Colorful Lights at Harvard and Yale

I noticed yesterday while wandering around the garden (between intermittent periods of rain) that the red hellebores are just beginning to bud. Signs of life in a mostly dormant period for plants!

I had another quiet day yesterday, thank goodness. I cleaned in the afternoon and spent the rest of the day mostly on the couch. I finished a good chunk of "Super Sad True Love Story," which I'm really enjoying. I've already mentioned how prescient this book is, envisioning the United States as an authoritarian dystopia -- where the only civilian job opportunities are in security, consumer credit, retail or media -- at war with Venezuela. Well, the dystopia has morphed into a civil conflict, with the government fighting its own people. It sounds dark, and it is, but weirdly the book is also funny.

One line really stood out for me. A Korean-American character writes to her friend: "This country is so stupid. Only spoiled white people could let something so good get so bad."

Dave, meanwhile, conducted the high school band's winter concert yesterday, so he was busy. I often don't attend the winter concert. I usually wait until the final concert of the school year in late spring.

Oh! We made our summer vacation plans for next year. Believe it or not -- and this will surely mark me as the senior citizen I am slowly becoming -- we are going on a cruise. We've booked a trip that takes us through the lake country of northern Italy and then down the Adriatic coast of the Balkans, around to Sicily and up the west coast of the "boot." Dave has never been to Italy and he loves the idea of a cruise, with his hotel room basically following him around. I chose South America a few years ago, so it's his turn. (I've been to Italy but I haven't seen the parts we're visiting, for the most part, so I'm excited too.)

I thought you might like another "holiday lights" video, this one from our neighborhood. Nothing as grand as what we saw in my earlier London lights video, but still nice, with music once again by the Vince Guaraldi Trio. Among other things, we see the colored doorway lights of Harvard and Yale Courts, the apartment buildings behind our flat, as well as "snow" paintings on the windows of the veterinary practice where we used to take Olga, and the Christmas tree on West End Green.

A Dark Season

Well, I am getting a late start this morning, aren't I? Dave cooked some short ribs last night and I made a pumpkin pie, and those activities combined generated more dishes than our dishwasher could handle. This morning I had to unpack the first load and start the second before I sat down to blog. I hate having to clean the kitchen when I first wake up.

I passed the doorway above on my way home from work last week. I loved those colored lamps in the entrance hall. At this time of year I notice light fixtures, lit windows and that kind of thing because it's almost always dark. I realized last week that I was leaving home in the dark every morning and returning home after dark every evening. It's kind of bizarre to go a full week without seeing your house in daylight!

I should show you my pumpkin pie:

Pretty fab if I do say so myself! I did not make the crust. It's a roll of shortbread pastry dough that I fitted into the pie pan because, at least in my grocery store if not in all of the UK, ready-made pie shells are apparently unheard of. The staff members I asked looked at me as if I had two heads, wanting such a thing.

I was inspired to make the pie because, as with our recent cranberry sauce encounter, we had an ancient can of pureed pumpkin to use up. If not now, when?

It turned out pretty well, though Dave overdid it on the whipped cream! The black specks in the pie are cloves. The recipe called for ground, and we didn't have any pre-ground so I put whole ones into our spice grinder. What emerged was a bit more gravelly than powdery, but it works.

Also yesterday, I downloaded the wildlife cam. It's been a rainy week, and you can see water droplets on many of the passing animals, if not outright rain coming down. High points include:

-- First, Guy Fox and then Q-Tip pass the camera.
-- At 00:28, we hear that weird sound that I thought was an owl, but now I'm just not sure.
-- At 00:33, weather.
-- At 00:42, a photo-bombing pigeon.
-- Then various foxes mill around, each on his or her own, until 02:16 when Blackie the cat huddles beneath our garden bench.
-- At 03:16, Pale Cat crosses the screen then comes right back the other way, huddling watchfully atop the bench.
-- At 03:52, a wet cat (Tabby, I think).
-- At 03:58, a daytime shot of Q-Tip back by the fence, scratching and preparing to jump over. (Not sure why the camera didn't capture his jump. When do these foxes sleep?)
-- At 04:19, Mystery Cat is back, also looking rather damp.

Holiday Overload

This sleepy fox, cozied up to a mug of tea, adorns the window of the paint-your-own-ceramics shop on the high street. A suitably wintry image! I'm not sure how any of our garden foxes would react to a snazzy star-spangled sweater.

Every so often this studio puts unclaimed or rejected work out on the street for people to take home. I usually don't take any of it but it always disappears, so someone does. I did snag a plate not too long ago, bearing the obviously smudged image of a stick-figure family, because I figured I could put it beneath a houseplant.

Yesterday was madly busy. We had a steady stream of high-school science classes coming through the library, picking out their winter reads. Every year the 10th Grade students read a science-related book over the holiday break and report back to their teachers in January with a review. They also give us a little sign with a condensed version of their review which we can post on the shelf next to the book. It's always amusing to see the kids trying to find the smallest, least-threatening-looking book possible. As far as I can tell, that's pretty much their sole criteria, even though we consistently try to explain that a small book about a boring subject is far harder to read than a big book about an interesting one.

At about 1 p.m., the school Christmas tree (which was supposed to arrive on Tuesday morning) was finally delivered, and it lives in the library. So I had to whip that thing into shape. I tested our two strands of lights, and both worked, so I wrapped the tree in the lights and decked it out with ornaments. Some high schoolers, taking pity on me, asked if they could help, which I thought was very kind. And then I turned on the tree and one of the light strands simply will not come on. I have no idea why.

