Wien

Well, as you can see, I have made it to Österreich. I'm in my friend Bill's apartment near the Taborstraße underground station, in what he calls his "sun room" -- a spacious lofty room with a curved wall of windows at the corner of the building. Here's the view:

Not too shoddy! The only downside is, Bill and his husband David moved here in January and none of their stuff has arrived. So the only things in the sunroom are a lamp and WiFi router (on the floor) and a big sofa, which is where I'm sleeping. The whole space has a very repossessed look, kind of like Demi Moore's apartment at the end of "St. Elmo's Fire," when the creditors have come and hauled away her furniture. Several of the other rooms in Bill's place have nothing in them at all. Thank God for the sofa.

Bill's husband isn't here either -- he's back in New York working for a few months. That's partly why I wanted to come and visit poor Bill, who is utterly by himself. He doesn't know anyone here and doesn't speak German. He seems fine with it but I felt he could use some company, and since I have the time, why not?

I haven't seen Bill in 15 years, but he was present when Dave and I got Civil Unioned in New Jersey and he hung out with us quite a bit back in the brief time we lived there. In fact, he helped me get my job with Gannett after I was laid off by The New York Times Co. (Never mind that I was not a huge fan of Gannett -- he did warn me.) I've known Bill since the '90s, when we were both active in the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA).

So, anyway, we haven't really done much yet. We went out for dinner last night to a neighborhood place where I had salad with a piece of fish on it -- better than I'm making it sound -- and then took a walk afterwards to the Stephansplatz just so I could orient myself.

The statue above is Johann Nestroy, a singer/actor/playwright who is renowned in Austria. According to Wikipedia (which is never wrong), he wrote a play called "Einen Jux will er sich machen," which Google translates as "He Wants to Have Some Fun." It served as the source material for Thornton Wilder's "The Matchmaker," which in turn eventually became "Hello, Dolly!" So there's some Austrian theatre trivia for you, in case it comes up in your next pub quiz.

A Communist flyer posted near our restaurant last night

My flight here was mostly uneventful. At Heathrow, in the waiting area, I sat across from three 30-ish young adults who seemed to be flying together with a chaperone. One of them, a woman, was having a tearful meltdown, saying she "wanted to go home to Mum." The chaperone kept trying to convince her she would have fun, blah blah blah, and eventually they did head off together for some airplane. Hopefully the poor woman's mood improved, or that's going to be a long trip.

There is lots of graffiti here. Some of it is quite amazing, and some of it not so much. I could make myself crazy trying to photograph it all!

This phrase, according to Google, translates to: "Women in the resistance."

Today we're headed to the park adjacent to Bill's flat, and possibly along the nearby canal. The park features a couple of towering Nazi-era fortress-like structures made of concrete, apparently so massive that tearing them down isn't an option -- Bill tells me one has been turned into an aquarium! Should be interesting to see.

Note to self: Buy coffee, milk and sugar. Bill, bless his heart, is a tea-drinker, and yours truly needs his java in the morning.

Near Misses

Jan. 1973

I'm off to Vienna this morning, but believe it or not I'm writing this post live, rather than packing. I'm only going for three days so packing won't be very complicated! Plus my flight doesn't leave until 12:30 p.m. so I have plenty of time.

Yesterday I decided to finally dispose of all the slides I'd culled from the first two batches I bought. I started with about 2,200 slides, I'd guess, and during my initial sorting I'd probably put half in the trash pile, like the ones in my "Rejects" post from a few days back. Most of them are blurry, dark or otherwise damaged. Some are just boring.

But before I finally tossed them I wanted to give them all a second look, to make sure some pictures weren't worth keeping. Here are four of about ten I pulled out of the trash pile to save.

