Buzzing Bluebeard

Although the weather is getting cooler and there's a noticeable touch of fall in the air, the bees are still out and about. They like our bluebeard (Caryopteris)...

...as do the hoverflies.

I spent all of yesterday tidying up around the house. I did laundry, watered all the houseplants, and mowed the lawn.

The grass is still looking scraggly in areas that we didn't mow over the summer, to preserve the teasels and encourage insect life. But it should bounce back in coming weeks with adequate rain and sunshine.

I sat out on the back bench and read the first 60 pages of "City of Night," that paperback by John Rechy that I picked up at a charity shop a couple of months ago. It's good so far. Very "Midnight Cowboy" in theme. It was published in 1963, a couple of years before "Midnight Cowboy," so it's ironic that the latter would go on to be the more famous novel about urban male hustlers.

I managed to break yet another slat out of the bench. I suppose we'll have to buy a new one. It's almost nine years old and we've refinished it once, so I think it's served its purpose. Now the wood is rotting at the joints and while it will probably get us through winter (when we rarely use it) we may replace it come spring.

Otherwise, there's not much news from this corner of the world. I was glad for a quiet day to let me get my life organized. Today I need to check in with the optometrist on the status of my new glasses. I handed them in more than two weeks ago to get new lenses and haven't heard a peep.

Music and Protests

This is Miuki. More about her in a moment!

I had a very busy day yesterday. I had a couple of social outings in town and, with a little wandering in between,  I was gone from 10 a.m. until about 9 p.m. And then I slept in this morning! So I am still way behind in the online world, but I'll catch up.

First, Dave and I had an 11 a.m. concert of wind orchestra music at Royal Albert Hall. This was part of the BBC Proms series, and it was a fairly long program in print. When we got to the theater and took our seats, I was nervous about how long the concert might turn out to be. But the pieces turned out to be fairly succinct, and we were done in a couple of hours. Composers included Ralph Vaughan Williams (who we heard through the auditorium doors because we were late), Malcolm Arnold, Percy Grainger, Gunther Schuller and Michael Tippet. The Schuller piece was a challenge. For me, I mean.

Afterwards, Dave, his co-worker Carolyn and I went to lunch at a nearby pub. I'd planned to go back to West Hampstead and spend the afternoon at home before meeting a visiting friend for dinner, but we left the pub at 3 p.m. and I was meeting my friend at 5 p.m., so I'd spend most of the intervening time on the tube. I decided to kill those few hours in Westminster instead.

Dave and Carolyn left and headed north, where Dave got accosted on the train by someone wearing a Jesus shirt and asking him why he wasn't on his knees praying RIGHT NOW to save his mortal soul. (I heard about it later.)

I, meanwhile, wandered over to Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square, where I came across multiple protests.

First, there were people from this organization protesting against the mistreatment of cats in China. They stood at the fountain in Piccadilly Circus in cat masks holding posters. Apparently they have a petition which is no doubt available through their web site. Forgive me if I am skeptical that Chinese authorities are going to care about a petition signed by people in London, but hey, I admire their effort. This is where I met Miuki, whose owner let me photograph her with the understanding that I would sign their petition, which I haven't done yet. Must get on that.

I bought a cup of coffee at Pret and took it to St. James Park, where I sat on the steps of a large monument to drink it. Two large families with noisy kids joined me, one on either side, and then a branch fell off a tree behind us and a terrified squirrel shot out of the greenery and scampered directly over my foot! I decided that place was way too chaotic, finished my coffee and got out of there.

At Trafalgar Square I found a march protesting the treatment of the Tamil people in Sri Lanka...

...and a protest against the application of the death penalty in Iran. (I'm against the death penalty anywhere, so that one resonated with me.)

Finally it was time to meet Jesse and Jennifer for dinner. I know Jesse from my years of Zen practice in New York, and I met his partner Jennifer about nine years ago when they last visited London. It was great to see both of them again and get caught up on life at the Zendo. Even though I don't practice anymore I feel connected to that time of my life and I wouldn't say I've turned away from Zen. More like I've just hit pause. Maybe I'll reawaken my practice once I retire.

Remember that New Yorker article about sitcom pioneer Gertrude Berg that I mentioned a couple of months ago? It cited Jennifer favorably as the author of several books, including one about women in television that included Berg. It was fun to hear from Jennifer what it was like to participate in that article. Seeing her name was such a surprise when I read it -- it could be the only time someone I know personally (albeit slightly) has been mentioned in The New Yorker.

Last night I dreamed that I was on the couch in the living room, and Olga was with me, wagging her tail and being her usual goofy self. Dave came over to pet her and for a moment everything seemed so normal. It was such a relief to see her again, and yet we weren't shocked. More like puzzled. I said to Dave, "Is there some parallel universe where she's still alive? How is it possible that she's here?" He said he didn't know. Only then did I become aware that I was dreaming, but I woke gradually, so as her presence faded the relieved feeling persisted a little while -- until it gave way to tears, the first I've cried in a month or so. I suppose in a way that was Olga visiting us from a parallel universe.

Stats and Garden Critters

At the risk of turning my blog into the "flower of the day," here's a picture of one of our dahlias. This dahlia, unlike most of the others, has had a very successful year with lots of flowers -- even though, as you can see on the leaves, it's covered with powdery mildew. Next year I'm going to have to stay on top of that problem better. It's been a real plague in this dry summer.

