Devil Dogs

Yesterday was gray and rainy, so my brother and I sought out indoor things to do. After dropping my niece off at school, we went to one of J.M.'s favorite coffee shops and hashed out a plan. We were supposed to run an errand at one of the big shopping centers in town, but we decided along the way to drop in to an antique mall where I've picked up some great old Florida photos in past years.

Fortunately, my brother really likes antique shopping. Dave can't stand it, so it's not something I get to do very often. We got there just as the place opened and spent a couple of hours poring over all the treasures. We even ate lunch there.

You gotta love these orange dogs with triangular eyes! And for only $8! I passed them by but then, while we were driving away, I looked through the photos on my camera, came across the one above and thought, "I NEED THOSE DOGS!" So we went back for them. They'll be coming to London. I also got a carved wooden woodpecker plaque that looks like it was someone's art project at summer camp. (I'd take a photo to show you but it's out in the car.) And of course I found some more photos to rescue and some old postcards too.

Good thing I have room in my luggage.

We got so engrossed in antiques -- we went to a second shop too -- that we didn't even bother to run our errand. Before we knew it it was time to collect Kate from school and go to dinner. During antique browsing and driving time J.M. and I had plenty of opportunity to talk about everything from our '70s latchkey upbringing to NATO and Trump. (Fortunately we share a common political perspective.) There really is something special and cathartic about being able to talk to someone who shares your personal history.

For dinner we went to a favorite local restaurant that unfortunately had a live band playing. It was quite loud and made conversation hard. It would have made Dave crazy -- he hates live music in a restaurant, and I'm not such a fan of it either. These guys were good, at least.

Unfortunately, I didn't get to see my older niece, Jane, who is living at college nearby. I don't want to intrude on her campus experience so I would never go there, and she was too busy to join us last night. I told J.M. not to bother her or pressure her to come to dinner. "She's doing what you're supposed to do in college. She's making her own life," I said.

Today I am back on the road, headed to Tampa with a special detour in mind.

Be Strong in the Lord

I got up early yesterday morning and took a long walk through the neighborhoods just to the east of Dave's parents' mobile home. It was about 55º F (or 13º C) -- cool enough that I needed a sweater, which isn't all that unusual for Florida in February. I had a great time checking out all the Florida-themed paint jobs and garden ornaments.

Then I took some boxed bed frames up to the UPS store to return them to Amazon for Dave's sister. They were purchased for their parents's new place, but for whatever reason they didn't work out. Those suckers were heavy and I was glad to get them shipped back and to be able to do something small for Dawn, who has been working so hard to get their mom and dad settled.

I had an appointment to meet my brother in Tampa at 12:30 p.m., so I hit the road about 11 a.m., which I thought would give me plenty of time. But THE TRAFFIC! Holy cow! I navigated my way out to I-75 and the northbound cars were backed up for miles. I don't know if there was an accident or what, but rather get in the middle of that congestion I drove past the Interstate and found a northbound detour, through the sprawling new housing developments that have paved almost every inch of the swamps and pastures that not so long ago patchworked that area. By the time I was on the main road again it was practically noon.

I got to Tampa half an hour late and joined my brother, J.M., for a meatball sub at Alfonso's, a pizzeria we frequented as kids -- now run by the former owners' son. Still a fantastic meatball sub! We ate as televisions overhead showed highlights of World Wrestling Federation matches.

J.M. and I had some important family business to attend to -- scattering my mom's ashes. It took a while to work out a plan, get permission and wait until I was back in the country. Not to be all mysterious, but I'll keep the details to ourselves.

We also visited the house where we both grew up. No one was home, but I laid a hand on two of the big trees on the property -- a magnolia my mother planted and a pine that was there before the house was built in 1966. I choked up, thinking about my mom and how these two trees had seen us grow up and get older. And now a whole new family is growing up beneath their branches. Trees seem so eternal.

That's the lake where we used to swim. If there is a God, he/she was present at the moment I took that picture.

We drove around the neighborhood for old times' sake and then hit the road separately for Jacksonville, where my brother lives.

It took four hours to get up here, so I was driving through little towns like Waldo, Starke and Middleburg at night. I haven't driven on an open road after dark in ages, and I worried I'd come across a deer or other wildlife, but I didn't. In fact I saw no animals all day, living or dead, except humans, the occasional bird and two house cats frolicking on a side street when I stopped in Starke to take the photo above. The absence of roadkill was striking. I wondered if wild animals are learning to stay away from roads, or perhaps there are simply a lot fewer of them.

Anyway, I'm here now!

Another Day in Paradise

Morning: Eggs, toast, grapefruit on the front porch. The weather is cool and crystal blue. The next-door neighbor, Tom, stops by to ask how Dave's parents are doing. He seems shocked by the suddenness of their move, but we explain how it happened -- Dave's dad's back injury, and how it left his mother (who has her own mobility issues) unable to care for him. Tom goes into a monologue about his Dutch heritage and his history in Michigan.

When we later tell Dave's parents about Tom's visit, they roll their eyes. "That guy likes to talk," they say.

Dave's sister leaves to take the parents to some doctors' appointments. Dave and I drive out to Anna Maria Island to see the hurricane damage. On the Cortez waterfront, the Seafood Shack stands decimated -- "crushed by the storms," as my brother wrote earlier. We all ate here as children. Now it's going to become a public dock and marina.

And of course, the Rod N' Reel Pier, which I wrote about last fall after Helene damaged it and Milton destroyed what was left. The sign says they intend to rebuild. A guy in biking gear is taking selfies next to the fenced-off pier entrance, decorated with wreaths and flowers. He shares his stories of fishing here with friends while growing up in Bradenton. I share mine of late nights with college friends, sitting on the end of the pier with bottles of Miller Lite, watching fish churn the water and a Space Shuttle launch on the other side of the state, blazing a trail like a shooting star in reverse.