July 1967

June 1974

Feb. 1974

(The dates I'm giving are the dates on the slide. Obviously the picture above wasn't taken in February -- it's probably from the summer of 1973. I don't usually save flower pictures, unless they're unusual, because -- like pictures of the ocean, mountains, countryside or sunsets --they're seldom very interesting without a memory or story attached. But as a dahlia enthusiast I decided to give this one a reprieve.)

June 1976

I don't know why this one was in the trash pile -- it's a nice shot, with Mama Duck standing guard while her babies get fed by that girl. This shows why it's always good to give everything a second look!

Then I put the trash slides in a plastic bag and put it in the bin. I thought about trying to find someone to take them for craft projects or something like that, but I'm afraid someone unscrupulous will try to sell them on for the photographs, and having already been picked through, they're just not worth that. It's best to just toss them.

I've only barely looked at the three bags of slides I acquired most recently. Some of them feature the same people as the slides above, so obviously they came (at least in part) from the same families. I'll deal with those when I finish scanning the current ones. The Flickr album is up to 104 images, and there are at least 50 more to go!

Ford Galaxie Redux

A chameleon with its tongue out? A tadpole? A sperm? The possibilities are endless.

Yesterday was very quiet. I scanned and posted more slides, I read blogs, I read The New Yorker. I've been wrestling with squirrels who have dug up a certain teasel seedling for the fourth time -- for some reason they just do not want this plant to survive! (Boud has recommended peppermint oil to repel them; I looked in one of our local shops and they didn't have any, but I am on the hunt. There's always Amazon, but I'd rather buy local if possible.)

I did not walk yesterday. Sunday is a day of rest.

When I walked on Saturday afternoon, I came across this 1963 Ford Galaxie 500. I was admiring it and at the same time, something about it clicked in my memory. I came home and looked in my photos, and sure enough, I photographed this exact same car before -- seven years ago, on the other side of London!

What it's doing in our neighborhood now, I have no idea. I may go back today to take a closer look, assuming it wasn't just visiting temporarily. The painted-on wording on the car is gone now, so perhaps it was sold, but it's definitely the same vehicle, with rust spots in all the identical places.

I'm not sure I have anything else to report. I am off to Vienna tomorrow afternoon to see my friend Bill for a few days, so today will be mainly getting the plants watered and everything in place for that little odyssey. I'm going to put a wire screen over that seedling to fend off the squirrels while I'm gone!

Some Wild Garden Action

I came across this graffiti in Camden when walking along the canal a couple of weeks ago. Nothing like a wild-eyed Staffy to brighten my day!

More reading yesterday morning. I learned the Lib Dems won in our local elections -- apparently plenty of other voters felt as I did, that they were the most promising candidates on the ballot.

Then I took another walk after lunch, just a wide loop around the neighborhood via Maygrove Peace Park and the cemetery. The weather was perfect. It's so nice to get out and walk in a t-shirt. My only complaint is that we have had no significant rain for at least a month. It's dry as a bone out there, the ground is cracked, and although the lawn and most plants seem to be doing OK we could sure use some moisture.

I lost a couple of my cosmos seedlings to pigeons, which plucked the heads off them as if they were corn for the picking. And I lost my biggest zinnia to a slug or snail. I'm down to three surviving zinnias, four sunflowers and five cosmos.

Remember my old habit of picking up china shards while walking, on Hampstead Heath in particular? Well, I found these during my walk on Friday and added them to my bowl. Lots of Blue Willow, or something similar. I'm intrigued by that bit at far left with the lettering -- looks like "acs L" or perhaps "acs D." I tried Googling to figure out what it might come from. When I uploaded a photo, the AI assistant helpfully said, "This is a ceramic shard featuring cursive script." Yeah, thanks for that.

Further Googling tried to tell me it comes from this pottery, which is just wrong. The font doesn't match and the wording isn't right. I think it's French based on the fact that a word ends with "acs," but who knows. There's just not enough of it to tell.

We had a crazy week on the garden cam! Some very unusual activity and lots of it, which is why I have a nine-minute video featuring birds, squirrels, rodents, wandering pets and, yes, foxes. As usual I'll list everything below, with the most interesting moments in red in case you'd like to jump ahead.