We continued to get rain yesterday, which was good, except that our school building developed some dramatic leaks including one that closed a stairwell. There's been some construction on the roof over the summer and I expect that created the problem, which fortunately didn't allow any water into the library.

I had another crazy busy day, which didn't permit me to either read blogs or respond (entirely) to comments. I did see Mr. Pudding's recent post about his blog stats, which prompted me to look at mine last night. I haven't checked them in ages and I found, like him and some other bloggers, that my page views have gone up dramatically in recent days. Seven of my ten most viewed posts in the last six months were written within the past ten days, with some of them gaining more than a thousand views, which seems statistically suspect. (Of course, I was writing about ABBA, so there is that.)

The "top referring URLs" were even more of a mystery. Google and other bloggers I expected, but I also got tons of views supposedly from the web sites of Stanford, Northwestern University, NASA and PepsiCo. Now, I know Pepsi and NASA are not linking to my blog, so I imagine this reflects some kind of bot activity -- maybe referral spam. (From Google: "Referral spam involves bots and automated tools, not real people, sending fake 'referrers' to your blog's stats page.") I don't quite understand the purpose -- it could be AI crawlers, or something else, but it doesn't hurt the blog and I'm not that concerned.

Here's my geographic breakdown of viewers within the last seven days. They love me in Brazil and Vietnam -- I have visited and written about both of those places, which could be why, but it could also just be bots. (Vietnam is one of my primary traffic sources, according to all-time stats.) My fellow countrymen and women here in the UK are giving me a comparatively cool reception.

I don't think any of this means anything useful, except that I get a lot of bot traffic like any blogger. But it's interesting.

Finally, this morning I downloaded the videos from our garden cam. Here's the latest garden activity, condensed into less than four minutes:

You'll see at least two (maybe three) different cats, a couple of really good glimpses of our lanky fox, and various birds. At the beginning of the video you'll see the cat and the starlings checking out some food in a plastic container -- that was a piece of Dave's leftover sushi that I left out for the fox. The cat and the starlings got there first!

Rain!

Finally, some rain! We heard yesterday that there were yellow weather warnings for heavy rain in southern England, and at least in our area we haven't had anything that dramatic. But we are getting a long, steady soaking, which is exactly what we need. The plants all look happy.

I made the video above rather hastily this morning. As you can tell, the lawn and garden were quite dry. There are a couple of high points to watch for. First, Nicole the Nicotiana is looking better than ever, with a couple of tall, impressive flower spikes. The avocado tree on the patio is also darker and leafier than it's ever been -- it loves being outside.

You can see it's a little hard to move around on our patio, with the banana, tree fern, avocado and other plants all around, and the coltsfoot and lady's mantle growing right out of the paving stones where we would normally walk! I just don't have the heart to take it out.

Finally, in the borders, the Thalictrum is about to bloom -- it has a cloud of little pink buds at the top -- and we're getting a second flush of roses from a couple of our rose bushes.

Rain! Yay!

Business as Usual, With Avian Supervision

We did get some rain yesterday, hallelujah! It wasn't the all-day soaker we could use but as they say at Tesco, "Every little helps." I realized in the evening that I didn't have much of a photo selection to blog, so I went out into the garden with my big camera and this little robin posed for me perfectly. I think it was hoping I'd put some seed in the feeder, so I did.

European robins are the friendliest little birds -- or at least the most unafraid. Anytime I'm out in the garden weeding or moving things around, they'll flutter nearby, waiting for me to uncover some choice bugs. They aren't afraid to get within just a few feet. Maybe they'd literally land on a person's shoulder, as in "Snow White,"  but I've never had that happen.

Yesterday was busy as heck. All the students are finally back at school and we had an avalanche of returned summer books. I was checking in and shelving for hours, both in our library and in the Lower School, and I had a stack of new books to cover as well. I expect more of the same today.

I must admit it has been good to see a lot of the kids again.

It looks like I miraculously caught this little Verbena bonariensis blossom as it fell from the main flower head, but actually it was hanging there by a filament of spider web.

I've been listening to the QAA podcast (formerly Q-Anon Anonymous) once again on my walks to work. I took a break over the summer so I have a lot of content to catch up on. One of the recent episodes was positively hilarious, detailing recent public spats between far-right figures Marjorie Taylor Greene and Laura Loomer, among others. Honestly, Twitter is one of the worst things ever invented. It's designed for people to attack each other.

Dave and I have firmed up our plans and bought our tickets for Christmas. We're returning to Florida to visit his parents and my stepmother and siblings. October break and Thanksgiving are still up in the air, but I have a few ideas, both within the UK and within close flying distance. Now if I can just get Dave to commit!

Musical Memories – With Pictures!

This is what pretty much every day has looked like for the past several weeks -- clear skies, sunshine, and dry, dry weather. The streetside hanging baskets in St. John's Wood are clearly loving it, with their copious blossoms, but then, the council keeps them watered.

