Butterflies and the Art Show

I've mentioned several times the dearth of butterflies in our garden this summer. I've seen a few cabbage whites, a few common blues and I think one single red admiral, and that's about it. It's been a terrible year considering we usually get commas, peacocks, Jersey tiger moths and others.

Well, now I'm seeing articles about how we're not alone. It's apparently been a disastrous summer for butterflies across the country. Some of it might be due to the climate, but according to experts cited in this article, "the declines in butterflies and other flying insects appear to be more than seasonal fluctuations relating to bad weather." As a result, Butterfly Conservation wants a ban on all neonicotinoid pesticides -- Britain and the EU banned them in 2018 but then the UK exempted the sugar beet industry from its ban. So those potent pesticides are flying around once again, instead of our beloved butterflies.

Isn't it amazing that 62 years after Rachel Carson and "Silent Spring," we're still having this conversation -- still waging this battle?

On a brighter note, I made a video to show you more of the community art show at the school where I work. I tried to do it all in one take -- it's not a very big show -- but people kept walking through the gallery so I had to do some splicing. I also tried to film in a way that shows the works but not the names of the exhibitors, for privacy reasons. So this will only give you a taste of what's on display, but it's better than nothing. I added the contemplative Asian-themed music mostly to drown out extraneous sounds of people talking, floors creaking and doors opening and closing, but it seems to complement the art, doesn't it?

You'll see pottery, embroidery, an architectural model, a decorated boom box, a painted pair of sneakers and a wooden sculpture of a jungle cat. And of course paintings and drawings and photography and all manner of wall art, including my very blue picture.

The only piece that gets really short shrift is an installation shown toward the end -- two side-by-side iPads, playing a looped series of videos created by one of our art teachers. The videos are fascinating to watch but I couldn't really capture them in my own short video, so you mostly just see the setup.

Finally, continuing our artsy theme, I created a few "paintings" with my Waterlogue app -- including this one of Olga napping in the garden near the hollyhock, which you'll remember from this post. I think it turned out well.

If Olga is going to do any outdoor napping this weekend, it will have to be this afternoon. We're getting possible rain this morning and then more certain rain tomorrow and Monday. That's OK -- the plants and grass need it!

(Top photo: A folded sticker on the sidewalk on Finchley Road, on my walk home yesterday.)

Exhibit

I passed this theater in Islington on the bus the other day when I went to Hackney. On the way home, I got off the bus specifically to photograph it. I'm not sure why "Beetlejuice" is spelled out two times and then broken off mid-word the third time. Is it a joke from the movie? (I've never seen "Beetlejuice," believe it or not.) And how can I possibly pass up a midnight showing of "Rambo: First Blood"?

Yesterday was pretty quiet at work, but I made major progress on several long-overdue books. I had about ten high school kids with books that were due last spring! Of course I've been sending them notices and writing their parents, but I wasn't seeing a whole lot of progress. Finally, yesterday, I wrote several of them telling them to see me right away, and if they didn't I'd come and find them in class.

I should know by now that all I have to do is threaten to embarrass a kid in front of their classmates and I get results. I got everything back or paid for except one boy who said he will return his book today. (We'll see.)

Our school community art show opened yesterday, and as you can see, there's quite an assortment of submissions on display. My very blue picture is right in the middle there. The well-meaning organizers put it in a glass frame, and I'm a little concerned that there's now too much glare to see the subtle detail in the photo. But I got lots of compliments on it, so who knows. There's an accompanying guide that includes a statement from each artist, and there are also some free-standing pieces in the middle of the room -- pottery and sculpture and fiber art.

Points for humor to the guy who drew the "Birds of Regent's Park (as seen from a distance)" at upper right!

There was an opening party yesterday afternoon -- I snuck away from the library for half an hour -- but of course I wound up mostly talking to the other exhibitors, rather than paying closer attention to the works. So I'll have to go back when the gallery is empty and check everything out. Maybe I can get a better, more complete photo.

Manny Two

This is the much-graffitied wall of Abbey Road Studios, which I walked past yesterday evening on my way home from a post-work pub gathering. One of my co-workers, the other library assistant, is leaving at the beginning of next month and the school has decided not to immediately replace her. For a while, at least, I'll be doing the work of two assistants (and splitting it with the other librarians). Remember how I was talking about how to spend my free time at work? Yeah, that whole conversation is pretty much moot now. Anyway, our pub gathering was to celebrate our departing colleague. She's moving to Spain where she's going to hike and learn Spanish and not work at all. Must be nice!

I started off yesterday with a dentist's appointment -- just a checkup after my recent cleaning. There's no news to report, thank goodness. The dentist still wants to replace one of my aging fillings and, ideally, do a root canal on a slightly discolored tooth in the front, but I'm in no pain and nothing is urgent so I just keep putting it off. If it ain't broke don't fix it. (And as far as I'm concerned, it ain't broke.)

