Repair Window

This morning I'm going to be hanging out at home waiting for the boiler repair engineer. Our boiler has mysteriously started leaking. For a while I'd find a puddle of water on the counter beneath it. Lately the puddle has disappeared but the system still isn't holding water -- I have to refill it every few days. If it gets low the hot water gets wonky and my shower turns cold right when I need to rinse off, and is there anything worse than that?

So, anyway, British Gas is coming to hopefully get that repaired. And then they're coming again on Thursday because our drains at the side of the house are blocked up again. It's not sewage, just wastewater from the sinks and washing machines, and from upstairs as well. Obviously we need to get that flowing, and because of our landlord's home care policy, that responsibility also falls to British Gas.

Meanwhile my boss is probably annoyed because I'm missing work to get all this done. The repair people give a "window" of time when they're going to show up -- today I'm just missing the morning, and how much of it depends on how early the guy gets here. Thursday is an "all day" window -- and what the heck is the point of that? -- so I could be out a lot of the day or a little, once again depending on arrival time and ease of repair.

We also have new couch delivery next week, so I'll need to be home then. Job? What job?

I moved around some of the plants in the living room, to prepare for winter and the need to bring tender plants indoors. I shifted the yucca -- which is almost too tall for the ceiling -- to the left of the door and the little rubber tree to the right. That's a sunnier spot, and it's also where the mandarin orange will eventually go when it moves inside. Other than that, it's just a matter of protecting a few geraniums, and I can find space for those.

The rubber tree has come along well since I rescued it from a dumpster many months ago!

Yesterday I was working in the library when a tired-looking little girl came in toting her books. She sat down at one of the tables in the otherwise empty room. I asked her why she wasn't in class, and she said she had to leave to do something or other, but now she was done. There were still five or ten minutes to go before the next class, so I said, "Well, maybe you should go back?"

"Oh, I just couldn't!" she said. Something about the way she said it struck me as so funny. I let her sit there and gather her wits.

(Top photo: Islington, on Sunday.)

On the Wild Side, Part 2

If you read Sharon's blog, which normally hosts pictures of Phoenix, you may have seen this sculpture -- which is not in Phoenix but here in London. Sharon visited recently and took pictures of it in Paternoster Square, near St. Paul's Cathedral, and blogged them a few weeks ago. I've been meaning to go down and see it myself and yesterday I finally had the opportunity.

It's called "Go Widlife Go!" by the artists Gillie and Marc. These artists have done a variety of animal-themed sculptures to call attention to the threats facing our planet's biodiversity and specifically its wildlife. (You may remember one I blogged several years ago based on orphaned elephants.)

"Jumping on the scooter and joining the ride is a simple act designed to encourage the public to become part of the journey with endangered animals," according to a nearby explainer. There's a gap between the animals for visitors to pose for pictures (although there are also signs saying "please do not climb," which I guess means don't go higher than that).

This is part of a larger public art and social movement called "Love the Last," to bolster efforts to save animals. Gillie and Marc also have their own web site here, and I see that they have several other sculptures on view in London. Maybe I'll eventually catch up with those.

As long as I was out and about, I decided to get some exercise. I walked 2.5 miles up through Islington to the Caledonian Road and Barnsbury overground station. The weather was beautiful and I had the opportunity to take a few more pictures along the way, which you will no doubt see in the coming week.

Griping About Dahlias Again

Our white Japanese anemones are finally blooming. Normally they flower right around the start of the school year -- Dave and I always joke that's how we know it's time to go back to work. This year, they're a month behind. It's a good thing we didn't go by their calendar -- we'd have been fired.

And while doing a quick search to make sure I hadn't already blogged about white anemones this year, I came across this post from last October. Can you BELIEVE how good my dahlias looked? And at that time of year?

In order to absorb the full impact of that photo you'd have to see what they look like now, and frankly I'm ashamed to show you. Several I've cut back entirely, and the others have scraggly-looking stems that until yesterday were loaded with dead leaves on their lower parts. I know I've said this before, but I let them dry out too much this year, partly because of crappy compost.

A couple of them are still blooming, like the "Dalaya Dark Aruna" variety that I also showed you about a week ago, but you can see the cursed powdery mildew on the leaves.

OK, I know I'm getting repetitive, and I'm sure you're thinking WILL YOU SHUT UP ABOUT THE DAHLIAS ALREADY. Sorry about that. I just can't believe what a dismal year they've had, and after I laboriously repotted most of them in the spring!

I harvested not only a couple more tomatoes but also our miniature mandarin orange yesterday. The orange was about the size of a large-ish gumball, the kind that used to stain our teeth blue when we were kids. I cut it open and Dave and I each had half. It was about the sourest little thing I've ever eaten -- more like a lemon with a whiff of orange aroma. It would have made a better cocktail garnish than a snack.

I finished "City of Night" yesterday, so that's finally off the table. I also read a New Yorker profile of Pam Bondi that I've been meaning to get to, since she's from my hometown and we have friends in common. (It sounds so weird, to think I have friends in common with the Attorney General of the United States, though I don't think they're still friends with her.) We both attended the same university at the same time so it's entirely possible I crossed paths with her there, but if so I don't remember it. My parents would almost certainly have known her father, since they all worked at the university. She grew up in a household of Democrats and I think most people are mystified by her hard-right turn. Many seem to chalk it up to ambition more than any deeply held personal convictions.

Speaking of the White House, Dave and I are watching "The Residence" on Netflix and enjoying it. I know we're a bit late to this comedic murder mystery but hey, better late than never. We're also watching "Platonic" on Apple TV, yet another Seth Rogen show. If you need some laughs -- and don't we all, nowadays -- both of these are good options.

Nocturnal Perambulations

I'm getting a bit of a late start on my blogging today. I didn't wake up until almost 7 a.m. and then I did a couple of things to get the day going -- checked the garden cam, started some laundry, made coffee, unpacked the dishwasher. Anyway, I'm here now!

