Manny Two

This is the much-graffitied wall of Abbey Road Studios, which I walked past yesterday evening on my way home from a post-work pub gathering. One of my co-workers, the other library assistant, is leaving at the beginning of next month and the school has decided not to immediately replace her. For a while, at least, I'll be doing the work of two assistants (and splitting it with the other librarians). Remember how I was talking about how to spend my free time at work? Yeah, that whole conversation is pretty much moot now. Anyway, our pub gathering was to celebrate our departing colleague. She's moving to Spain where she's going to hike and learn Spanish and not work at all. Must be nice!

I started off yesterday with a dentist's appointment -- just a checkup after my recent cleaning. There's no news to report, thank goodness. The dentist still wants to replace one of my aging fillings and, ideally, do a root canal on a slightly discolored tooth in the front, but I'm in no pain and nothing is urgent so I just keep putting it off. If it ain't broke don't fix it. (And as far as I'm concerned, it ain't broke.)

I also double-checked my US voter registration which is still valid and active, so no nefarious voter-roll purges have targeted me, fortunately.

Here's our newest patient in the plant hospital, a Monstera I found yesterday morning walking the dog. In fact, I found it on the pile of trash on the problem corner I mentioned in yesterday's post. (Of course, more trash had been deposited there!) The plant was bone-dry, so I brought it home and gave it some water, and I'm letting it recover in the dining room. I thought it would perk up significantly but it still looks pretty much like that, so recovery may be a process. It needs a clay pot, some fresh soil and some TLC.

Dave and I had a Monstera when we lived in New Jersey that we named Manny. So we're calling this one Manny Two.

Pizza Fraud

I got a surprise yesterday evening when I noticed our yellow rose had not only leaves, but five blossoms or buds! I mentioned before that our roses were looking pretty dire at the end of the blooming season. They struggle with black spot and some were down to bare twigs -- including this yellow one. But since then many have produced a second round of leaves and some flowers, and I was glad to see this one bounce back. In the past it's been one of our hardiest and most productive roses but it's had a tough year.

We're going to pay closer attention to rose care next spring.

I got another surprise last night when I logged on to our bank account to send a routine payment. I was looking over our statement, as I try to do at least once a month, when I noticed four charges on Monday from Domino's Pizza. We never order Domino's, and we certainly didn't order it four times on Monday. So I began looking more closely at our past charges and discovered to my horror that we'd been charged by Domino's 12 times in recent weeks, a total of £360!

I fault myself for not being more on top of this, but we've been so busy with starting school and various other things that I just haven't watched the bank account closely enough. It all started August 19 with one charge of £27.96, and escalated from there.

Strangely, there seem to be no other suspicious charges. Whoever is bilking us is apparently just a pizza lover. ("Kids," Dave says, but I'm not so sure.)

Anyway, I called the bank and it turns out the perpetrator was using Dave's debit card number. We have no idea how they got it, but his card has been cancelled and the money is being provisionally refunded to us, pending an investigation.

I certainly did not need that little bit of excitement in my evening.

Here's more excitement I didn't need:

This pile of debris was sitting in front of an apartment building around the corner from our flat for days and days. There was a wooden pallet, some furniture, and lots of household rubbish. I finally reported it to the council -- along with two other rubbish/furniture piles on nearby corners -- and they cleared it all. I was so happy when I came home that evening and saw the area clean.

The next morning, I walked Olga and found:

SO ANNOYING!

I reported it again and allegedly this has been cleared too (I haven't been out to check yet) -- but this is one of several problem corners in our neighborhood so I'm sure it won't be long before there's another mountain of junk there.

Mermaid Mystery Solved

Well, I did it. I have vanquished Barbra Streisand's autobiography -- all 960 or so pages. When I took it to work yesterday I said to myself, "I am not hauling this book home again!" I managed to finish it off during lunch and checked it in then and there.

I had to laugh when she said in the acknowledgements that the book took ten years to write, and even then her publishers had to basically pry it out of her hands. That's so Barbra.

Oh! And I solved -- well, sort of -- the mystery of the mermaid.

I took my good camera to work yesterday and got this picture of the tiny sticker -- the best I could do to capture the detail. When I came home, I ran it through Google image search and found this. Yes! It's the same image, and much prettier in color, posted by an apparently Korean artist using the name Kim Sanho. The same artist has an Instagram here.

(Wikipedia has an article about a South Korean comic book artist by that same name, but he's 85 years old and his style seems much more old-school, so I don't think this is his -- perhaps it's by an admirer who has adopted his name as a tribute?)

