I was out in the garden trimming yesterday and found this little primrose blooming. A pleasant surprise! I also see our winter aconite coming up, and our snowdrops. There's always something happening, even in the so-called "dead of winter."
We had some crazy wind last night from Storm Isha. Not as crazy as some parts of the UK, which were seeing gusts in the 80-90 mph range. But it was windy enough that the scaffold across the street was banging and clattering like crazy. I could hear it from our living room while watching TV. I was waiting for that whole building to take flight.
I gotta say, though, it feels good to have some warmer temperatures and rain.
I walked to the grocery store at lunch to buy some soup, and passed an Ikea shopping cart sitting on the sidewalk. This wouldn't be unusual if there were an Ikea store anywhere around us. But the nearest one's in Wembley, which is about four miles away! How this shopping cart got all the way to our street is a mystery to me. Did someone take it on the bus, or pop it into their van? Who does that?
When I got back home I called Ikea, which was an adventure in itself because of course you can't call the store directly -- instead you have to call a central number and speak to some guy in Scotland who seems never to have encountered this situation before, having been trained only in helping people assemble their Ektorps and Nordens.
Supposedly someone's going to collect the abandoned cart, someday.
In addition to our single primrose, we have some orchids blooming (indoors, of course). This is the plant I found at Fortune Green a year ago, which first bloomed for me last September. It has put out a second stalk of flowers, but for some reason several of the buds have shriveled. It's a dark time of year to try to bloom. Maybe it's just not getting enough light.
(That white blob in the background is Olga, lying on her pink blanket on the couch.)
And these two, adopted from a windowsill at school at the start of the pandemic, are also offering up some tropical vibes in this chilly season. We have several others with flower stalks, so we should see more blossoms in a few weeks or months.
I started a new book yesterday, "Trust" by Hernan Diaz, which was one of the Pulitzer winners last year. I'm only about 30 pages in so I can't offer an opinion yet. Business culture in New York in the 1920s isn't inherently very interesting to me, but we'll see where the book goes.
Oh, and speaking of books, I was putting our rubbish bins away after our trash collection on Friday and noticed that one of them seemed heavy. I looked inside and found that the Russians had discarded a shopping bag full of Russian-language children's books. (They must have put them in the bin right after the trash guys came.) I retrieved them and I'm going to take them to school and add them to our so-called "heritage language collection," which is maintained in the Lower School for international students to read in their native languages. I don't think the Russians would mind, do you?
This is not the first time I've pulled something out of the trash that they've thrown away. They must think I'm very eccentric. To put it nicely.
25 comments:
By thirty pages in I usually know whether or not I like a book enough to keep reading. Sometimes I'll skip ahead a few chapters to see if it gets more interesting, if it does I'll keep on, but usually it doesn't and life's too short to read everything.
The flowers are lovely.
Central heating must really confuse plants like orchids. Mid winter is a strange time to flower for tropical plants, but how nice to have flowers mid winter.
Would a bus driver allow a shopping cart onto a bus? If there is a train, I can understand.
Giving books another life is good.
That primrose is an Auricula by the way..highly prized by Victorian gardeners, often displayed potted up in a "theatre", sheltered shelves to protect the petals from rain damage. They are attractive.
It must be the time of year for orchids. I have 3 in flower ( the large flowered white one like yours has been looking beautiful since mid september) and 2 spikes coming up.
Your orchids are simply gorgeous. Congratulations, this is not an easy gardening success.
Looking through neighbour's trash cans? Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. I am still not convinced that your upstairs Russians are not working for the kgb, so maybe the books were some code selection????
The Russian children's books probably contain coded messages from The Kremlin giving your upstairs neighbours instructions about their past espionage missions. Currently, they are probably involved in ousting The Conservatives.
That IKEA cart is odd. I do wonder if they'll ever bother picking it up. Your orchids amaze me. One of our orchids has a flower stem!!!
I think it's high-larious someone brought/stole an IKEA cart. The things people do ...
Carlos has a couple of orchids blooming in the sunroom now; a rare drop of color in winter.
Perhaps someone pushed that shopping cart the four miles from Wembley. Whatever happened, I wish we knew the story.
My orchids are going to bloom and my orchids never bloom! I'm pretty excited. I think it's because last summer I just set them outside for a few months and basically forgot about them. Your primrose is the sweetest thing.
I finished the Larry McMurtry biography and what a life that man had! Besides writing about forty books (somewhere along those lines) he also bought and sold books his entire life. I mean, that's what he would have said his profession was. And besides all of that, he mostly raised a son on his own, had girlfriends all over this country, and spent years of his life driving from one place to another to visit with his ladies or his son and grandson, and to go from one of his bookstores to another.
He was something.
Good find on the Russian kid books! McMurtry would be proud of you for saving them.
My guess, as it happens in our urban cities quite often, is that a homeless person used it for a time and then traded up and left it sitting. I know when I was in California, there were lots of shopping carts everywhere, long miles from their respective stores.