We begin with Sharpie sniffing around. Then:
-- At 0:15, a little mouse comes out of a nearby bush. Man, that thing can jump!
-- At 0:36, Q-Tip (or some fox with a white-tipped tail) comes by.
-- It's followed at 0:51 by a black cat. This is not Blackie, who is all black. This is a different cat, much fluffier.
-- At 1:37, a fox is back. Looks like Crooked Tail. It sees something at the back of the garden and takes off after it.
-- At 1:51, squirrel and pigeon.
-- At 2:05, Sharpie is back, followed by Q-Tip, and then at 2:56 by Crooked Tail. (Again, my fox differentiation is not absolute.)
-- At 3:13, SQUIRREL PANIC!
-- At 3:22, Crooked Tail.
-- At 3:31, a starling.
-- At 3:39, squirrel long jump!
-- At 3:49, some kind of LBT (sparrow?) intimidates a pigeon.
-- At 4:10, a great tit flutters in, followed at 4:17 by a dunnock on the ground.
-- At 4:22, Crooked Tail is back.
-- At 4:34, a robin flutters up to perch on the camera.
-- At 4:53, you see my legs as I'm trimming our hazel tree. (I guess I count as wildlife!)
-- At 5:13, Crooked Tail comes by.
-- At 5:26, the mouse is back.
-- At 5:43, we see another tit hopping around.
-- At 5:59 we get some brilliant daytime footage of (I believe) Sharpie. It really shows off his or her coloring.
-- At 6:39, the dunnock is back.
-- At 6:49, I put down a couple of pork chop scraps for the foxes.
-- At 6:58, an unwelcome surprise! A RAT appears and carries away the pork! I've learned my lesson about feeding the foxes.
-- At 7:09, a fox appears and sniffs around, but the rat has apparently made off with all the food. This is followed by lots of coming-and-going by a couple of different animals, I believe, all within the span of about half an hour. They probably smell the meat but they're too late.
-- At 8:28, that friggin' rat is back.
-- At 8:48, a fox trots past. It's early morning, so you can really hear the dawn chorus, mainly robins and blackbirds.
-- At 9:08, there's a horrible screech, and then Pale Cat chases a fox past the camera!

The Bicentennial and Someone Else's Dog

Our clematis is blooming once again, and looking a little healthier this year than last. It has never really thrived but it's hanging on.

Yesterday was unremarkable. I read The New Yorker in the morning, specifically Jill Lepore's article from a couple of months ago about the Bicentennial. As the USA prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary with all kinds of grandiose, Trumpian plans and schemes, she looked back at the 200th anniversary to see how we handled that. I was a child at the beginning of 1976 -- nine years old, to be exact -- and I remember the Bicentennial as a time of unity and celebration. As Lepore described it:

There was no end to the kitsch: Bicentennial beer mugs, flatware, dishes, glassware, placemats, and salt shakers; little glass Liberty Bells; patriotic yo-yos and egg timers; Bicentennial coffee grounds and coffeepots; Red, White ’n Blueberry ice cream; Bicentennial Barbie with a white lace mobcap, a flouncy red skirt, a blue bodice, and white pantaloons. You could get a Bicentennial auto loan and screw Bicentennial license plates onto your new car. At diners, where you likely ate off placemats made to look like replicas of the Declaration of Independence, your coffee came with Bicentennial sugar packs, displaying a short but sweet biography of an American President, and your 7 UP in a commemorative sixteen-ounce bottle. You could wipe your hands on Bicentennial towelettes, featuring a silhouette of Paul Revere on a horse. Kellogg’s ran a Bicentennial contest (“Make a picture of your favorite American Revolutionary hero—like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Betsy Ross, or others—eating a good balanced breakfast”); entrants got a red-white-and-blue kite. Campbell’s soup cans came with an offer for a Colonial Campbell’s Kids Doll. Log Cabin maple syrup was packaged in a special Bicentennial flask.