After all that plus a stint in the Lower School, I was ready to go home -- but no! It was time for our annual faculty/staff holiday party! The library was cleared, food and drink brought in, and I stayed for another hour or so chatting to co-workers and mingling. (Dave cleared out before the party.)

And then I had a Christmas panto to attend last night. This is something the school's faculty/staff LGBTQ+ affinity group does every year -- we go to a bawdy gay panto down by Charing Cross. This year's theme was "Beauty and the Beast" and it was quite fun, as usual. Let's just say my new mug would have fit right in.

After all that, I'm feeling a bit shell-shocked this morning. I'm looking forward to a quiet weekend of staying home and reading!

Luna and Cat

I woke up about 3:30 a.m. and went out to the kitchen for water, and noticed light pouring into the living room from the full moon.

The back garden was lit up as well. Plenty of light for fox photography with the garden cam if they came around last night! We'll know this weekend when I download the images from the cam.

And of course I couldn't let such a gorgeous moon go to waste without getting a proper photo of it!

Blogger Mitchell posted a video a few days ago that brought tears to my eyes (in a good way!) when I watched it last night. Have you ever seen videos by Playing for Change, an organization that virtually unites musicians around the world to perform together? I heard about them 15 years ago, after attending one of their concerts with my blog pal Barbara, who some of you might remember from Blogland. (I haven't spoken to Barbara in years, not since she stopped blogging, but I still see her husband on Facebook.) Anyway, Mitchell found a Playing for Change version of "Peace Train" that features Yusuf Islam/Cat Stevens himself as well as many other musicians, and it's very poignant, considering the state of the world today. When I heard that unforgettable voice again it gave me chills. The video is on Mitchell's post here (below the pictures of his adorable cats).

And just for the heck of it, here's a link to my personal favorite Playing for Change video, the Indian folk song "Chanda Mama." Both of these are well worth watching and show that music really does unite us, in the face of all our other differences.

And Vulgar Hilarity Ensued

This woman was in front of me on the escalator as I came home from my Christmas lights expedition on Tuesday night. Someone's been to IKEA!

Now, you know I usually run a family-friendly blog here at Shadows & Light. I try to keep profanity to a minimum, not because I don't use it in real life (I do) but because I'm a believer in being polite. Some people are bothered by four-letter language, and I generally tend to think it's best to try to avoid offending my readers. Or anyone, for that matter.

This is one reason why I'm so mystified by the right-wing's refusal to respect gender identity, for example. If someone says they're a woman or a man, who am I to argue? Isn't it a simple kindness to acknowledge their truth? At a bare minimum, human rights considerations aside, it's the polite thing to do.

And this is one reason I just can't tolerate Donald Trump. He relishes angering people; he draws power from it. A disturbing number of his followers do too. A huge amount of public policy is being made just to "own the libs" and infuriate Democrats. How is that the way to run a country? How is it acceptable to have a leader who declares any segment of the population "garbage"? (Which, by the way, is Nazi-speak in its rawest form.)

So yes, I like to be polite. That ability is part of what makes us human.

But having said all that, I found the funniest thing on my walk to work yesterday morning:

I'm trying to imagine the circumstances that led to this mug being discarded on the street. Was it a gag gift at a "hen do"? Regardless, I sent Dave a picture immediately and we both had a good laugh.

Reader, I kept it.

Probably not something I can use "in polite society," as my mother would have said.

London Christmas Lights

Yesterday after work I followed up on my vague plans to go out and take pictures of holiday lights. When Dave and I were returning from Gatwick Airport on the train over the weekend, I saw that the top of The Shard was lit up with colorful lights for Christmas. I hadn't seen that before, though it may well happen every year, and it made me think I should go check out other Christmas illuminations.

So here's the result -- a four-minute video of Christmas lights, London-style:

It begins on Bond Street, where we check out the decorations on shops including Montblanc, Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Dior. (Don't ask me what the green blob is atop the Dior store because I'm not sure.) We then proceed to Savile Row, the home of high-end tailors, where the lights depict scissors snipping ribbon.

Then on to Regent Street, draped with angels as it was last year, and then to Carnaby Street, which has again used those weird "Skylab" lights. At least this year they're more colorful.

We see an exterior shot of Liberty of London, followed by perpetually-crowded Oxford Street, including a bus offering a Christmas Lights tour! Notice the passengers wearing their Santa hats. Then we take an invisible tube ride to the City, where a bus passes the columned Royal Exchange before we join the hordes on London Bridge, looking out over the river at the illuminated Tower Bridge and the top of The Shard.

Finally, we stop for some mulled wine along the river (yours is virtual!) before taking a look at the Christmas market on the south bank of the Thames. The photo at top shows a pub near the market, beside the HMS Belfast warship.

The music is "Christmastime is Here" by the Vince Guaraldi Trio, taken from the "Charlie Brown Christmas" soundtrack. (Fortunately the copyright holders allow its use on YouTube.)

The Red Ribbon

Here's the scene at the cafe on the corner. Very Christmasy! I really should go out after work and take some pictures of holiday lights. That's perhaps the one good thing about darkness falling at 4:30 p.m. -- we have lots of time in the evening to enjoy light displays!

Yesterday was World AIDS Day, despite the refusal of the Trump Administration to recognize it. I've written before about AIDS and the impact it had on my life as a young gay man. Men of my generation, even if we didn't catch the virus, were indelibly scarred by it. (Men just a couple of years older bore the brunt of the plague, with huge numbers of them dying young.) So yesterday...