Dave and I drive back to the mainland, navigating horrendous high-season traffic, to join his parents for lunch at Discovery Village. Dave and his sister go back to their apartment to assemble more furniture and fill out 10-page insurance forms that inexplicably come with multiple envelopes, yet all seem to be going to the same place.

I duck out for a Starbucks coffee and find this:

What is it about Trump that creates this kind of enthusiasm? People loved Reagan, Kennedy, Clinton, Obama, but none of them, to my knowledge, inspired their own roadside shops. Neither did Newt Gingrich, Barry Goldwater, Rush Limbaugh or other earlier heroes of the rabid right. I suppose it's because Trump is not just a man. He's an attitude.

I drive back to Discovery Village and we hang around until dinnertime, when we go to a nearby Italian restaurant. We find an easily accessible table and park Dave's parents' walkers next to a wall. A jazz band plays too loudly and I, trying to eat healthy, get the biggest, most ridiculous salad I have ever seen, topped with about half of a full-sized chicken (diced). I eat a third of it, bring home the rest and throw it away.

Today I'm off to Tampa to meet my brother for some family business before heading north to Jacksonville.

Oysters with Pearl

Dave and I have rapidly settled into the American way of life. We are eating, eating, eating and occasionally shopping. When in Rome, I suppose.

We went to breakfast yesterday at the Cortez Cafe, which is one of my favorite spots for pancakes and eggs (and I had both). Then we moved some furniture and wall decor to Daves' parents' new place in Discovery Village, which sounds like a bigger job than it really was -- the furniture wasn't large and our cars have capacious rear storage so we could do it without renting a U-Haul or anything like that.

While Dave and his sister stayed at DV to assemble some chairs for his parents (imagine long but unnecessary story here involving free chairs mistakenly sent via Amazon), I decided to run to Kohl's to return a belt that his mom sent for my birthday in November. (When I say "run" I mean drive, obviously. Again, the American way of life.)

The belt was too small. I have a 32-inch waist but she sent me a 32-inch belt, which of course means it wasn't long enough to be buckled because you need a little extra belt for that. So I brought it back from London and drove it to Kohl's and explained my tale of woe: old purchase, different store, no receipt, blah blah blah.

They were nice about it, even though I could only get a refund for about two-thirds of what Dave's mom paid. I intended to also buy a replacement belt and some new undershirts. But the process turned complicated when they needed a driver's license, which I suddenly could not find. I looked in my wallet and my pockets and...WHERE WAS MY DRIVER'S LICENSE?! I can't drive around Florida for a whole week with no license!

I tried to pass of my British biometric ID card but that wouldn't work because they have to scan a bar code on the license, and then of course that led to questions about why I had a British ID and a purported Florida license that I couldn't find. I finally ran out to the car and was half-tempted to drive away before I got arrested for identity fraud -- but I found the license, which I'd carelessly tossed into the glove box, thank god thank god thank god. I took it in and they scanned it and then they needed a phone number for my Kohl's reward dollars, or something like that, and of course my British number wouldn't work. So I gave Dave's Mom's number and she got my Kohl's dollars, and will now probably be arrested herself when she goes back to the store.

Long story short, I got out of there with a new belt and t-shirts, and not in handcuffs.

I've seen lingering signs of damage from last year's hurricanes, Helene and Milton. The mobile home park where Dave's parents have wintered for years (and where Dave, his sister and I are now staying) has several units that look like this, especially along the waterfront of Sarasota Bay. There are uprooted forests of Australian pines, gigantic trees that are non-native and invasive and not really made to withstand those kinds of storms. Miraculously, Dave's parents' place escaped serious damage, though some of the landscaping seems to have been killed by salt water.

On my way back to Discovery Village from Kohl's, I took a side trip to drive through the neighborhood where my friend Cherie lived in the '90s. I used to go to her house every Thursday night to watch "Must See TV" but on this return trip I could not find it. The area has changed so much with road-widening and new construction, and of course all the trees are bigger, and I recognized nothing.

I came across this flock of ibis, which seemed perfectly untroubled by the increasing urbanization as they happily nibbled morsels off the pavement and out of the lawns.

Finally, last night, we went to dinner at the Anna Maria Oyster Bar, which is a longtime haunt of Dave's parents and right next to DV, and thus very convenient. (Even though it's next door we drove, because now they both use walkers.) I had a couple of raw oysters, coconut shrimp with cheese grits and Brussels sprouts, and key lime pie.

We were intrigued by AMOB's dedicated waitress, Pearl:

I have never in my life seen a robotic waitress. (I'm saying waitress because of the coconut-husk bikini top, which may be in dubious taste from a feminist perspective but never mind. This is Trump country.) She seemed very "Star Trek." We gave our orders to a human, and humans mostly took care of us, but Pearl did steady duty helping to deliver food. She was very skilled in steering around people and obstacles, and seemed to flawlessly navigate the layout of the restaurant. Apparently she has occasionally been known to get stuck on a rug or drop a bowl of soup, but what waitress doesn't?

I'm not sure what's on the agenda for today, aside from more time at Discovery Village. ("What are we discovering?" Dave asked. None of us are sure.)

(Top photo: A bath-house at an RV park near Dave's parents' mobile home.)

Spacious Skies

We arrived in Tampa safe and sound last night, tired from the trip and the persistent crowds but otherwise fine. We flew out of Gatwick on British Airways, taking the direct flight that I always like. But this time, checking in was a nightmare. We were at the airport the recommended three hours ahead of time, and we spent an hour and a half standing in the check-in line. It was huge to begin with, but then the BA staff kept calling people up for flights that were leaving sooner than ours, so over and over again we were bypassed by hordes of people behind us who basically didn't give themselves enough time. As I told the woman standing in front of us -- who was equally punctual and thus equally punished -- "I'm just going to show up an hour later next time!"

And the ticket agent had to jump through hoops to find us both seats because by the time we got to the counter we were so freaking late and the plane was oversold. (Normally we check in online in advance, but I confess I completely forgot. Won't make that mistake again!)