This is the kind of stuff I remember, along with a third-grade class trip in 1975 to see NASA's Bicentennial exposition at the Kennedy Space Center. We all rode a bus across the state and I remember gigantic rockets and lots of machinery and the Vehicle Assembly Building with the Bicentennial logo on the side. (I also developed a fever on that trip and I got a vanilla shake at McDonald's -- weird what we remember.)

What I'd forgotten, or more likely never knew, is that the celebration of the Bicentennial was as mired in politics as the semisesquicentennial is now. As Lepore outlines in her article, Lyndon Johnson launched the planning with one committee, which Nixon subsequently disbanded, installing his own people. As Nixon's administration became mired in Watergate, the planning eventually fell apart, and states and cities were left to manage their own celebrations.

Hearing that it was all such a political nightmare even 50 years ago somehow puts our modern situation into perspective, though it doesn't justify Trump's expenditures on a vulgar triumphal arch and schlocky sculpture garden.

In the afternoon I went for a walk on Hampstead Heath. I really needed some exercise; now that I'm not walking to work every day, it's too easy to sit around the house. Even with all my gardening, I feel like my fitness is slipping. So yes, I am going to get out more and work off some calories. (When we get a dog that will help.)

Speaking of dogs, this random dog ran up to me with a gigantic log in its mouth, which it apparently wanted me to throw. I did, and the log broke in half, and the dog then insisted on trying to carry both halves, which led to no end of canine frustration. It was out with a dog-walker, and eventually moved on with the rest of the pack.

I also passed this leaning pine tree, which has been leaning for as long as I can remember. Over the years it has been secured with cables to adjacent trees, and been braced from beneath with two gigantic posts. I blogged it before back in 2020, before the bracing. I wonder why there's such an effort to save this bedraggled tree? It must have some historic significance. (And here's the answer, courtesy of Google: It's known as the Constable Pine, drawn by artist John Constable in the early 1800s when he lived near the Heath. I learn something new every day!)

Tree Fern and Elections

I took this from the upper floor of a double-decker bus, hence the weird downward angle. This little shop is apparently a combination of Dollar Store (or Pound Shop) and Bed, Bath and Beyond. You can get men's socks for £1, Colgate toothpaste for £1, a bath mat for £1. The proprietor in the doorway looks like he's keeping an eye on the man in the green sweatshirt at far right. I imagine people steal stuff from those bins.

Why was I on a double-decker bus? Well, when I left the library job in mid-April, some co-workers gave me a gardening gift certificate that can be redeemed at various garden centers around the country. The closest one to us is a posh little place in Maida Vale. So I headed down there to see what I could get with my gift card.

I got several annuals, like petunias for a hanging basket and a little clump of mixed annuals for a pot on our front porch. I also got the geranium above, even though I really don't need another geranium. Isn't it an amazing color? (There was already a valerian growing in this pot, so I put the geranium next to it!)

The big purchase, though, was a pot for our tree fern. We repotted it just three years ago, and yet I was pretty sure it was rootbound once again. I'd put some bluebell bulbs around it that have never done well, and this spring I tried to take them out and replant them elsewhere, but I literally could not dig them out of the soil because the fern has so many dense roots.

So I got a huge pot, as well as some compost, and called an Uber, and then the pot wouldn't fit in the Uber, so I had to pay an £8 cancellation fee (!) and call an even bigger Uber XL, and all of that was a headache but I finally got the pot home.

And sure enough, when I tried yesterday, I couldn't get the tree fern out of its old pot. I pushed and pulled but that root ball was so tight that I eventually had to break the pot, which was heartbreaking because it was a really nice terra cotta vessel that we could have used for something else. (I remembered when we last repotted the tree fern, we had to cut its plastic pot off because it was similarly jammed up.)