...I wore my red ribbon on my lanyard at work, as I always do on December 1. I wonder if the kids even know what it means. I did hear one student talking to the head librarian about a project she's doing on HIV and AIDS, so there is still awareness out there, for which I'm thankful.

Last night I re-read the Barbara Kingsolver essay about the Canary Islands that I saved many years ago, from her book "High Tide in Tucson." It was much as I remembered it -- a very evocative depiction of the landscape and the flora and fauna. But she didn't mention those spiny cacti once, and that was my clearest memory of the whole piece! She focused on the moister, more fog-bound environment of the laurel forests on La Gomera. Funny how the brain deceives. (I have since learned those "cacti" are actually a type of Euphorbia, and thus not cacti at all.)

Petrified Cranberry Sauce

This may look like some semi-tropical scene from Tenerife, but as you know by now, it's just our bird feeder with our resident, noisy parakeets. They and/or the squirrels have figured out how to remove the lid, so that top suet ball always disappears faster than the others. I could try to wire it down but I should really just get a new feeder. That one was here when we moved in and it has certainly done its duty over the past 11-plus years.

Yesterday was very quiet. I did laundry, including Dave's new pink shirt. I had visions of it staining everything else in the load pink but it didn't. I don't think that's really an issue anymore, is it? I think fabric and dye technology has improved beyond that. But I do still separate lights and darks, just like my mother taught me.

I pretty much caught up in Blogland and also managed my media, a never-ending task!

We've had an ancient can of cranberry sauce in the pantry for a while now. I have no idea when we bought it, but it expired in July 2024. Still, canned cranberry sauce won't really go bad, will it? I told Dave I was determined to eat it, and I opened it up and put it in my grandmother's special cranberry sauce dish, just as we always did during the holidays at home. Last night I had it with dinner (chicken) and it's perfectly fine.

And I put up our Christmas lights on the fiddle-leaf fig. This is as good as decorating gets around here. Merry Christmas!

Finally, I downloaded the weekly haul from the Garden Cam. We had very few videos this week, possibly because in the middle of the week I moved the camera to film the patio right outside our back door. I thought it would be interesting to see what critters venture close to the house. Answer: both Pale Cat and Q-Tip.

I first had the camera in the garden, where we see a couple of passing foxes and Pale Cat.
-- At 0:41 we get a peaceful garden scene of a pigeon, a flock of starlings and a squirrel rummaging through the fallen leaves. That lasts about a minute and it's my favorite part of this video.
-- After that, more foxes, including one moving very slowly at 1:45. I can't tell if it's injured or just being cautious and smelling the smells. It looks healthy when standing still.
-- At 2:05 the action moves to the patio, where Pale Cat wanders past.
-- At 2:25 a cautious fox spies the newly relocated camera and clearly doesn't like it.
-- At 2:43 an industrious squirrel buries a hazelnut. (Note to self: dig up nut so it doesn't grow!)
-- At 3:02, a daytime "Loch Ness" view of a passing fox's back, in the middle of the afternoon.

Now I've moved the camera back to the rear of the garden. I'd like to get more evidence of just how many foxes we're dealing with, and that's the only place I've ever obtained footage of two at once.

Emergency Vase Delivery

We are back home again, safe and sound in West Hampstead. When Dave originally planned this trip I questioned the wisdom of flying all the way to the Canary Islands for something like 36 hours on the ground. But it actually proved to be a nice little break -- a dose of sunshine and semi-tropical beauty, and lots of time for offline reading in the air! So bravo to Dave for cooking up this idea.

(I know it was terrible for our carbon footprint, and we stayed at a golf resort to boot. But hey, we have no kids and we don't drive, so our overall footprint is still pretty small.)

We left yesterday in late morning, after breakfast at our hotel. I had bought some milk at the Hiper-Dino on Thursday to put in my "cowboy coffee," and I wanted to use it up before we left, so I brought it to the restaurant and put it on my cereal. Dave made fun of me for bringing my own milk and I'm sure the waitress wondered what the heck, to the extent that she noticed. But I used it up.

Oh, and I forgot to tell you about the Emergency Vase Delivery. Dave and I were lounging on our hotel room terrace the afternoon before when a knock came at the door. We'd already dismissed the maid and told her we didn't need cleaning, so we couldn't imagine what this was about. The knock came again. Dave had been sunbathing and had to put on his pants to answer the door (I was still outside because I didn't hear the first knock) and when he opened it, a maintenance man was standing there with a big ugly white vase. "This for apartment," he said in broken English, and came in and set it down on a cabinet in the living room (where we already had at least five other decorative vases and bowls).

"We were missing a vase!" I said to Dave in mock horror.

The maintenance guy just shrugged sheepishly and let himself out. The whole thing was so strange. Why didn't they just wait until we were gone to deliver their completely unnecessary vase?

Sunset from the airplane window, seen off the coast of Morocco or maybe Portugal. Somewhere out there.

The flight back was uneventful. I read about half of Gary Shteyngart's book "Super Sad True Love Story," which is entertaining and weirdly prescient. It was published in 2010 and depicts a near future where the USA is an authoritarian dystopia that has invaded Venezuela! I KNOW! Shteyngart must be feeling like Carnac the Magnificent right about now.

We finally got home about 9 p.m., just in time to order chicken from Nando's and then fall into bed. But after a good night's sleep I feel totally normal, having not changed time zones or disrupted our sleep schedules. I see the appeal of Tenerife as a British vacation destination!

A Look Around Tenerife

Finally -- I can show you what this place looks like in daylight!