Somehow we got seats -- Dave even got an exit row, though he said it wasn't particularly comfortable -- and here we are. I spent the flight reading -- two New Yorkers, a BBC "Gardener's World" magazine and the rest of "The Wager," which I really liked.

Once in Florida, we disembarked from the plane, breezed through passport control, baggage claim and customs, and said hello to Phoebe the flamingo. (Obviously that's not me in the picture. Phoebe is besieged by a steady stream of photo-posers and selfie-takers.)

We then went to pick up our rental car, which turned into another massive delay because of course the people in front of us had some problem with their car reservation, which the counter agent was apparently unable to solve to their satisfaction. A manager was called, there was much strenuous explanation of policies and procedures blah blah blah, the customers had to get on the phone to a travel agent of some kind, there were furrowed brows and shaking heads. We were finally called to an adjacent counter (after a 30-minute wait) and when we departed a short time later with our key fob, they were still there, trying to get to Disney World.

Speaking of which, there was lots of Disney swag on our plane -- t-shirts, bags, stuffed Mickeys and Minnies. The man in front of me was wearing a Disney-branded elastic headband securing his sunglasses to his head (yes, even on the plane). You could tell these were all people who had already visited the Happiest Place on Earth and were going back for another round. Other British schools must also be on break now -- in any case, there were a million kids.

We got on the road, cruised down the smooth, wide highways through St. Petersburg and across the Sunshine Skyway Bridge to Bradenton. I had to pay the bridge toll ($1.75) in cash, and all I had was a $50 bill that Dave's parents sent me for my birthday last year. "This is all I have, I'm sorry," I said to the toll-taker when I handed it to him. "Well, what if I don't have the change?" he said, with a half-grin. "I don't know!" I responded, but I could tell he did in fact have it, thank God, and we were on our way again.

We got to Dave's parents' place in Bradenton and sat up with his sister Dawn, de-briefing about their recent move to assisted living and all the tasks involved. Today we're moving some furniture and other stuff to their new place at Discovery Village, which Dawn has branded "DV" for short.

I was up at 4:20 a.m. this morning (in England it was 9:20 a.m., so I actually overslept!) and had to run out to find coffee because the coffee machine here has apparently already made the move to DV. Fortunately there's a big Ed Ruscha-worthy gas station with an attached 7-Eleven just a mile or two down the road. The hot, fresh coffee gushed out of the urn like a brown waterfall and here I am, back in the land of plenty.

Taking Wing

As I walked home from work yesterday, I noticed that the Bottlenecks sign that was recently revealed on one of our corner shops is being covered up again. At least it's not being painted over or destroyed. Maybe at some point decades in the future, when Every Skin and its successor shops have come and gone, Bottlenecks will once again see the light of day and make people wonder about its origins.

The last two days at work were ridiculously quiet, given that there were very few students in the building. I mostly did background tasks in the library, things that I've been meaning to get to but can't when the kids are around. I cleaned out our resource lists and catalog collections -- lists of books we compile for specific classes or class projects -- deleting dozens of old ones. I also cleaned out my desk drawers. Big excitement!

Finally, at about 3 p.m., I could no longer pretend I was doing anything useful and I came home. Dave was already here because he did all of his parent/teacher conferences from his recliner via video calls. Our modern world!

We did nothing special for Valentine's Day, unless you count the steak dinner Dave cooked last night, which was indeed pretty fantastic. I'm not a big steak eater, normally, but that steak was darn good. I also got to watch Dave administer his own injection of Yuflyma, the hilariously named medication he's now on for his Crohn's. It's a "bioidentical" of Humira, and it replaces a different medicine he used to have to get every three months via infusion at the hospital. So the good thing is, no more hospital visits, which used to take hours and required him to miss work. The bad thing is, self-injection -- but it's actually pretty easy, administered every two weeks with something like an epi-pen rather than an old-fashioned syringe.

And this morning, we're off to Florida. In fact, I have to go pack. Our friend Warren will be staying over to take care of Olga, who is so far none the wiser that we are leaving. (We've delayed getting out the suitcases until the last possible moment.) Warren has stayed with Olga before so I think she'll adapt to the situation just fine, even if she's not particularly happy about it.

My Country 'Tis of Thee

Well, the unthinkable has come to pass, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been confirmed as the USA's new health secretary. I really did not think it would happen. I thought just a handful of Republicans -- particularly those with medical backgrounds or moderate tendencies (like Collins and Murkowski) -- might oppose him. But no! It turns out the only Republican with any integrity is Mitch McConnell, who helped enable the Trump administration in the first place and now seems to be having sudden pangs of conscience. Too little too late, Mitch.

Meanwhile, the National Park Service has stripped any references to transgender people from its page dedicated to the Stonewall Inn and the uprising there in 1969 -- even though transgender people were a key component of that event. Talk about rewriting history. It's positively Soviet.

All my life, I have believed in the strength of the American system of government. Checks and balances seemed to ensure that nothing too wild could or would ever happen. That was the genius of our Founding Fathers, right? Even the dark days of George W. Bush and his war on terror, when we tortured and incarcerated people indefinitely in Guantanamo Bay without trial and I was left with the feeling that I didn't know my own country -- even those days didn't seem as perilous as this. With Congress as Trump's lapdog, the only checks and balances we have are the courts. They are pushing back valiantly, but you gotta wonder what's going to happen when Trump, with his apparently endless reserves of money, litigiousness and bile, appeals any contrary decision to the Supreme Court.

Trump and his minions insist those pesky judges have no right to stop him. He's the president, after all! Apparently he failed civics, if he ever studied it.

And while Trump continues to lay claim of ownership to Gaza, imperiling the release of Israeli hostages (who he really doesn't care about and in fact would rather see not released, giving him and Netanyahu a green light to continue exterminating the Palestinians), I note that the right-wing media outlet I peruse doesn't report his Gaza comments at all. His MAGA followers don't like this Gaza idea, because they don't see it as "America First," so the right-wing media response is to simply ignore it.

