A Sky Aflame

Just like everyone else, we're having some chilly weather here, though the degree of chill is decidedly less than most places. I think it was in the high 50s F when I walked yesterday morning. I passed a guy bundled in a jacket and said, "It's breezy this morning!" He said, "Yeah, it caught up with us."

Hardly cause for complaint, considering how many people are dealing with snow and ice and wrapping their plants to protect them from freezing temperatures.

I love the name of this little house (above) that I passed: "NO rEGRETS." That's a Florida joke for sure, with egrets painted on the shutters. And it's for sale! I wonder how much they want?

And then there's this place:

I'd be afraid to drive on that driveway!

Yes, I love some Florida whimsy. Which is probably why I had such a great time at Goodwill yesterday. Dave, his sister and I all went after breakfast at the Cortez Cafe (a waffle for me, with two eggs over hard) and I did pretty well. I got a pair of shorts and three short-sleeved shirts, which will be great for trips to warmer climes and for approximately three weeks a year in England. One shirt has tiny flamingoes on it, one by Michael Kors has a sort of random floral-ish pattern, and then there's this:

Those are barbecue grills, in case you can't tell. I initially left that shirt behind because it's a "slim fit" and it's a bit snug on my shoulders, but then I decided I could make it work so I went back. I had to have it. I loved the pattern too much.

I passed this one up:

It was a hideous lavender-and-green striped shirt, and it was $24.99 (highway robbery!), and it had a spot on it. So, no sale. But I loved that fabric inside the cuffs and collar. Can you see the tiny dog faces? As I told Dave, if the shirt had been made of that fabric with the stripes inside the cuffs, I'd have bought it in a minute. Maybe even for $24.99. Maybe even with a spot.

I also passed on the rather extensive assortment of "Gone With the Wind"-themed plates.

In the afternoon, my brother showed up, having driven down from Jacksonville. He'd proposed going to a rustic little restaurant called Tide Tables on the Intracoastal Waterway, overlooking the bridge connecting Cortez to Anna Maria Island. Well, Dave's mom vetoed that idea because she thought it would be too cold, and she wasn't wrong. Most of Tide Tables' seating is outdoors, and what's inside is pretty rustic. So JM and I went on our own, and had a fantastic seafood dinner in chilly Old Florida surroundings with a waterfront view.

When we got there, the sky looked like this. You could see the line of clouds marking the cold front that had settled over the area. It was a dramatic enough sky, but as we ate it just got better and better. I am not exaggerating when I say it was one of the best sunsets I've ever seen. Here's a final FloriVideo™ to inadequately convey how spectacular it was:

Watch the whole thing, because it just gets better and better! And keep an eye out for the pterodactyls pelicans plunging into the bay for fish. (Music: "Triste" by Antonio Carlos Jobim, permitted on YouTube by the copyright holder.)

After our conch fritters, my fish tacos and whatever my brother had (I can't remember), and after we'd been sufficiently awed by the waning beauty, we raced over to a nearby chain steak house to join Dave and his sister and parents. Let's just say, I think my brother and I had a superior restaurant experience. (Well, my brother experienced both of them -- he ordered a steak at the steak house, on top of his seafood from Tide Tables. Surf and turf!)

Today we're heading back to Tampa to see our stepmother, who's still in the hospital but seems to be improving, and so Dave and I can catch our flight tonight. Tomorrow, insha'allah, I'll be coming to you from chilly England, where we're about to get a "snow bomb" according to weather reports. I'll be home just in time to cover the avocado!

Black Beans and Pelicans

I don't know what I've gotten into, but all of a sudden my legs are covered by itchy bites. I don't know why this surprises me, since I'm in Florida, where (as I'm pretty sure Ms. Moon has said) everything will bite or kill you if given half a chance. I think it happened when I was planting the new landscaping at my in-laws' yesterday morning. Chiggers? Mosquitoes? I have no idea.

I did get their plants in, though! Front to back, we have Hibiscus, Clusia, Ixora, a ti plant, another Hibiscus, and then behind a few hardy Dracaenas that were there already and survived last year's hurricanes, a third Hibiscus (which you can't see in the photo above). There's also a Lantana in the front flower bed. I'd forgotten how easy it is to plant things in soft Florida sand! Dave told his sister, "Steve's definitely going to want to move here now, because it's so much easier to dig than in England."

After cleaning up, Dave, his sister Dawn and I hopped into the car and drove to Tampa to meet with my college friend Sue. We had lunch at Carmine's in Ybor City, and realized that yesterday was the tenth anniversary of the party that Sue and her husband John threw at their house to celebrate my wedding to Dave. We got officially married just days before in Tampa, though we'd been Civil Unioned in New Jersey five years before that, and we use the New Jersey date as our anniversary.

