A Pictorial Tour of Saturday

In French class yesterday morning we talked about food. Fortunately it's fairly easy for me, having lived in Morocco, where many foods imported by Europeans retain their French names, and living now with a French-trained chef. I know my carottes from my courgettes and my chou from my chou-fleur. Partitive articles, on the other hand -- for talking about indefinite quantities of chou or chou-fleur -- well, they give me fits.

So I was quite happy to get out of there on a sunny fall afternoon and take a walk.

First I came home and got Olga, and we departed for the West Heath. We'd already had an excellent morning walk -- among discards set out for the trash man, I found a nice big color wall photo of the Brooklyn Bridge and an almost-new pair of Tommy Hilfiger pants! (Not my size, alas, but I washed them up for the charity shop.)

But of course we needed an afternoon walk, too.

In Hampstead, we found many houses decorated for Halloween. Some of them were a little over-the-top, with hedges wrapped in fake cobwebbing and doors draped with skeletons. I preferred the subtler ones.

And then we got to the Heath, where Olga found...

... a big mud puddle!

As KC and the Sunshine Band sang: "Shake Shake Shake"!

We had a great time exploring a corner of the Heath where we'd never been before. We found a mysterious archway over nothing. Perhaps it was once an entrance gate of some kind.

And on the way home, we found an empty meeting hall with an impressive colonnade. Olga insisted on posing within it. I could not dissuade her.

Once home, the dog got a bath and then slept the evening away, while Dave and I watched "The French Connection," which I hadn't seen in ages.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, we haven't downloaded anything from our Infrared yard camera in a couple of days. I'm trying to give it time to capture something mildly interesting! And we had no trick-or-treaters at all.