First Rose, and Chilly Plants

Here's the first rose to appear on our bushes this year, blooming well ahead of any of the others. I'm surprised it's produced a flower in these chilly temperatures -- it's 45º F out there now (7º C), and will hit a low of 40º F (4.5º C) on Saturday. This year seems quite reluctant to warm up! Or is it usually this cold in April and I've just forgotten? I tried to sit outside in the sun to read yesterday morning but it was just too brisk. (The daytime highs are in the mid-60s F.)

I've started shuttling my flower seedlings in and out of the house so they can stay indoors overnight. They seem to be growing quite slowly and I think they may just need some nighttime warmth.

I also brought my rescued rubber tree back inside. The poor thing is still in a sulk. I repotted it and the root ball looked solid enough, but it has produced no new growth and has lost a few leaves. The stem (trunk?) is still green but it looks a bit wrinkled, as if it isn't absorbing water well. So who knows -- the roots may be dead. Again I think the outdoor cold was doing it no favors. We'll see if it does better in cozier indoor temperatures.

I thought about cutting the whole thing back to see if it will sprout anew, but as long as it has green leaves I'll wait on that.

Here's another rescue I found next to a neighbor's trash cans two days ago. It's a fiddle-leaf fig and it was dry as a bone, loose in its pot. Again, I repotted it and gave it a drink. It has a tiny green sprout at the top so there's hope. I need another fiddle-leaf fig about as badly as I need another rubber tree.

On the bright side, remember the orchid the Russians threw away last summer before they moved? I pulled it out of the trash and adopted it, and it is now rewarding us with flowers.

Also blooming are our geraniums, at least this variety. They were incredibly prolific last year and I've repotted them so hopefully we'll get another good showing. Once again I didn't trim any of our geraniums and some of the plants are looking a bit straggly. I just can't bring myself to prune them. I don't know why.

OK, enough plant news. What else have I been doing around here? Well, I spent yesterday morning reading and running errands, as usual, and then in the afternoon I took a long walk, partly so I could catch up on my podcasts. Now that I'm not walking to work every day I don't have that listening time in the morning and evening, so I have to reconfigure my routines.

I passed these interesting murals along a pedestrian path on my way up to the Clitterhouse Playing Fields -- sort of an oceanic horizon on the left and leopard skin on the right. Colorful!

I was out for about two hours and got lots of listening done. I suppose I could listen at home but it seems weird to just sit on the couch and listen to a podcast. To me, that's something I do when I'm out moving around.

I see Trump is now going after the Southern Poverty Law Center with his weaponized justice department. Maybe I should double my donation this year? Honestly, that man is just vengeance personified. He's like Richard Nixon with his "enemies list," but even worse. I wonder if my donations to the SPLC and other progressive groups have landed me on some roster of citizens-to-watch. I probably don't given enough for them to worry about me, but you never know. I may be stopped by ICE on my next visit to the USA!

I've started watching a series on Netflix called "Black Rabbit" with Jude Law and Jason Bateman. It came out last year and I never had a chance to screen it until now. I'm two episodes in and it seems pretty good, though dark. Dave didn't really take to it so I'm watching it on my own. We typically don't turn on the TV until the evening and I don't want to change that. When my dad retired he started watching "Guiding Light" but I don't think I'm ready to surrender my life to daytime television!

June's Camera

When I visited Florida in early March for my stepmother's memorial, my stepsister and brother-in-law gave me her camera, a Canon SX70 HS. It's a lightweight, easy-to-use point-and-shoot with a built-in zoom and some other features. As it turns out, the timing was good, because I'd been thinking about buying a so called "bridge camera" to have a lightweight alternative to my big DSLR.

Yesterday I took June's camera out for a trial run. I'd never used it before and I wanted to see what kind of pictures it would take. I walked to Gladstone Park, on the other side of Cricklewood, shooting images along the way.

The photo above I took just steps from our flat, on West End Green. That guy was putting some kind of coating on the bronze plaque that commemorates the planting of that tree in 1902 for the coronation of King Edward VII. He'd brush it on and then heat it with a blowtorch (hence the gas bottle next to him). I asked him about it, and he said it's called "patination" -- it restores the bronze coloring so the plaque doesn't entirely oxidize and become green.

I wanted to try the camera in various situations. This was my test to see how it handles close-ups. I saw this brick with an interesting manufacturer's mark, only belatedly realizing there's a little ladybird (ladybug) on the left-hand side!

I shot all these pictures on auto, so I wasn't experimenting too much with settings. There is a manual option so I could use that if I wanted. The camera has a fold-out screen on the back, so I could frame my shot using that or by holding it up to my eye. I tried both methods.

Look at those beautiful doors! Can you imagine how great they must look from the inside, with sun coming through that stained glass?