I woke up in the middle of the night and had a wander around the flat, which I occasionally do. It's not that anything is bothering me or that I can't sleep for any serious reason -- I usually just need a drink of water. While I was up I took these photos of the streetlights in the dining room, and the view out the window. I like the peacefulness of the house and neighborhood at night. Occasionally when I look out the window at the street I see a fox trotting along the pavement, but I didn't see one this time.

Remember how I just washed the windows a couple of months ago? Well, urban life has speckled them with grime once again. They look OK in daylight so it will be a while before I give them another cleaning. I have higher priorities.

Once again I've had a busy week and I've fallen behind on everything not work-related. I did manage to get my UK passport application mailed off, so hopefully I'll have my new passport in a couple of weeks. And I scheduled the delivery of our new couch on Oct. 2, and contracted with the council to pick up our old one on Sept. 29. (This is assuming Dave and I can get it out to the street!) For a couple of evenings in between, I suppose I'll be sitting on the floor next to Dave's recliner, like a pet.

I haven't mentioned it until now but the head of the Art Department at school has pulled together another faculty/staff/parent art show. You may remember I entered last year's, so she came to me a few weeks ago and asked if I wanted to enter a piece once again. Unfortunately I've been too busy to give much thought to my options, never mind get something printed and framed, so I took the easy route and submitted a photo I took back in 2014 and had already framed in the library. You can see it, along with the rest of the art show, in the video above -- mine is the "Mr. Scissor Hands" picture. (This one.)

Once again, I'm impressed by the creativity in our community. There are a lot of photographs this year, but also pottery, sculpture, painting and textile art. The video gives a general overview, and I conclude on perhaps my favorite piece, an embroidered picture of an Edwardian building where the artist lives.

Today I'm going to finish "City of Night" if it kills me. I'm just not able to read during the week and although I like this book I want it done.

Atari

Here's our Thalictrum, which Dave named Theo. Theo is blooming now, sending out clouds of tiny pink flowers. He seems a bit late this year, maybe because of the dry summer. We tried to keep him watered but he may not have been entirely happy. He seems healthy enough.

There has been no progress on the broken bench on Finchley Road. I first blogged it in May, it gained its warning cones not much later, and then some wag declared it postmodern art. But it's still there, looking worse and worse. It's stuff like this that convinces people that Britain doesn't function well anymore. I'm not sure why the council (or whoever is responsible, and maybe that's the problem -- maybe no one is) couldn't remove it, if not replace it, within the past four or five months. It must be on someone's radar because they put those cones out there. Why the foot-dragging?

I've been meaning to blog this picture for a while, mostly because it cracks me up. That hair! Yes, that's me in the early 1980s, at the age of 15 or so, playing video games at my dad's house. We had an Atari game system (which you can see on the cabinet behind me) that loaded games using a cassette player. It was cutting edge at the time! We played Space Invaders, Missile Command, Asteroids and other games on that console, which plugged into a color TV monitor (out of the frame at left).

I've been thinking about this picture, and my not-very-extensive gaming history in general, because of the revelations about Charlie Kirk's shooter and the fact that the guy apparently spent vast amounts of time online. I hear about young people nowadays who spend almost all their waking hours playing video games or plugged into some device. (As Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said, "Go outside and touch grass.")

I remember that I could only play on that Atari for a couple of hours before I'd start to feel yucky. I just had to get up and move around after a while. Maybe it's because the ergonomics of gaming were not as advanced back then, and I could only spend so long sitting cross-legged on the floor. Kids nowadays have fancy desk chairs. But I like to think I also had a built-in "off switch" that helped me know when I'd had enough. Some people don't have that.

A Fruit Fly in My Wine

I've just been reading about ABC television's decision to suspend Jimmy Kimmel indefinitely for the fairly innocuous comments he made about Charlie Kirk's killing. It is frightening how readily television companies knuckle under to the USA's newly authoritarian government. This is what happens when big business puts its own interests ahead of those of the public, who are entitled under the Constitution to hear a range of views from a range of sources -- including views critical of the government and its leaders. We are in a scary place.

You probably saw that Trump filed a multi-billion dollar defamation lawsuit against The New York Times for its critical coverage prior to last year's election. He took exception to statements like the paper's assertion that Trump as president would "defy the norms and dismantle the institutions that have made our country strong." And yet, here we are! He's trying to drive the Times out of business and threatening ABC's license over comments by a talk show host. He's deploying military on the streets of our cities. He has demolished the country's capacity for providing federal aid overseas and he's rewarding red states over blue ones at home. Seems to me that's defying norms and dismantling institutions.

I commented on the Times' own story about the lawsuit, "Don't you DARE settle this! To quote Trump, 'Fight, fight, fight!'" I have no idea whether or not they published it -- I see a lot of other people said similar things. The Times doesn't have the pressure of an FCC license hanging over its head so perhaps that gives it more room to resist.

A side note -- it's interesting that Trump filed his lawsuit in the Middle District of Florida, which is based in Tampa. Long ago, when I was first starting out as a reporter, I used to help cover the federal court in Tampa. I'd pop in on my way to the office and look through all the new suits to see whether anything interesting had come in. This was when the courthouse was still located in its charming old 1920s building, not in the modern monolith it occupies now. How surprised I would have been to find a lawsuit from the president in the stack! (I'm assuming Trump filed suit in Central Florida because it's a more conservative district and one more likely to give him a win. I can't imagine why else he'd do it there -- Palm Beach, where he lives, is in the Southern District.)

I did once attend a press conference at that courthouse with international implications, when the U.S. Attorney announced drug-trafficking charges against Manuel Noriega, the president of Panama. I was a 21-year-old college student at the time, and even my editor said he'd have sent someone more experienced if he'd realized how big the story was! I helped write it, though. I remember thinking it was silly we'd indict a foreign leader, when he was clearly out of the reach of our courts. I never imagined we'd invade the country months later and capture Noriega that way. I was young and naive.