Yesterday was our only full day in Tenerife, so we had to make the most of it. I managed to fit in a long photo walk, a swim in the pool, some reading, a massage and a trip into town -- all fun or relaxing activities, it's true. I'm certainly not complaining.

That's the coastline, above, down the hill from our hotel, with the island of La Gomera just barely visible on the horizon. You can see the scrubby native vegetation, just as Barbara Kingsolver so memorably described it in the essay I mentioned yesterday.

But first things first -- breakfast and a surprise (to us) wedding! Dave and I walked to the Atlantico restaurant, which is where our breakfasts are served. We chose a table on the terrace overlooking a small green lawn, and saw that a marquee had been set up below with rows of chairs. I saw the marigolds tumbling from the urns and thought, "This must be a Hindu event." (I saw similar marigolds everywhere when I went to India years ago.)

In very short order, people were showing up dressed in colorful oranges and yellows, the bride and groom sat at the front of the group, and the ceremony began. All of us in the restaurant watched from the terrace above. You just never know what you're going to see, do you?

From there I took a car down to the tiny beach that serves both our hotel and the nearby Ritz-Carlton. (As you can see, I wore the Eastbourne dashiki!) I explored the beach area itself and then decided to walk back. The cliffs and hills are quite steep and there were steps to climb, but it was good exercise and offered some panoramic views.

I saw this dinosaurish-looking flower vine growing up a hillside. The blossoms were huge and stiff or waxy-looking. I thought: "What the heck are those?" Thank goodness for my plant-identifying app, which tells me it's a vine called Cup of Gold, or Solandra maxima, a type of nightshade.

I also passed this ravine containing a little memorial. Intrigued, I got out my zoom lens...

It looks like a memorial for someone who died in 1963 at the age of 20. Surely it's not a grave -- it seems to be on solid rock. Perhaps the scene of a tragic event? Anyway, very curious that the marker is down there all on its own.

I crossed a beautiful shadowy golf course -- inadvertently intruding on the fairway and causing a golfer to scold me, not wrongly, for being in a "dangerous" place -- and eventually got back to the hotel. After all that exertion I was ready for that swim and massage afterwards!

Yesterday evening Dave and I wanted to get away from the resort, so we had a drink at the bar in the Ritz and then took a taxi into the nearest town, Playa San Juan. We found a waterfront restaurant where we ran into two students from our school in London! What are the odds?! We chatted with them and their father, marveling that our paths should cross so far from home.

We had fish soup and I had seafood (shrimp and fish) on skewers, while Dave had pasta with clams. That's Dave above, outside the restaurant after we ate, wearing the new pink shirt he bought so he'd have something fresh to wear.

Back to London today!

Nearly Naked in Tenerife

Well, here we are in Tenerife, a tiny volcanic speck in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of the Western Sahara. When I lived in Morocco many years ago, I was conscious of the presence of the Canaries out in the ocean -- not that I could see them -- but even then I was farther north than we are now.

Years ago I read Barbara Kingsolver's book of essays, "High Tide in Tucson," in which she wrote partly about the Canary Islands. Apparently she lived here for a while, and although I haven't re-read that particular essay in years I did save it in my file of favorite writing. I should look at it again. I remember her describing the arid, rocky environment, the cactus and low-slung thorny plants. It's a very weird landscape, though to be honest I haven't really seen it yet (except from the plane, above). It was dark by the time we emerged from the airport and the sun is just coming up now.

It's already been an eventful trip. Dave and I got ourselves launched about 9 a.m. yesterday after putting our stuff in a single backpack. I thought we packed amazingly well until Dave said to me on the Thameslink train on the way to Gatwick, "Guess what I forgot?

I was thinking a toothbrush, or deodorant. "What?" I said.

"Clothes!"

Yes, you read that correctly. Dave managed to pack his medicine and some underwear, but he packed no outerwear at all. The only clothes he has are literally on his body. How this happened I have no idea but I can't stop laughing about it. Fortunately we're only here for two nights.

On the plane I plowed through the final 150 pages of "The Old Curiosity Shop" and finished it just as we were preparing to land. I get some of my best reading done on airplanes, when there are no distractions and I'm able to simply sit and concentrate. I didn't hate the book, and there were some good moments and colorful phrases, but it wasn't Dickens' best. It was basically a long meditation on mortality. I still wonder if I'd have felt differently about it had I not read in the introduction that Little Nell was going to die. I still can't believe they gave away the ending.

We're staying in a secluded resort community called Los Jardines de Abama, just up the hill from the Ritz-Carlton. I think these are really residences that are meant to be purchased, but they're used for tourist accommodation until they're sold. We have a swanky, fully-furnished place with a terrace overlooking the ocean and a Hiper-Dino grocery store within walking distance.

There are three restaurants within our complex, which seems mostly devoid of people. Last night, tired and hungry and without any supplies, we tried to go to the one closest to us, which supposedly serves typical Canarian dishes such as seafood. The concierge at the hotel told us with a downcast look that no tables were available. He went downstairs while we contemplated ordering room service, but then came bounding back up and said he had a table after all.

We were taken downstairs to a restaurant that was at least three-quarters empty, and that seemed to have one maitre'd and two servers. There were, I think, four other occupied tables. We sat down, were treated well and had a passable meal, wondering where everybody else was. (Granted, it was about 7:30 p.m., which is probably early for Spaniards to eat dinner.)

Look at those stars! I don't see anything like that in London. As you can see from the top picture, the island was socked in when we landed, but the sky cleared pretty quickly.

