to remove that sometime soon -- but I'm still wary because in past years we've had pretty heavy snow in late February and early March. I probably need to leave it in place for another month or so in case the avocado needs to be covered again.

But we're almost done with this winter, I can feel it!

Racism and Public Works

The pink magnolias are starting to come out -- this tree is going to be a cloud of blossoms in a week or two. Look at all those buds!

Professional Development yesterday wasn't as tedious as one might expect. It was about structural racism and how it affects children's performance in schools. For example, if children feel picked on or singled out or somehow threatened, their brains are paying more attention to survival than to learning -- their brain stem goes into fight-or-flight mode, which short-circuits any activity in the "learning zone" of the pre-frontal cortex. Obviously I know that children who are happier and more comfortable are better students, but I'd never heard about the brain chemistry involved.

There's an online training session we're supposed to complete as well, and I only finished 66 percent of it, so I need to go back and do that today.

I absolutely do believe that structural racism exists. A lot of people are uncomfortable with this idea but it makes perfect sense to me -- people who come from advantaged backgrounds, and in the USA and most of the West that has typically meant white people, tend to do better themselves for a variety of reasons. And people who are part of groups that are perceived to be "less successful" have higher hurdles to jump. That doesn't mean there aren't other factors involved in success, like class and wealth, but race is often heavily correlated with those.

There are a lot of poor white people too, but even they have an immediate advantage because they are unburdened by assumptions and expectations based on race. They may have other barriers based on class or accent or region -- that has certainly been historically true here in England, and that's a problem as well. But racial assumptions seem a heavier burden to me.

Anyway, I'm not saying anything new here, but I found it all interesting.

In notes from the Department of Public Works, remember that sidewalk that was so slanted someone put God-awful planters on it to keep people from walking there? Well, there's been a massive project to level it out. Crews came in, dug up the pavement, moved around utilities, and made a huge mess in general so that now there's a flatter sidewalk in front of this new building.

And no more planters. Of course, I wonder where the plants went.

It looks pretty good, doesn't it?

And closer to home...

...this is happening across the street. Don't ask me what it is, but a jackhammer was out there at 9 p.m. on Sunday night plowing up the pavement. Kind of an interesting time to start that project, but maybe the pavement had to be gone so crews could do their work on Monday. As I always say, never a dull moment!

Waste Not, Want Not

After watching the noisy, invasive parakeets in the Plaza de la Merced in Málaga, it's nice to be home watching our own noisy, invasive parakeets in our garden! Noisy, invasive parakeets really are a worldwide phenomenon. They sure do love our suet balls. That one on top is trying to lift the lid to get into the feeder!

Seriously, it's great to be home. I love putting down the bags, unpacking everything, doing the laundry and getting organized. That's what I did yesterday, in addition to finally catching up on most blogs and responding to some comments.

I made lunch with some ingredients in the fridge that survived our weeklong absence, but only barely. We had some broccoli in there that was looking a bit pale, and a head of baby gem lettuce that "expired" on Jan. 14! (I say "expired" in quotes because why does lettuce need an expiration date?) The outer leaves were looking pretty sad, so I threw those away, but the inner ones looked fine and I washed them up and ate them. Waste not, want not!

(Every time I hear that phrase, I think of a scene in the TV miniseries "Backstairs at the White House," which I watched as a kid. One of the presidents -- Wilson or Coolidge, I can't remember -- arrives at the White House and begins turning off lights. "Waste not, want not," he says. Something tells me that is not a lesson Donald Trump will have learned.)

Here's some of the promised footage from the garden cam, showing our bird feeders. As I said yesterday, I wanted to see whether rodents were getting to the seed, and they're not -- at least not in the feeders. But the birds are messy eaters, particularly the great tits, which fling seeds hither and yon with wild abandon. In addition to great tits, which have black heads, white faces and yellowish bodies, you'll see smaller blue tits, which have blue heads and bright yellow bodies. You can also hear the roofers talking as they work on the house next door.

Today we have a professional development day at work. I think there's some kind of meeting to get us all on the same page and then some planned tutorials or other activities. This may be my last professional development day, come to think of it!

Home Again

Here's one more picture from Spain, showing a tray of Easter cookies at the bakery down the street from our hotel in Málaga. I went there yesterday morning for a coffee and a pastry before we left for the airport, and snapped this picture. The guys with the hoods look a little scary to our American eyes, but in Spain those pointy hoods are known as capirotes and are traditionally worn in processions during Lent.

We got off to the airport with no problem yesterday morning, simply wandering out to the Plaza de la Merced to pick up one of the dozen or so taxis waiting. Our check-in was smooth and the flight was fine -- there were a few periodically screaming kiddies but nothing like our journey a week ago. Apparently taking small children on vacation to Spain is something that people in the UK commonly do. When I was a little kid we never went anywhere that required an airplane, unless it was to see grandparents -- and even then, we usually drove.