Anyway...

Last night I was lying on the couch, drinking a glass of vin rouge and catching up on blogs, when a tiny black fruit fly flew into my wine. I didn't notice it until I took a sip and had to spit the thing out. I gingerly set it on the table next to the couch -- it was no bigger than a sesame seed -- and darned if it didn't start moving around, surviving not only being drowned in alcohol but briefly being in my mouth. It stretched its legs and dried its wings, and after a few minutes it flew away. I thought, "In these crazy times, may we all be as resilient as that fruit fly!"

(Photos: Morning sun in our entrance hall, and some graffiti and a sticker I saw yesterday. I think the second sticker means that Instagram is full of spam?)

Pigeons

Why are all those pigeons hanging out in the walnut tree?

They've discovered my bird feeder, that's why.

Remember the plastic seed feeder I put out a little more than a month ago? I found it in our shed, and it hadn't been used in a long while specifically because in the past it had attracted too many pigeons. I decided to try again, filled it with seed and at first, I enjoyed the small birds coming and going -- the tits and robins and dunnocks.

Then the pigeons moved in.

Actually, I suspect that all along they'd been emptying the feeder. Those seeds disappeared way too fast for the tiny birds to be entirely responsible.

The pigeons are too big for the feeder, so there's a lot of flapping and chaos while they try to perch on it. I think they use as much energy feeding as they get from the food, for a net gain of zero. But that doesn't stop them.

The little birds still get in a nibble now and then, but overall the pigeons monopolize the seed -- just as the starlings and parakeets monopolize our suet balls. Speaking of which, I haven't seen many starlings lately. Perhaps they move on as the weather cools down. The suet balls last several days now, and the parakeets come and go, unlike earlier in the year when I'd put out suet balls and they'd disappear in a few hours.

Thanks for your feedback yesterday on the wisdom of mowing the lawn in flip-flops! I did consider the safety of that, but as I said in a comment, I figured my feet don't get near enough to the business end of the mower for it to be a danger. But you're right -- it's probably not smart. I'll wear shoes from now on.

Olga has been visiting me in dreams again. I don't know what's bringing this on -- maybe the change of seasons? I wake up a bit melancholy. I ran into a neighbor yesterday who also has a very old dog. We've seen each other on the "dog circuit" for years, and I told him we'd lost Olga. His dog is 17, but she's a different breed -- a sort of furry poodly thing -- and though she walks slowly, she's still managing. I told him as long as she's eating and walking, she's in relatively good shape!

I was sorry to read about Robert Redford's death yesterday. I mean, the guy was 89, so it's not such a surprise -- he was born before both of my parents and they've been dead for years. But film creates an illusion of eternal youth and vigor, and it's always a surprise to find our screen idols aging like the rest of us. I liked Redford because his heart was in the right place. He seemed a good guy overall.

Bureaucracy

I found these stickers on my walk home yesterday evening -- an interesting, and encouraging, response to the right-wing, anti-immigrant demonstrations that occurred over the weekend! That flag is the St. George Cross, the national flag of England, and it's often waved by anti-immigrant demonstrators (remember the "Send Them Home" guy in Blackpool?). I like the idea of reclaiming it for everyone.

Flags are weird things, aren't they? A scrap of cloth, and yet a powerful symbol -- and a lot of us disagree about what's being symbolized. I'd argue that the American flag symbolizes rights of expression that could include, ironically, burning the American flag. And yet a lot of people think it symbolizes pride, and that burning it somehow contradicts or offends its message. (Not that I'm about to burn a flag. I'm just using that as an example.)

I've never been a flag-waver. I think I've hung a national flag exactly once, and that was in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Like a lot of my neighbors, I put one in my apartment window in New York as a symbol of unity and recovery. Oh, and I waved the British flag at our citizenship ceremony, with all the other immigrants!

Speaking of which, I applied for my first British passport last night. I'm hoping to get it in time for Tenerife at Thanksgiving. According to the Home Office web site that shouldn't be a problem, though they're making me jump through some hoops -- like I once again have to find someone of professional authority to verify that my picture is in fact me, even though I just jumped this same hurdle for my citizenship application. It's not a big deal -- I can get someone at work to do it easily enough -- but it seems a silly requirement. Don't they have my picture on file in some big computer? Can't they just look at that and see that the passport photo is authentic?

Here are some more stickers and signs I've found posted in recent weeks. Bureaucracy makes me a grumpy cat.

I would like to have seen "an exhibition of giant backlit SX-70 Polaroids," but alas, it was two years ago. The homage to one of my favorite movies was eye-catching, though.

There are several places in the world where kindness is not on display -- Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar, Yemen -- and Gaza is definitely among them.

Can you stand another garden cam video? More good shots of the fox and our regular visiting cats. At 2:02, the fox appears very agitated and moving fast -- I'm not sure what that was about. Maybe it had a scary encounter with some other animal. And at 2:17, I'm mowing the lawn, so be ready for some engine noise! I was surprised the cats were out wandering around in the rain. I thought cats hated water?

Dave the Trip Planner

I spent all day yesterday at home. It was supposed to get rainy later in the day, so I spent the morning trying to get some stuff done. I moved our rubber trees inside after their summer outdoors -- both of them look much better having had that outdoor time -- and I mowed the lawn. The garden looks much tidier.

I also vacuumed and took care of all the houseplants and washed the door mat at the back door, and I trimmed the bushes along our front steps so we can get in and out of the house without looking too much like the Munsters.

And then I dealt with blogs and blog comments, and finally, after all that, I sat down to read another 100+ pages of "City of Night." I hadn't touched the book all last week but now I want to make a concerted effort to finish it. I'm feeling a bit bogged down. I wouldn't say John Rechy is the greatest writer -- he turns a nice phrase but he's also very casual. Wasn't it Truman Capote who said of Jack Kerouac's work, "it's not writing, it's typing"? (I also have it in my head that he said that about Jacqueline Susann, but that might have been a joke I read somewhere.) Anyway, Rechy occasionally wanders into typing territory, but the book is nonetheless remarkable for its candor about gay culture in a very conservative era. I wouldn't say it's sexually explicit, except through implication and deduction, but the cultural descriptions must have been eye-opening for many people at the time.