Again, the camera seems to handle close-ups well. Canon introduced this model in September 2018 so it's not very old, and it wasn't particularly cheap. (My stepmother, who traveled the world, would not have a cheap camera!)

It handles street photography pretty well, though there's a bit of lag between snapping the photo and being ready to take the next one. It's not as rapid-fire as my big Canon EOS 5D Mark III.

It does landscapes nicely too. Here's a wood in Gladstone Park full of blooming wild garlic, also known as ramsons, with some bluebells in the back.

On the way home, I stopped in at a Costa in Cricklewood and had coffee sitting in the window, looking out on this scene, which I shot with my phone:

Interesting that there are two "casinos" right across from each other! Always being ripped off by The Man. The phone picture is smaller than the camera shots, about 2 MB compared to 6.5 MB -- so June's camera does indeed appear to capture more information than a phone.*

WHOA! What is this?! I didn't take this picture, obviously, but it came along with the others when I downloaded the images. Then I remembered my brother-in-law saying he took the camera to Lettuce Lake Park in Tampa to try it out himself -- he still had the date stamp turned on, so you can see that photo was taken Feb. 28, a few weeks after June died. There were a few other odds and ends on the memory card as well.

My verdict is that I'm pretty pleased with the camera. I think it will serve me well when I don't want to carry my big DSLR, which weighs 3.5 pounds with my lightest lens (and I'm usually carrying a camera bag containing two other lenses as well, weighing several more pounds). This camera is light enough to put in a jacket pocket. What a relief!

*Addendum: Actually, this is a misleading comparison because the iPhone photos are saved as HEIC files, which are compressed image files meant for greater storage efficiency. When I export them as JPEGs they're similar in size to the camera photos (also JPEGs).

Wires, Glass Art and More Garden Footage

From my walk through Queen's Park on Friday

I decided my task for yesterday would be to tame the wires in the alcove by the front door -- the ones strewn like giant spaghetti noodles behind the rainbow unicorn. In late morning I went to the hardware store and bought more cable clips, and affixed the phone line (which carries our internet) around the perimeter of the wall. I cut off the coaxial cable, which does nothing functional -- I think it's a remnant of a very old, outdated cable TV installation. I coiled up the detached cable and put it in a cabinet in the bathroom that we never use.

And voila! The floor behind the unicorn is now clear and it looks so much better.

Hey, it's a small thing, but I consider it a step in the right direction.

Also, I took the plunge on planning a little trip for next month. My old friend Bill from New York recently moved to Vienna with his husband. I haven't seen him in years, so I'm going to fly there for a few days in mid-May. Woo hoo! I last went to Vienna in 2023, so not that long ago, but I liked it and I'm happy to go back, especially to see things from the perspective of someone who actually lives there. Plus I spent most of my days on that last visit in librarian training, and this will all be free time!

I took a closer look at the art glass vase that I got from my stepmother's house in March. I remember my dad buying this vase when he got his bachelor pad at the La Place Apartments in Tampa following my parents' divorce in 1974. I think he bought it at an art show. In fact my brother and I may have been with him at the time.

I wanted to try to figure out who made the vase. The signature looks like "J Buron / 74" and I couldn't find any glass artists online with that name. But there is a man named John Byron who signed his works in an identical style and made similar vases from that same time period. I think this is a Byron vase and the signature got slightly obscured when he leveled the base. I don't know anything else about Byron, such as where he worked or sold his creations, but I'll keep looking.

And finally, I downloaded the garden cam for another wildlife-watching extravaganza! Who needs David Attenborough, honestly?!

We start out with Tabby the cat sauntering past, followed 15 minutes later by a fox with a stick or bone in its mouth. I sure would love to know what they're carrying around out there. The fox makes a circuit of the garden and stops behind a pot of hostas to give itself a scratch.
-- At 0:36, a squirrel works its way perilously far out a branch on our Japanese maple. They always nibble bits of the maple as it's budding. I imagine the tree's sap is rising and the new growth tastes sweet? Just a guess.
-- At 0:51, we get a quick daytime glimpse of Pale Cat.
-- At 0:55, later that same afternoon, we get a bee buzzing past the camera with Pale Cat sitting magisterially atop the back garden wall, surveying his domain.
-- At 1:09, a squirrel hops down from the bench and toward the camera.
-- At 1:23, a curious cat comes right up to the camera for a sniff. It might be Pale Cat, but I can't quite tell because it's so close to the camera you can't see its markings.
-- At 1:33, we get a partial glimpse of another cat. I think it's Blackie.
-- At 1:38, we see a series of visits by foxes hours and/ or days apart.
-- At 2:14, I put down a fish skin for the foxes. One finds it about 20 minutes later and carries it farther back in the garden, eats it and then sniffs around looking for more.
-- At 3:25 a different fox (Crooked Tail) comes a couple of hours later, drawn by the scent of the fish skin, but it's long gone.
-- At 4:32, we see another squirrel prowling cautiously through the green alkanet, a common weed/wildflower with blue blossoms that the bees love.