The weather app on my phone says there's a 50/50 chance of rain today, tomorrow, and each day through next Monday. If the odds are right, we should get some precipitation soon. This is so far our driest month of the entire year, with just 1.8 mm of rain -- I would be thrilled to get almost anything. We need a couple of days of slow soaking.

Given our discussion of ABBA and pop music a couple of days ago, I've been thinking about early musical memories. I remember hearing ABBA's "Dancing Queen" on the radio quite a bit as a child -- for some unaccountable reason, my nine-year-old ears heard the lyrics as "the air is clean" -- but of course I'd remember music at that age. What about earlier?

Here I am in what used to be called "nursery school," now known as pre-school, in 1970-71. I'm standing next to the teacher, Mrs. Dahm, holding her hand. Apparently I was big on holding hands back then. The mother of one of the girls in my class -- Kim, on the far right -- told me years later that I'd always hold Kim's hand on the way into school. Seems a bit clingy.

At this point I went to a private Presbyterian school in Tampa, close to where my mom worked at the university. I wasn't quite four years old when I started there, because I had a November birthday, which meant I was younger than most of my classmates for my entire school career.

In 1970, my mom was driving a dark green Ford Mustang with a black interior, and this is where I remember hearing some of my earliest pop music -- riding to and from school in her car. I associate several songs with that Mustang -- Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline," the Beatles' "Hey Jude" and "Let it Be."

I also remember going to my friend's house -- he's in the photo above, standing two kids away from me, with the red-striped shirt -- and his mother serving us grilled cheese sandwiches. I don't even remember his name now -- Gregory? Gary? Geoffrey? -- but his mother was very pretty and looked like Anita Bryant. I distinctly remember hearing Don McLean's "American Pie" while at his house, and probably not for the first time, given that it was a huge hit that year.

Just for good measure, here's my kindergarten class, from 1971-72. I love how someone made me wear a clip-on tie but didn't bother to tell me to tuck in my shirt. At least I didn't have to wear a bow-tie or a double-breasted suit. My teacher was Mrs. Fisher. Of course the musical memories I'm describing could have come from this year as well, because we were still tooling around in Mom's Mustang.

When I switched to the elementary school in my suburban hometown, north of Tampa, for first grade, I began taking the school bus, and my exposure to pop music on the car radio diminished. In my house, we rarely listened to the radio when I was little, and my mom's idea of a good record was Brahms or the music from "Victory at Sea." I don't think she even owned a pop or rock album, unless you count the cassette of "Bridge Over Troubled Water" that a friend made for her. (She rarely if ever played it. I swiped it years later.) My dad was more tuned in, but strangely I don't remember being exposed to much of his music until after he and my mom divorced in 1974 and he'd take my brother and me to his apartment every weekend. We'd listen to 8-track tapes in his Volkswagen -- Bread, the Fifth Dimension, Simon & Garfunkel, Donovan, Melanie.

I heard music at the house of some friends down the street, the Betzes -- songs like "The Lord's Prayer," which I've already written about, and "Billy, Don't Be a Hero," and "Seasons in the Sun," which I found weird and scary. (Why was he singing about dying?!)

Eventually our school buses had radios installed, and we listened to Q-105 on the way to and from school. That's when my musical memories really begin to flesh out with more variety. At first it was "Oh What a Night" by The Four Seasons, and "Let 'Em In" by Paul McCartney and Wings. As I got older we eventually moved into the years of the Bee Gees and "Saturday Night Fever."

Anyway, that's what I was hearing as a kid. What about you? What are your earliest musical memories?

Gator Buddha

Our canna lily bloomed yesterday, the first flower we've seen from it this year. The poor thing isn't exactly thriving -- where it once had multiple stalks, now there's only one -- but considering I bought it on a whim at the florist five years ago and wasn't sure it would live beyond one season, it's done amazingly well. It probably needs a new pot and some fresh soil.

We finally harvested some tomatoes! Dave picked these two yesterday morning. They're a little on the mealy side, honestly, but I still enjoyed mine because we grew it!

We spent yesterday entirely at home. In fact I put the yard waste out for collection in the evening and found the door still locked and chained -- or "ginked," as my dad used to say when I was a child. We hadn't unlocked it from the night before. That shows how domestic we were!

I worked in the garden, trimming some stuff and trying to keep our paths reasonably clear, so we could get to the patio without being smacked in the face by the undergrowth like a character on "Gilligan's Island." And I did see a couple of those nasty little flower bugs that give me such terrible bites at this time of year. They're definitely out there.

I did laundry. I cleaned the bathrooms. I vacuumed. That kind of thing.

I also archived all my pictures and backed up my computer, which is always a process.

I know some of you watch the show "Poker Face," with Natasha Lyonne. I was watching the night before last, and it was a kind of Florida-Man-on-Steroids plot, involving a jealous police officer who spikes a fellow officer's pet alligator, Daisy, with methamphetamines. Daisy then kills her owner and becomes a hunted creature, and it's up to Natasha Lyonne's character to return her safely to the swamps. It was a fundamentally silly plot, making fun of those wild Florida Man news stories we often see.

Anyway, at one point Natasha's character, Charlie, peers into the gator's eyes and sees a sort of cosmic, psychedelic swirl suggesting that Daisy is an elevated spirit, perhaps a divine creature. The final frame in the psychedelic swirl is the image above, which I took from the TV screen because I love it so much. I'm not sure a more perfect image has ever been created to combine the Buddhist and Floridian threads in my own past.