I just learned yesterday, incidentally, that John Rechy is still alive! He's 94 years old. So much for the idea that clean living leads to a long life. After all, the famously dissipated William S. Burroughs lived to be 83.

Our cyclamens have bloomed in the back garden. We planted these things years ago and they just keep coming back. We're always surprised by them, having forgotten they were even there.

Speaking of surprises, Dave has come up with a Thanksgiving trip for us. He bought us tickets to Tenerife on Easy Jet, and found us a hotel. This astonishes me for several reasons: 1) It involves an airport, which Dave detests; 2) We've never flown a discount airline anywhere; and 3) He took the initiative to make the plans. Usually I am the trip planner. I am thrilled to take a back seat for this little adventure even though, like our planned October break in Penzance, it's going to be a very short vacation (about 48 hours).

Remember the blurry photo of my childhood dog Herman that I posted several days ago? I wondered how it would look after being run through Waterlogue, the watercolor painting app. It still looks blurry, weirdly, but it's an interesting effect!

Dahlias and Political Turbulence

Our dahlias are coming to the end of the line. One of the "Bishop's Children" plants still has flowers (above), but the others had grown shaggy with dead leaves and practically white from powdery mildew. So I took a radical step yesterday and cut all but one down to the ground, and pruned the mildewy parts out of two other plants. My theory is that they might sprout from the base enough to keep photosynthesizing until frosty weather arrives, when they all go back in the shed.

The newer dahlias that we purchased a couple of months ago, like the "Dalaya Dark Aruna" variety above, are looking healthier, but they are also suffering from powdery mildew on the leaves.

Here's "Iron in the Fire," looking pretty good.

And here's "Poodle Skirt," with a little fly on the petals.

I did some other trimming in the garden yesterday morning and quickly accumulated a full bag of yard waste. It may look like we allow our garden to run wild, but the truth is I'm out there pruning all the time. That garden generates an incredible quantity of biomass!

Given some of the comments on yesterday's post, I want to make clear that I am not agreeing with or supporting Charlie Kirk's political message at all. As I said, he and I held opposing opinions on most subjects and I found the extremity of some of his remarks appalling. All I'm saying, and I'll reiterate it here, is that we should not let a person's most extreme views represent the whole person, and we can't hate each other. We have got to focus on our commonality. It is the only thing that will save us. Our adversaries, like Russia, thrill to the widening divisions in our western societies (and work to widen them further). Let's not allow that to happen. We gotta work together, people.

There are a lot of rumors swirling around the suspect in Charlie Kirk's shooting -- some of which were referenced in yesterday's comments -- and the truth is, we don't know exactly what motivated him. I'm curious about that, but at the end of the day it really doesn't matter. He went too far and his actions cannot be justified.

I say all this the day after a massive right-wing anti-immigrant march, called the "largest nationalist event in decades" and attracting more than 110,000 people, was held in London. People who lament living in America and being subjected to the rightward movement of the US government should keep in mind that it's happening here too. It's happening everywhere. The wholesale global movement of displaced people has rocked all of our free societies. It's not the migrants' fault -- they're just going where there's opportunity. The ongoing question is, how can we all handle these pressures compassionately and with humanity?

Dave and I responded in the only sensible way possible. We went to the movies.

I haven't been to a cinema in months -- I can't tell you the last time, maybe to see "Dune: Part Two" back in March 2024. Dave, however, is a massive "Downton Abbey" fan -- he's watched the entire series multiple times. So we went to see the new "Downton Abbey" film, allegedly the grand finale, and we both enjoyed it. Frankly, it was much better than I expected, if a little rushed in its mission to bring every story to some type of conclusion.

Our movie was at 1:45, and we got to the cinema practically an hour early.

"I timed it like we were going to the airport," said an obviously excited Dave.

To kill time, we had a coffee in a downstairs cafe at the shopping center that houses the cinema. We were deluged with music from at least three competing sound systems, which was incredibly annoying and forced us upstairs to sit in the cinema lobby. Dave consumed half of his popcorn before we even got into the theater. Maybe next time we shouldn't be quite so prompt.

Charlie Kirk

I have had quite the week, with a lot to do at work. I've already mentioned two of my projects -- the weeding of our poetry and literature section, and cleaning up and organizing the board games in the Lower School. There was more of that, plus daily routines, putting up a new display and pulling a cart of books for an upcoming class. Now, finally, the old literature books have been stamped and boxed for charity, the board games are about half organized, and as of yesterday evening, everything was where it belonged -- for the moment!

And then there's been this terrible news about Charlie Kirk. I obviously disagreed with Kirk on many issues, based on what I've read and seen of his public remarks. But I didn't follow him closely, and of course I would not wish violence upon him for merely expressing his opinions. If we can't have a conversation, if we can't exchange opposing views, we're in a dark place as a society.

David French wrote an interesting column in the Times that emphasized this dangerous ground. "One of the worst elements of modern political discourse is that we tend to learn about our opponents entirely through the words and actions we find offensive..." French wrote. "We don’t ever see the points of agreement. We rarely see the person outside his political context. Post by post, our hearts harden until some people reach a point where they will celebrate the deaths of people they’ve grown to despise."

I often see this in comments on right-wing news sites, where Democrats are vilified and continually threatened with violence as traitors, satanists and communists. I'm sure it happens on left-wing sites too, though commenters on the mainstream news sites I read tend to be pretty reserved.

The internet lends itself to this kind of dehumanization, this blind outrage, because we don't have extended, thoughtful exchanges where we're looking into the eyes of our opponents and seeing them as a whole person. They're just obnoxious anonymous trolls, popping in for quick sniping comments, the snarkier the better. Modern social media fosters this climate.