After a fun lunch of Cuban sandwiches and black beans (for me), Sue went back to work and Dave, Dawn and I strolled through Ybor City, Tampa's old Latin quarter and once a world headquarters for cigar manufacturing.

We popped into La France, possibly one of the best vintage clothing stores on the planet, where Dave bought one shirt and I bought two. Turns out they are not vintage because La France also sells some unusual newly manufactured clothes, but I still love them. I'll post a picture tomorrow.

We considered going to some Tampa thrift stores but we wanted to get home before traffic got crazy, so it was back over the Skyway and home. We tried to go to some Goodwills in Bradenton, but the two I knew about have been turned into donation-only centers, where you can drop stuff off but not buy anything. What's up with that?! We'll have to try again today.

Today's FloriVideo™ comes from my evening walk. I tried to focus on pelicans, because I've given them short shrift in my previous videos and they are really remarkable birds. They are absolutely pterodactyls. The variety I've shown here is the brown pelican, but there are white ones too. You'll also see several sunset shots of Sarasota Bay, with the bridge from Anna Maria Island to Longboat Key in the distance.

Here's where I spent the late evening, watching light seep from the sky as I listened to Bossa Nova music on my iTunes. I later went inside for left over pizza and we all watched "Die Hard," in which neither Huey Lewis nor Tommy Lee Jones appear, contrary to popular and mistaken opinion. (An actor named Dennis Hayden, who is in the movie, somehow manages to look a little like both of them -- even though they do not particularly look like each other. The mysteries of camera-work!)

Spoonbills and Sushi Socks

I spotted this manatee on my early-morning walk yesterday. I love how someone has managed to give it lipstick and mascara.

BUT...I actually also spotted real manatees on my walk, along with a bunch of other interesting wildlife. Spoonbills! I've only seen roseate spoonbills in the wild a handful of times, and yet there they were, in a ditch behind some trailers, with an egret and some ibis.

And of course I decided not to bring my big camera on this trip, so all I had was my phone to record these momentous events. But it's better than nothing.

Here's a special FloriVideo™ Wildlife Edition to show you the morning's critters:
-- We start with a flock of Nanday Parakeets, flying away. I mainly wanted to record how noisy they are.
-- Then we see three Nanday Parakeets on a bird feeder, with a stork hanging out beneath them. The stork ambles away as I approach, but the parakeets stay put and squawk loudly.
-- There's an osprey, sitting in the top of a tree and piping loudly.
-- That's followed by the spoonbills and the other birds as seen in the photo above, with a noisy fly-by from the parakeets.
-- And then, manatees! They's just dark blobs in the water, but you can see their noses emerge as they breathe. We could hear them exhaling and inhaling as we stood on the shore.
-- There's another view of the spoonbills, egret and ibis from the other side of the ditch.
-- And finally, a cormorant surfaces with a big flopping fish in its beak. We didn't think it would be able to swallow it, but it did, to the disappointment of a waiting osprey. (You'll hear a woman's voice, along with me and Dave -- just another curious onlooker!)

Dave and I had lunch yesterday with my friends Jay and Charlie, who I used to work with at the Sarasota newspaper back in the day, and their partners. It was great to see them again. We ate on the patio of a restaurant at University Town Center, a glam new shopping area east of town -- it seemed like a good idea at first, but by the end of the meal I was wilting like a hothouse flower. The sun was brutal! That area was all farmland when I lived here back in the '90s. Progress, I suppose.

And yesterday evening we had our lasagna Christmas dinner. We gave Dave's dad his jar of pennies, as well as some other gifts. I got this great set of socks from Dave's sister Dawn:

Don't you love those?! I hate to even try to wear them, they're rolled so precisely. I may just enjoy them in the box for a while!

The Steak Seduction

I just ordered my morning coffee at Starbucks and it came in a paper cup, contained within a second paper cup, contained within one of those little cardboard rings that's supposed to protect my fingers from heat. And with a plastic lid. Seems like a lot of material for one cup of coffee.

Although Dave's parents' trailer has WiFi, it doesn't have a very good coffee machine. So I still find it easier to drive the short distance to Starbucks in order to blog.