Oh, and making coffee this morning was an adventure. The coffee machine is this cheap-looking Nespresso pod thing, so I decided to make "cowboy coffee" with supplies from the Hiper-Dino (whose mascot is, of course, a dinosaur). I got up, boiled some water, added a few spoonfuls of grounds and the coffee promptly boiled over. I pulled it off the heat and let it brew a few minutes before straining it into a bowl, French-style, because our only cups are these tiny little pretentious things that I could empty in three sips. So now I'm sitting with my bowl of coffee looking out the sliding doors onto our terrace and, beyond, the lightening ocean and the neighboring island of La Gomera, which I think is actually the island Barbara Kingsolver wrote about.

Fortunately we have a washing machine. We may need it for Dave's one shirt and one pair of pants!

AI and a Police Policy

Here we are on Thanksgiving, the best of all holidays. Nothing to do but eat and hang out together! OK, and cook and clean, too. But seriously -- compared to the insanity that is Christmas, Thanksgiving always seems so even-keeled and responsible. It's Bud Abbott to Christmas's Lou Costello.

We worked a half-day yesterday, but there were no kids. We had Professional Development devoted to issues surrounding Artificial Intelligence, which our school's powers-that-be have determined we should all learn how to use. My approach to AI is to ignore it as much as possible, but then, I am not a teacher and so don't need to worry too much about recognizing AI use in my students' papers and that kind of thing.

I went to a webinar about AI and energy use, which I thought would be interesting, and it was. We've all heard about massive server farms that suck up energy and endanger the environment, but this webinar -- by a former MIT librarian who now works for the University of Arizona, I believe -- took the opposite view. She said the amount of energy expended on AI is actually fairly small, and also gave several examples of ways that servers can be powered in an environmentally friendly manner. It was the techno-optimist approach, I'd say.

About lunchtime I walked home via the pedestrian bridge over the West Hampstead tube tracks, where I found these three giant graffiti eyes peering at me.

And today, Dave and I are off to Tenerife! Our flight doesn't leave until around noon, so we have the morning to pack and get ready. Not that there's much packing to do. We'll only be there for two days.

The British police have started a dubious new policy that I have to call out for being more harmful than positive. After the Southport stabbings in 2024, when a British man of African descent killed several little girls in a dance class, there were riots over rumors that the assailant was an illegal immigrant and/or asylum seeker. He wasn't, but that didn't stop people from threatening immigrants housed in temporary accommodation.

So the government decided to try to head off misinformation about such attacks by announcing the nationality and race or ethnicity of arrested individuals. Which is what led to two men recently arrested for stabbings on a train to be described as British, one black and one of "Caribbean descent." (The second man was subsequently released.)

I get announcing the nationality of offenders. It's still debatable whether it's a good idea, but I can see how it might avoid fueling unwarranted attacks on innocent immigrant populations.

But when I was a newspaper reporter, our policy was to never state a suspect's race in a news story, unless it was directly germane. After all, what purpose does it serve? Unless the police are trying to catch someone and they have a detailed description that includes race, mentioning race simply triggers racist responses in readers. If the offender is white, readers may imagine the crime as a result of someone's drug problem or schizophrenia. But if an offender is black, it often merely confirms pre-existing prejudices.

Unsurprisingly, anti-racist groups are saying that the new police policy is harmful. It seems to me that if the goal is to avoid needless violence against immigrants, it ought to be enough to say an offender is British. (Or not, which is the flip-side of this policy -- if police in any country announce a suspect is an asylum-seeker or immigrant, as is true in yesterday's shooting of two National Guardsmen in Washington, D.C., doesn't that risk fueling more violence and prejudice?)

A suspect's race or ethnicity -- separate from their nationality -- is entirely irrelevant.

Sex with Napoleon

Someone asked the other day to see a photo of the library Monstera. Here it is. One of the maintenance guys, Jose, who cares for the library plants, always calls it a "she." He'll say, "She has been here a long time," or "She needs some new soil." I would add that "she" seems to thrive on neglect. She just hangs out in her corner and Jose waters her now and then. She has lived in the library as long as anyone can remember.

Our library windows desperately need a cleaning.

And as long as I'm uploading random pictures from work -- I walked past a colleague's office yesterday morning and caught a glimpse of this scene out of the corner of my eye. I thought, "Did they hang up a Ukrainian flag?"

But no.

In the Lower School, the kids celebrated their last day before Thanksgiving Break by wearing pajamas and bringing their favorite stuffed toy to school. Most kids had stuffed animals, but one kid had a stuffed plant! I was very impressed and asked him if I could photograph it.

Despite all these fun and games, yesterday was crazy busy. Just more of the same, but I did not have a spare moment except at my lunch break. Today, fortunately, is only a half-day and there are no kids. It's devoted to professional development involving AI. I will limp through it even though I don't really need or desire professional development at this point in my career. I suppose I must remain open to learning new things.

Last night Dave and I went out with our friend Chris to see a drag show in South London. A few weeks ago, Chris spotted an immensely tall drag queen standing in front of a tube station promoting her one-queen show, in which she time-travels and performs comedic bits. We decided to go. So yesterday we schlepped down to a pub for dinner and then a nearby one-room theater for Coco's performance. You could tell her act was still a bit "in development" but it was quite funny. I've never before seen a drag queen feign sex with Napoleon and sing "I Dreamed a Dream" while stuffing her mouth with cakes. Surreal!

Annie at the Barbican

Last night, after a long and exhausting day at work that is better not spoken about, I went with some friends to the Barbican to hear the photographer Annie Leibovitz talk about her new book, a two-volume set dedicated to portraits of women. My friend Colin offered me one of his extra tickets on Sunday, and I jumped at the chance because -- photography! (Even though the kind of portraiture that is Annie Leibovitz's specialty isn't really my kind of picture-taking.)