We all have the same questions -- what prompted Kirk's assassin to act as he did? What stirred him so much that he felt killing Kirk was justified? I'm stating the obvious, but even for a person worried about the political trajectory of the USA and many of our western democracies -- as I am -- this was an extreme act. And the alleged perpetrator seems like such a nice boy, with a promising future. So many questions, but the main one is Why?

Again, I'm stating the obvious, but killing a single person like Kirk achieves nothing. In fact, it's counterproductive, because your foe is elevated and becomes a martyr. I've already seen right-wingers likening Kirk to Martin Luther King Jr., which I find galling but the comparison is out there. You can't kill an idea. This is the same mistake governments make when they try to kill individual terrorists, even if they are powerful leaders and organizers -- there's always another one ready to step up and take the place of the fallen, because the foe isn't a person, it's an idea, a philosophy. Kirk and his fellow leaders aren't the enemy. Right-wing, evangelical Christian nationalism and extreme conservatism are what's dangerous.

French concluded his column with a quote by Abraham Lincoln spoken on the eve of the Civil War: "I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection."

It can be difficult to feel any affection for our political opponents in this day and age, but I think we have to try. It's the "turn-the-other-cheek" message that many of us were raised with. Otherwise, where are we headed?

(Photo: An apartment building reflected in a puddle on the street, yesterday.)

Lots o' Fox

I downloaded the wildlife cam last night and found a bonanza of footage! As you can see from the video, I moved the camera to a different spot -- a location about midway down the garden, looking toward the rear wall (where the camera was before).

This new spot seems like a good one. It gives a view down the path at the side of the garden, which means animals pass right by and stay in the frame for a while. You'll see not only multiple shots of our fox, but FOUR different neighborhood cats! I had no idea so many cats are hanging around. I suppose now that the scent of Olga is gone they feel more at home.

Here are some video highlights:

Start Afternoon light, on its own, can trip the camera by shining in the lens. Kind of a cool effect.
0:10 The fox shows up the back of the garden, has a good scratch and a leisurely stretch, and walks right past the camera.
1:16 The fox shows up after dark for another drive-by.
1:30 The bengal cat with the collar and bell comes around, leaving its scent.
2:00 Another cat comes by, a pale one.
2:15 A black cat shows up.
2:30 A squirrel works very hard to dig a hole, apparently burying a nut. It puts its whole body into the task!
2:49 The fox comes by, sniffs out the squirrel's hole, and makes a valiant effort to eat the nut. (Which probably smells like squirrel.) It gives up, goes to the back of the garden for a stretch, then does a couple of drive-bys.
5:20 The fox comes back after dark.
5:42 The bengal cat comes back, then runs away at the sound of nearby cats fighting.
6:10 Still another cat shows up -- this one a tabby.
6:30 The squirrel comes back and eats its nut!

I must say, after all that, I'm glad the squirrel got its prize in the end.

This obviously condenses a lot of action into a short time frame, making it seem like the animals were practically on top of each other. But it's actually several days' worth of activity. Everything up to the 2-minute mark occurred on Sept. 8; the rest on Sept. 10.

Magimatic

As long as we're talking about childhood photography, I thought I'd post this picture of my first camera -- a Magimatic X50 that I got for Christmas in 1974. I'm not sure who took this picture or why. It may have been me, using either my dad's or my brother's camera, and I do remember that it's from a trip we took to the beach. It's my only record of the old Magimatic, which I stopped using in the early '80s and later gave to Goodwill.

This camera took 126 cartridge film, and I have long believed it was manufactured by Kodak. But when I got to reading about it online yesterday, I learned that it was actually made by the Imperial Camera Company of Chicago, Ill. Apparently it was a competitor of the Kodak Instamatic. A blogger named Jim Grey wrote an interesting reminiscence about his own Magimatic several years ago, and mentioned that they cost about ten bucks new, which seems believable. It was almost entirely plastic and was never meant for high-quality pictures. Here's what it looked like still in the box.

I laughed when I read Jim's lament that his Magimatic pictures were so blurry. "The X50’s shutter button is super stiff and hard to fire, leading to camera shake that obscured the details of my recorded childhood memories," he wrote, and YES, I had the same problem! So many of my old photos are blurry. For example, here's my dog Herman, in November 1979:

(I may also have been running after her to get the picture -- Herman used to cower if I ever raised the camera and would either scurry away or roll over on her back in a submissive pose.) As I recall, the button got harder and harder to push as the camera aged. By the time I got to high school it was barely functional.

This is what most of my pictures look like from that era. But what can one expect from a $10 camera?

I believe the Magimatic was so named because it took a Magicube, a flash cube that required no batteries. Flash pictures generally worked better, perhaps because that brief moment of illumination helped conceal any camera shake. Unfortunately I have very few flash photos, because getting a flash cube meant going to the drug store and spending money, God forbid.

Here's one that I've blogged before, of my dad. It's one of my first pictures -- you can see the Magimatic camera box sitting on the table in front of him.

Apparently some camera buffs still use Magimatics, even though the cartridge film is no longer commercially manufactured. Here's a whole video on how to load an old cartridge with modern 35mm film and wind it through the camera. Why anyone would want to do that I'm not sure, but whatever floats your boat, as they say.

Anyway, I had some fun reading and reminiscing about this camera yesterday. And as long as we're wandering down a nostalgic path, how do you like my new t-shirt?

This is a replica of the t-shirts sold at the first concert I ever attended. I had an original but of course it eventually fell apart, decades ago. I was looking around online to remind myself what the shirt looked like, and I found someone online selling them new. It just arrived yesterday. Score!

Carnage and a Space Dog

I came across this gruesome scene outside a charity shop on Finchley Road yesterday morning. What could have happened here? It looks like a gigantic object fell from a great height onto these unsuspecting pedestrians, at least one of whom was wearing no pants. It's a mystery.