I also double-checked my US voter registration which is still valid and active, so no nefarious voter-roll purges have targeted me, fortunately.

Here's our newest patient in the plant hospital, a Monstera I found yesterday morning walking the dog. In fact, I found it on the pile of trash on the problem corner I mentioned in yesterday's post. (Of course, more trash had been deposited there!) The plant was bone-dry, so I brought it home and gave it some water, and I'm letting it recover in the dining room. I thought it would perk up significantly but it still looks pretty much like that, so recovery may be a process. It needs a clay pot, some fresh soil and some TLC.

Dave and I had a Monstera when we lived in New Jersey that we named Manny. So we're calling this one Manny Two.

Pizza Fraud

I got a surprise yesterday evening when I noticed our yellow rose had not only leaves, but five blossoms or buds! I mentioned before that our roses were looking pretty dire at the end of the blooming season. They struggle with black spot and some were down to bare twigs -- including this yellow one. But since then many have produced a second round of leaves and some flowers, and I was glad to see this one bounce back. In the past it's been one of our hardiest and most productive roses but it's had a tough year.

We're going to pay closer attention to rose care next spring.

I got another surprise last night when I logged on to our bank account to send a routine payment. I was looking over our statement, as I try to do at least once a month, when I noticed four charges on Monday from Domino's Pizza. We never order Domino's, and we certainly didn't order it four times on Monday. So I began looking more closely at our past charges and discovered to my horror that we'd been charged by Domino's 12 times in recent weeks, a total of £360!

I fault myself for not being more on top of this, but we've been so busy with starting school and various other things that I just haven't watched the bank account closely enough. It all started August 19 with one charge of £27.96, and escalated from there.

Strangely, there seem to be no other suspicious charges. Whoever is bilking us is apparently just a pizza lover. ("Kids," Dave says, but I'm not so sure.)

Anyway, I called the bank and it turns out the perpetrator was using Dave's debit card number. We have no idea how they got it, but his card has been cancelled and the money is being provisionally refunded to us, pending an investigation.

I certainly did not need that little bit of excitement in my evening.

Here's more excitement I didn't need:

This pile of debris was sitting in front of an apartment building around the corner from our flat for days and days. There was a wooden pallet, some furniture, and lots of household rubbish. I finally reported it to the council -- along with two other rubbish/furniture piles on nearby corners -- and they cleared it all. I was so happy when I came home that evening and saw the area clean.

The next morning, I walked Olga and found:

SO ANNOYING!

I reported it again and allegedly this has been cleared too (I haven't been out to check yet) -- but this is one of several problem corners in our neighborhood so I'm sure it won't be long before there's another mountain of junk there.

Mermaid Mystery Solved

Well, I did it. I have vanquished Barbra Streisand's autobiography -- all 960 or so pages. When I took it to work yesterday I said to myself, "I am not hauling this book home again!" I managed to finish it off during lunch and checked it in then and there.

I had to laugh when she said in the acknowledgements that the book took ten years to write, and even then her publishers had to basically pry it out of her hands. That's so Barbra.

Oh! And I solved -- well, sort of -- the mystery of the mermaid.

I took my good camera to work yesterday and got this picture of the tiny sticker -- the best I could do to capture the detail. When I came home, I ran it through Google image search and found this. Yes! It's the same image, and much prettier in color, posted by an apparently Korean artist using the name Kim Sanho. The same artist has an Instagram here.

(Wikipedia has an article about a South Korean comic book artist by that same name, but he's 85 years old and his style seems much more old-school, so I don't think this is his -- perhaps it's by an admirer who has adopted his name as a tribute?)

From what I can gather, the characters are from a story called Rain and Yuyeong, or Yoo-young, and the image was drawn to commemorate an award won by a project called Local Private Life 99 (or sometimes Local Privacy 99). This appears to be a series of comic books by various artists, each based on a particular Korean city. On this web page, one of the books -- focusing on the city of Busan -- is described:

So that seems to be our story, but interesting that the writer is here called Coral. The image itself is signed Sanho. Who knows what the artist's real name is! Apparently the sticker shows the characters after they've met and the mermaid is past her paper-bag crisis.

Anyway, that's probably way more than you wanted to know, but funny how a tiny sticker on a lamppost in South Hampstead led me down that rabbit hole of Korean comic books and graphic novels.

(Top photo: A fallen rose petal on one of next year's teasels, in our garden.)

Hackney

You might recall that another of my goals for the weekend was to get out of the house. After spending all of Saturday on various household tasks, I decided to go yesterday on a photo outing to Hackney, in east London. The weather was beautiful and rather than spend time underground on the tube, I also decided to do all my traveling by bus. That way I got to enjoy the scenery (?) between here and there. Or at least the daylight.

