Comments and a Kilner Jar

This is another shopfront from my walk through East London a week ago. That guy was gesturing to someone inside to open the side door for him. Don't you love that hand-painted sign?

Blogger is giving me fits this morning, not letting me upload photos in my usual way. I'm having to drag and drop them from my desktop rather than using the upload tool. Let's hope it's a transient problem.

I had a very low-key day yesterday. I walked Olga in the morning but otherwise we didn't leave the house. The weather was damp and gray and I stayed mostly on the couch reading "Barnaby Rudge." I'm 150 pages in and it's not bad, though there's no sign of the Gordon Riots yet, and they're supposed to be the centerpiece of the book. Dickens does like to set the stage.

I considered going on another photo walk and even had some ideas for where to go, but the weather was so uninspiring I just couldn't do it. As I'm sure you've read there were massive protests over Gaza in London this weekend and I sure didn't want to get in the middle of those. As I told someone not long ago in the blog comments, I don't feel like I have a dog in that fight -- at least not more than I do in any humanitarian disaster -- and it's such a poisonous issue with so many opinions being bandied about that mine isn't likely to make a bit of difference. Perhaps that's cowardly, but seriously, is there any more toxic subject for debate than Israel and the Palestinians?

I got mostly caught up on blog reading, which is a plus. Oh -- someone asked me when I answer comments on my blog. Here's the deal on that: I do answer them, in most cases, but it often takes me a while. My blogging routine is to get up in the morning, make coffee, and sit down and write a post. Somehow I work a shower, breakfast and a dog walk into the schedule, and then I go to work. Once there, I answer the previous post's comments, unless I'm too busy, in which case I may not get to it until the next day. The afternoons I reserve for reading and commenting on other blogs. If I don't answer comments by the second day, I usually just let them go -- no one's going to be looking back any earlier than that for my responses, anyway. I do read them all, though.

So, long story short, I try to answer them and I'd estimate I do about 75 percent of the time. But sometimes, life happens instead!

Here are some items I found on the street while walking the dog on Saturday. A neighbor put them out with some other stuff by their trash bins, and I first passed them walking Olga to Fortune Green. I thought, "If those are still there when we come back, I'll take a look." And they were, so I grabbed the heavy cut-glass relish tray and brought it home to Dave. I told him about the jar and he sent me back for it. (So in this case, he can't complain about me bringing stuff home!)

The jar is a Kilner, which is an old name in British canning -- kind of like Mason jars in the states, I think. You may remember I once found a broken fragment of an antique Kilner jar on Hampstead Heath that I kept on our windowsill for a while. This new one is quite nice. I told Dave we should use it for Olga's Dentastix!

Oh, and some more exciting vacation plans are in the offing. It's a long way away, but Dave and I have reignited our plans to visit Brazil and Argentina. You may remember we had a trip to Brazil planned in 2020, before Covid hit and derailed everything. I've made a reservation on a new package holiday that will take us to both countries next summer. I'm not crazy about the idea of leaving the dog for two weeks but here's hoping we can sort that out without too much trauma for her. We have to live our lives, after all!