I don't want to seem too pessimistic, but it does seem like we're in uncharted waters and about to smash ourselves on a reef. I have no idea what's going to happen. Meanwhile I have friends in Washington who are losing their jobs or, if they're lucky enough to still be employed (so far), are sifting through agency grants and policies for problematic words like "justice." It makes my head spin.

I know, I know. Resist. Believe me, I'm resisting in whatever way I know how. I'm putting my money where my mouth is with donations. Just the other day I bought a "Gulf of Mexico" t-shirt in a vain attempt to resist Trump's ridiculous rewriting of our global map -- a minor form of resistance, to be sure, but it's something. (The shirt is being delivered to Dave's parents in Florida, where I hope I'll be able to wear it without being killed.)

In other news, unrelated to Trump, I purged my iPhone of photos. I'd stacked up a ridiculous quantity of photos over the years -- about 2,600 of them since 2017 or so. I winnowed them repeatedly over time but they still felt overly burdensome for my phone's operating system. They were all backed up elsewhere, so on Wednesday I deleted about 2,000 of them, giving me a much more reasonable library of pictures that I might actually want to look through. Of course, Olga is in at least half of them.

I just realized, seeing the date, that I penned this political screed on Valentine's Day. Sorry about that. Not very celebratory of love, but I send you all a virtual hug anyway.

(Photos, both taken yesterday: A glass-block sidewalk panel over a shop basement on Finchley Road; a brick wall in St. John's Wood.)

Skunk, NAFO and Another Moment

Here's another dewy plant in our garden -- an aquilegia that's just sprouting. More signs of spring and new growth!

I think my computer is biting the dust. When I started it this morning, after it nursed at its charger all night, it promptly died. I got a "low battery" notice but when I clicked on the icon, it said the battery was at 98 percent (although I also got a "service recommended" alert). Anyway, I can't do much on battery now, and the speaker is shot, and a lot of the letters are worn off my keyboard, which looks hilarious. I've had this machine for nine years and it's had heavy use. I think its time has come.

I probably won't deal with that until we come back from Florida. I have enough on my plate at the moment.

Yesterday afternoon was quiet in the library and I finally got some things done that I've been meaning to tackle, like updating our database usage statistics. Doesn't that sound exciting?! Woo hoo! I even had a chance to respond to blog comments and catch up on some blogs.

I expect more of the same today, though I have a couple of projects I want to work on, like cleaning up our resource lists and collections in our catalogue. (Sometimes when a class does a certain project, we put together a list of books for the students to draw on as resources, and those lists tend to stack up in our computer even if the class never does that project again. They must be manually cleared out from time to time.)

You know how I'm always intrigued by stickers I find around town? Here's one that's a bit mysterious. What on earth is NAFO? And what is that creature that looks like a fox with Donald Trump hair?

Well, according to the ever-reliable Internet, NAFO stands for the North Atlantic Fella Organization, an "internet meme and social media movement" that arose after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It's meant to counter Russian propaganda and support Ukraine, and its symbol is a Shiba Inu dog, which is somehow related to the Doge meme. I think I'm too unhip to really understand how all these things come together, but at any rate, that's what we're dealing with.

Speaking of being unhip, I walked into the library yesterday and smelt a distinct skunky smell. I thought, "How did some animal get into the library?" I wondered if a fox had invaded the building and left its mark somewhere. But then a co-worker came up to me and said, "Did you smell the marijuana when you came in this morning?" Oh, is that what it was?! Now I once again understand why some people call it skunk. Why the library smelled like marijuana I could not tell you, but I assure you I was not involved.

Finally, here's another item from my archives -- a 12-second "Moment of Zen." Back in 2011 I uploaded a video of light changing on a wall over a period of about two minutes. In my days of Zen practice, this is the kind of thing we'd notice while meditating facing a wall -- the patterns of light shifting and changing. I suppose I was trying to convey some of that meditative tranquility. I took the video above on the same day, as a first attempt. It's too short, but if you need a quick Moment of Zen, here you go.

Crocus and Citrus

Another crazy day yesterday. I just do not have "normal" workdays anymore. There's always so much to do -- now that I've taken on half of the duties of my former colleague, whose position has gone part-time -- that I'm streaking from one thing to the next. On the plus side, I got in 14,480 steps according to my Apple health app, so maybe I worked off that chocolate horror of a donut from the day before.

I forgot to mention our biggest news from Monday, which is that we once again have a door on our kitchen cabinet. Remember when it fell off last August? Well, I reported it to property management, but nothing was done until late January, when the property inspector visited and raised the issue in his report. Suddenly, the door was scheduled for repair. Whatever it takes, I suppose.

As you can see, things are happening in the garden. We have a crocus coming up (above) and the buds on the daffodils are yellow, though none of them have opened yet.

Also...

...the stolen citrus tree, which is currently spending the winter just inside the back door, has produced an anemic little fruit! I don't fully understand this tree. It produces white buds which never seem to open into the kinds of citrus blossoms that I remember from my years in Florida, and somehow it occasionally manages a meager little fruit like this. But I doubt the fruit (which I think is a mandarin orange) will ever reach a size suitable for eating or any other use. We shall see.

Dave and I finished "Shrinking" on Apple TV, and even though some of the characters are a little too clever and thus a bit annoying, we're looking forward to Season 3. We also started the third episode of the new season of "Severance" last night, but we've realized we have no idea what's going on. It's possible that we both fell asleep for a portion of the first two episodes, so I think we're going to back up and start the season again.

Finally, while I take a certain amount of pride and satisfaction in blogging every day without fail -- I like to think of myself as a constant in an inconstant world -- I can't hold a candle to this woman, who has written in her diary every single day since 1936, and is still going! (That link is to The Washington Post, which has a pay wall. I am posting it as a "gift article" because you should then be able to read it, but you may have to enter an e-mail address or somehow register with the site. I'm not sure.)

