Orchids and a Primrose

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.