We met at the restaurant in the Barbican overlooking the central reflecting pond. Another co-worker, Mike, came as well. As you can see above, the church across the way already has its Christmas tree up and lit. We had a good dinner -- fish & chips and a gin & tonic for me, two essentially British pairings!

I tried to photograph the unusual round, concrete restrooms at the Barbican, but I couldn't get the whole space into a single frame. So I took a pano shot, which distorts things, but I think it turned out pretty well! The toilets themselves are around that curve at left. You can even see me in the mirror. The space looked like something out of "A Clockwork Orange," but I guess it must be incredibly easy to clean. You could just hose it down.

Anyway, the Leibovitz talk was a bit disappointing. As I told Mike and Colin afterwards, some people are visual communicators and some people are verbal, and Leibovitz is definitely the former. She started by showing slides of her earlier portraits of women, which featured in the first volume, but some slides contained about a dozen thumbnail pictures and it was hard to see them. She also basically just ran down the list of who was featured -- Elizabeth Taylor, Martha Stewart, Dolly Parton, etc. -- but she didn't tell many stories or talk much about the processes she uses to take her portraits. I would like to have heard more about how she gets people to relax, to reveal themselves.

Then she went through slides of the photos in the more recent volume, and then took a few questions in a disastrous Q&A. She declined to use the pre-submitted questions the Barbican had collected, and instead had the poor host trying to pass a microphone from the stage out to the audience, where the questions were often unfocused and Leibovitz was obviously having trouble hearing and understanding them. The questions rambled and the answers rambled.

So I wouldn't call it an altogether successful evening, but it was still interesting to see her and see her work. I suppose at the end of the day the pictures are supposed to speak for themselves, right?

She did talk about how London felt lighter to her, and less oppressed, than the United States does right now. She is clearly opposed to Trump's governance and threw in a few somewhat political remarks here and there. For example, she showed a picture of a room at the White House featuring portraits of the first ladies, and said something like, "Who knows if it still exists?"

Little Green Oranges

The Hellebores are coming out again. Mrs. Kravitz's Polish gardener used to call them "Christmas roses" -- before he vanished, as all Mrs. K's gardeners eventually do. I think she fires them all. Anyway, I still think of Hellebores by that name. The white ones are blooming now -- the red ones haven't appeared yet and always come a bit later. 

Speaking of Mrs. K, I haven't seen her in ages, or even heard her being belligerent with her gardeners. Of course it's not exactly a gardening time of year, so she may just be indoors, but normally I see some sign of her. I think she must be away again. And our neighbors upstairs are so well-behaved we barely know they're there. It's quite a change from how things used to be around here!

No Olga, no noisy neighbors -- what's my blog coming to?!

We had a bit of a scare yesterday. I was going through the bank statement when I found a charge for $31.72 -- yes, in U.S. dollars -- that I did not recognize. The debit was named UNHYYTERJP2, which was not helpful, and the charge came from Hong Kong. Of course this sent up alarm bells right away. I hadn't ordered anything online, and I asked Dave if he'd ordered anything and he said no.

It seemed a very weird and specific amount to be fraudulent, but I racked my brains and could come up with no legitimate reason this would be on our bank statement. So I tried to call the bank. This led to a vortex of automated phone hell that eventually told me their fraud office was closed (!) and I'd have to call back on Monday. I couldn't report it online unless I had their app, which I do not because I don't do any banking on my phone, ironically for security reasons.

When I Googled that payment name, I found a discussion thread of people questioning transactions with similar names, and they all had to do with Apple Pay. I don't use Apple Pay, but Dave does. So I suggested he go back through his payment history to see if anything would explain that charge. He wasn't sure how to do it, but he figured it out -- and BINGO! It turns out he ordered a board game online for his Dad and then forgot about it.

I was so relieved I forgot to be mad at him. I had visions of reporting fraud and having our cards canceled just as we are about to go to Tenerife later this week. What a headache that would have been.

I moved our little Mandarin orange tree outside again, now that the weather has warmed up. It has numerous little oranges on it (above) and seems to be having a very productive year. That spidery thing to the right of the fruit is a fallen leaf from the Russians' miniature Japanese maple on their terrace upstairs. (Yes, they moved, but they left all their plants behind with an automated watering system.)

Otherwise yesterday was quiet. I read more, took care of all the houseplants, and did some minor housework. Aside from the banking scare, a nondescript Sunday.

Fox With Sausages

The avocado has been released, and looks none the worse for wear -- compared to the banana tree at lower left, which definitely got a bit frost-burned. (It freezes back every year. We don't even try to preserve it as it will leaf out again in the spring.)

And we had lots of rain yesterday, which no doubt helped freshen up the avocado too.

I stayed inside and made:

Yes! Front-porch squash soup! I only used one of the squashes, the one that looked the ripest (the bright orange one in this picture). I cut the squash into chunks, baked it, scraped it off the skin, pureed it with chicken stock, cumin, olive oil and salt & pepper, and served it topped with dried onions and toasted squash seeds. And in my case, accompanied by toasted rolls with peanut butter, which you can see at right on the floor.

Dave, who had ridiculed my plan to bake a squash that served as a porch decoration for the past month, had some too and agreed it was good, though he thought it needed more "backbone" and suggested I add cream to it. We didn't have any cream but I used a dash of milk instead and that did make it richer.

