Strange Flora

Olga and I found this very autumnal leaf while walking yesterday. I guess nature sheds and renews all the time, doesn't it? You wouldn't believe the trouble I went through to photograph it -- bringing it home, putting it in bright indirect light, turning it so the shiny leaf surface produced no glare, setting the exposure and aperture so I could get everything in focus with my macro lens. I'm still not sure I succeeded, but c'est la vie.

Yesterday was Dave's 45th birthday -- I keep forgetting he's younger than me! We had a modest celebration. Dave cooked up Escoffier Quenelles -- his greatest pleasure is to cook something unusual and French, and he'd never made these before -- and I gave him some swanky, colorful socks from Paul Smith and a gift certificate to the Le Creuset store around the corner. We're also going to dinner tomorrow night at a place the identity of which I cannot yet reveal.

While walking this morning, Olga and I came across this strange vegetative creature atop a parking meter. God only knows what it originally held. (Well, I suppose it originally held watermelon, but what later preparation, I mean.) Maybe it's left over from a little neighborhood street fair that Olga and I encountered yesterday. We checked it out, but the weather was gray and it didn't look like anyone was doing a booming business. I felt sorry for the lonely woman at the frozen yogurt stand.

Temperatures are in the 50s at the moment, and yesterday BBC weather showed a huge, swirling, ragged vortex of storms sitting on top of the British isles. It looked like a hurricane, but the weather is nowhere near that severe. Just intermittently rainy and gray. So there's not a lot of getting out and about.

I'm beginning to doubt my ability to read a book. I'm on Nadine Gordimer's "A Sport of Nature," about a young woman growing up in South Africa, and I am not finding it riveting. I love reading, but I have had the hardest time with the last several books I've chosen. Maybe I need to be more selective, or just read stuff that's more fun and less challenging. I honestly can't remember the last time I read a real page-turner, and I love that feeling -- when you're so into a book you literally cannot put it down.