Ten Across

When I got off the tube in West Hampstead the other day, I saw these shoes sitting forlornly beside a bench. Did someone take them off, switch into fancier footwear, and then leave them behind? Maybe they ran to catch a train and then, just as the doors closed, thought, "Oh no! My shoes!" Or maybe they left them behind on purpose, wanting to get rid of them. Another urban mystery with no solution.

I ate this yesterday, and I'm not proud of it. Not long after I got to work, a colleague called me on the phone and said donuts were available, courtesy of our school's parent group. So I went to check them out and found a variety of heart-shaped confections from Dunkin Donuts including this one with an Oreo on top, and Oreo filling. There's really no way to make a donut nutritious, but this one threw caution to the wind! And so did I.

And here's a career first for me -- I was a clue in a crossword puzzle in the school paper!

Ronald Reagan's Dolphins, and a Cat Named Bob Dylan

I didn't leave the house at all yesterday. The weather was grim -- damp and drizzly, cold and cloudy -- so I stayed inside and read "The Wager." I also did all my usual minor housekeeping and plant maintenance. And I dug around a little more in my photo archives.

As it turns out, it's very difficult to tell whether all my photo CDs have been moved to my hard drive. But everything I checked had, in fact, been moved, so I'm taking that as a good sign.

Above is a piece of street art I found in Brooklyn way back in 2007, depicting leaping dolphins in a circle around Ronald Reagan's nose. Here's the original Reagan photo, a pretty famous one. I'm not sure what the art means, if anything, but it's visually intriguing, isn't it?

And this is me, on the roof of our family home in Florida in 2007. Every once in a while we'd have to climb up there and rake the leaves off the shingles. Otherwise they'd pile up and my mom was convinced (probably correctly) that they'd rot the roof.

And finally, here I am in New York City with two other bloggers in 2007. Some of you may remember Reya, in the middle, who had a couple of blogs including The Gold Puppy, named after her beloved dog Jake. She hasn't blogged for about ten years now, but she posts regularly on Facebook -- which I suppose is blogging, in a way. She can still be found in older comments on my blog, and in some of my posts like this one about our blogger May Pole gathering in 2008.

And on the left is Janine, whose blog Tangled up in L'Heure Bleue was a combination of personal writing, Bob Dylan fandom and perfume reviews, with photos featuring her cats. Some of the cats -- one of whom was named after Bob Dylan -- even had their own blogs, as I recall. I used to hang out with Janine a bit but I haven't seen or heard from her in years.

You know, it's interesting -- the 2000s seem to collapse like a telescope when it comes to the passage of time. The year 2000 seems not that long ago, doesn't it? The '70s, '80s and '90s are very distinct decades in my mind, but the 2000s are a muddle. I don't feel like fashions have changed much, or that life is all that different now than it was a quarter-century ago. We now have AI and streaming television, but that's about it. Maybe the years seem to streak past more quickly because I have now lived so many of them.

Anyway, that was a blast from the past!

Today, back to work -- but it's a light week for me. Thursday and Friday are parent/teacher conferences so the kids aren't in regular classes, and though I'll be at work, there won't be much to do with no kids around. Wednesday is only a half day. Woo hoo!

More Memory Lane

Another old picture, this one from July 2011, the month we moved to London. I don't think I ever blogged it before -- at least, not that I could find. I don't remember where it was taken. Maybe Notting Hill or Queensway, near the flat where we were moving.

As you can probably tell, I spent part of yesterday looking through more archives. I'm trying to make sure everything that is on a CD has been moved to a portable hard drive, because how long are those CDs going to be accessible? I already have to borrow a CD player from work to read them. Pretty soon even that will be difficult.

Here are two more photos from the beginning of July 2011, right before we left the USA:

We drove first to Michigan, where we left our furniture to be sold and put some stuff in storage in Dave's parents' basement.

Here's Dave at the home where his family once lived on Grosse Ile. The funny thing about this picture is, they didn't live there at the time it was taken. They'd already sold it, but as I recall we went back to pick up an old bathtub from the garage. Dave's father wanted to install it in one of his rental properties. While we were there Dave apparently felt the need to water the new owners' garden. Why he did this is a complete mystery to me -- maybe the plants were looking desperate. And what's that that tripod on the lawn behind him? Looks like something that would be used by a land surveyor.

And here I am in Saugatuck, on Lake Michigan,  where Dave and I caught the local Fourth of July parade. I remember this only because I blogged about it. I don't have that shirt anymore but I liked it -- I got it at the Bridgewater Commons mall in New Jersey. Lord & Taylor, I think, or maybe Bloomingdales.

It's kind of fun to root out these old photos that I'd completely forgotten about and show them the light of day.

What else did I do yesterday? Well, I read about 75 pages of "The Wager," which is really good. It's been fun to enjoy some non-fiction for a change. Reading about the perilous life of a seaman in the 1700s -- the lice, the typhus, the scurvy, the ever-present danger of falling overboard or getting tangled in the rigging, the rats, the filth -- makes me appreciate the luxury of my own life now. We don't know how good we have it, honestly. Just a couple of hundred years ago people lived truly hellish existences. (And still do in some places on our modern planet.)

Dave and I also went to the 50th birthday party of one of his co-workers. She had a little gathering at her flat in Lisson Grove, near St. Johns Wood. And when I say "little gathering," it was still too big for her microscopic flat. But we had fun and it was good to get out and socialize.

One of Dave's co-workers asked if I was still walking around the city with my camera as much. I said no, I haven't been, that I've been taking more photos with my phone these days. "They're almost as good as the camera photos," I said.

"But is it as satisfying?" she asked. And I thought, hmmmm...that's a good question. "No, it's not," I said. And maybe that's an aspect of photography that I've been missing lately -- the ability that the camera gives me to control more of the exposure. Something to think about. (It doesn't mean I will strap on the ten-pound camera and lens bag any more readily.)