Anyway, it's my Facebook profile image now. I'm waiting to see if anyone recognizes the source.

Dave, by the way, doesn't like "Poker Face." He has trouble with Natasha's gravelly voice. I think as a musician he just hears vocal cord damage and it sends him over the edge.

Little Crumbs and ABBA

Here's another picture I've been meaning to take for a while, and I finally had the opportunity on Saturday. I passed this little shop many months ago while exploring this area but it was closed. I thought it was a cafe, and only later on Google Street View did I see it was actually a junk/furniture shop that regularly spread out its wares on the sidewalk. So I wanted to go back and catch it while it was open.

Given the sign, with a little cup of steaming something over the word CAFE, I deduced with the confidence of Dr. Watson that it perhaps had been a cafe at some point in the past. And indeed, Google shows it as such way back in 2016. Two years later, it was looking more like a vintage/junk shop. Now it's positively crammed and, inside, a bit dark and musty.

I didn't buy anything, but this item was intriguing -- a small bedside cabinet decorated with stencils of Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly. I might have bought it if I were 30 years younger (and it was really inexpensive). Now I need it like a hole in the head.

Yesterday I finished my book, "My My!: ABBA through the ages," by Giles Smith. I must say I was a bit surprised when I mentioned reading a book about ABBA a few posts back, and no one challenged me about it. No one said, "You're reading what?!"

Of course it could be that none of you particularly care about my reading habits, which I TOTALLY understand. But I must tell you, this was a very enjoyable book. It wasn't an encyclopedic dissection of the lives and recordings of the ABBA musicians, at least not in any dry, referential sense. It was very readable, more a story of Smith's personal experience with ABBA (like most of us, he discovered them as a young teenager) interspersed with information about the musicians and the records and the photos and the concerts. As Smith himself put it on page 302, the book isn't for die-hard fans so much as "for people who find they have had the members of ABBA and their music in their heads, on and off, practically all their lives without really trying, and might be curious about how that's come to happen."

Having said that, it does go on some peculiar tangents. There's pretty much a whole chapter discussing the wisdom of the line "feel the beat of the tambourine" in "Dancing Queen," ABBA's signature song. Apparently there is no actual tambourine in "Dancing Queen," which I must admit I never knew, and although it sounds like a throwaway rhyme about a silly grade-school instrument, Smith points out that properly playing a tambourine is actually more complicated than one might imagine. Besides, as he says, "feel the beat of the drum machine" doesn't sound nearly as good.

I became an ABBA fan around the time I was 14, when I asked for and got the K-Tel album "The Magic of ABBA" for Christmas. A couple of high school friends were also very into ABBA -- we were not a rebellious crowd -- and I spent hours talking to my friend John on the phone in the evenings, planning ABBA mix tapes that we never made. A few years later I bought their album "The Visitors" at the mall. This was relatively late to ride the ABBA bandwagon, given that they broke up right around that time, but I went on listening to them and I've never really stopped. Their music is still in my iTunes. They really did have a knack for writing and performing musically perfect, if sometimes linguistically awkward, pop songs.

It was always cooler to listen to the Ramones or the Sex Pistols or even Blondie, but I was never a fan of harder-edged music. (I did eventually own Blondie's "Greatest Hits," but I wouldn't call them particularly hard-edged either.)

Anyway, you've probably read some of this before, in my posts about going to the ABBA exhibit or the ABBA Voyage concert in East London. Smith also discusses ABBA Voyage as well as the music's use in the musical "Mamma Mia" and the movies "Muriel's Wedding" and "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert," which as you know are two of my favorites. Those ABBA musicians, who are all now approaching 80 years old, just keep popping up like groundhogs in our cultural landscape.

The Tiger and the Carrot

When Sharon and I went to East London last weekend, we passed this building on the bus. I tried to take a couple of pictures out the bus window, but they didn't turn out very well, so I went back yesterday to get some clearer shots. It's a pub called The Tiger near Hackney Wick, and I'm not sure it's still in business -- but that mural is pretty impressive.

So yes, I did get out yesterday to take some pictures. I started at Homerton station and then walked westward, following the route our bus had taken the previous week, and photographed several places along that path. I'll share more of those photos in future posts. I guess I walked a couple of miles before finally boarding the overground train at Canonsbury to get back into Westminster.

Because this was another goal for my weekend -- to see the scene in "Evita" in which Eva Perón, played by Rachel Zegler, sings from the balcony of the Palladium theater. Every performance, nights and matinees, she emerges from the theater and sings "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina" completely free to the assembled crowd. It's part of the show -- inside, the audience sees her via live digital streaming, and we in the crowd become, in effect, the Argentinians cheering for their beloved leader. It's a pretty cool idea though it was allegedly rather controversial at first, basically giving away the show's big moment to the public rather than the paying audience. But then, that's very much in the Perón spirit, isn't it? We're the descamisados, the poor shirtless ones!

The word is to arrive early to get a good position, so I got there about an hour ahead of time...

...and I still managed to put a lamppost between me and the balcony, but I got some pretty good shots of Eva doing her thing. She is amplified, and the crowd also hears the orchestration from the theater, so we get the full effect of the song.