So yes, they own a mobile home here, but they don't live in it. At least not anymore. Dave's mom and dad have both had health issues that necessitated their moving to an assisted living center, where they eat and sleep and spend most of their time. That's why we're staying in the mobile home, which frankly I love, because it's in one of these little sun-blasted waterfront retirement parks with hyper-neat landscaping and plastic flamingos and palm trees. We've joked about moving here ourselves. At least, I think it's a joke.

When I took my morning walk yesterday I found this sphinx moth (I think?) resting on the paved street. It was covered with dewdrops and looked like it had been there a while, but I didn't want it to get squashed, so I picked it up and moved it to a planter in front of someone's house. It was surprisingly hard to move. Those little feet can really cling. Hopefully when it warmed up and dried off it was able to move around a little more easily.

We ran errands yesterday morning, mostly preparing for today's Christmas dinner. There were originally plans for a roast and potatoes and all that stuff, but at some point it was decided that lasagna was the way to go -- easier to make and store, and using only one dish! So we bought lasagna supplies and also some new shrubs for the mobile home, where the landscaping suffered in Hurricanes Helene and Milton last year. We bought three Hibiscus, a Lantana, a ti plant, an Ixora and something I don't remember ever seeing before called a Clusia. I think the latter might actually become a tree someday, so we have to be careful where we put it.

Dave and I will be planting them today and tomorrow, and his sister will care for them, since she's staying for the next several weeks.

This insanity was parked outside a restaurant at the shopping center. I'm sure it's not road-worthy. It's just for display. There's a whole nativity scene inside the van.

Last night, Dave's parents came over (they still drive) and we ordered pizza and had a leisurely evening full of mobile home park gossip. For example, we heard about the female neighbor who solicits men in the park with offers of meat ("I have steaks and my husband isn't here; would you like to come over?"). Grace Metalious, eat your heart out!

After dark I took my nighttime walk. Today Dave and I have lunch with some friends from my years living in Sarasota (1994-2000) and then it's lasagna time!

Turtle Killers Go To Hell

Well, I'm in Bradenton now, staying at the mobile home on Sarasota Bay owned by Dave's parents. But I don't have any pictures of Bradenton yet because yesterday we were sorting out practical matters like trying to figure out the mysterious internet connection at their retirement home. They have institutional WiFi, but they also have their own WiFi for their unit, plus a router that we can't sign into at all. That third router -- why it's there and who's paying for it -- is the real mystery.

Anyway, all these pictures were taken yesterday morning before we left Lutz. I got in the habit of taking a long-ish morning walk near my stepmother's house, which got me some exercise after the daily self-harm I committed by eating a Boston kreme donut at Dunkin'.

The good news is, I should have better internet access here in Bradenton, so I'm hoping I'll be able to catch up somewhat in blogland! I know I'm way behind!

Dave and I drove down yesterday over the Sunshine Skyway, the very high bridge over the mouth of Tampa Bay. The day was sunny and we got spectacular views. I was prepared for hellish traffic, since it was a weekday, but of course no one was going to work on the Friday after Christmas so it was smooth sailing the whole way.

We met Dave's sister at the Cortez Cafe, our favorite diner in Bradenton, where I had the multicultural combo of a Greek omelette and grits. Then we went to see his parents at the retirement center, and stayed with them all afternoon. I only popped out for a Starbucks and to run a rather bizarre errand -- Dave's mom wants to give his dad a jar full of pennies for Christmas, because he's apparently a coin enthusiast and she thought he'd enjoy sorting them all. Getting hold of enough mixed pennies to fill a quart jar turns out to be a bit of a challenge. The first bank we went to gave us four rolls, but they're all fresh pennies from the mint -- so of no use for sorting. The second was a jackpot -- I got 20 rolls of pennies rolled by customers, which was above the teller's usual maximum but she said she was loaded down with them so was happy to sell them on. Problem is, that only fills half the jar.

That may have to suffice. We can get more later, if Dave's dad takes to this gift at all.

Last night we went to the Anna Maria Oyster Bar for dinner -- a cobia sandwich for me, along with two weak martinis. Which is just as well because I was driving.

Doesn't this look like one of those "ugliest dog contest" photos? This is Pinky, my stepmother's lone surviving chihuahua, who is mostly blind these days and also has no teeth. Remember how insane she and her erstwhile companion, Manny, were ten years ago? Manny is no longer with us but Pinky, of indeterminate age, is hanging in there. Fortunately her fierceness has diminished along with her vision.

Picnic Island

I have always been fascinated by this building. It stands all alone in its marble magnificence, completely different from the modest houses that surround it. When I was younger it was called the Commerce Building, I believe, and as I remember it was vacant. Apparently it was saved from demolition in the mid-'90s and became a library in 1998.

