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.)

Tally Ho!

It's been so damp lately, baby teasels are sprouting from seeds still in the pod. I may put some of those in their own pots to cultivate them for spring!

Well, I'm back on a computer -- a new one, which I went out and bought yesterday. I usually go to the Apple Store in Covent Garden, but I suspected Covent Garden would be insane on a sunny Saturday, so I instead I took a bus up to the Brent Cross shopping mall. And wouldn't you know, that was insane too! Heaving, as the British would say. I navigated the mysterious sign-up-and-wait system of Apple Store shopping, and used my waiting time to pretty much settle on the machine I wanted.

After a painless transaction I emerged with a new 13-inch MacBook Air running the Sequoia OS, with 16 GB of memory (quite a bit more than my old machine). I can see all the keys -- they haven't been worn away by too much frenzied typing! And the screen is so new and clear and free of blemishes! It's also much lighter than my old machine.

So I'm pleased all around, except for one thing: I cannot get Lightroom, the Adobe software I use to edit my photos, to run on this new machine. You'd think it would be as easy as going to their website and downloading an update, but no. Nothing downloads, even when I'm signed in. Apparently this is a known problem. So I have to monkey around with that today.

I also had a bit of a kerfuffle about cables. The new Macs are so smooth and minimalist that they only have two cable ports, both requiring USB-C cables. There's no place to insert a flash drive or memory card or any regular USB device, like my camera. So I had to go back to the Apple Store to buy an adapter, and I realized moments after I bought one that it really wasn't what I needed, which they didn't seem to stock. So I took the tube to work and picked up the adapter I use there. Thus I was at least able to shift all my data to the new machine via my back-up drive.

I took the photo above outside the Brent Cross mall. I was amused by the "Tally Ho!" -- apparently that's the last stop in North Finchley, outside the Tally Ho pub. But it also seems like a friendly greeting!
 
I did a lot of other stuff yesterday too -- cleaned the kitchen, where the painters had splashed some stuff around the sink, repaired a picture frame that was damaged when it fell off our newly-painted wall (the nail was loosened by the painting), and re-hung two pictures with new hooks. I took care of some houseplants and trimmed some stuff back in the garden too. It's about time to prune the roses and the buddleia, but I'll give them another week or two.

Do you remember me blogging about Ben Wilson's chewing gum art? He's a street artist who paints on hardened bits of chewing gum left on the sidewalk. The piece above is located near the school where I work. I first wrote about it 13 years ago, and revisited it again eight years ago. As of yesterday, it's still there, albeit looking faded and worn. Its companion piece, also shown in those posts, is long gone.

Oh, the police arrested some guy for our neighborhood stabbing. Still no word on who was stabbed or why, or who was arrested, but I'm virtually certain this was not a random thing. It's likely to be a beef over drugs or women, as is often the case.

Breakage and Police Drama

More blogging by phone today. I managed to get my computer working yesterday enough to do a backup, so I haven’t lost any data, which is a blessing. (I back things up every few months anyway, but my last one was in October, so I was overdue and fortunate I made it work.)

Today, I’m off to get a new computer, I suppose.

The photo above shows my bedside table, which will give you an indication of how desperate I was for a photo to blog. Here’s another tale of woe: The painters broke my green glass bedside lamp, which I’d had ever since we moved to London. (I picked it up free from a room full of cast-off household goods being left behind by other teachers!)  So for now I’m using that red desk lamp, which was in the closet of our flat when we moved in. I’ve turned it toward the wall for less direct light.

I’ve already ordered a replacement for my green lamp, which was an IKEA product (“Lykta”). They’re no longer being sold but I found one on eBay for not much money. It should be here soon.

What did we ever do without the internet?

Well, we were nicer to each other, for one thing.

Speaking of which, as I walked to work yesterday morning I passed this scene on the next street over. The cops had not only the roadway closed but the sidewalks too. This is a street where I walked Olga almost every morning when she was younger and I think of it very much as our neighborhood, so I was curious what happened. (Once a reporter, always a reporter.)

I asked one of the officers on the scene. He would say only that there had been “an incident.”

It wasn’t until I got to work that I read someone had been stabbed! Yikes! The story, as is often true here, is maddeningly short on details. But it happened at 4:30 pm the previous day, and I do remember seeing a helicopter fly overhead just as I was coming up my front steps after work. That was the air ambulance, arriving to take the victim to the hospital. Apparently his injuries are life-threatening.

I don’t ever remember anything this dramatic happening in our little ‘hood so I’m eager to hear the rest of the story. Hopefully we will.

Remember how I just posted about “decline porn” and the safety of London? Hmmmm.

I thought this was amusing. I happened to enter my first name into a Google search the other day (can’t remember why) and these are all the prompts that came up. It sucks that Stephen Miller is now one of the top standard bearers among the Stephens of the world! I had not heard of Stephen Hough or Stephen Bernard Libby, and “Stephen traitors” perplexed me until I learned he’s a participant on a TV show (called “Traitors,” obviously, which I have never watched).

Anyway, this might be fun to try with your own name. I have a feeling the lineup would be different if I were Googling from the USA. That list seems heavy on the Brits.