From what I can gather, the characters are from a story called Rain and Yuyeong, or Yoo-young, and the image was drawn to commemorate an award won by a project called Local Private Life 99 (or sometimes Local Privacy 99). This appears to be a series of comic books by various artists, each based on a particular Korean city. On this web page, one of the books -- focusing on the city of Busan -- is described:

So that seems to be our story, but interesting that the writer is here called Coral. The image itself is signed Sanho. Who knows what the artist's real name is! Apparently the sticker shows the characters after they've met and the mermaid is past her paper-bag crisis.

Anyway, that's probably way more than you wanted to know, but funny how a tiny sticker on a lamppost in South Hampstead led me down that rabbit hole of Korean comic books and graphic novels.

(Top photo: A fallen rose petal on one of next year's teasels, in our garden.)

Hackney

You might recall that another of my goals for the weekend was to get out of the house. After spending all of Saturday on various household tasks, I decided to go yesterday on a photo outing to Hackney, in east London. The weather was beautiful and rather than spend time underground on the tube, I also decided to do all my traveling by bus. That way I got to enjoy the scenery (?) between here and there. Or at least the daylight.

I took a bus down to Baker Street, and then another bus from there to Hackney. (I could have ridden that bus all the way to Hackney Wick, which is even farther east, but I'll save that for another day.)

I got off the bus near Balls Pond Road and walked south past the majestic Empire theater and the town hall.

The cynical among us might see this sticker and think, "Don't we always?"

I headed toward London Fields, a large green park where people were out sunbathing, romping with dogs or climbing on sculptures (top photo). Granted, that particular sculpture -- a pair of flower sellers -- includes benches, so it's meant to be climbed or at least sat upon. I photographed it before, way back in 2012, and I'd completely forgotten about it, so it was fun to revisit it.

These guys were having a game of cricket, looking very official in their whites.

I walked down Broadway Market, where there was lots of lively street activity. I bought a falafel wrap for lunch and took it back to London Fields to eat near the flower sellers sculpture, and then popped into a neighborhood bookshop. I was happy to find "Smiling in Slow Motion," the second volume of Derek Jarman's diaries, there. You may remember I bought and read the first, "Modern Nature," several years ago and loved it. (It inspired me to visit his cottage at Dungeness.)

I made my way down to Hackney Road, where I passed this shop. It's not very remarkable now, but 13 years ago I took one of my favorite shopfront photos here. It had more character then. (The whole area has gentrified tremendously, but there's still plenty of graffiti.)

I gradually headed eastward and then north again along Kingsland Road, back up to Balls Pond Road where I caught the bus back home. I didn't get any reading done yesterday, so alas, I did not finish Barbra -- my one unaccomplished weekend goal. Perhaps today.

A Carnival of Dust

This seed pod of the colorfully named "stinking iris" looks like it's grinning at me with orange teeth. I usually try to cut down these pods to prevent the iris from spreading -- it can be a bit thuggish -- but I left this one. It's growing in an area of the garden where not much else grows, so frankly, if we get a few more iris there it wouldn't be a bad thing.

I got a lot done yesterday. I vacuumed, watered all the plants, did laundry, changed our bedsheets and read another 80 or so pages of Barbra. I also downloaded a few more of her songs from iTunes. Back in the mid-'80s I went to Peaches Records and Tapes in the University Collection shopping center in Tampa, and bought an album of hers called "Emotion." Barbra does not look upon it fondly -- in her book she called it a "hodgepodge" that she barely remembers making, mainly to fulfill a contract. She's on the cover wearing a pink off-the-shoulder "Flashdance"-style sweater. I listened to some of it again on iTunes and it is indeed pretty terrible -- very synth-pop. But I remembered liking three songs: "Clear Sailing," "Here We Are At Last" and the somewhat overwrought "Left In the Dark Again." So, for nostalgic purposes, I downloaded those and played them while doing my chores.

How about some dramatic before-and-after cleaning pictures?

In our bedroom, we have two IKEA-style white armoires. They were here when we moved into this flat ten years ago, and they're the closest thing we have to bedroom closets. I had never tried to move them and I've often thought it must be pretty dusty under there.

Yesterday I muscled them away from the wall and as you can see, I was not wrong.

But after vacuuming and cleaning the floor, as well as taking out that unused coil of ancient coaxial cable, I was left with this:

I totally forgot there was an electrical outlet back there. If I ever knew it.

Anyway, I did this with both armoires and they were easier to move than I expected. So maybe I won't let this job go for another ten years. I had fantasies of finding all sorts of things behind or under them -- missing clothes? Money? But all I found was a clothespin. Sad trombone.

Finally, I mowed the lawn, including tying up the leaves of all the remaining teasels so I could mow more carefully around them. I found this hardy little cyclamen blooming in one of our flower beds. We planted those things not long after moving in, and every year one or two still come up. (The squirrels ate many of them.)