Dave and I passed it on Wednesday morning when we took a drive out to Picnic Island, a public park on Tampa Bay at the southern tip of the Tampa peninsula. I used to ride my bike out to Picnic Island when I lived in Tampa and I have fond memories of that area.

There are always lots of horseshoe crab shells out there. I'm glad the crabs haven't all been harvested for their blue blood. You can see downtown St. Petersburg across the bay on the distant horizon, directly above the crab.

We walked around the park a bit, watching the tiny fiddler crabs emerge from their holes in the mud flats around the mangroves, and checking out the scenery along the beach. Here's a FloriVideo™ featuring the scenery and something that sounds a lot like a seagull but isn't:

We had a busy Christmas yesterday. Dave and I went to the hospital in the morning to visit my stepmother, who seems to be doing OK. She complained of pain so she got some medication and we left after a short time to let her sleep. My stepsister who went to see her later said she didn't even remember we'd been there! Oh well. I think she's going to be in the hospital for several more days at least. She's still due to have some more tests and another procedure.

We had Christmas dinner at my stepsister's house, with her, her husband and some of their friends. Dave was in charge of the roast beast, which he actually cooked in the oven in our guesthouse, which as far as we could tell had never been used. It's right next door to my stepsister's so we walked it over when it was done.

Today we're off to Bradenton to spend the rest of our trip with Dave's side of the family. They've been very patient while we deal with my stepmother and her unexpected illness. This trip has been so surreal.

Merry Christmas!

This is a snapshot of my grandmother's Christmas tree, taken approximately 42 years ago. Every year from the time I was about 10 until I graduated from college, my mom, my brother and I drove north during Christmas break to visit her in Hyattsville, Md., near Washington D.C. We piled into my mom's Ford Escort and drove for two days on what seemed an exciting and exotic voyage, staying at a motel somewhere in the middle, usually some little town in South Carolina like Orangeburg or Santee or Manning.

I have such great memories of those trips. In the early years we'd drive US-301 up through Georgia and South Carolina, where I think I-95 wasn't entirely finished yet. We then joined I-95 through North Carolina and Virginia. Once the interstate was built, we switched to it along with everyone else, and forever after I lamented that we no longer drove through little burgs like Allendale, S.C. or Claxton, Ga. -- where we went right past the fruitcake factory! Part of the fun of the trip was seeing those familiar places over and over.

I loved the giant welcome signs at every state line, and crossing them felt like a triumph. Even though a state line is a political abstraction, we could almost feel the air change. I loved crossing the same rivers, eating in the same restaurants and staying in the same motels. The first few years we stayed in a motel in Orangeburg that was right out of the 1950s, with a restaurant in the forecourt.

Anyway, once we got to Grandmother's, one of the first things we'd do is break out her Christmas tree and decorate it. I can't quite remember where she stored it, but I have visions of it hanging upside down from the rafters in her basement or garage, covered with a plastic or cloth shroud. I may be making that up. (If so my brother will let me know.) She always waited until we arrived to break out any Christmas decorations.

She herself laughed at her little tree, saying it was rather pathetic compared to the invariably large and elaborately decorated one at my uncle's in northern Virginia (where we spent actual Christmas day, surrounded by our cousins). But we loved it.

Here's a (blurry) closeup of the vintage nativity scene we always put out with the tree.

I have no idea what happened to any of this stuff when she died in 1988. Maybe my cousins inherited some of the decorations. But finding these old pictures among my negatives brought back great memories. Voila! Time travel!

May all of you have a great day, whether you celebrate Christmas or not, and may you enjoy whatever memories the day may carry for you. Here in Florida my stepmother remains in the hospital, so we'll be going to see her as well as having dinner with family and friends in the evening.

Wildlife Sightings and Venusian Trivia

I was taking an early-morning walk yesterday when I encountered a guy standing in the road in his bathrobe, holding a cup of coffee, waiting for his dog to do its business. I saw these stately, dramatic Angel's Trumpet (Brugmansia) plants growing in a nearby yard, and stopped to take a picture of them. "If you break a piece of that off and stick it in the ground, it will grow for you," he said. Which I suppose was an offer for me to do so, because then he went into the house behind the plants, but obviously I can't very well smuggle Brugmansia into the UK so I passed.

(Besides, Dave and I tried to grow a Brugmansia in a pot many years ago and it didn't go well. We had an invasion of red spider mites, as I recall.)