I took a bus down to Baker Street, and then another bus from there to Hackney. (I could have ridden that bus all the way to Hackney Wick, which is even farther east, but I'll save that for another day.)

I got off the bus near Balls Pond Road and walked south past the majestic Empire theater and the town hall.

The cynical among us might see this sticker and think, "Don't we always?"

I headed toward London Fields, a large green park where people were out sunbathing, romping with dogs or climbing on sculptures (top photo). Granted, that particular sculpture -- a pair of flower sellers -- includes benches, so it's meant to be climbed or at least sat upon. I photographed it before, way back in 2012, and I'd completely forgotten about it, so it was fun to revisit it.

These guys were having a game of cricket, looking very official in their whites.

I walked down Broadway Market, where there was lots of lively street activity. I bought a falafel wrap for lunch and took it back to London Fields to eat near the flower sellers sculpture, and then popped into a neighborhood bookshop. I was happy to find "Smiling in Slow Motion," the second volume of Derek Jarman's diaries, there. You may remember I bought and read the first, "Modern Nature," several years ago and loved it. (It inspired me to visit his cottage at Dungeness.)

I made my way down to Hackney Road, where I passed this shop. It's not very remarkable now, but 13 years ago I took one of my favorite shopfront photos here. It had more character then. (The whole area has gentrified tremendously, but there's still plenty of graffiti.)

I gradually headed eastward and then north again along Kingsland Road, back up to Balls Pond Road where I caught the bus back home. I didn't get any reading done yesterday, so alas, I did not finish Barbra -- my one unaccomplished weekend goal. Perhaps today.

A Carnival of Dust

This seed pod of the colorfully named "stinking iris" looks like it's grinning at me with orange teeth. I usually try to cut down these pods to prevent the iris from spreading -- it can be a bit thuggish -- but I left this one. It's growing in an area of the garden where not much else grows, so frankly, if we get a few more iris there it wouldn't be a bad thing.

I got a lot done yesterday. I vacuumed, watered all the plants, did laundry, changed our bedsheets and read another 80 or so pages of Barbra. I also downloaded a few more of her songs from iTunes. Back in the mid-'80s I went to Peaches Records and Tapes in the University Collection shopping center in Tampa, and bought an album of hers called "Emotion." Barbra does not look upon it fondly -- in her book she called it a "hodgepodge" that she barely remembers making, mainly to fulfill a contract. She's on the cover wearing a pink off-the-shoulder "Flashdance"-style sweater. I listened to some of it again on iTunes and it is indeed pretty terrible -- very synth-pop. But I remembered liking three songs: "Clear Sailing," "Here We Are At Last" and the somewhat overwrought "Left In the Dark Again." So, for nostalgic purposes, I downloaded those and played them while doing my chores.

How about some dramatic before-and-after cleaning pictures?

In our bedroom, we have two IKEA-style white armoires. They were here when we moved into this flat ten years ago, and they're the closest thing we have to bedroom closets. I had never tried to move them and I've often thought it must be pretty dusty under there.

Yesterday I muscled them away from the wall and as you can see, I was not wrong.

But after vacuuming and cleaning the floor, as well as taking out that unused coil of ancient coaxial cable, I was left with this:

I totally forgot there was an electrical outlet back there. If I ever knew it.

Anyway, I did this with both armoires and they were easier to move than I expected. So maybe I won't let this job go for another ten years. I had fantasies of finding all sorts of things behind or under them -- missing clothes? Money? But all I found was a clothespin. Sad trombone.

Finally, I mowed the lawn, including tying up the leaves of all the remaining teasels so I could mow more carefully around them. I found this hardy little cyclamen blooming in one of our flower beds. We planted those things not long after moving in, and every year one or two still come up. (The squirrels ate many of them.)

I also took out an old, dying lavender bush. It was actually sort of an accident -- I was cutting the dead part out but accidentally cut the live part too. Oh well. It really was dying.

Dave and I are watching "The Perfect Couple" on Netflix. It's entertaining, but Nicole Kidman's character speaks with the strangest accent. It's not Australian, it's not English, it's not mid-Atlantic theatrical, and it's not patrician New England. (The show takes place on Nantucket.) It sounds like nothing I've ever heard. I hope it gets explained at some point.

Mermaid

This peculiar little sticker is stuck to a light pole that I pass on my walks home from work. It's a tiny thing and very hard to photograph, but it seems to show a girl in a pleated skirt walking up to a mermaid with a very long tail. Maybe it's a scene from a comic or cartoon that I'm not familiar with. I want to try to get a better picture, maybe when I'm carrying my big camera and not just my phone.