I also found a really good clay flowerpot, which was sitting next to some trash bins. I left it there because I couldn't very well take it to work, figuring if it was still there when I walked home I'd grab it. It was, and I did.

So you could say I had a productive day.

Oh, I did other things too. I worked in the Lower School twice yesterday, and I'm embarking on a new project to help them get their board games organized. For example, they had two "Monopoly Junior" games that had become intermingled over time, and I spent about an hour counting out all the pieces so that we had one complete game. (The second game wound up being just bits and bobs, not enough to play, so maybe we'll save it for spare parts.) As I said to Dave when I got home, "For this I went to college?"

Here's a new artwork in the Lower School hallway. (I recommend clicking the picture to enlarge it for full effect.) It says "respect" on that sunray leading to the...dog?...carrying a forked stick and wearing two neckties. At first I thought the background was outer space, but then I saw fish and what looks like lots of little bacteria floating around. Clearly someone is studying surrealism.

Thanks for indulging my musings about my childhood yesterday. In the interest of fairness I should mention that my parents did at least two other things for me photographically when I was a kid -- they enrolled me in summer camp, where photography was an activity I studied, and I got experience both taking and processing photos there. They also signed me up for a weeklong kids' photography course at the local university when I was in eighth grade. I was hardly deprived. My main gripe is that it took so long for them to give me a decent camera, but I suppose I could have saved up for one if I'd been really committed. My weekly allowance was something like $1.50, with occasional $10 or $20 payments when I mowed the lawn -- so it would have taken years, but it was theoretically possible!

Our tube strike is continuing. Every time I pass the crowded bus stops and busy overground stations -- the overground rail network is not closed -- I thank goodness I can walk to work.

Youthful Obsessions

Here's our pink anemone, a late-summer bloomer that's doing really well this year. I was admiring it the other day when I spotted a tiny flower crab spider perched on its uppermost petals. Can you see it, on the closest flower?

Here's an extreme (and slightly blurry) close-up. These spiders lurk on flowers, waiting for bees or other pollinators to fly in for some nectar. When they do, the spiders grab them with those long front legs and eat them. Nature red in tooth and claw!

I ordered a book of Stephen Shore's early photography last week, and it arrived yesterday. Shore is one of my favorite photographers, shooting the kinds of seemingly banal streetscapes that I appreciate -- finding the beauty in the ordinary. He recently released a book of images he made as a teenager in the early '60s, walking around the streets of New York, and wrote an accompanying essay in which he recounted how he got interested in photography. Apparently an uncle gave him a photo processing kit for his sixth birthday (!) and his parents allowed him to turn his bathroom into a darkroom. From then on, he processed his family's photos and when he was eight years old, his family gave him a Ricoh camera. Four years later, they gave him a Nikon SLR. A neighbor gave him a book of Walker Evans' photographs.

"My natural way of learning was to become interested in something and throw myself into it, to become obsessed for a period of time and then move on to something else," he wrote. He never had much interest in formal education, but when his parents sent him to a boarding school in the Hudson Valley he met a teacher who was also a photographer, and who encouraged him. He moved back to Manhattan for high school, wandered the city taking pictures, and famously had the chutzpah to schedule an appointment with Edward Steichen, the director of the Photography Department at the Museum of Modern Art. Steichen bought three of his photographs for the museum, and his career was launched.

I'm telling you all this because what struck me, as I read this essay, was the way the adults in his life encouraged him from a very young age -- sometimes to an extraordinary degree. His father was a handbag manufacturer, his mother a homemaker, yet they gave him expensive cameras and allowed him to transform their house. They indulged his obsessive learning style.

I can't help but contrast this with my own parents. They also gave me a camera when I was very young, a Magimatic, and my dad had built a darkroom in our house where he showed me how to process pictures. But after their divorce and my dad's remarriage, they both became strangely reluctant to encourage my interests in photography. My dad took pictures with me a handful of times, allowing me to use his Minolta, but I begged for a decent camera for years and didn't get one until my senior year of high school. And although I was never very interested in photo processing -- I was happy to let the drug store do it -- I would have enjoyed more darkroom time.

I shared Shore's obsessive learning tendencies, but unlike his parents, mine reacted to them negatively. They got exasperated if I spent too much time on any one hobby, and frustrated if I neglected my schoolwork. During a period in my early teens when I was consumed with taping music off the radio, I remember my mother saying, "I don't know why you have to become so obsessed with everything." That criticism nagged at me. And yet, what if they had indulged those obsessions? What if they'd encouraged me to learn about recording, how it worked, how to manage levels, how to splice and edit? Maybe I'd be a sound engineer. Or maybe not.

I don't think they were bad parents. I'm not saying that. I did get encouragement in some hobbies -- beer can collecting, stamp collecting, shell collecting, and yes, photography. But I think they were consumed by their own lives and dramas -- particularly my mother -- and my father was constrained by a self-imposed need to treat me, my brother and my step-siblings (the children of his second wife) fairly and equally. He was reluctant to spend too much time or money on any one of us, because he'd have to do the same for the others. (It's not coincidental that the hobbies he most encouraged, like collecting beer cans, were those I shared with my siblings.) Shore, as an only child, didn't have that kind of competition.

I guess all I'm saying is, I wish my parents had seen my youthful obsessions as a good thing, rather than an annoyance. And I wish they'd paid more attention to helping me channel those obsessions in productive ways. I still might not be Stephen Shore, but I've always felt like I missed a crucial early stage in developing my photographic interests, particularly. Then again, I suppose there are plenty of people who come to things late in life and excel nonetheless.

No Blood Moon for Me

Another of our orchids is blooming. This is the one I found while walking Olga at Fortune Green a couple of years ago. This is its second round of blossoms for us, and they're a nice contrast with the yellow-green orchids I found later that same year, which are also blooming up a storm at the moment. You can see the head of the glass pheasant popping up in the bottom of the frame there.