I had a pretty good walk, actually, and saw several other interesting things. I made a quick FloriVideo™ to share them with you:

We begin with a flock of ibis at sunrise, followed by a nonchalant peacock, some wary deer and some very loud black-headed parrots. (I think they're Nanday Parakeets, which are apparently known to have large feral colonies in the Tampa area.) I didn't bring my big camera and zoom lens on this trip so I couldn't get a better shot of them, sadly.

Thanks for all your good wishes about my stepmother. She seems to be doing much better. We spent time with her yesterday morning and again in the evening. She has some issues that have affected her kidneys, so she got both a blood transfusion and dialysis yesterday to help correct her blood chemistry before they do a procedure today to hopefully fix the problems. "I never thought I'd be having dialysis," she said, and I must admit it was a surprise to all of us too. I don't think she'll be home for Christmas, but we'll see.

In the afternoon Dave and I went to see blogger E, who is an old college friend of mine. We both worked on the student newspaper at the University of South Florida back in the day and became friends that way. I haven't seen her in a while so it was nice to meet up and sit by the pool in her condo complex for a chat on a pleasant, sunny day.

Here's a large colony of mother-in-law's-tongue growing around a tree at her condos. Florida is the place where houseplants run wild!

Last night I went out to play in a trivia contest with my stepsister and her husband. We didn't win, but it was an interesting contest -- the host asked a question, and then played a song that is somehow associated with the answer. A word in the answer may be in the name of the song, for example, or in the artist's name. Sometimes it's a tenuous association -- "Ventura Highway" was associated with the planet Venus, for example. Speaking of which, if someone asked you to name the hottest planet, what would you say? I said Mercury, but apparently Venus is hotter, at least according to our trivia host. I guess the atmosphere must trap heat, while Mercury is mostly barren rock. Who knew?

FlorAqua in Six Minutes

Before I get going with my post today, I want to say to all my commenters that I am reading every single one of your comments, and I apologize for not responding or acknowledging them individually. It's just too busy around here and I don't have internet unless I'm at Dunkin' Donuts! (Which, as Catalyst pointed out the other day, is now called just Dunkin'.) But by all means keep them coming, because they provide a little morsel of normalcy in this bizarre holiday season. (More on that in a moment.)

Yesterday my brother wanted to take his daughters to The Florida Aquarium, a somewhat exotic outing for them since they live in Jacksonville and don't get to visit it regularly. I'm not sure Jacksonville has anything comparable. And although I've been to the aquarium it's been at least a decade, if not two, so it sounded exotic to me too. Dave and I decided to tag along.

Here's my speedy (yet hopefully peaceful) six-minute version of our visit:

It's a little like a screen saver, isn't it? I don't know the names of all the fish, or didn't make note of them, but we start with an alligator snapping turtle from beneath, followed by a tank of long-nosed Florida gar, an alligator, an otter and a couple of roseate spoonbills. (The sound effects are from Apple, by the way -- I had to put new sound over the video or you'd just hear the racket of dozens of people talking. I used jungle sounds for the first segment, which covers birds and creatures of fresh-water wetlands, and then ocean waves for the rest.)

Other notable creatures include one of the luckiest spiny Florida lobsters in the world at 1:55; a couple of scorpionfish at 2:08; a tank of red-saddled anthias at 2:27, with a spotted garden eel watching cautiously from the sand; a big hogfish at 2:49; paddlefish at 3:42; archerfish at 3:59; and lionfish casting dramatic shadows at 4:52.

So it was a fun visit, and my brother heads back to Jacksonville with his family today.

Meanwhile, Dave agreed to cook last night for my stepsister, her husband and my stepmother. We stopped at Publix ("where shopping is a pleasure" -- really!) and picked up some ingredients for beef bourguignon, which he put together last night. It was delicious.

Unfortunately -- and this is where things get bizarre -- my 81-year-old stepmother has been showing signs of some health issues for the past several days. Last night it became apparent that she needed to see a doctor, and sooner rather than later. So right after dinner we popped her in the car and took her to the emergency room. She has been admitted to the hospital for some tests and treatments, so that has cast a bit of a pall over our remaining family togetherness. I got about four hours of sleep, I think -- partly owing to continuing jet-lag -- and my poor stepsister and her husband probably got even less.

I also heard that my New York photography pal Allan Ludwig has died, which I'm sorry about. He and I were part of a Flickr group that used to photograph graffiti and street art in New York City. My Flickr account is still full of pictures from that time, if you go back to its earliest years. Here's a photo from 2007 of some of our Flickr group, with Allan and me in the front row. I didn't know until I read his obituary that he'd written a Pulitzer-nominated book! Hidden talents are all around us.