I have a boatload of things to do this weekend, most of them small tasks like laundry and mowing the lawn. But I'd also like to get out of the house, and I am determined to finish Barbra's autobiography. I think I have about 150 pages left. I'm up to her relationship with the Clintons and her political views, which unsurprisingly seem very much in line with my own. I've teased her about privilege in past posts, but she is very generous philanthropically and very sensible politically, and I love her for that.

And yet, yesterday I read another of her stories that amused me, about her relationship with the Warner Brothers studio and its chief executive, Steve Ross. Warners, she said, "once rescued me from the vacation in hell."

Jon and I, with our kids, along with friends and their kids, had rented houseboats on Lake Powell. And then everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong. Our friends' boat broke down, so suddenly we had eleven people on ours, with only one tiny bathroom. And then the rains came, and the water got rough. Winds were rocking the boat, and bats were swooping down at night. All I could think of was rabies, because Robert Redford had been bitten by a bat on Lake Powell just before we started filming "The Way We Were," and had to undergo weeks of painful injections in his stomach. Just the thought of those shots made me feel sick. And then Jon drove the boat into a sandbar. That was it. I called Warners and said, "Get me out of here!"

And by golly, Warners sent a company plane and retrieved Barbra from her dismal vacation. It's kind of like very fancy travel insurance, I guess.

Workplace Philosophy

I love it when the hydrangeas get old and dappled like this in the autumn. You can see on the right that the purple asters are blooming too. We don't seem to have as many of them as usual -- maybe I was too thorough in my garden-clearing last year.

I realize I must have sounded ridiculously entitled in yesterday's post, complaining about feeling pressure to not read blogs at work. I should make clear that no one has told me not to do that, so this is mostly my own assumption (guilt?), but we are going through some changes in our department that make me think it would be frowned upon. And of course I understand why that is. They're not paying me for blog-reading, obviously.

But here's the thing: My job is almost entirely focused on helping kids when they come into the library. If I have no kids at any given moment, and I've done the background tasks that are also part of my duties (re-shelving, book displays, contacting people with overdue books, that kind of thing) then I literally have nothing to do. I've always felt that if I get the job done, and done well, then reading on the side shouldn't be frowned upon. It's pretty much my only option for killing time, unless I'm just staring into space. There's only so much shelf-neatening a person can stand.

I certainly don't want to be given some unnecessary task so that I can spin on a hamster wheel to look busy. I've been fortunate enough all my adult life to have jobs that allow me to hold this philosophy, but I've certainly heard stories about workplaces that time bathroom breaks and that kind of thing. So I know it's not everyone's experience.

(Also, in my defense, I usually only take about 20 minutes of my lunch hour, so I figure that other 40 minutes goes into my down-time over the course of the rest of the day -- though, granted, I don't measure or track that time in any official way.)
 
So do I sound like an entitled, spoiled, self-justifying jerk? Maybe. But that's how I think about work.

Maybe instead it's time to think about retirement! Hmmmm...

Flickr just billed me for renewing my mom's account -- £111 for two years. I maintain this account because years ago we scanned and uploaded a bunch of family photos there, like the one above of me, my mom and my brother swimming in the lake behind our childhood home in Florida. Of course my mom is no longer alive and I've downloaded all the pictures onto my computer, but somehow I can't bring myself to close or delete the account. (The online pictures are all set to private so only I can see them.) I suppose I should, though. That's a lot of money for a redundant family archive. (And it's non-refundable, so at this point I have the account for two more years, no matter what.)

Finally, I belatedly realized I've already shown you a video of this, but I made another one last night so you're seeing it again. This is Olga wiping her face on the outside shrubbery after she eats in the evening. This is her daily routine, followed without fail. It always amuses me. (And if we don't let her do it she wipes her face on the couch!)

Hang Ten, Kiddo

This tiny skateboard has been left on a garden wall along my walk to and from work. At first I assumed it's for a little kid. (Hence the post title, though I suppose "hang ten" is a surfing phrase more than a skateboarding one. Oh well, I'm using it anyway.)

I put my hand on it just so you'd have a sense of scale.

The underside looks like this. Maybe it's a dog skateboard? Should my post be called "Hang Ten, Fido?"

I have been slammed at work lately. There's just too much activity whirling around me to do any blog-reading or commenting from my desk, which I used to be able to do between "customers." I won't get into why that is, but suffice to say I'm not happy about it. I used to enjoy being treated like a professional who could be trusted to get his job done and get it done well, rather than someone who requires constant monitoring.

Last night was a rarity in our household -- I made dinner! Dave was feeling tired (he has to go in to the hospital today for his regular infusion of Crohn's medication) and he wanted to order take-away. But we had a ton of odds and ends in the refrigerator from our recent dinner party and even before, and I talked him into letting me "cook." I'm using quotation marks because all I did is make egg salad sandwiches and a side salad, but still!