Here's the tree fern, standing on its own tightly packed root ball. You can see how dense those roots are.

And here it is in its new home, able to breathe easier! I still couldn't get the bluebells out, so they moved with the fern.

Dave had argued for putting it in the ground, but I just don't know where we'd put it. We don't really have a place in the garden for such a big plant that likes shade and dampness. So it's staying on the patio.

This was my other big excitement yesterday -- voting in my first UK election! We were electing local councillors, not national offices, but the results of these elections are being weighed to judge political power nationally. The results are still coming out, but it looks bad for Keir Starmer and Labour and good (unfortunately) for Nigel Farage and Reform.

I voted for the three Lib Dem candidates in my area. I've always liked the Lib Dems and they campaigned tirelessly here. I even had one come to my door, which surprised me. No Labour or Conservative council candidates came to my door. We're still awaiting results so I don't know yet who won.

Voting in England, at least in my area, is very old-school. We do have to present a photo ID, and then we're given a ballot and a pencil. The ballot lists the candidates with a box next to each name, and we mark an X next to the candidates we choose. No computers, no punch cards, no touch screens. Then we pop the ballot into a ballot box and that's that.

I asked the seated man above, who was checking our registrations, whether it was OK to take a picture of the polling station. "I don't know -- no one's ever asked me that," he said, laughing. I told him it was my first time voting so I wanted it for posterity, and promised to take it from a discreet distance.

Dave is also eligible to vote but he wasn't feeling well yesterday so he didn't. (He said he didn't know who to vote for in any case.) He's staying home from work today, too. He's due to start some new Crohn's medication later this month but everything moves at a snail's pace with the NHS, so meanwhile, he's metaphorically limping along.

The Rejects

I thought it might be fun to do a post showing the types of slides I'm culling. Remember how I wrote several days ago that I go through each batch and discard about half of them right away? Well, here are some that didn't make the cut.

I have a bunch of slides from one person who had a terrible time aiming the camera (above). Their pictures tend to skew upward, so there's lots of sky or ceiling and the subject is squeezed into the lower third of the frame. (I've belatedly developed a fondness for this one, from 1967, which I call "Baby Contemplates Gigantic Sky." I might keep it.)

"Cleveden" (1968) -- Way too dark. There's not really any way to save an image like this. I can sometimes increase exposure and lighten shadows and make something workable but this one is beyond repair.

This one, of a ski lift in Austria in 1983, has the opposite problem -- it's too light. (And also too boring.)
 

I have several pictures of this 1982 scouting event, and they all look like this. It's almost as if someone was pointing the camera from their hip. Nice shot of someone's elbow. Is that person in the middle with the sleeping bag wearing a coonskin cap?

I have pictures from someone's African safari in 1975. I think they were taken out the window of a moving vehicle. Those brown smudges appear to be leopards.

Another person's camera just could not focus. I don't know whether this was the photographer's fault or the camera was broken, but in any case, many of their photos -- of similar events involving cars and motorcycles -- look like the one above.

This lovely 1977 photo is helpfully labeled "Park Hotel, Oban," just in case you wondered. Taken out the window of a moving vehicle, I'm thinking? (And also incredibly filthy -- I should have dusted it before I scanned it!)

I wondered what might have motivated someone to take this picture. It turns out the Park Hotel was one of two involved in a major fire that killed ten tourists in 1973. The fire was centered in an adjacent hotel, the Esplanade, but the Park's guests were evacuated. Perhaps someone passing by the scene a few years later took the picture because of that event? I believe both hotels were subsequently torn down, at least in part.

Anyway, as you can see, I have a lot of junk to go with the good photos. It's funny that people kept these slides in the first place, isn't it? Of course, they were ultimately discarded one way or another -- which is why I have them -- so maybe I'm picking through someone else's photographic trash.

I'm leaning toward throwing all of these, except the baby, in the bin. I see no earthly reason to save them.