A Day in Pictures

Dave and I got moving early yesterday before the rest of my family was up and about (since we're five hours ahead of everyone in terms of internal biology). We went to the Three Coins Diner, a favorite breakfast spot of mine that I've mentioned on the blog before.

Here's Dave about to go inside, those three fluffy pancakes calling his name. One good thing about the Three Coins is we never have to wonder whether or not it's open -- because it always is.

This guy sits beside the cash register. Very old Tampa, with its cigar-industry references. Cuesta-Rey cigars used to be made in Tampa.

After his pancakes and my broccoli-cheese omelette, we headed back to Lutz, passing this ridiculously colorful building on the way. How could I not stop for pictures?

Talk about positive energy! I think it's a screen-printing company.

Back at my stepmother's, we were met by my brother and his family, who drove down from Jacksonville and are staying at a hotel downtown. All of us spent the day together, chatting and exploring the docks and lakefront. We got lunch from the Publix deli and ordered pizzas for dinner. There's not a whole lot of cooking going on this Christmas. I'm not even sure my family is having a Christmas meal -- my stepsister and her husband are planning a party instead. I think Dave and I are on the fence about whether we want to stay for that or head down to see his parents in Bradenton.

Elvis, my brother-in-law and stepsister's cat, is indifferent...

...as is his companion, Ozzy. They are the softest, plushest cats I've ever encountered in my life!

Sunshine State

Well, here I am, safe and sound on the other side of the Atlantic. Above you see the view out my window as we flew over the Florida coast at Cape Canaveral. That's the Kennedy Space Center directly below, where the Apollo moon missions used to blaze upward and hold the country spellbound, where Challenger met its sad fate but many other shuttle missions launched successfully. Back when we did those sorts of things, you know?

It was a loooooong flight -- more than ten hours, I think. Are planes flying more slowly these days? When we checked in, Dave and I upgraded to premium economy seats, which cost us more but gave us more cabin space and little perks like a meal on real china and a glass of champagne upon boarding. It was the smartest thing we could have done. We were much, much more comfortable as a result. I stood up only once during the whole flight, and didn't feel too awfully confined. I did have a rather rambunctious little boy sitting directly behind me, leading to occasional unexpected squeals, bumps and thumps, but you can't have everything.

Of course there was a kid from the school where we work on our flight, with his family. This seems to be de rigueur when we travel.

On the plane I finished "All the Colours of the Dark," which I enjoyed, and watched a very interesting movie called "Nightbitch," starring Amy Adams, about the trials of being a young mother. I was attracted to it because I like her, and I figured she wouldn't make a crappy movie, and indeed it turned out to be smart and surprisingly surreal. I also managed to leave my glasses case on the plane (but fortunately not the glasses themselves). Oh well.

My stepsister and her husband picked us up at the airport, where Phoebe the Flamingo still presides over the terminal:

We drove up to Lutz, north of Tampa, where we're staying in my stepmother's guesthouse. We've seen her and my nephew and we all went to dinner last night. I slept surprisingly well. Today my brother shows up with his family.

At the moment I am, of course, at Dunkin' Donuts, which you will remember is my blogging redoubt while I'm in Lutz. The guesthouse doesn't have WiFi and, more critically, it doesn't have a coffee machine. Fortunately, Dunkin' Donuts opens at 5 a.m. -- which of course is 10 a.m. by my own body clock, well past the time I would normally require coffee!

I do have one more thing to post from London, which I meant to include in yesterday's post but forgot:

This one-minute snippet of garden-cam footage shows both how miserable the weather was last Thursday, and what happened when I put a hard-boiled egg out for the foxes. You see the egg in the first shot, sitting back by the flowerpots and center-left of the screen. It vanishes in the next clip as a fox trots by -- we don't actually see the fox eat it, but I'm sure that's what happened! And then, at 0:35, we see proof that the foxes are making that weird call I've been hearing in the garden -- one trots by and makes the noise as it goes.

I thought about bringing the garden cam to Florida to see what's wandering around my stepmother's yard, but in the end, I just didn't have the energy for that!

Burlington Arcade

Yesterday I went into Westminster to pick up a couple of last-minute things for Christmas. I know I said I wasn't doing gifts, but I decided it would be in poor taste to show up in Florida utterly empty-handed. So I got some swanky chocolates from Fortnum & Mason that everyone can share. I bought a box for my family and a box for Dave's, along with a tiny Christmas pudding for wherever we happen to be on that day -- I think at my stepmother's. The bill was something like £112. Insanity!