I discovered that somehow we'd knocked the temperature control on the fridge WAAAAY down, and all the salad greens in the veggie drawer were positively frosty. Still, we ate them. They were a bit limp but they tasted fine. I put the temperature dial on a more temperate setting.

Speaking of frosty, it's 42º F this morning (that's 5.5º C). OK, that's not actually frosty, but it's getting there. Tomorrow is supposed to be even colder. I still have one lagging dahlia that hasn't bloomed yet. It has tiny buds on stalks, and I brought it indoors last night, thinking it might appreciate the warmer house -- but I think it needs to be outside during the day to benefit from the sunlight. We're in a race against time! 

Debate

It sounds like Kamala emerged victorious from last night's presidential debate. I didn't watch but I've just been reading about it and I'm pretty happy with that consensus. It sounds like she ably stood up to Trump's baloney. Meanwhile, commenters in the right-wing media are resorting to fantasies and the usual misogynistic tropes. One reader of a conservative fake-news website wrote: "She was FULL of adrenacrome, folks. Obvious." Another said: "She acted like a married woman arguing with her husband bringing up irrelevant things from the past to piss him off."

And have you seen the memes of Trump cradling kittens and ducks, supposedly protecting them from scary immigrants who want to eat them? (Despite the fact that authorities in the town where the immigrants live say there's no evidence for those falsehoods.) To be honest, the memes are hilarious, and I would post one here except that I can't bring myself to put that man's face on my blog, even in a humorous or mocking way.

This is what Republicans bring to the table -- conspiratorial gobbledygook and misogyny. This is the best they can do.

Well, I know who I'm voting for. And she doesn't live at Mar-a-Lago.

(Photo: Trump-colored flowers discarded on the street yesterday.)

Some Photo News

In contrast to yesterday's summery photos, here's an autumnal one. This cherry tree (I think?) on my walk home from work is already showing hints of color in its leaves. Fall is right around the corner.

Speaking of pictures, yesterday I finally settled the question of which image to use in the faculty/staff art show at work. I decided to stick with the very blue "Sky, Land and Sea" photo. The print looks good, and since I'd already submitted an artist's statement to go with that image it seemed best not to change course. It took a long time to make this decision because I had to wait for the art teacher who's coordinating the exhibit to print the picture so I could proof it. She offered, and it saved me some money to go that route, but she's so busy that if I had it to do over again I'd have had it professionally printed.

Oh, I got some other fun news about my photography. Ten years ago I wrote about John, the guy who sold used books on the West Hampstead railroad bridge, and his dog Sugar. After John's sad death I wrote about the murals that went up commemorating his life (and homelessness in general) on the same bridge. Those murals became a flash point for some community controversy, and now a documentary film has been made about the art and the community response. I allowed the director to use my photos in the film, and I've just received a free ticket to the premiere on Oct. 8. How cool is that?!

I'm looking forward to seeing it because I'm not sure I ever got the whole backstory about how the murals were created and why some people were so upset about them.

In other news, I rented another Barbra Streisand movie last night -- "For Pete's Sake," from 1974. It was fun and kind of zany, as if the producers were trying to recreate her success in "What's Up, Doc?" from a few years earlier. But this movie didn't have Peter Bogdanovich, Buck Henry, Madeline Kahn and the other critical participants that helped "Doc" become such a phenomenon. I wouldn't have felt cheated if I'd bought a ticket, but I'm not sure I would have remembered much after I left the theater, either. The most memorable scene involved a real live bull licking Streisand with its gigantic tongue as she's trying to drive a motor home -- that was pretty funny.

In her book, Streisand called the movie "a piece of fluff," which is accurate. But it was also an important turning point in her life, because it's how she met Jon Peters, who wound up being her romantic partner for the rest of the 1970s. A hair stylist, he designed the pixie-haircut wig she wore in the film. She also confesses she was terrified of the bull, but when it licked her arm she had to laugh, too.

A Book and a Movie

The sun came out yesterday morning, much to my surprise because the forecast called for a cloudy day. Olga got in several hours of sunbathing, which always makes me happy, and I sat next to her and read more Barbra. (I'm up to "Yentl," Streisand's movie from the early '80s, about halfway through the book.)

I also did two loads of laundry and wandered in the garden, trying to take a picture of the sleeping Olga from a different and more interesting angle. I pictured her with our Gallery Valentin dahlia (top) and with our hollyhock, showing the sun coming through the petals (above). It was fun to experiment.

One of our rose bushes, the salmon-colored one with the wonderful scent, recently formed a bud that didn't manage to bloom. The bud shriveled on the bush and when I touched it yesterday it disintegrated in my hand. It still smelled nice, though. The petals look more yellow than salmon, but trust me, the adult flowers are mostly pink.