Yesterday was pretty quiet. I spent a lot of time reading. I had vague plans to take a walk last night up to Parliament Hill to watch the lunar eclipse, or "blood moon" as it's popularly known, but I got engrossed in a movie and forgot! Dave and I rented "Eddington," which I heard about through the QAA podcast. It's a movie about a small-town sheriff in New Mexico who becomes consumed with right-wing paranoia during the Covid-19 pandemic, and I enjoyed it. It reminded me of "Urbania," a movie I saw years ago that made references to every urban myth at the time, thereby satirizing the whole phenomenon. "Eddington" refers to just about every element of online debate in 2020, from the advisability of masking to Black Lives Matter to fears of Antifa and wokeness. It's meant to be over the top -- there's even a literal dumpster fire -- but it gets seriously, violently crazy at the end. So, yeah, who needed a "blood moon"?

In the afternoon our phones both simultaneously went off with a loud tone we'd never heard before -- a sort of high-pitched alarm. It turned out to be a test of a government emergency alert system, but you'd think someone could have warned us it was coming. I thought Medvedev had finally followed through on his threats to start dropping nukes. (Here's what it sounded like, if you're interested.) It was similar to those "Amber Alerts" I get when I visit Florida -- government alerts about missing children that come through the phone with an alarm -- which always startle me.

Apparently our tube strike is happening today as planned. Fortunately I walk to work so it won't be a huge issue for me, but I feel sorry for people who have to travel any distance. I assume a lot of people will be working from home. Apparently the strikers want a shorter working week, among other things. Their work week is already 35 hours but they say this contributes to on-the-job fatigue. I have a feeling this may be a difficult argument to make to the rest of us, who work 40 hours, but I suppose they would argue there are differences in the intensity of the job. (Tell that to anyone who's had to manage a room full of seventh graders!)

Finally, Dave and I made some plans for October break. We're going to take a sleeper train to Penzance, in Cornwall, for a short stay. The main purpose of the trip is the train experience, and we're only going to spend two days in Penzance itself. But it should be fun, or at least interesting. Up to now, the farthest west we've ever been in that direction is Salisbury, so this will be new territory for us!

Goldfish Revisited

I'm getting a bit of a slow start this morning because I slept a little later than usual. Last night Dave and I went to see our friends Gordon and Donna in Leyton, East London, and we were there until about 11 p.m. That is a positively insane hour for me these days, so now I need some recovery time!

Yesterday was pretty slow, consumed with reading and household errands. I did all the usual stuff -- laundry, gardening -- and read about 30 more pages of John Rechy's "City of Night," which I hadn't picked up all week. I like this book -- I keep thinking it must have created a heck of a scandal when it was published in the early '60s -- but I can see it's going to take me some time.

We didn't head out to Leyton until about 5 p.m., and neither of the most direct tube lines -- the Jubilee and the Central -- were running. I don't know if that was a prelude to the tube strike, which is supposed to start today, or an unrelated problem. We caught the overground instead, which got us to Stratford without too much trouble, and then we started to hoof it to Gordon's. We passed an idling taxi and grabbed that to save ourselves the walk, because Dave was carrying a banoffee pie and schlepping that around East London wasn't the easiest thing. The taxi let us out on Leyton High Road so I could photograph the buildings above, which I've been meaning to do for a while. Isn't that a crazy paint job?

Anyway, Gordon made dinner and we had a great time catching up. I asked if they'd recently seen the neighbor boy with the goldfish, and they weren't sure who I meant, so I read them the last few paragraphs of my post from January 2012. We had a good laugh. That kid is in his mid-20's now. How time flies. But I have never forgotten Alan John the goldfish!

Over the Fence

Thank goodness it's the weekend! This has been a long week, with some very busy days. Yesterday, fortunately, was much easier -- I spent several hours in the library's poetry section, weeding old books and trying to make room on the shelves for fresh material.

Many people don't understand book weeding, or question why we do it. But even in areas like poetry, where the information contained within the pages of the books doesn't age, the books themselves do. Libraries eventually find themselves with a lot of old, yellowed, sagging, marked-up poetry books, and libraries that have a carefully edited collection are actually used more effectively than those with shelves and shelves packed full of aging material. As both of my bosses have often said, we are not an archive. Our books are meant to be used.

So, yeah, I weeded out a lot of books -- mostly huge, dense anthologies and literary criticism from the 1960s through the '80s, most of which hadn't been checked out for many, many years. Some were never checked out. Now there's room to breathe over there and the shelves look much fresher. As I've written before, I love weeding -- it plays to my desire for organization and simplifying.

I'm getting more used to my new glasses but I still don't love them. I find I only use the top part of the bifocal lens. The bottom part might be useful if I'm trying to read tiny print on a jar, for example, or maybe on a pharmaceutical package insert. But for my day-to-day work mostly on computers, the top part is fine.

This week I had the garden cam pointed backwards, at the junction of the wooden fence and the brick wall at the back of the garden. This is where animals come in and out of the garden, and I wanted to see how they do it. Here's a quick video that answers the question -- for both foxes and cats. There's a similar point on the other side, and in this way the animals can treat all our gardens as one big hunting and/or exploring ground.

The other day I talked to my quiet neighbor, who lives in the house physically connected to ours on one side. She is a model neighbor -- we never hear her and she keeps pretty much to herself. But as I was moving around the rubbish bins the other day she stopped and asked who was living upstairs. So I gave her the updates about the Russians moving out and this new family moving in, and how pleased I am because they're so quiet compared to the Russians. She agreed, and it never occurred to me that of course she'd been hearing them too through the common wall. Things are much more peaceful for both of us these days!

(Photo: A study in squares and rectangles, taken as I waited for the tube one morning this week.)