I stood next to a couple who were back for the second time, and I could see how this would be tempting to do repeatedly. I bet some drama-addicted theatre queen out there is going every day.

After that I came home and sat with Dave in the garden. We talked about potential travel plans for the fall. He's a bit worn out with traveling, having been to the states four times so far this calendar year, but I am resolute in insisting that we do something for October and Thanksgiving breaks. We don't have to go far, but I don't want to just sit around the house feeling the absence of Olga.

I also read a chunk of my ABBA book and got the houseplants all watered and cared for, including giving our elephant ear a bath to get rid of its mites. (One plant or another always has a bug problem.)

This was the carrot I pulled out of the refrigerator for lunch. Now, I don't mean to be completely juvenile, but COME ON!

The Postmodern Bench

Remember the collapsed bench outside the telephone exchange on Finchley Road? Well, it's still there, three months later, along with its orange conical sentries standing at attention.

Someone stuck a sticker to the back that says "The Museum of Postmodernism." I don't think there is any such museum in London, so that's a pretty deliberate (and funny) comment about its longtime presence as a street sculpture.

I've just been outside refilling all the bird feeders. Those birds can really plow through food. I do feed them less in the summer, recognizing that they need to learn to forage for themselves (among the bolognaise discarded at the back of the garden) and probably also need to know when to migrate as food dwindles. But on weekends I like to watch them on the feeders. It occurred to me that 7 a.m. may be a bit early for the squabbling starlings, but hopefully the neighbors will forgive me.

It's starting to feel quite autumnal out there. Our low temperature is 54º F at night (that's 13º C) and the highs are 72º F during the day (an ideal 23º C). But more than that, there's something about the air -- a crisp edge that suggests the coming of fall. Or maybe it just feels that way to me because I'm back at school.

I spent much of yesterday in the Lower School re-shelving books and putting things in order. I think both libraries are in pretty good shape and ready for the onslaught of kiddies come Tuesday. (Monday is a bank holiday, thank God.)

I have a couple of goals this weekend: I want to go take some pictures; I want to finish this book about ABBA that I've been reading for two weeks (it's mostly just been sitting on my end table next to the couch, but it's not bad and I'd like to finish it); I want to plan some trips for our break periods in the autumn. Plus I need to do the routine weekend stuff like laundry and watering all the houseplants. Our rubber trees have been sitting outside all summer and I suppose I need to think about bringing them inside again, though we won't have any really cold temperatures for another couple of months.

This column in The New York Times really annoyed me, in which David Brooks blames liberals and progressives for the right wing's nihilistic, destructive tendencies. Apparently we overconfident, domineering liberals have beaten the poor conservatives into silent, seething submission, leaving them physically hunched over and unable to express their God-fearing perspectives, to such a degree that they have now decided to simply destroy everything. He holds up Curtis Yarvin and Christopher Rufo as examples of this trend, both of them right-wing extremists of the highest order. So it's my fault that Curtis Yarvin thinks the way he does? Talk about shifting responsibility!

I get so tired of this assertion that conservatives can't express themselves. Rush Limbaugh? Newt Gingrich? Jerry Falwell? Jon Voight? Ted Nugent? I've been hearing conservative voices for decades. I certainly didn't feel predominant in the culture during the terms of George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan.

And I loved this sentence: "For reasons I don’t fully understand, educated elites are more socially progressive than non-elites." Well, gee, could it be education?!

At least he ultimately comes out against nihilism, but his source of reassurance is statistics that show more young men going to church. Given the growth and persistence of Christian nationalism, I'm not entirely sure that's a good thing -- but I suppose we shall see.

Not Very Uplifting

Here are some of the buildings Sharon and I encountered during our visit to Hackney Wick last weekend. It may be gentrified, but it's still a very colorful neighborhood!

This one has a Roy Lichtenstein feel to it...sort of Lichtenstein-meets-Marvel-Comics.

You might be wondering (probably not) whatever happened to my itchy arms. Well, they're still itchy. I have backed off the belief that insects are the cause. I haven't been outside enough in the past week to have encountered any insects. I'm returning to the belief that this is a result of cumulative sun damage over the course of the summer. Now that I'm at work I'm obviously in the sun much less, and I've been taking a daily antihistamine, which seems to help -- so I think the problem is slowly, slowly going away. It's still a very peculiar situation.

The lesson for the future, I think, is that I need to wear sunscreen.

I've been missing Olga a lot lately. The other night I woke up in the wee hours and came out to sit in the living room for a moment, and missed the fact that when she was alive, she would wonder where I was if I didn't come back to bed. She'd come out to sit with me on the couch. I still miss her snoring weight and her presence in the garden during the day, annoying as it could be. It's been slightly more than a month since she left us, but it seems much longer. When a constant presence is suddenly absent, that absence seems even more profound.

I think I'm approaching this year at work with more trepidation than I let on in yesterday's post. This was amplified by a meeting we had yesterday where we outlined what's needed in the coming year, and it sounds like I'll be spending even more time in the Lower School and less doing what I used to do. Every day's schedule is going to be different, and there will be much less routine. I'm told that overdue materials are "just books" (in other words, don't spend so much time trying to get them back) and I'm still doing all the book covering. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what's expected of me, but the message I'm getting is that I should not count on sitting at the circulation desk as much. At the moment, the prospect of another whole year is not very compelling. Maybe that will change as I get more into the rhythm of things.