I did have one scary moment in the airport. We were sitting at the gate, waiting to board our plane, when I went to a vending machine to buy a bottle of water. I punched in the number for the water and inserted my bank card in the ATM-like slot, only to realize that the slot was for cash and not for cards -- and the card was pushed so far in that I couldn't grip it to pull it out. Holy crap, I thought, I'm either going to have to leave my card here or miss my flight! I had visions of frantically calling the bank to cancel it before we took off.

Fortunately, I have a very thin leather wallet, and I was able to insert the edge of the wallet into the slot and push the card askew, so that its corner stuck out. I then gingerly grabbed that corner with my fingertips and worked the card out of the machine. Whew!

Back home again, the house and garden were just as we left them. The hyacinths are up and one of them is blooming -- these are the sparkly bulbs we got years ago for Christmas. They just keep coming.

Remember how I trained the garden cam on the bird feeder, to see if any rodents climbed the pole during our week away? Well, I skimmed through the footage last night. I didn't see rodents at all, which is good -- apparently to whatever extent they're around, they're staying on the ground where they belong. But I did get some good footage of birds, including some showing them throwing seed out of the feeder -- which in turn, of course, attracts the rodents.

Maybe I'll post a bird video at some point, but first...

...on our train journey from Gatwick back to West Hampstead, we passed over the Thames bridge at Blackfriars station, which offers a spectacular view of the river and the city beyond. I made a very quick video to show you what that view was like from the Thameslink train.

Oh, and at the airport, we ran into a group of about ten senior students from our school, coming back from a ski week in Austria. They seemed unaccompanied by any adult, though they must be 18 themselves, or close to it. I guess by that age they are capable of traveling on their own, and indeed they all seemed alive and in one piece. Dave and I run into students all the time when we travel, but usually they're with their families.

Today will be all about settling back in, doing laundry, that kind of thing. Gotta get ready for work tomorrow!

"Balls of Steel" Gazpacho

Well, we got back to Málaga without incident yesterday. Car travel is really pretty awesome, if you don't mind the expense -- which I do, at least enough not to do it regularly. But it's hard to beat in terms of convenience.

Before we left Granada, I took a walk up into the hilly neighborhood just below the Alhambra to photograph the street art there. Dave and I saw some amazing murals when we rode up by taxi the day before, and walking gave me a chance to stretch my legs and get some fresh air before getting in the car for the hour-and-a-half drive to Málaga. I stopped in a park and saw this guy:

That's a lot of dog! He was brushing their coats and as he'd work on one, the other two watched me intently, as if I were a gigantic dog treat.

The car ride was smooth and back in Málaga we checked in to the same hotel where we'd stayed earlier in the week, coincidentally on Calle Granada. Then we headed out to the Plaza Carbón for lunch.

The adjacent Plaza del Siglo

We found a table in the shade and I ordered an excellent sangria and some salmorejo, a cold blended tomato soup similar to gazpacho. It was all excellent until I got to the bottom of the salmorejo bowl and found these:

They looked like tiny ball bearings, the size of BBs. I've been warned in the past while eating birds like grouse or pheasant that they could contain birdshot, but there was no poultry in my gazpacho! We could only theorize that an immersion blender used to mix the soup had somehow self-destructed and thrown off these ball bearings. The servers were very apologetic and gave me the soup for free. Fortunately it was smooth enough that no chewing was required, and they were very easy to detect so I'm reasonably sure I didn't swallow any. (Will I set off the airport metal detectors?)

After lunch Dave went back to the room for a nap (you can see this is our pattern) and I wandered around Málaga. I wanted to get out of the tourist zone, so I headed west and north, winding my way through the streets roughly between the hotel, the river and the Plaza de Capuchinos. I walked past graffiti saying (in Spanish) things like, "there is no Covid-19," "the virus is the television," and "chemtrails: they are spraying us." So there are crazy people in every country.

I passed this fun mural by Sara Fratini on the Calle Padre Mondejar. I couldn't get the whole thing in a photo so I had to make a video, made more awkward by several streetlamps on the sidewalk that I had to step around!

Finally, last night Dave and I decided to head down to the beach. Málaga is known as a beach resort but I'd only barely seen the Mediterranean, and Dave hadn't seen it at all. So we walked to the Playa de la Malagueta, where we found a restaurant that seated us just at sunset. We had some good seafood tapas, followed (for me) by some fish stew and a strawberry dessert made with Inés Rosales cake ice cream. I knew about Inés Rosales cakes from Mitchell's blog, so I was glad to try it, albeit in ice cream form.

As we ate dinner, a group of about 20 teenagers on some kind of school trip -- we think they were American -- gathered on the walkway just outside the restaurant windows and ate pizza, which proved distracting. And then some little kids eating with a family in the restaurant ran out onto the beach to play on the Malagueta sign (above). It's hard to tell, but there are six of them in that picture. I don't think I would be an overprotective parent, but I'm not sure I'd have felt comfortable having my under-10 kids running around on a dark beach with no parent nearby! (The adults stayed seated indoors.)

Soon, we'll be off to the airport. Thank you, by the way, for slogging through my overly long Spain posts. I know I've been cramming a lot in here each day and I appreciate your indulgence. They will help me remember this trip in the future. Coming to you tomorrow from London!