I also took out an old, dying lavender bush. It was actually sort of an accident -- I was cutting the dead part out but accidentally cut the live part too. Oh well. It really was dying.

Dave and I are watching "The Perfect Couple" on Netflix. It's entertaining, but Nicole Kidman's character speaks with the strangest accent. It's not Australian, it's not English, it's not mid-Atlantic theatrical, and it's not patrician New England. (The show takes place on Nantucket.) It sounds like nothing I've ever heard. I hope it gets explained at some point.

Mermaid

This peculiar little sticker is stuck to a light pole that I pass on my walks home from work. It's a tiny thing and very hard to photograph, but it seems to show a girl in a pleated skirt walking up to a mermaid with a very long tail. Maybe it's a scene from a comic or cartoon that I'm not familiar with. I want to try to get a better picture, maybe when I'm carrying my big camera and not just my phone.

I have a boatload of things to do this weekend, most of them small tasks like laundry and mowing the lawn. But I'd also like to get out of the house, and I am determined to finish Barbra's autobiography. I think I have about 150 pages left. I'm up to her relationship with the Clintons and her political views, which unsurprisingly seem very much in line with my own. I've teased her about privilege in past posts, but she is very generous philanthropically and very sensible politically, and I love her for that.

And yet, yesterday I read another of her stories that amused me, about her relationship with the Warner Brothers studio and its chief executive, Steve Ross. Warners, she said, "once rescued me from the vacation in hell."

Jon and I, with our kids, along with friends and their kids, had rented houseboats on Lake Powell. And then everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong. Our friends' boat broke down, so suddenly we had eleven people on ours, with only one tiny bathroom. And then the rains came, and the water got rough. Winds were rocking the boat, and bats were swooping down at night. All I could think of was rabies, because Robert Redford had been bitten by a bat on Lake Powell just before we started filming "The Way We Were," and had to undergo weeks of painful injections in his stomach. Just the thought of those shots made me feel sick. And then Jon drove the boat into a sandbar. That was it. I called Warners and said, "Get me out of here!"

And by golly, Warners sent a company plane and retrieved Barbra from her dismal vacation. It's kind of like very fancy travel insurance, I guess.

Workplace Philosophy

I love it when the hydrangeas get old and dappled like this in the autumn. You can see on the right that the purple asters are blooming too. We don't seem to have as many of them as usual -- maybe I was too thorough in my garden-clearing last year.

I realize I must have sounded ridiculously entitled in yesterday's post, complaining about feeling pressure to not read blogs at work. I should make clear that no one has told me not to do that, so this is mostly my own assumption (guilt?), but we are going through some changes in our department that make me think it would be frowned upon. And of course I understand why that is. They're not paying me for blog-reading, obviously.

But here's the thing: My job is almost entirely focused on helping kids when they come into the library. If I have no kids at any given moment, and I've done the background tasks that are also part of my duties (re-shelving, book displays, contacting people with overdue books, that kind of thing) then I literally have nothing to do. I've always felt that if I get the job done, and done well, then reading on the side shouldn't be frowned upon. It's pretty much my only option for killing time, unless I'm just staring into space. There's only so much shelf-neatening a person can stand.

I certainly don't want to be given some unnecessary task so that I can spin on a hamster wheel to look busy. I've been fortunate enough all my adult life to have jobs that allow me to hold this philosophy, but I've certainly heard stories about workplaces that time bathroom breaks and that kind of thing. So I know it's not everyone's experience.

(Also, in my defense, I usually only take about 20 minutes of my lunch hour, so I figure that other 40 minutes goes into my down-time over the course of the rest of the day -- though, granted, I don't measure or track that time in any official way.)
 
So do I sound like an entitled, spoiled, self-justifying jerk? Maybe. But that's how I think about work.

Maybe instead it's time to think about retirement! Hmmmm...

Flickr just billed me for renewing my mom's account -- £111 for two years. I maintain this account because years ago we scanned and uploaded a bunch of family photos there, like the one above of me, my mom and my brother swimming in the lake behind our childhood home in Florida. Of course my mom is no longer alive and I've downloaded all the pictures onto my computer, but somehow I can't bring myself to close or delete the account. (The online pictures are all set to private so only I can see them.) I suppose I should, though. That's a lot of money for a redundant family archive. (And it's non-refundable, so at this point I have the account for two more years, no matter what.)

Finally, I belatedly realized I've already shown you a video of this, but I made another one last night so you're seeing it again. This is Olga wiping her face on the outside shrubbery after she eats in the evening. This is her daily routine, followed without fail. It always amuses me. (And if we don't let her do it she wipes her face on the couch!)