You may notice that the perspective of the garden cam changes several times. I've been moving it around to see where I can get the best footage, and to change up the background so we're not always seeing the same thing. OK, it's not quite Attenborough.

A Fox, a Pig and a Ceilidh

This fox visited our garden yesterday evening, when it was still light enough for me to get a photo of it peering at me from behind the birdbath. I'm always happy when I catch a glimpse of the foxes in daylight so I can appreciate their coloring, and now that we have daylight so late in the day that's likely to happen more.

I spent most of the day reading "London Falling," which I finished. I powered through that book. It was so good -- a real page turner. It tells the true story of a London teenager who died in 2019 in a fall from the balcony of a luxury apartment on the Thames. Why he fell, and the circumstances surrounding his presence in the apartment and what might have happened there, are a mystery. It turned out he was pretending to be the son of a Russian oligarch and had become mixed up with some unsavory characters who wanted his nonexistent money -- and that's the barest of the bare bones of the story. The author wrote an article in The New Yorker about the case in 2024, which he then expanded into this book. An outstanding read! I sent it to school with Dave this morning, to donate it to the library.

It did make me marvel at the underground world of con-men, liars and thieves that surrounds us all every day -- particularly in a cosmopolitan, global financial city like London where people come from all over the world to invest their ill-gotten gains, real or imagined. It's enough to make a person a little paranoid.

On a happier note, I went to my first ceilidh yesterday. It's basically a Scottish dance party, similar to what we'd call square dancing in the USA. In fact I'm sure square dancing derives from these kinds of dances, or maybe vice versa -- one we danced yesterday was the Virginia Reel. The colonials have come back to haunt the motherland!

One of Dave's colleagues in the music department hosted this ceilidh (pronounced "kay-lee") for her birthday, in the gym of a school right around the corner. Dave insisted on the walk over that he wouldn't dance, but of course he wound up dancing twice, one of those times with me. It was fun to watch and I got to chat with some of his co-workers and even some kids from our school, who were there with their parents. I'm glad to be able to say I am no longer a ceilidh virgin.

No. There are no videos. At least not that I'm posting publicly.

On the way home we stopped into Waitrose to pick up some stuff for dinner and I found this item in the garden section. This little ceramic pig is stuffed with sheep's wool, and supposedly, hanging it in the garden gives the birds something to nest with. I bought it for £7 even though it seems a bit ridiculous. Who doesn't want to give their birds a cozy nest?! We'll see if any birds use it.

There's a sucker born every minute, as P.T. Barnum supposedly said. Or was it W.C. Fields? Someone like that.

In the evening I poured a glass of wine, using these glasses that Dave's parents and sister sent me for my retirement. They capture my mood pretty accurately!

Household Stuff, Plus Birds

This is that weird little alcove by our front door that I spent time cleaning up recently. The bird's-foot cactus used to live on that windowsill, and the gigantic mutant ZZ plant was in front of the alcove so I could never get in there to clean. Now we've moved the cactus, discarded the misshapen ZZ, cleaned and dusted and brought in that very sculptural dracaena, which is perfect for that space. My next step is to tidy those wires on the floor behind the unicorn. When the ZZ plant was there we couldn't really see them, but now we can and they must be dealt with.

That dracaena, by the way, is the one I rescued from the lawyer's office.

Yesterday was very domestic. The most exciting thing I did was take our sheets and towels to the laundromat to be washed. (Maybe now that I'm home more I should do them myself -- the main problem is how to dry them, since we no longer have a clothesline and our dryer is too small for an entire king-sized sheet set, unless I want them to come out looking like wadded-up Saran wrap.)

I also mowed the lawn, which is why I took these photos.

Things are sprouting, like the Inula at lower left, even though we've had very little rain and the ground is dry as a bone. I planted my teasel seedlings yesterday and actually bent my spade trying to dig the hole! Once I wet the soil and added some compost it was easier to deal with.
 
You can see my wildlife cam to the right. I've been moving it around the garden trying to get the best perspective.

Here's the garden from the bench. The forget-me-nots and bluebells are blooming up a storm! And as you can see we have one teasel right smack in the middle of the lawn -- not the best place, but that's where it grew. Better than last year when we had about 15 of them out there.

I also got a delivery of some compost and topsoil from Wickes, and used it to repot the citrus tree, which wasn't as root-bound as I thought but still needed a new and bigger pot. I bought Miracle-Gro compost because I was so unhappy with the Wickes brand I bought last year. We'll see if this is any better.

Well, THIS is an exciting blog post, isn't it?!

