Tulips and Noisy Birds

We're going through a dry spell here. According to our local weather website, March "came in much drier than the long-term average," with just four days of recordable rain totaling 3.8 mm. That's basically no rain.

This was after a very damp February, though, so all in all we're close to average for the year. Still, we need some rain. I've been watering pots as well as plants in the ground, and Dave and I only belatedly noticed that our poor tree fern was dried out and shriveling. Hopefully we got some water onto it in time to save it.

The good news -- no slugs! Remember how our plants were ravaged by slugs last spring?

We're supposed to get up to 20º C today. Everyone's been talking about this like it's an apocalyptic heat wave, and since I don't really function on the Celsius scale I've been vague about what 20º C actually means. Yesterday at work a few of us were talking about it, and I said, "I think it's uncomfortably warm." One of the cleaners said he thought it meant about 85º F! Finally I hauled out my phone and it turns out we were all incorrect, and 20º C is only 69º F -- actually very pleasant.

Thank God I didn't have to convert Celsius temperatures for the "Life in the UK" test. Remember how I had to take that years ago to get permission to live here indefinitely? I passed with flying colors but I'd have failed for sure if I had to wrangle with math -- ugh.

Our yellow tulips opened yesterday on the patio. I think this is the first year we've had two of them. We have another clump of tulips out in the garden, and our bulldozer of a dog knocked the one flower head off before it fully matured. I have it on the windowsill in a little vase and it seems to be opening there, amazingly.

Steve Reed · Robin and Blackbird (Evening)

We were sitting inside yesterday evening at dusk, watching the vintage and very sexist show "Bewitched" on television, when I heard the birds making a real racket outside. My Merlin bird app identified them as a Eurasian blackbird and European robin, and it sounds to me like there are more than one of each. I guess they're getting amorous. You'd have a longer recording if a plane hadn't approached overhead, forcing me to stop it. Urban nature!

Dave and I sat out in the garden earlier in the evening, so don't worry -- we're enjoying our outdoor space too. The only problem is, Olga barks at us incessantly when we're out there. Something about being outside but sitting down (as opposed to playing with her, I suppose) drives her crazy.

(Top photo: A renovation project on my walk to work.)

Pacing Myself

So, back to real life. I'm feeling a little better about things than I was on Tuesday morning. For one thing, I got that spare router mailed off, so hopefully I'll avoid the fee from BT and I still have our main router to provide Internet. One minor issue crossed off the list.

Also, I'm seeing glimmers of hope in the political world. Of course Elon is still swinging his chainsaw through the federal government, but I'm heartened by the fact that the judicial response to Trump's brutality -- against both faithful government workers and powerless immigrants -- has been one of rejection. He's getting shot down left and right, legally speaking. Whether he ultimately abides by any of these rulings, who knows, but it shows the system is working so far and his overenthusiastic embrace of executive power is not going unchecked.

The Democratic victory in the Wisconsin judicial race gave me a boost, and although Republicans won the Florida races, they didn't win by as much as expected. (Knowing Florida and its voters, I don't see it turning blue anytime soon -- unless Trump destroys Medicare and Social Security, which Florida voters would never forgive.)

And Cory Booker! There are signs of life in the Democratic party.

Work continues at a busy pace. I know I haven't responded to comments here in several days, but I am reading them all. I just haven't had time during the day. I generally write blog posts in the morning, respond to comments during my workday and read other blogs in the afternoon/evening. This schedule has been shaken up by my workload lately.

You don't need to hear all the details of what I've been doing at work -- mostly building and taking down displays and covering new books, in between dealing with students and working part-time in the Lower School. I told my boss I was stressed by my doubled workload (and static paycheck) since my full-time co-worker left last fall. She suggested I pace myself on some of these new tasks, so I'm going to do that. Book covering may take a few days rather than me plowing through them all at once.

I am at an age where I feel the physical effects of my job more and more. After covering a stack of new books and shelving a cartload of old ones, my hands get sore. Getting up and down off the floor is harder. All perfectly natural and even expected, but still sobering when it's happening to my body!

I'm going to try to more frequently employ the approaches of my Zen practice from 20 (!) years ago -- deep breathing, pausing the "stories" spinning through my mind, noticing what's really happening.

Overall mood: Improving.

I'm Turning Japanese

You've all seen this photo of Olga before. I blogged it several weeks ago when we went to Fortune Green to see the daffodils, then just coming out. I'm blogging it again today because it was the subject of an experiment.

Have you seen this trend involving tweaking photos to look like Japanese anime? It even made the front page of The New York Times web site. Supposedly people are using Chat GPT to turn their photos into scenes that look like they could have been taken straight from "My Neighbor Totoro" or "Spirited Away" -- specifically Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli films, according to the Times.
 