(Maybe I need to call Barbra's rose expert? Will he bring me ice cream from Santa Barbara?)

I took Olga for a brief walk up to the trash piles on West End Lane, her favorite destination these days. I tried to get her to go to the cemetery but we didn't even make it past the corner. I think our cemetery-walking days may be over.

Finally, in the afternoon, I rented "Up the Sandbox," a Barbra movie from the early '70s. In her book, Streisand told the backstory of several movies she did during that time that I realized I'd never seen -- "The Owl and the Pussycat," "Up the Sandbox" and "For Pete's Sake." So I'm going to make an effort to watch them.

"Up the Sandbox," which is based on a book, tells the story of a young New York mother who has a sort of Walter Mitty-like fantasy life as she struggles with the tedium of keeping house and raising small children. When she discovers she's pregnant with a third child, she must decide whether to keep it or not. She goes to a clinic, walking down shadowy hallways populated by somewhat menacing figures, and ultimately winds up in a climactic fantasy battle with her fellow patients and a grotesque doctor. I won't give away the ending.

It was an interesting movie, but very much of its time. Once or twice there was some casually denigrating language for LGBTQ+ people, for example. Streisand said in her book that the film is not about abortion, but that seems disingenuous -- it was about the lives of women in a broader sense, but the pregnancy and abortion question were certainly at the center of the plot.

And now, back to work!

Sunday Morning Rambling

I am utterly unprepared for blogging today. I had no picture ready, so I took one showing the view of the living room from where I'm sitting at the moment. As you can see, the indoor jungle is about as out-of-control as the outdoor one.

Again, bravo for digital photography! From phone to publication on the web in minutes! A lot different from the weeks it used to take to get developed film back from the drugstore, with publication not even a possibility. Social media may be rending the fabric of our society, but at least I can blog.

As you can see, I have nothing much to say. I woke up with the Marine Corps Hymn playing in my brain: "From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli..." I have absolutely no idea why. (I also wasn't singing it right; for some reason I was thinking, "the shores of New Orleans.")

Did you know that "the halls of Montezuma" refers to Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City, which the Marines captured in the Mexican-American war in 1847? And "the shores of Tripoli" refers to the First Barbary War, fought in North Africa in 1805?

Don't say you never learned anything from this blog. (And thank Google.)

I spent yesterday cleaning the house and reading more of Barbra's autobiography. (You can see it in the photo above -- that gigantic tome sitting on the table by the couch.) The weather is cool and very humid. My bare feet feel like they're sticking to the hardwood floors. It's not pleasant.

Last night we had our friends Chris and Colin over for dinner. Dave made a seafood pie with a mashed potato crust, because one friend is pescatarian and the other is gluten intolerant. This presented menu planning challenges, but Dave prevailed, and was then disappointed when the sauce broke in his fish pie. It tasted great, though, and no one but Chef Dave noticed. (I certainly didn't; I'd had a martini.)

We served peas in the covered Chinese bowl that I found on the street (see previous post). And then Dave told Chris and Colin I'd found it on the street. I made clear we'd cleaned the heck out of it but I still wish he hadn't done that. Some people might find it an appetite killer! Chris and Colin rolled with it, though, brave souls.

Olga Update and Fish Bowl

The hollyhocks are still going at it, having decided late in the season that they wanted to bloom after all. We've had four flowers now, with more potentially on the way!

I'm happy to report that Olga has rallied. She seemed a little better yesterday morning, and Dave and I went to work as usual. Dave intended to come home early and I called the vet to ask about an afternoon appointment. But when the vet's office heard she was shivering, they asked to see her right away -- I'm sure they were concerned about the potential for infection after her surgery. I was pretty sure she didn't have a fever but I said OK, got back on the tube and came home, and took her in.

Sure enough, the vet examined her and said nothing was obviously wrong. Her heart sounded strong, her temperature was normal and her teeth and gums looked fine. She theorized Olga had an upset stomach, which is certainly probable given that she chews up sticks on her walks, drinks out of the birdbath and snatches food off the street before I can stop her.

She took some treats at the vet's, and had another one before I went back to work. We canceled her walk yesterday, so she stayed home for a long nap, and when we came home yesterday afternoon we could see she'd eaten. She also ate as usual last night. So she seems on the mend.

My first trip to work wasn't entirely wasted, though, because on the way I found these amazing bowls set out with someone's trash. They were covered with lime scale -- white hard water deposits -- but I figured I could clean that up, so I grabbed them. Before I took Olga to the vet, I put them in a bucket with some de-scaler, and by the time I came home in the afternoon they were in great shape. I ran them through the dishwasher and voila! More dishes we don't need!

I especially like the bowl on the right, which has three fish on it. It's pretty big -- it could hold half a dozen apples easy.