I think I'm just exhausted with all the opening-week activity, too. I'm ready to have students back and stop with all these meetings and trainings and speeches and socializing.

All I know is, it's not a good thing when I wake up in the middle of the night stewing about work. I am ready to leave this part of my life behind.

Dave had a little more left over bolognaise sauce from dinner on Wednesday night, and I put it out for the foxes once again. I honestly don't mean to make a habit of this but I hate throwing away perfectly good meat sauce, and when it's not enough to save but too much to put in the trash, an animal is the perfect solution. Again, I'm missing Olga!

Anyway, this time around, the fox never came for it. According to the garden cam, a curious cat checked it out but I think ultimately the starlings ate it. The idea of birds eating meat sauce is a little disgusting for some reason.

Pronunciation

I found that sticker on my walk home last night. I'm not blogging it because it illustrates my mood or anything like that -- in fact I've been pretty upbeat this week, even though I have a lot going on workwise. The first week of school (for teachers) is always a crazy time as we go through all of the standard all-school meetings and training sessions. Yesterday we had one on creating "courageous global citizens," and today we have child protection training, which is mandated by law.

And of course, we're still setting up the library, so when the training is done I'm organizing shelves and displays and moving stuff around. Yesterday we divided the board games into three different groups for display in three areas, for example. Plus I'm taking departed patrons out of the library system and organizing magazine sign-ups (don't ask) and blah blah blah.

I honestly don't mind it all, but it is boring to write (and read) about. Hence not much to blog about my days at the moment. Students come back on Tuesday.

Blogger Margaret uploaded this entertaining map the other day, supposedly showing the town names in each state that are the hardest to pronounce. (You may have to click on it to see the names clearly.) Like Margaret, who disputed Washington's choice of Puyallup, I took issue with some of them immediately.

In my home state of Florida, for example, the name chosen is Ocoee, which is a city near Orlando. I would have chosen Immokalee, Chokoloskee or Islamorada, all of which I have mispronounced at one time or other. For years I did not know that the "s" in Islamorada is silent, as in island.

What about Mississippi? Their choice is Louisville, and even assuming it's pronounced LEWISville (because why else would it be hard to pronounce?), a quick look at Google maps offered a host of other worthy contenders. There's Hushpuckena, Arkabutla, Looxahoma, Bogue Chitto, Toomsuba, Shubuta, Eastabuchie and Wiehe -- and also Splunge, which is just funny.

Likewise, the choice for Nebraska is Cairo, which I assume must be pronounced KAYro. (Because, again, why else would it be hard to pronounce?) But they overlooked Unadilla, Ohiowa, Otoe, Niobrara, Verdigre, Minatare, Joder (surely not the Spanish curse word?) and Ough.

And finally, Colorado. Seriously? Crested Butte is the best they could do? What about Iliff, Capulin, Abarr, Arickaree, Hoehne and Gulnare?

There are others I could challenge as well, but I suppose the point is that mispronunciation is in the eyes (or mouth) of the pronouncer. Still, it was a fun exercise. It would be interesting to do it for Britain. I'm sure the winners would be somewhere in Wales, home of the famous Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, which is an actual place.

Bolognaise

There is not much room in my head at the moment for anything but work, so rather than bore you with further tales of the library (which bore me as well) I'm going to share another video from our garden wildlife cam.

This one begins with a mysterious cat that I have never seen before, getting up close and personal with the camera lens. There's some squirrel chaos. Then I put down a container with a small amount of Bolognaise sauce that I thought the foxes might enjoy. The magpie comes to check it out but isn't interested. The starlings peck at it a bit. Then, finally, a lithe young fox shows up, and although the camera failed to catch it actually eating the meat sauce, I know it did because the container was licked clean. (And subsequently recycled by me.)

I think the camera must need new batteries. Its reaction time seems slower than usual. There's no reason something as big as a fox standing in front of it shouldn't trigger it right away!

The Animals

I told you I'd take photos of all the animal-head sculptures that live in the library display cabinets. These are projects that students made in an art class many years ago -- before I got my current job in 2013. So I've been staring at these critters (and they've been staring at me) the whole time I've worked at the school.

Now the current librarian is talking about swapping the artworks out for something new. If the animals do get removed, they will apparently go live in the art building.

Excuse the dusty shelves. No one ever cleans inside these cabinets! I love the platypus on the right.

I think that lizard, or sea creature, or whatever it is, is from a different art project.

The one at bottom right is a boar -- sorry the light is right in its face. The one next to it is a walrus. All these heads are made of clay and they're quite heavy.

A pretty good assortment of creatures! Some are better than others but I do enjoy them all, so it's nice to have a record of them now.

The Storehouse

Yesterday I met up with blogger Sharon, who is visiting London from the sweltering desert environs of Phoenix, Arizona. Sharon had mentioned in an earlier comment on my blog that she wanted to visit the V&A East Storehouse, a vast working museum and warehouse in East London where the V&A houses many of the items in its collection. I said, "I'll go with you!" So yesterday we made it happen.