The Past is Never Dead

Because I'm sure you all don't want to read another post about shelving books and other library activities, how about a little trip down memory lane?

I went digging around in my digital archives last night to try to find some writing I did years ago that I thought I might be able to turn into a post. In 2006 or so I wrote a lot about my childhood and my life, partly because I'd gone to a therapist who encouraged it, and partly because I was hypochondriacal and convinced I was going to die (these two things are not unrelated), and I wanted to write down all my stories.

I was thinking specifically about a time when I "ran away" as a little kid, and went meandering aimlessly through my neighborhood until someone came and got me. I was sure I had written all that down and wanted to refresh my memory.

I got briefly distracted when I found the much more recent photo above, from May 2015, featuring Olga as a graceful young lady (!) watching Dave come into the living room. We'd just moved into this flat the previous summer, and I'm struck by how empty the place looks compared to now. And doesn't Olga look robust?! She was only about five years old then. (She got up with me this morning but now she's back in bed as I write this.)

I also found this picture, which isn't even mine -- it's something I took off the Internet because we used to have cups just like these when I was a kid. As I recall, I sold sets of them in 1978 or so as part of a school fundraiser for the marching band. Or maybe for the Boy Scouts.

Anyway, we wound up with a set and I have never forgotten them. My brother and I still talk about them. I have no idea what happened to ours, but similar cups are still available on eBay and other resale sites. I'm sure bazillions of them were made. They're very '70s.

I finally found the writing I was looking for. Here's a snippet:

The Central Florida that I knew as a child has disappeared from many areas. Back then, it was already suburbia, but sparsely developed. There were pine lilies in the vacant lots in autumn and vast tracts of palmetto and scrub. The road in front of our house was unpaved white limestone marl. Quail ran across our backyard in a single-file line, and mayflies blanketed the windows in spring.

The sunlight, the coarse grass, the pine needles, the fire ants. The sighing of the wind in the pines. The stinky, decayed smell of the muddy lakeshore. All of it is so deeply embedded in me that I feel like part of the land – I feel like the tannins that darken the water in Lake Wisteria are flowing through my veins. I may be part alligator.

A few paragraphs later:

(My brother and I) went “camping” together one day, packing our little school bags with slices of white bread and jars of water. We walked to the end of the road. Then Mr. Betz drove up and told us to go home, that Mom was worried, and so we did.

That's it?! Not quite the memory I have now, which is that I walked not only to the end of the road but to a distant part of an adjacent road, and that my brother wasn't with me, and that I was not "camping" but running away. But I may be conflating two different incidents, neither one particularly significant or eventful. I thought I'd written more. Oh well.

This is not my picture, but one my brother took last November while attending a remembrance for my mom at the church we grew up in. (And thus, also related to my childhood and this post!) I had no pictures of the sanctuary and I asked him to get some, having spent many hours staring up at those stained glass windows of Jesus, which at the time were shadowed by the fronds of a palm tree planted outside that back wall.

I suppose I'm thinking more about Florida now that I'm preparing to go back there in a week's time. One of the tasks my brother and I have planned is to spread my mom's ashes near where we grew up.

Anyway, thanks for indulging this rather disjoined trek down memory lane. As William Faulkner wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

Overloaded

I know I say this all the time lately, but this week has been brutal. I have pulled ten carts of books for various classes, so many that my knees and hips are sore from all the kneeling and crouching. (Of course every single book I need is on the bottom shelf! It's a librarian rule.) Plus I've been re-shelving all the returns and working in the Lower School library too.

When I first started feeling my joints this week, I thought it was from walking to and from work. But I do that all the time, so why would they suddenly start bothering me now? It took me a while to realize my aches and pains were actually from moving all those books around. Plus we changed out all our book displays this week, which required additional pulling and re-shelving.

I am so exhausted that I somehow convinced myself yesterday that it was Friday, and had to keep reminding myself that I have one more workday left this week. February Break cannot come soon enough! (One more week...)

On top of that I could not sleep last night. I finally dozed off around 2:30 a.m. and slept fitfully until Olga got me up at 5:30 a.m.

Anyway, I'm sorry I haven't replied to all your comments the last few days* but I really HAVE read them all. I just cannot seem to keep up in blogland. (Maybe I should have gotten online when I was lying awake last night? I did not use my time wisely!)

I've also been planning our trip to Florida and trying to organize the garden work here. Plus Dave's been sick, which I'm sure means I will catch his cold just as we're about to get on an airplane.

There's just a lot going on!

*Addendum, 11:54 a.m. -- just caught up on comments!

(Photos: Taken on my walk home yesterday.)

Gaza, and a Valentine's Day Cactus

I walk beneath this second-floor lounge and restaurant in Swiss Cottage most days. It's right across the street from Ye Olde Swiss Cottage, the closed pub I wrote about yesterday. It looks like kind of a colorful place but again, as with the pub, I've never been inside. Apparently it's a shisha bar. I've never smoked shisha and it isn't something that appeals to me, but I like Lebanese food, so maybe I'll check it out sometime.

It certainly has a colorful staircase. I'm not sure about the wall of plastic plants, though.

How to describe yesterday? Another day, another head-spinning, reality-bending dramedy from the White House. My jaw was once again on the floor reading Trump's statements about Gaza. This president who ran on a platform of isolationism and ending foreign wars suddenly wants to "own" Gaza and transform it into a tourist mecca? After taking steps to dismantle the government's main agency for foreign aid? And he's going to move two million people to adjacent countries that don't want them, in violation of international law?

I really don't want to turn this blog into a daily round of "what Trump did yesterday," but honestly, this Gaza thing was so far off the charts I can't avoid mentioning it. Even his ardent supporters on the right-wing news site I regularly read were dead-set against it. They elected him to be America-first, and understandably they do not see "owning" Gaza as a step in that direction.

As one of them wrote, "I wish he’d just shut up in these forums and make such outrageous announcements in a reasonable, objective manner elsewhere. This is far from something we’re 'going to do.' He needs to cool his jets and stay focused on the current challenges."