Oh well. I'm sure Christmas is what keeps Fortnum & Mason afloat the rest of the year.

Across Piccadilly from the shop was this brightly lit shopping arcade, Burlington Arcade, that runs to Burlington Gardens and thus to Bond Street. I took a look inside.

There's a "Twelve Days of Christmas" decorating motif going on -- I believe those are the "twelve drummers drumming" above. I barely looked at the shops because I wasn't really in the market for any of the finery that's on sale there.

At the other end I wound up on Bond Street and saw...

...a very trendily-dressed woman and her cotton-ball of a dog, who was sporting a special Santa hat and collar. This is the kind of thing you see on Bond Street.

From there I headed to the Tate Britain, because I wanted to see the Lee Miller exhibit currently on show. Miller was a model and surrealist photographer associated with Man Ray in the 1920s, who then became a fashion and war photographer in her own right. The Tate show covers her early surrealism, her fashion work for Vogue, and her years as a war correspondent, including some heart-wrenching images of post-Holocaust concentration camps and the destruction in Europe.

And there, among the wartime pictures, was this one:

Yes, that's the Burlington Arcade, taken during or after the Blitz. I was mesmerized by many of Miller's photos, like the one of four rats sitting on a piece of wood in Paris, their tails hanging down in parallel lines, looking composed and almost elegant as one would expect of Parisian rats. Or the one of René Magritte and his dog LouLou, which reminded me of Paul Simon's song, "René and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War." I thought, "That's it! That's the dog!"

Anyway it was an interesting exhibit and I'm glad I fit it into my schedule before we depart for Florida today.

I came home and gave Dave his gift, which I bought on my errand to Covent Garden a few days ago. I got him an Apple watch, largely because I want him to be able to track his heart rate. But it does a lot of other cool things too, like measure the quality of one's sleep and, of course, provide all the communication you could ever want with the world at large. It's right out of Dick Tracy, for sure.

Last night we watched "Being Charlie," the movie Rob Reiner made with his son about addiction. It was modeled on their family experiences and was quite powerful, but as you'd expect, also quite sad. The lead character, Charlie, seemed so angry and nihilistic -- a perception perhaps heightened by recent events. I was struck by a scene when Charlie said to his father, "I don't hate you." Which makes what ultimately happened all the more mystifying.

Ernesto and Peter Arnett

Ernesto, the ceramic skull I bought in Cozumel years ago, is slowly being overtaken by the jungle in the living room. He probably doesn't mind. He's from a pretty jungly place.

It rained all day yesterday, so I didn't leave the house except to go out in the back garden a couple of times. I downloaded the footage from the garden cam and it was boring, so I deleted it all. Once again I didn't have the camera in a good position.

Later, I boiled an egg that had come to us in the carton with part of the shell missing. The only thing between the innards of the egg and the outside world was a sort of thin membrane, which I decided made it risky to eat. So I took it out to the foxes and reset the camera. Maybe we'll get some footage of them having a feast, though the last time I gave them a boiled egg a magpie ate it. (The egg looked fine, once cooked and peeled, and I have no doubt a fox could digest it just fine!)

I hope to take a walk some time today, but maybe not down Billy Fury Way. Remember how Olga and I walked there occasionally, even though it's a fairly grimy footpath? Well, the paper has an awkwardly headlined story -- "Seven-Week Lights Blackout in Drug-Hit Path" -- about how none of the streetlights there are working at the moment. I might go there in daylight, but I think I'd want a dog with me, not that Olga was ever a very fierce protector.

The orchid in the kitchen is blooming like crazy, underneath the yellowish overhead light. You can see the rain on the window. It was that kind of day.

I also saw in the news that Peter Arnett died. I actually have a Peter Arnett story, from my own reporting career in Florida. In the late '80s and early '90s, I worked at the newspaper in Lakeland, east of Tampa. A magazine called the Washingtonian reported that Arnett, who was representing CNN in Baghdad during the first Iraq war, was going to marry his more youthful girlfriend, a fellow journalist who had attended college in Lakeland and whose parents still lived there. So I got sent out to interview the parents.

It was a rather awkward story to write, because 1) It was basically just gossip column fodder, and 2) It's always risky to write about what someone is "going to do," rather than wait until they've done it, and 3) Arnett and his alleged bride-to-be were both in the Middle East, so I couldn't talk to either person directly involved in the relationship. I had to rely on the parents for information. I churned something out and it ran in the paper and that was that...

...except that Arnett never did marry the woman. He wound up going back to his wife, from whom he had been separated. By that time I was gone from Lakeland and the world had moved on. C'est la vie.