I met Sharon near Euston Station and we took the tube and then the overground train to Hackney Wick, a colorful neighborhood full of street art near the River Lea. I've been to Hackney Wick many times and you've seen it on this blog. But the Storehouse is a relatively new addition to the neighborhood, which has been dramatically built up and gentrified since the London Olympics were held there back in 2012. What was once a landscape of junkyards and industrial estates is now an Emerald City of glittering apartment buildings and hipster cafes. There's still some impressive street art here and there.

We stopped at a little coffee shop across from the museum where, curiously, they seemed to sell large dramatic houseplants as well as cappuccinos. Only after we left did we see it was called "Coffee and Plants." Well, that explains it.

We entered the Storehouse, where Sharon (like all visitors) had to put her bag into a locker before entering the storage/exhibition area. Visitors are asked at the outset not to touch the objects on the shelves, many of which are within easy range, but the mood is relaxed and there's not a lot of strict monitoring. And how do you know what you're looking at? Well, the displays on the end caps of the shelves have a number, and there's an app where you can enter that number and read about each item.

To learn about the other objects in storage, you have to be able to see the item number and enter that on a different web page. Sadly, I couldn't see the number for the pandas above, so their provenance remains a mystery.

There's a glass floor looking down into a lower gallery, not quite as terrifying as the one I stood on at Blackpool Tower. See the round black objects in the display case at top center of the photo above? Those are Keith Moon's drums, all in their protective cases. The V&A owns an incredibly eclectic collection of stuff, like Mughal architectural remnants, a medieval ceiling from Spain, British Art Nouveau ceramics and hand-tailored robes from Africa. It's fascinating that they've developed a method for simultaneously storing it all and showing it off.

Above is part of the facade of Robin Hood Gardens, an architecturally acclaimed housing estate in East London that is sadly being demolished. (I went there and blogged about it way back in 2015.) The V&A salvaged part of the building and the entrances of two apartments, so you can imagine walking along the outer corridors of the estate back in its heyday. There's also an accompanying film showing interiors and an audio track where residents explain what it was like to live there.

From the macro to the micro -- the size of objects in the V&A collection can vary vastly from gigantic architectural elements to the smallest mementos.

Here's Sharon photographing the Kaufmann Office, another architectural installation. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright between 1935 and 1937 and made of cypress paneling, it used to be the office of Edgar J. Kaufmann, a Pittsburgh department store owner. Wright and his acolytes also had a presence in Arizona, at the architectural studio Taliesin West, and Sharon has blogged several of their buildings, so this was a perfect find for her!

After wandering around the Storehouse for a couple of hours we had a quick lunch in the cafe (cheese and piccalilli sandwich and coffee for me), and decided to hop on a bus and take a scenic route back to Marylebone. We caught the 30 bus from Hackney Wick and sat in the coveted front seat on the top deck, which we discovered is not so coveted on a hot sunny day. It was like being in a dehydrator -- we nearly roasted up there before we moved to a shadier seat farther back. But we had a good view!

Hourglass

Well, I got several items crossed off my "to-do list" yesterday. (There is no actual list. Only in my head.)

First, in late morning, I went back to the optometrist. I simply wanted to ask him whether my experience with my varifocal lenses was normal. Was it normal, for example, to only see a portion of a photo on a computer screen in focus? An area about the size of a drinks coaster?

To my surprise, he did not say, "Give it a while and try to get used to them." He didn't say, "Your eyes will adapt." Instead he said, "Oh, that's not good," and promptly took the glasses back. He said the way these lenses are designed, there's a sort of hourglass-shaped area of focus -- which is why the tops and bottoms of the lenses worked fine for distance and close reading, but the mid-range center focal area was so narrow. Why on earth they would be designed so that the CENTER OF THE LENS is the narrowest focal point is my question, but no matter. He said he'd give me new lenses! I don't really need the distance part -- my distance vision is only a tiny degree shy of normal, and I can read signs and see birds in trees and that kind of thing unaided -- so he's going to turn the glasses into bifocals, with mid-range and close-up areas, and I can continue wearing them as readers.

I also wonder how much of this problem has to do with the size of the lens. They aren't that big, and it could be that we were just trying to do too much with too small an area.

Anyway, I'm back using my old reading glasses for the next week or so.

I did some other stuff too, including finally ordering a new couch. Dave and I are ready to get rid of the brown behemoth, which you'll remember we did not even choose but simpy inherited from this flat's previous occupants. (It was almost new then.) The brown behemoth is gigantic, and the new couch is not going to be as big -- about 40 cm shorter, and 20 cm less deep. So we'll have a bit more breathing space in the living room. The new one is also going to be dark blue, a shade poetically called "night owl blue" in the "clever woolly" fabric range. I think it will arrive in a couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, we have to figure out how to get rid of the brown behemoth. It's worn out, with a big hole in one cushion and substantial fabric wear, mostly from dog paws. The company delivering our new couch won't take away the old one, so Dave and I will have to get it out to the street somehow and schedule the council to remove it. I remember the previous owner telling me that the delivery guys had a terrible time getting it into place because it's so big it wouldn't fit through the hallway -- they had to bring it up the alley at the side of the house and in through the back door. But we've had the side gate replaced since then and I'm not sure even that will be possible. Drama to come!