Steve Reed · Robin & Wren

Yesterday morning I awoke early -- about 4:30 a.m. -- and went out to the dining room to take a look at what was happening on the street. Answer: nothing much. But then I heard this little bird singing away in the pre-dawn darkness, and I opened the window and made a recording. According to my Merlin app there are actually several birds there -- a robin and a wren most prominently, but also a great tit and a European blackbird somewhere in the background. (The birds start about four seconds into the clip.)

Queen's Park

Yesterday was fabulous. I spent the morning reading, working my way into Patrick Radden Keefe's book "London Falling," and had a peanut butter-and-apple sandwich for lunch. And then I took a long walk through Queen's Park, Maida Vale and St. John's Wood before meeting my work colleagues for a pub night retirement send-off.

As always, it felt good to get out and walk with the camera. If you're a longtime blog reader you may remember that right after Dave and I moved here in 2011, I became quite infatuated with London's chicken shops. I never actually ate in them, but I was intrigued by all the creative names that so often made reference to the American South ("Carolina Chicken," "Dixie Chicken" and "Tennesseeland," for example), as well as the remarkably consistent red-and-blue signage. I noticed yesterday that one of the shops I'd photographed before is now closed (above) but it made a great photo subject, with that tattered blue tarp breezily trailing its fibers in the wind.

The bandstand in Queen's Park is looking colorful and quite spiffy.

I walked along one street beneath some ornamental cherry trees that are shedding their blossoms. The ground was carpeted with pink and when the wind blew, the petals rained down. I couldn't quite capture the full effect on video because of course when I pulled out the camera, the wind let up. But you get the idea.

I noticed that all the fox stencils that used to ornament that area are now gone. I was infatuated with those almost as much as the chicken shops.

I stopped at a park off Harrow Road, near the Regent's Canal, and had a coffee. An obviously inebriated man came up to me and said, "Good afternoon, Phil Collins. You look like Phil Collins!"

(For the record, I look nothing like Phil Collins, except that we're both bald. And I had a hat on.)

I gave him a rather pinched smile and he went on his way.

This bike shop selling baby seats came up with a novel way to market them.

The pub gathering in St. John's Wood was terrific -- lots of my colleagues came, as well as Dave, and I got a £200 gift card (!) for gardening supplies, which I will probably use to buy a new garden bench, as ours is literally on its last legs. I also got more cute cards and letters from students and school staff members, as well as a prayer plant from my co-librarian Staci. She made a nice speech that, as I told her afterwards, made me sound way more competent than I actually am. And I told everyone that I felt very lucky because, while I studied journalism in college, I had also considered library science as a possible major -- and how many people get to work in both of the fields that they consider their calling?

You're probably thinking, "Good grief, enough already!" Don't worry -- last night was pretty much my final hurrah, at least until the end-of-the-year luncheon at school in June, which I plan to attend.

Totoro Gets a Bath

This is the candytuft plant that Olga used to wipe her face on after eating every night. Pretty much her whole body, in fact. This spring it's looking unusually lush and blooming up a storm, not having been mauled recently by a dog.

This is one benefit of being petless -- the garden plants are unmolested. As much as Olga loved the garden, she did inflict some damage, wandering through the borders and creating a shady bed beneath the peonies. Not a reason to avoid getting another dog, though I'm still leaning toward waiting until after we return from our summer holidays.

before                                                                                                        after

I could definitely get used to this retirement thing! Just about the most urgent activity I performed yesterday was giving Totoro his semi-annual bath (above).

I also puttered around the house -- thereby proving that puttering can indeed be done indoors as well as in the garden. I vacuumed, did a load of laundry and finished "The Haves and the Have-Yachts." I've had a Waterstones gift card hanging around for months, I think since Christmas -- I can't even remember who gave it to me. So in the afternoon I walked down to Waterstones and bought Patrick Radden Keefe's new book, "London Falling," which I've heard is very good. The cashier at the bookstore was generous with her praise -- she said it was more about human nature than just a true-crime story. I'm looking forward to reading it. I loved his book about the IRA, "Say Nothing."

Here's some of what's blooming in our garden at the moment -- the aquilegia (above), which has some little insects in the center of the flower...

...the azaleas...

...and the African daisies, which seem to love that sunny spot on the patio.

I was unamused to find mating scarlet lily beetles near our lilies. I can't bring myself to kill them -- they're so pretty and jewel-like -- but they'll gnaw the lilies to nothing if I leave them alone. So I'm not sure what to do. Last night I threw a couple of them over the garden wall -- our neighbor is having her house renovated and she's gone, so she won't care -- but that's the coward's way out and I'm sure they'll return. I really should just be merciless.

Finally, here's the tulip bouquet Dave gave me for retirement. Since I blogged my other flowers I felt I should show these off too. See the foam flower outside the window? It's going gangbusters as well.

This really is the best time of year to retire. I love having these spring days free and open, with so much to enjoy in the garden.