Anyway, it wasn't the brightest spot in my journalism career and apparently I didn't even save a clipping of the story. About fifteen years later, when I was working for The New York Times Co. in Manhattan, we paired with Google to have the archives of all of our smaller newspapers, including the Lakeland paper, digitized and made available online. It used to be that stories like this one I wrote would come up with a Google search. But then the Times sold the papers and I believe the new owners took their archives offline, because I can't find any of that stuff out there now. Again, c'est la vie.

Green Man Lover

I just awoke from the most glorious night's sleep. I must have really needed it, because I woke up about 5 a.m. and thought, "Oh, it's break, I don't need to get up now!" And then I fell back asleep and slept soundly another two hours -- and let me tell you, that two hours made a huge difference.

So yes, it's break. Woo hoo! Yesterday was busier than I expected it to be, with several visiting classes and lots of last-minute checkouts. I got a bottle of wine from the head librarian, which I thought was very kind considering I kvetch about her regularly. I really need to just grow up and not be such a whiny baby. I also chatted with a couple of co-workers who are leaving either now or in mid-January, having taken the buyout as I did. One woman asked me if I'd had any second thoughts and I told her none at all. "Me either!" she said. "People keep asking me what I'm going to do, and I tell them, I'm going to museums!" Pretty much my plan too.

I compiled the database stats for November and worked a short shift in the Lower School library, and then left work about 2 p.m. I walked home and spent the afternoon reading. Dave was at a doctor's appointment so it was a good time to catch up on blogs and continue working my way through "All the Colours of the Dark," which I'm enjoying but which is HUGE (576 pages hardback). I'd like to have it done by Saturday so I don't have to take it to Florida.

I found this funny graffiti on Finchley Road. According to Wikipedia, the Green Man is "a motif in architecture and art, of a face made of, or completely surrounded by, foliage, which normally spreads out from the centre of the face. Apart from a purely decorative function, the Green Man is primarily interpreted as a symbol of rebirth, representing the cycle of new growth that occurs every spring."

There is also a folkloric Green Man: "By at least the 16th century the term 'green man' was used in England for a man who was covered in leaves [and] foliage including moss as part of a pageant, parade or ritual." This evolved into a sort of pagan figure, though the roots and significance of the Green Man in that context are debated. There are lots of pubs called "The Green Man."

I'm not sure which type of Green Man we're loving, here. Could be any or all of them, I guess.

(Top photo: Our white hellebores, blooming away!)

Fog

I got up at about 4 a.m. this morning to get some water, and this is what it looked like out the front window. Remember the estate agent's office that I mentioned in Monday's post, the one that glows blue at the top of the street? You can see it up the hill on the left. That building across the road has been under renovation for some time. God only knows what they're doing to it.

Sometimes when I look out at the street in the silent, unmoving early hours, I'll see a fox running down the pavement. While the city sleeps, the foxes are in charge.

Well, this has been a dispiriting couple of days, hasn't it? To put it mildly. The shooting at Brown, the shooting in Australia, the heartbreaking family tragedy of the Reiners. I loved "All in the Family" when I was a young teenager, though I wasn't permitted to watch it when I was a small child -- my parents thought it was too mature. Rob Reiner, just like his character Michael Stivic, represented a liberal sensibility that I always valued and I will miss him. I can't imagine the degree of parental anguish he and his wife must have felt in dealing with their son's addictions, not to mention the torment and alienation of the son himself. And I hate the fact that Reiner died with Trump in office. He deserved to see the end of this reign of destructive narcissism.

Today is our last day with students -- and it's just a half-day, so I'll be home in the early afternoon. And then we're on Winter Break! Woo hoo! Dave and I have a couple of days to get ready for traveling -- laundry and that kind of thing -- and then we're off to Florida.

I made our end-of-the-year charitable donations yesterday. Same cast of characters as usual: the ACLU, Planned Parenthood and the Southern Poverty Law Center. I'm also going to support Hope Not Hate in the UK, a sort of British equivalent to the SPLC.

And I wore my London Christmas sweater to work yesterday, even though it's overly warm and the lights no longer work. I'm always glad to get another use out of it. Hard to believe I bought it 11 years ago! Here's the little video Dave and I made back then to show it in action, which I apparently never embedded on my blog, though I did link to it:

What a time capsule that video is. Look how tiny our houseplants are! That's the avocado tree in the background by the window, now much taller than I am. And of course Olga on the floor behind me, gnawing on her Kong.

Anyway, I'd say I've gotten my money's worth out of that sweater.