As always, whenever you mention Russians, "How was I to know, they were with the Russians too?" - Warren Zevon I could have worse songs rumbling around my brain for the rest of the morning.
Your orchids are so beautiful! My little plant is not showing any flower buds and it usually flowers in February ... I don't think it will this year!
The Russians put that bag of books in the trash bin, so it would be safe to say they could care less about what you do with them! Let us know if anyone at school actually reads any of them!
Aw that primrose made me smile :)
The books in Russian in your library will certainly catch some kids attention. Neat idea.
The orchids are beautiful and so pleasing to see in your photos. Great idea to save those books. I can't imagine throwing them away. There is always a market for books no matter what language they are in. I decided to not stay at home yesterday, another very gray day. I went for a walk at the garden and got rained on. I enjoyed being out anyway.
Your flowers are amazing, Steve. So lovely to see especially since right now all I see is snow! Do I cut off the stem that my orchids were blooming on and see if a new stem will grow or do I leave the old stem alone? I want to have your success with my one orchid plant!
Primroses are very strident plants. You just recently you pictured heavy frost in your garden and the primrose survived beautifully. Your orchids are fantastic. My white orchid is blooming too. What will your Russian neighbors think of next? Hopefully the books will be enjoyed at your school.
Everytime I see your orchids I think to myself, "Someday, I'm going to try my hand at orchids."
I love that you collected those books. The Russians are very wasteful people.
The orchids are beautiful. My cyclamen have been living in the garage lately but I think it's finally warm enough to pull them out again. They aren't getting any fresh air or sunlight. (at a premium anyway!)
One person's trash is another's treasure. That's great you could rescue the books. Those winds sound grim -- glad everything ended up all right. Four miles is a long way to push a cart -- and could you even do that from Wembley? How very odd!
The food bank where I volunteer has a limited number of carts which are for people to get their groceries to their car. We ask that they bring them back to the door, but occasionally one will go missing. It's frustrating!
Don't give up on Trust. It's one of those books that I was very happy with once it all tied together. Hopefully you'll feel the same way. (though I'm still not sure about Pulitzer status)
got news for you Steve...trash collecting or dumpster diving is 'eccentric'. but eccentric does not always mean weirdly bad. just kidding. I'm glad you retrieve useful things. we should all do more of that.
I mean just look at the orchids.
Repurposing 101 Brother Man - And Sure Wish Our American News Covered Your Weather Patterns
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P.S. Stash A Just Because Treat Under The Pink Blanket
I wonder why the Russians don't just put stuff directly on your step! By now they probably have a good idea what interests you;)
Your orchids are beautiful. I got one from one of my students when I retired. It started to look like it needed some TLC, so I gave it to my son, who loves orchids. I know that he'll nurse it back to health.
River: I usually give a book 100 pages before I quit -- and I only quit if I really, really dislike it.
Andrew: I have no idea whether a shopping cart would be allowed on a bus. I've never tried!
GZ: They also have another name, polyanthus?
Frances: It seems counterintuitive that they'd bloom in winter, but maybe they get a burst of energy from summer light and then exert it by blooming weeks or months later?
Sabine: Well, they're also OUR trash cans. I wouldn't normally go through someone else's trash cans! LOL!
YP: In all honesty, I do have mild misgivings about what they might say. But they're books for little kids. How bad could it be?!
Mitchell: Supposedly shopping carts are very expensive, so who knows? I want to at least give them the option to retrieve it.
Bob: It is SO nice to have some flowers, especially such tropical-looking ones, at this time of year!
Ms Moon: I am curious about that McMurtry book. I might try it myself! I do think orchids want and need a lot less care than people think.
Ed: Oh, that's a very good thought. I didn't even think about a homeless person using it. Maybe another homeless person will adopt it!
Marcia: I think sometimes they need a down year. My plants sometimes take a year to rest.
Bug: It's cute, isn't it?!
Red: Yeah, the Russian-speaking kids might love them!
Sharon: I wonder if our local charity book shops would want books that aren't in English. They might be hard to sell here!
Ellen D: It's basically up to you. Sometimes moth orchids like these produce a second, smaller flush of flowers on the same stem, but if you cut it off they'll grow a new one. If the stem turns yellow it has died and can definitely be cut off.
Susan: Yeah, primroses don't seem to be bothered by frost or even snow!
Debby: You should try them! Moth orchids are really not hard.
Margaret: Some cyclamen can safely stay outside during cold snaps, but some not. We have some in the ground that come back year after year, even after snow.
Jeanie: I can't imagine someone pushed it all the way here, at least not all in one go.
Kelly: OK, thanks for the feedback about "Trust"! I will persevere! It's not BAD, it's just not a subject I find very interesting.
Ellen: Ha! No, I wear the "eccentric" label proudly. We should all be more eccentric! (But then I guess we wouldn't be eccentric -- we'd be normal.)
Padre: I see plenty of news about American weather, but that's because I'm reading The New York Times and other American news sites.
Boud: Ha! Well, I don't want EVERYTHING they throw away. (They throw away a lot!)
Michael: Excellent! At least you passed it on!
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