I also trimmed the neighbor's rose bush overhanging our patio -- aka "the monster" -- and filled a yard waste bag with all those cuttings.

Meanwhile, we had Trump and Putin "negotiating" at their summit about the future of Ukraine, without even allowing the president of Ukraine to be present. What kind of colonialist BS is that? It's like two Victorian kings carving up Africa. Trump is so proud of his statesmanship but all he did, as far as I can tell, is cave to Putin's demands. It's not difficult to negotiate peace when all you're doing is capitulating. Giving in to a global menace is the easiest thing in the world.

(Photos: A hoverfly on our pink anemone, yesterday.)

Hammering and Animal Heads

Another day, another dahlia. I hope I haven't used this picture (or that joke) already. I'm starting to lose track!

We have had very warm weather the last week or so. One day we got up to 88º F (or 31º C) and that was no fun. Fortunately at school they're finishing up a replacement of the air conditioning equipment, so yesterday I had nice, cool air conditioning at work. The downside is that they're doing power-drilling on the roof, so the construction noise never stops. And you know how I love that.

Then I came home and found that Mrs. Kravitz had hired people to build some sort of structure in her back garden. They were out there hammering and sawing and from the looks of things it's still not done. I have no idea what it is. She already has a summer house and shed in the back, so it's a bit of a mystery. More construction noise!

In the library, my boss is on a campaign to remove a collection of animal-head artworks that students made many years ago from the glass display cases facing my desk. (I blogged one of these animals once but I don't think I've ever shown the whole collection. I'll photograph them all next week so you can see them.) They're very creative sculptures, all made of clay, and they've been there longer than I have -- at least a dozen years. I really like them and I've argued for them to stay, as did the art department head yesterday, but my boss is having none of it. She insists that the students all think they're creepy (in other words one person may have said that), and she's been asked by administrators to change them (I'm skeptical). I actually said out loud, in resignation, "Well, that's fine. I'll only be here another year anyway."

I have a feeling I'll be saying that a lot this year. Assuming my buyout package is approved, which I still haven't heard.

After work I picked up my new glasses, with my "varifocal" lenses. So far, I am not a fan. It's very hard for me to wear them to work on the computer, for example, because the mid-range focal area is so small. If I focus on one word on the screen, everything within about an inch of that word is in focus, but beyond that it gets progressively blurry. In other words, I can't see my whole screen clearly, and forget looking at something like a photo or a painting in its entirety. Not to mention a spreadsheet. Shouldn't I be able to clearly see more than that?

Also, when I turn my head, everything sort of tilts and slants. My screen goes from a rectangle to a parallelogram. That doesn't happen with my regular reading glasses. It's like being underwater.

So, I dunno. The jury is still out. I'm wearing my old reading glasses at the moment.

The other day I happened to look at my secondary e-mail account at Gmail. I almost never use it, and I found an e-mail from April, from a guy trying to gin up publicity for a book release about some New York graffiti artists. I had allowed the artists to use some of my photos in their book, and he sent me photos of the printed pages so I could see how they turned out. That's one of my photos above on the left, superimposed over a negative image of the artists. (Here's the original shot, from April 2010.)

And here's the second one -- this picture, from April 2011. I must say, that looks quite good on the page.

I allowed these pictures to be used for free. After all, I took them mainly to make a record of graffiti and street art in New York at that time, and I'm glad they've served that purpose for the artists. (I did get credit, which is all I usually ask.) The book is a 468-page behemoth selling for $150 so I may have to be satisfied with these images of my images -- not sure I want to shell out that much myself!

Venus and Nicole

This lovely (?) mosaic version of "The Birth of Venus" graces a tunnel beneath the train tracks near Waterloo Station. Dave and I came across it while walking to lunch on Wednesday. What would Botticelli say? Probably "Get all that junk off my artwork!"

When I went to Italy in 2007 I saw the original painting in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. It was kind of like standing in front of the Mona Lisa in Paris or Van Gogh's "Starry Night" in New York -- I felt a sense of disbelief and awe that this is the REAL THING.

The mosaic at Waterloo is definitely not the real thing. But it has a certain rustic charm.

My first day back at work was uneventful. It mostly involved just getting my desk organized -- cataloguing and putting away all the magazines that accumulated over the summer, dealing with mail and deliveries, putting things back in place after they'd been moved and pushed around by whatever itinerant workers happened to wander past the circulation desk at some point. I shelved the returned books and prepared some beginning-of-the-year displays.

It was especially nice doing all those things with the lingering sense that it may be the last time I'll have to start a school year. Still no word on whether my application for the school's buyout offer will be accepted, but I expect to hear something any day.

Nicole the Nicotiana has bounced back quite beautifully after her bout with root rot earlier this year!

Next to Nicole you can see Tommy the tomato (all names courtesy of Dave). We have not yet picked any of the tomatoes. Dave is convinced they're not ripe, even though they are bright orange with red stripes. He thinks they're going to turn red. I'm not convinced -- we don't know what variety of tomato it is because the plant was a gift -- but every now and then I give the tomatoes a light tap. I figure if they don't fall off the plant then maybe they're still OK.