I'm hoping to plow through more of Barbra Streisand's book this weekend. Remember how I mentioned her casual references that betray her privilege? Well, in one section she writes about a brand of coffee ice cream she loves that's only available from a shop in Santa Barbara. She drops in this sentence: "Sometimes in an emergency situation, I may call Dan, my rose expert who lives in Santa Barbara, and ask him to bring me a couple of pints when he comes down to check on my garden once a week." So, a) she has a rose expert, who b) comes weekly from another city, and c) also acts as ice cream courier?

A few pages later she writes about going with Donna Karan to Deepak Chopra's retreat center in Massachusetts. When she gets back to New York she's disappointed to find that the flowers she'd ordered for the window boxes at her apartment are the wrong color. She calls the plant place to complain, but then decides, "what the hell. It was such an ordeal just to get flowers and potting soil up to the 22nd floor. Besides, I didn't want to kill the poor things by throwing them out. So I simply closed my lace curtains so I didn't have to look at them."

A couple of weeks later, a friend comes over and points out that the flowers are now the correct color. Streisand, astonished, calls the plant place to find out if the blossoms could change color on their own. She's told no, and when she asks Deepak Chopra about it, he gives her some line about how desire can manifest change. But don't you think it's far more likely that the people at the plant place panicked when she wasn't happy and swapped the flowers when she was out? They probably said, "We have to make this right! She's BARBRA STREISAND!"

A Bee, Still Sleepin'

This little bee was tucked into that dahlia yesterday morning, riding out the rainy weather. It didn't look very cozy but I suppose when you're a bee you take shelter wherever you can get it. I alluded to the song "A Sleepin' Bee" in an earlier post, and now that I'm reading Barbra Streisand's book it seems even more appropriate to do so again.

We're due for more storms this morning -- we even have a yellow weather alert, calling for "outbreaks of heavy rain." I cancelled Olga's dog-walker. She doesn't need to be dragged out in that.

When Dave got home yesterday Olga was in a state. She was shivering and wouldn't take a treat or eat any food. She climbed up into his lap and when I got home, she was still shaking. I put her next to me on the couch, covered her with her pink blanket and she eventually calmed down and fell asleep, and then ate most of a can of food (as well as half a paracetamol). I have no idea what was going on. She didn't seem obviously sick, but she could have been in pain or maybe she was just chilled. Remember how she asked to be let out twice the night before? I think she wasn't feeling well then, either.

We did have rain yesterday but she wasn't out during the rainiest periods, and there was no thunder that I heard. (She normally doesn't react to thunder anyway.) I don't think she was upset by any of that.

I slept pretty soundly through the night, fortunately. I woke up around 4 a.m. and listened for Olga's breathing just to make sure she was still alive. Of course I don't want her to die, but in some ways it would be a blessing to not have to make end-of-life decisions.

Elderly dog drama.

Sleepless, With an Extra Pillow

I just had a terrible night's sleep. Don't you hate that? I went to bed at my normal time (10-ish) and woke up about an hour later, and I was up and down from then until 3:30 a.m. or so. Olga asked to go out twice, which is very unusual in the middle of the night, and I don't know whether she didn't feel well or simply did it because I was awake. Otherwise, I just lay there, mulling things over.

I wasn't even worried about anything in particular, but of course if you lie awake for four and a half hours you're going to find something to worry about, or get annoyed about, or some injustice to replay in your mind over and over on a continuous loop. As always, now that it's morning, I feel completely removed from all of those thoughts, as if they happened to another person.

One thing I did worry about yesterday were those dogs (above). I was walking to work and I passed them on Finchley Road, and they seemed completely unattended. They had no visible collar or identification and were foraging through the trash. As you can see, they look pretty healthy, and ultimately I just kept walking. But I wondered if I should have called 999 (the British version of 911) and stayed with them until help arrived. It would have made me ridiculously late for work, and I'm not sure how I could have corralled them, being one person with no leashes or collars. In fact, I was afraid I'd spook them if I hung around -- but I know if someone found Olga wandering on Finchley Road I'd want them to look out for her.

So I probably screwed that up. Hopefully they're OK. They seemed like they knew what they were doing, unlike that panicked little dog I saw running loose in Buenos Aires.

Here are some other oddities I encountered yesterday on the sidewalk. First, a fragment of a doll from Provence, in a very fancy but faded costume. I assume she was discarded because she was so faded. She has also headless, but still had one slender arm protruding from beneath her blue shawl.

And I found this neck pillow on a pile of debris in St. John's Wood, color-coordinated with the pallets and bins around it. Doesn't that make a nice still life?

I didn't keep either of these items. In fact I didn't even touch the pillow. Too much ick factor.