I consider it very promising that even his voters are saying, "WTF?!"

Now apparently the administration is trying to walk back this idea and portray it as Trump speaking extemporaneously (even though he had written notes) in a way meant merely to shock and provoke action from Middle Eastern leaders. He's just a bumbling narcissist who respects no institution and sees everything as a real estate deal -- an extractive capitalist who apparently has no idea of the costs associated with such a ridiculous scheme. (Maybe this is why his businesses have been forced to declare bankruptcy six times?) He's like a cartoon character with dollar signs in his eyes, his tongue hanging out.

Meanwhile, an even deeper danger comes from Elon Musk and his college-aged minions, slashing their way through the federal bureaucracy with no constitutional authority to do so.

I am not going to write about this every day. I am not, I am not, I am not.

Here's one of the Thanksgiving cactuses at work, which has decided to also become a Valentine's Day cactus. I took this picture right after spraying the leaves down with an alcohol-and-water solution to kill mealybugs. I am still on a campaign to rid this cactus and its much larger parent plant of pests. It is a never-ending campaign, but it's a good way to decompress between busy periods in the library.

Oh, and one last thing about American politics. I know there's been a lot of talk about the price of eggs in the United States. Out of curiosity, I asked Dave, who handles the shopping, how much we spend -- he said we pay £3.50 for six eggs, from a grocer who delivers them to our door. That's about $8.50 per dozen. But it's possible to buy much cheaper eggs here -- Sainsbury's is advertising a dozen free-range eggs for £3.15, or about $4. So I'm concluding that 1) The UK is not having the same egg price crisis as the USA, and 2) Dave and I pay too much for our eggs!

Farewell, Swiss Cottage

Another day, another dead pub. This is the former Ye Olde Swiss Cottage, in the neighborhood of the same name, which I pass through on my walks to and from work. The pub, which I depicted a couple of times on this blog even though I never went inside myself, closed on February 1. The wrought iron rooftop sign and ornamental lampposts have already been removed, leaving the building forlorn.

It's right next to the Swiss Cottage tube station, and in fact apparently gave its name not only to the station but the entire neighborhood. If you want more history, read Matt Brown's article from Londonist -- he notes that although there's been a pub here since at least the early 1800s, the widening of Finchley Road in the 1960s left it standing on a traffic island, and "a pint in the Swiss Cottage beer garden was less like sitting on the shores of Lake Geneva and more like the Zurich western bypass."

That's pretty much why I never went there. Despite the cozy chalet-style architecture, Ye Olde Swiss Cottage always seemed rather inaccessible amid a sea of concrete and busy roadways -- even though all it took to get there was crossing the street. (You could even avoid the traffic fumes, sort of, by using a subterranean footpath -- or subway, as the British say.)

Although the owners removed the signage and probably anything else of value, they left behind the flowers, which is kind of sad.

Farewell, Swiss Cottage. I hardly knew ye. (Or perhaps I should say "uf widerluege," although apparently that technically means "until we see each other again" and I'm not sure that's going to happen.)

Green Sunrise

Another day, another picture of Olga. This is around the corner from our flat, next to the Roche Bobois furniture shop (the window with the funky vases at upper left) and across the street from the tennis club. We had just a hint of sunrise on the horizon, below the clouds, but most of the greenish light is coming from a streetlamp.

I promise I am not going to complain a lot about Donald Trump today. But I've been struck by the irony of his recent moves to destabilize the Agency for International Development (USAID). Trump makes so much noise about illegal immigration, and he's allegedly taking forceful steps to stop it, yet he is targeting an agency that could play a critical role. If we want to stop or slow immigration, we need to give people reasons to stay home, and that means developing the economies of their home countries. Which is exactly what USAID does. It's a tiny fraction of the federal budget (and ought to be a lot more) and it makes a real difference in providing jobs and developing industries for people overseas.

As a former Peace Corps volunteer, I am curious to see what Trump will do with that agency. I can't imagine it will prosper under his inwardly-turned worldview. (The Peace Corps is separate from USAID.) The Peace Corps is less expensive, so it's probably lower on his hit list.

Trump has done at least one thing that I think was a good idea, and that is ordering the declassification of all the information about the JFK, RFK and MLK assassinations. There's apparently not much classified material left, and it still may not all be made public, but I think it's past time to be as open about those events as possible. Anyone involved is almost certainly dead by now, or at least very elderly, and perhaps doing so will quell the endless conspiracies that continue to circle about JFK in particular. It's probably just political showmanship, as the Kennedy family has said, but I'm all in favor of anything that could help foster the open flow of information.

Doubting Myself

Yesterday the sun was so bright that I put Olga's bed out in the garden so she could soak up some rays. I put on a jacket and sat with her, reading "The Wager" by David Grann, about the wreck of British ship off the coast of Chile back in the 1700s. I've just started it but it seems promising. Unfortunately, despite the sun, it wasn't warm -- 44º F or 6.6º C -- so we didn't stay out there very long.

Still, the seasons are slowly revolving.

We heard nothing back from Mrs. Russia regarding the front garden. Maybe she's written the landlords, but I doubt it. I think we're in a stalemate.

We are also in a bit of a Cold War with Mrs. Kravitz next door, over our rubbish bins. Remember how several years ago we locked them because she (or someone in her household) kept using them? Well, one day last fall I found one of the locks torn off and a lot of rubbish from her bins strewn around in our alleyway. I came in and told Dave, who marched over to her house to demand answers. Mrs. Kravitz was greatly offended that we suspected she had torn off the lock, and she hasn't really spoken to us since. (I think she's also been gone for much of the winter. I've only caught a glimpse of her once or twice.) Her rubbish at the time included a lot of gift bags from fancy brands like Chanel, and in retrospect, I think a homeless person or other passerby tore off the lock because they thought something valuable might be in the bin. (We did apologize for confronting her, for what it's worth.)