I was pretty darn proud of myself. I plan to eventually cook up the other two as well, if they look like they're suitable for eating. I won't know until I cut them open.

I spent the afternoon reading, cleaning, the usual stuff. I also downloaded the garden cam and found 358 videos (!), so it was a very active wildlife week in the garden!

I edited those videos down to nine action-packed minutes. Still too long, maybe, but it seemed the absolute minimum.

-- We start with Q-Tip and then Guy Fox, both sniffing the ground right in front of the camera.
-- At 0:40, a brand-new cat! Who is this cat?!
-- At 0:50, pigeon panic.
-- At 0:57, Guy Fox is back, and makes a quick exit to the right. Hunting something?
-- At 1:28 we get a daytime view of Q-Tip, which I always like so I can appreciate the foxes' red fur. He goes over the fence at right.
-- At 1:56, squirrel shenanigans.
-- At 2:06, the beginning of several clips showing both foxes together. Although it looks like night, these clips were taken about 5:40 p.m., which means Dave and I were up and around in the house. If we'd looked out the back door we could have seen these critters hanging out.
-- At 3:27, one of them starts vigorously scratching and you can see fox dander (or hair) float past the camera!
-- At 4:20, Guy Fox again. There's a lot of territory marking in this video, which may account for all the curious sniffing.
-- At 5:08, Blackie saunters past.
-- More fox activity, and then at 6:37, Pale Cat wanders by. Note the temperature: 34º F (about 1º C).
-- At 6:45, two magpies toss aside fallen leaves, hunting for insects.
-- At 6:58, we catch a fox with a string of sausages hanging out of its mouth! Where did those come from?!
-- At 7:06, woodland utopia with pigeon hop.
-- At 7:15, Q-Tip trots past, followed at 7:23 by his bark. It's an ungodly sound so don't let it scare you!
-- At 7:40 we see another cat (Tabby, I think).
-- At 7:48, Blackie walks past the bench, followed at a distance by Pale Cat, who stalks Blackie right past the camera.

OK, that was a lot! I admire you for sticking with it, unless you didn't and I don't blame you for that either. I'm well aware that nine minutes of foxes and cats is not entertaining to everyone. I did try to cut out anything superfluous, while still keeping enough variety to make things interesting. I had so much footage that I cut a lot of clips I would ordinarily have used.

I'm thinking I may be seeing multiple foxes out there, not just two. It's hard to tell.

Finally, last night, I was off to Bermondsey, where I snapped a photo of The Shard looming over this streetlit scene. I attended a birthday party for my co-worker Staci, which took place in a restaurant in one of those arches beneath the train tracks at left. I stayed a couple of hours, chatting with people from work, and had a couple of glasses of white merlot, which I didn't know was a thing. Dave didn't go, and curiously he suddenly feels better this morning. I suspected he'd improve once the threat of that party was past!

Jungle Shadows

Sometimes on my lunch hour at work, after I eat, I sit in the corner of one of the library's quiet rooms and read or respond to blog comments. Yesterday I went in there and this was the scene (above). Is there any plant that makes a better shadow than a Monstera? I've blogged our library Monstera before -- it's been there longer and I have and longer than any of my immediate predecessors. I'm not sure anyone at the school can remember a time it wasn't resident in the library. (The plant itself is just around the corner to the left, by the window.)

I wound up not answering comments yesterday because I was shooting pictures of the shadows instead, and just letting my mind decompress. I did read them all, though, and appreciated every one!

Yesterday I worked with two Lower School classes. These first-graders (above) decided to slide beneath the couch to read their books, which I thought was pretty funny. (Their heads were sticking out the other side.) In case anyone ever asks you how many first-graders fit beneath a couch, now you know the answer -- at least three. I bet another one could have squeezed in there.

If I get ambitious today, I'm going to try to make soup with our front-porch pumpkins. I also hope to make more headway in "The Old Curiosity Shop," and I have an adult birthday party to attend this evening. Hopefully Dave will feel well enough to go with me. He seems better today. I felt a bit woozy yesterday afternoon, like I might be coming down with something, but the feeling subsided so maybe I've fended it off.

It's a comparatively balmy 40º F (4.4º C) as I write this, and the low temperatures won't be below 40º F for the foreseeable future. Liberating the avocado from its sheath is also on the day's agenda.

A Very Quick Discussion of the Hardy Boys

I'm not sure how this happened, but it is somehow already 7:34 a.m. as I write this, and I have to leave at 8 a.m. to get to work on time. So blogging today will have to be speedy! Clearly I overslept, partly because Dave isn't feeling well and plans to stay home, so I didn't have the benefit of his alarm going off at 5:45 a.m. (Though usually I wake up naturally earlier than this.)

Maybe the cold weather has activated my hibernating instincts. That's our birdbath (above) yesterday morning -- a solid block of ice.

Work was pretty slow yesterday. The Model United Nations group has been holding a mini-conference in the library in the afternoons with students from other London schools. It means a lot of people and a lot of activity, but there's not a lot for me to do -- none of them are really using library resources, just the space. So I mostly wind up hanging out. I did work on gathering our monthly usage statistics yesterday and filling out that spreadsheet, so at least I had a task to work on in the background.

I came across the book above in the Lower School and sent it to my brother with the caption, "The world is going down the toilet!" The Hardy Boys, in my day, were relatively sophisticated mystery books, or at least that's how I remember them. They were not skinny paperbacks of cartoon characters worrying about zombies.