When I got home I cut down the rest of the teasel forest -- at least the ones in the middle of the grass. I really didn't want them to re-seed. As you can see, we still have a second generation coming, which will grow tall and bloom next summer. And I kept the ones in the center flower bed and a single one in the bed to the left, so the birds can nibble on those seeds. Striking a balance!

Oh, and I wound up not going to that photo exhibit at the Royal Geographic Society. The event was cancelled because the presenter (I didn't even realize there was a presenter) had Covid. C'est la vie.

We got some rain last night. That was one tiny benefit of lying awake -- I could hear the rain pattering down, hopefully reinvigorating our grass and all our dry plants.

A Cloudy Sheep

Olga felt energetic yesterday morning, so we walked our full route around the housing estate. This planter is always full of flowers. They're a little past their peak now, but still looking good.

Here they were at the end of July:

Impressive lilies, right?

We also saw the cross-eyed cat yesterday:

Olga and this cat have been glaring at each other for years, and both are senior citizens at this point. They put on a show of antagonism, but I'm not sure how deeply either one is feeling it.

Anyway, it felt great to get a walk in with the dog. I am sticking close to home these days because the dog never wants to go far and I feel guilty leaving her behind. I realize this is insane but it is what it is. I bought a ticket to a Royal Photographic Society exhibit tonight that I plan to attend just to get myself out of the house.

After walking Olga, I was off to work, where the day was uneventful.

Not long after school started I found this in the library. It's an enamel pin that obviously fell off someone's jacket or bag. I'm still not sure what it depicts, but I'm leaning toward a sheep. (At first I thought it was clouds, and then I thought it was a pig or cow.) I put it on my desk so its owner could find it but no luck so far. A sixth-grader was exclaiming over it yesterday -- she called it a cow -- and I told her I'd give it to her if no one claimed it by the end of the week.

Orchid Report

Our orchids are looking good at the moment. Above are two of the rescues from that batch I found in a neighbor's yard waste last year. (They're the sister plants to the one that so infatuated the bee -- which came around for a day or two but then decided to pursue a more giving partner.)

The one in front is looking good. The one behind it is very strange -- it's extremely robust in terms of leaves and roots, and it grew an impressive flower stalk, but then it dropped its flower buds. So I don't know what happened there.

Here are a few others that have flowers now.

The flowers on this one have been around for months and they're just about to wilt, which is why they look more textured.

Two more have flower stalks with buds so we should see blossoms from them soon!

Barbra and Olga

Here's our pink Japanese anemone, which grows near our fence by the back steps. It sent up a tall flower stalk earlier this year, and then suddenly part of the plant shriveled and died. I don't know if it got too dry or what, but I was glad to see some of it has survived and bloomed. (Even if the flower is slightly lopsided!)

I spent most of the day in the garden yesterday with Barbra. I'm 200 pages in, so about a quarter of the way. What's struck me so far is how wildly unusual her life is. She was so young when she became famous -- still a teenager, really -- and she had a fairly meteoric rise. There was a brief period of singing in nightclubs and couch-surfing, but really, as an adult, she's never not known success. She's never not been famous.

I'm not sure she's even fully aware how unusual her life is. She says she doesn't think of herself as a star. But she treats quite casually the small moments when she exerts that star power -- like when she calls up Tim Cook at Apple because the newest generation of Siri mispronounces her name, and by golly Tim Cook corrects that mistake. Or when she asks to buy a painting from the Philadelphia Museum of Art (granted, the museum turned her down). I'm sure she knows on an intellectual level that most people can't do those things, but does she fully perceive her privilege?

Still, she comes across as likable and sensible, and the book is a smooth and easy read. I'm enjoying it, and I love hearing the backstory of how she came to sing a legendary duet with Judy Garland, for example, or how she questioned the lyrics of "People," one of her signature songs. She asked Bob Merrill, the songwriter, "Isn't it people who don't need people who are the luckiest people in the world?" His terse reply: "No."

I washed our back-door mat and set it out in the sun to dry. I wonder if Barbra ever washes her own back-door mat? Probably not now, but as a young star she used to hand-wash her clothes in a bathtub in the kitchen of her apartment. Kind of an amusing image.

Some of you may be wondering how Olga's teeth are doing. Here's your answer:

You would never know that dog just had eight teeth removed, would you? Sorry I kept getting my fingers into the frame. I was having trouble holding the phone at that angle.

Thanks to those of you who warned me about mint and how it's likely to take over if planted in the ground. That hasn't been our experience here -- we planted it in one flower bed and it struggled along for a couple of years before being utterly consumed by English ivy. To be honest, I wouldn't mind it taking over. We need some ground cover that can out-compete the weeds in the central flower bed. So we may take the plunge and put it in the ground anyway. I'll let you know.

I can't resist closing with this photo of sleeping Olga. She was zonked.