Thinking about these fraught neighborly relations, I began to wonder yesterday if we're the problem. As I said to Dave, "Am I an asshole?"

He assured me that I am not. Granted, he's a biased source, but surely wanting to use your own trash bins without finding them filled with the neighbor's debris isn't that extreme.

Besides, I suspect being an asshole is a bit like being insane. If you worry you might be, you're probably not. It's only people who think they are without fault who have the real problems.

We have since removed the locks on the bins. They were a pain to navigate and one side benefit of confronting Mrs. Kravitz, and her appalled reaction, is that she wouldn't dare put her rubbish in them now.

Well, let's lighten the mood. Here's a video of Olga plowing through the overgrown ivy in the garden. This is the same ivy we're going to have pruned and brought under control when the gardeners come in about a month, so Olga is enjoying it while she can!

Desk Hygiene

I shot this image of the moon and Venus yesterday evening in our western sky. According to this very informative website, the moon was in a Waxing Crescent phase with 11 percent of its surface illuminated. A beautiful night!

I had a pretty low-key day. I spent several hours in blogland, reading others' blogs and responding to comments on my own. I think I'm more or less caught up.

I was amused by John Gray's post showing his "untidy desk" (which was not at all untidy). It made me think about the reporters I used to work with and their appalling desks. If there's any industry that creates a less tidy culture than a print newsroom, I don't know what it is. Reporters, at least in my day, were constantly scribbling notebooks and legal pads full of handwritten notes, and stacking them up around the margins of their desks, along with police reports and depositions and old newspapers and all manner of paper detritus. I worked with one guy, Tom, who had years worth of paper piled on and around his desk -- he was notorious even in our messy environment -- and how he ever found anything I'll never know. I wish I had a picture of his desk now because it was truly remarkable. A paper mountain, or fortress, with a chair in the middle.

I guess the fact is, for the most part, we reporters only ever needed our most recent notes. After that, the notebooks and paperwork could be consigned to an "archive," in whatever formal or informal sense we maintained one. After all, news was a daily business, and we could always go back to our earlier published stories if we had to rehash older information.

I worked with another guy early in my career, Sam, who was notorious for leaving half-consumed mugs of coffee sitting atop his piled-up paperwork. Those cups sat there so long that they became biology experiments. I guess he must have cleaned them at some point but I remember them being pretty gross.

Personally, I always keep a tidy desk. I can't stand piles of paper. I remember reading somewhere that having too neat a desk sends a negative message to supervisors -- that you aren't busy enough. But I still kept mine clear. I saved my notes until a story published, or maybe for a few weeks or months afterwards, and then I'd periodically throw them all out. Even now, I keep my desk at work mostly empty -- which is hard because it's the main circulation desk in the library and it tends to be the place where people flump stuff down as they're passing by. Whatever's on it is what needs to be done imminently, and then it gets shelved, filed or tossed.

I don't even have a desk at home. My laptop is my desk.

Here's Olga navigating the narrow path along the side of our house. It leads to the garden gate, which opens onto the street (except it's always locked). Every morning she has to go sniff around over there as part of her "rounds." Maybe foxes wander through? Or squirrels? Something keeps her intrigued.

Hagar's Head Lice

I got an extra hour of sleep out of the dog this morning! She woke up at 5 a.m. as usual but when she began giving me the paw, I just rolled over and darned if she didn't settle down and let me sleep until 6. I consider that a major victory.

The snowdrops have come up in our garden -- they're not quite open yet but they're already looking good. The daffodils, despite an early start, have slowed and we don't seem to have any that are near blooming. I think the recent cold weather has chilled their enthusiasm. We've had daffodils in January before, but not this year.

Speaking of gardening, the saga of our front garden continues. You may remember that our upstairs neighbors, the Russians, cooked up a plan to rip out some of the bushes. I opposed this plan and said so in an e-mail to our landlords, and they sided with me. (The Russians and our landlords jointly own the house where Dave and I rent the bottom flat, and under the terms of our lease they are jointly responsible for the front garden.) Well, Mrs. Russia wrote me yesterday complaining that her wishes have been "disregarded and misrepresented" and she pushed again for ripping out those bushes. She expressly asked that I not forward her message to our landlords. I don't know why she insists on coming to me with these issues because, to use George W. Bush's word, I AM NOT THE DECIDER. I told her to write the landlords.

Meanwhile, it looks like our garden won't be trimmed anytime soon. Pruning gridlock!

Honestly, is it any wonder the world is such a mess? We can't even get simple landscape maintenance done without instigating another Cold War.

I found this Viking hat (complete with braids!) on the ground on my walk home from work last night. Have we been invaded again?

Seeing that fake hair reminds me that we got a note the other day about cases of head lice being reported in the school. Fortunately this is not a problem I have to think about, having very minimal hair myself. I remember when I was a kid we would have lice checks in elementary school -- the nurses would come to our classrooms and go up and down the rows of students examining our heads. As I recall they used a pencil to look through our hair, and it felt great. If they found lice the kid got sent home right away, which must have been embarrassing. Do you think they used the same pencil to look through all of our hair? That seems problematic, doesn't it?

I was aghast at Trump's press conference following the Washington, D.C. plane crash. I don't think I've ever seen such a bizarre performance from a sitting president. My jaw was literally hanging open. To immediately use such a tragedy to make a political point about DEI programs, insulting all the pilots and air traffic controllers involved by implying they were unsuited for their jobs, basically blaming every minority group in the country for the crash, and providing no evidence to support any of those claims -- it was astonishing. The fact that the helicopter pilot has subsequently been shown to be a woman doesn't change any of that, because who knows who was doing what at the time? There's been no completed investigation. I cannot believe this man is the leader of the free world.

Also, why are Army helicopters flying so near the flight path of a major commercial airport? Is that part of the training? Are we now using innocent civilians as military training fodder without their consent?

Is it just me, or does Trump look terrible? Like, even worse than usual. He looks like a ghost with an Oompa-Loompa spray tan.