But...this prompted me to read about the history of the Hardy Boys books on Wikipedia, which brought the revelation that the books were actually shortened and rewritten even before I was a child, to compete with television and "dwindling attention spans." (And to remove offensive racial and ethnic stereotypes.) So I can hardly claim to be a Hardy Boys originalist, though I think I did read some of the originals when I found my uncle's old copies at my grandmother's house in Maryland.

I loved Hardy Boys books when I was young. I read dozens of them. They practically taught me to read. I specifically remember developing the skill of skipping over words I didn't know and then surmising the meaning based on the context. I taught myself a lot of words that way.

To be fair, the book above is actually a special Hardy Boys offshoot series targeted toward younger readers, featuring Frank and Joe Hardy in grade school. So it's not representative of the state of the franchise as a whole, though I'm not sure how well read the series is these days. We have some in our library and they rarely get used.

I did bring in that orange rose to save it from the freeze. I'm appreciating it a lot more on our kitchen windowsill than I would be outdoors!

And with that, I'm off to work -- at 7:52 a.m. Not a bad blog post for eighteen minutes of writing!

Avocado and Fascism

Well, I managed to get the avocado wrapped up yesterday morning before I went to work. Dave had to leave before me so it wound up being a solo job, but at least I had the benefit of daylight. It was perfect timing, too, because about two hours later it was snowing.

I wired a bamboo pole to the avocado's trunk, to hold the peak of the wrapping above the foliage. Then I used two more poles to lift the shroud over the top of the tree, and then clipped a second shroud around the base. Hopefully that's enough.

I considered color-correcting that photo above, because it's so blue -- but that's what the thin morning light looks like at this time of year. So I left it.

When I checked my phone a little while ago it was 30º F outside (about -1º C) and it's usually a tad warmer on the patio, so I'm optimistic. I'll leave the tree shrouded into the weekend, when it's supposed to warm up again.

I was in the Lower School when the snow started falling yesterday morning and the little kids' faces lit up like it was Christmas. Of course they're all so young they may have never seen snow before, or not remembered it, anyway. It melted as soon as it landed, but it was pretty while falling.

I read a disturbing story in The New York Times yesterday about the growth of Orthodox Christianity among young converts, who see it as a strong, masculine, demanding religious tradition. A certain strain of young, conservative men like the patriarchal structure, the beards, the emphasis on family and tradition -- and the idea that it's Christianity closer to the "source." Of course I have nothing against Orthodoxy, particularly for those who are born into it, but it's worrisome that young men seek it out for perhaps not the healthiest of reasons (and risk distorting the religion in the process). Apparently the growth of the church is partly due to online influencers, which of course makes me suspect the malign hand of certain international actors.

And now I read that young Spaniards are drawn to Franco and the Spanish government is trying to find ways to educate people about the terrors of his regime.

Is this a generational thing, a pendulum effect? People who are too young to know what authoritarianism really is, being drawn to it? What is this need for a big boss daddy, for discipline and structure? Why are kindness and compassion seen as "feminine" weakness (an inherently misogynist association)? Maybe now that we're seeing authoritarian tendencies creep into our own governments and our daily lives (at least in the USA, but potentially also in the UK with the rise of Reform) younger people will begin to see the downsides and better appreciate freedom and liberalism. Wishful thinking?

Legalese

Well, we haven't covered the avocado yet, and so far, so good. It's only 40º F (about 4.5º C) out there this morning, but the temperature is supposed to plunge this evening so I have to get a cover on today. I'm debating whether to do it this morning before I leave for work, or this evening when Dave will be here to help but it will be dark. Or maybe I'll even come home at lunchtime. Decisions, decisions.

I've been having a back-and-forth with the attorney I hired to do our estate planning. This guy has done legal work for others in my family and I chose him for that reason, asking him to write a will for me and Dave. I paid him for his services, and then the will turned into a trust, which turned into multiple trusts. It seemed to be getting very complicated and he was having doubts about his approach because we have assets in two countries, so he brought in another lawyer with experience in Britain. This lawyer consulted with us once and said the trusts could be a problem, but then stopped returning my calls, which often happens when they see how complicated our situation is relative to how much money we have (not much).

The funny thing is, it's really not that complicated. We don't have kids. We don't own real estate. It's all liquid assets. But since the first lawyer bailed, I've tried three more on both sides of the pond, and after an initial consultation they've all either declined to take our case or simply stopped calling me back. (It's not my personality, I swear.)

So estate planning is still in limbo. The back-and-forth is resulting from the fact that I pre-paid the first lawyer. He offered to refund part of our money, and I've been pressing him to follow through with that, but getting money out of a lawyer is not easy. I do want to pay him for his time, because I sort of talked him into taking our case, but after all, we didn't get a finished product -- so I feel like I'm due something. He has finally agreed to refund us $500, which is about an eighth of what I paid him. It's better than nothing.

(I can tell already this post is going to attract all kinds of spam comments from estate planners. Please refrain, spammers! I will not hire you based on a blog comment!)

I'm also trying to schedule a meeting with my financial planners, given that I'm about to retire, to talk to them about options. I blew the last meeting on Zoom because I totally forgot about it -- unlike me, but it's been busy around here.

It's hard to be a responsible adult, you know?

Meanwhile, in the library, my days have been nonstop. Yesterday was particularly crazy: multiple classes, several carts of re-shelving, two stints in the Lower School, a stack of new books to cover and of course my regular checking in and out. One of the librarians organized a family book club that involved setting up an "Everest Base Camp" in the library. Fortunately, I didn't have to help with that, but just as I left yesterday evening someone was erecting a tent in the middle of the floor! Get me out of here!

(Photos: A flower shop in West Hampstead, and graffiti on my walk to work.)