Cat Napkin and Free Speech

Can you stand another bee photo? I took this one a few days ago of a bee trying valiantly to visit the long, trumpet-shaped flowers on Nicole the Nicotiana. It was quite windy and the bee was having trouble landing on them. I'm not sure those flowers are really made for bees as opposed to ants or something smaller, but somehow it managed and hopefully benefitted. I would think a Nicotiana would make some pungent honey, as aromatic as those plants are. Even just touching it leaves my hand strongly but not unpleasantly scented, and feeling a bit sticky.

As a follow-up to my previous post about covering books, I thought you'd like to see what I'm dealing with in terms of quantity. These are the books I covered yesterday, both hardbacks and paperbacks. This is how they usually come to me, in stacks with the spine labels printed on top. I covered all of these and it took me a couple of hours. Whew!

Covering can be a weirdly soothing process, a task that requires skill and attention but not a lot of brain power. I can daydream a bit while I do it. But as some of you suggested in the comments, it also becomes tedious when there are a lot of books to do -- and also kind of painful, because it requires a good grip and a firm hand to smooth down the plastic covering, especially on the paperbacks. My hands are always sore after I cover a stack of books.

Anyway, enough of that.

A student gave the head librarian a cupcake yesterday on this napkin. I thought it was pretty cute so I thought I'd share it. The librarian also gave me the cupcake, which wasn't bad!

This reminds me that The New York Times had an article the other day about "junk journaling," in which people -- all women, in the article -- create collages in notebooks with found items like stickers, labels, napkins, stamps, ticket stubs, whatever. I suppose I'm junk journaling here, in a virtual sense. I've always saved stickers and labels and other bits of trash and stuck them into my journals, way back to when I was a kid in the '70s. I had no idea what I was doing had a name. (Granted, my collages were not as dense as those produced by some of the junk journalers highlighted in the article!)

Dave was away last night for Back-to-School night, in which parents come to the school, see the facilities and teachers, blah blah blah. There was another one scheduled for next week but now that's been postponed because of a planned tube strike beginning Sunday.

As long as we're talking about current events, did you see that comedian Graham Linehan was arrested for some anti-trans tweets he made several months ago? This has caused quite a furor and a discussion about the limits of policing speech in the UK. Although Britain values free speech, there is no written constitutional guarantee like there is in the USA and there are limits to what can be said without legal repercussions. I can't walk up to a person on the street, for example, and use racist language against them -- that's an offense for which I can be arrested. Linehan was arrested, as I understand it, because his tweets recommended punching trans women if they're in female-only spaces -- that specific suggestion of violence is what got him into trouble, though he says he was "joking." (Ha. Ha.)

I think what Linehan said was odious and offensive, but I do think the police went too far in arresting him. His threat, such as it was, was non-specific and not directed toward any individual. I tend to have a rather maximalist view of free speech, that people should be allowed to be assholes if they want -- and perhaps this is my American perspective since free speech in the USA is more legally absolute than here.

But I question why people say the things they do. I don't know why we all can't be more considerate of each other, live and let live, and stop trying to game the Twitter algorithm by being the most offensive person in the digital room and thereby getting more views and retweets. As the saying goes, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all."

A Harvest, and Covering Books

We got these tomatoes from our tomato plant (or, as the British say, "tomahto plahnt") last weekend. Unlike our first harvest these weren't at all mealy and in fact we found them really good. I only wish we had more! I think the plant still has some green ones on it but who knows how well they'll ripen as the weather cools. Dave's co-worker gave him this plant last spring, so frankly anything we get is a bonus.

OK. Some of you asked for details about covering books. I'm going to do my best to make this interesting.

When we add a book to our library -- whether purchased or donated -- it goes first to the cataloging clerk. That person, my co-worker, enters the book into the online library catalog using international library references that guide its placement, within a certain Dewey decimal category, for example. Her cataloging ensures that someone searching for a book about a certain topic or by a certain author will be able to find it. The clerk prints a spine label bearing the book's call number -- usually a sheet of them at a time, for a stack of books -- and then hands everything to me.

If the book is a paperback, I start here. First I attach the spine label, which you see I've already done. Then I use scissors and a plastic smoothing tool to wrap the book in special library-quality book covering. It's an adhesive plastic a bit like contact paper, but made specially for books.

If I do a good job (which I always do!) the book winds up looking like this. It takes a little more than seven minutes (I timed myself) to wrap the adhesive plastic around the entire book, smoothing out any air bubbles with the tool, and to trim the corners and edges. Sometimes books need more than one spine label, if they're for a certain age group or fall into a certain category like a graphic novel.

I also stamp the book with the name of our library, inside the front and back covers, as well as the date it was acquired. I attach a "date due" slip inside the back cover, and that's where I stamp the due date when the book is checked out. (Most libraries don't stamp due dates anymore but we still do. We're old-fashioned like that. It helps kids know when the book is due and helps us see at a glance how often it gets read.)

Hardcover books are a whole 'nother thing. I take the dust jacket off the book, affix the spine label to it, and cut a different kind of book cover to fit it.

This cover is a sort of clear plastic envelope with a paper backing, and an adhesive strip at the top. The dust jacket goes inside it, facing the plastic, then the adhesive strip is uncovered and the clear plastic is folded down and secured to the paper backing to create a pocket around the dust jacket. Can you envision that? Sometimes part of the paper needs to be trimmed away to better fit the dust jacket, in which case the plastic folds down farther. It's basically one-size-fits-all.

Then the corners of the covered jacket are taped to the book using special book tape, which secures the cover to the book itself.

And voila! The book is covered, and after stamping it's ready to be checked out.

I'm sure this process still isn't entirely clear, but I couldn't take a photo of every single step because a) phones are prohibited at our school starting this year, so I had to be furtive about using mine at my desk, and b) I need two hands for most of the steps so I had no way to hold the camera.

If you want more information about the products used during this process, you can see them at library supply sites like this one.

Covering a single book is no big deal, but often the cataloger hands me a stack of 20 books at a time, and covering those can take a few hours -- especially since I'm also dealing with kids and re-shelving and doing all the other things that are part of my job.

Fun, right? Aren't you glad you asked?