Being a Miyazaki fan, I decided to try it with Olga. But when I went to Chat GPT, it wouldn't let me modify my own photo. (Maybe I need a different version or a pay subscription?) The best I could do was upload the photo so Chat GPT could describe it, and then render its own version using that description. Here's how Chat GPT saw the photo:

"A white staffordshire terrier with brown spots standing among bright daffodils in a sunlit park, surrounded by whimsical European-style buildings."

It didn't like it when I asked for that scene to be rendered like Miyazaki -- it gave me a warning about violating the site's policies. Maybe I was too specific since Miyazaki is still alive and his films are copyrighted. So I asked for the scene in Japanese anime style, and here's what I got:

Not quite what I was going for. A little too cutesy, particularly that second one. So I tried another AI program called Artguru, where I could modify the photo itself, and I got these:

Who is that dog? It's not Olga. Nor is this, the product of another AI website called Fotor:

That dog needs a diet!

(By the way, I am aware that uploading my pictures to an AI website adds to the vast pool of information that AI will use to generate future images. I'm fine with that. AI is probably scraping them from my blog anyway!)

I decided to try again with a picture of Me, Dave and Olga. We took this during our trip to the dog pub on Green Park several years ago, back before the pandemic.

I skipped Chat GPT this time and went straight to Artguru with an instruction to render the photo in a Japanese anime style. Here's the result:

Remember the song "I'm Turning Japanese" by The Vapors?

As Dave said when I showed him the results, "Who the hell are those people?!" And also, why do I look like Dave's grandfather? How did I get hair? Where did that living room behind us come from?

Let's try Fotor:

Well, this looks more like us, but I'm not sure why we look like someone died when we're both smiling in the original photo. What's with the gloomy color palette? Once again, Olga needs a diet. And we both need surgery to remove those extra fingers.

A Litany of Complaints

I woke up on the cranky side of the bed this morning, at about 3 a.m. I lay there thinking, first about my job, and then about our internet service provider and how they're going to sock me with a £30 fee if I don't return our router (more in a moment), and then about income taxes and financial planning and our continued need to get some kind of estate plans in place, and then about applying for UK citizenship. And then I realized that I left laundry in the machine overnight, so I had to get up and hang that on the drying rack, and then I unpacked the dishwasher and hand-washed the things that can't go in the dishwasher, and I just got crankier and crankier because it wasn't even daylight and WHY IS ALL OF THIS MY RESPONSIBILITY?!

It is 6 a.m., people, and I am already feeling put-upon.

I suppose most marriages have a division of labor -- one partner does some things while another partner does the others. In our case, Dave does the food. He buys the groceries and he cooks them, and that is not a small thing. He also has a job that requires more out-of-hours planning than mine, and a health condition that saps his energy, and ailing parents that need whatever assistance he can render from this distance. I understand all of that, and I try to be patient and understanding and appreciative.

But lately I have been feeling like things are at a critical mass -- particularly the big-picture stuff involving finances, taxes and life planning. That all falls squarely on me. Dave says he doesn't have a head for it, and I get that -- it's not a lot of fun (and a thousand times more complicated since my mother's death). It's also incredibly hard because it involves two countries, with two different legal and financial systems. It's not the kind of thing where I can call the lawyer down the street or go to "Wills R Us" online and have a will written. We need specialists, and I have run into roadblocks.

These are also questions that seem incredibly LARGE when it's 4 a.m. I'm sure once I move around a little more and the day gets going they will recede to their proper place in the background of my daily life. I just have to buckle down and deal with them. I have some referrals and I need to follow through.

The internet service provider situation is kind of ridiculous. I got a call the other day from BT (which used to be British Telecom), which has provided our internet service since we moved to this country in 2011. In fact we took over our old landlord's account, and letters from the company still come addressed to "Tong," which is hilarious because that wasn't even his correct name. Anyway, BT said they are switching all their residential customers over to a new spinoff company called EE, and would we make the switch? Now, I was at work, sitting at my desk and trying to deal with students while this person with an impenetrable Scottish accent was outlining the finer points of this change in my ear, and I admit I may not have grasped everything -- but I made sure that our rates wouldn't go up and our service wouldn't change. They assured me that was the case, and it all sounded relatively seamless, so I said fine.

Now they're demanding we return our BT router within 30 days or face a £30 fee, and yet EE has sent me no new equipment. How can I have Internet service with no router?! Honestly, the stupidity is mind-boggling, and I wish I'd never agreed to make the change. I have a second router that BT sent ages ago and I saved as a backup, so I think I'll send them that one and hopefully it will head off the fee while giving us time to get new equipment -- assuming we're even really supposed to get new equipment. I have no idea.

On the bright side (literally), this is the display I built yesterday at work. It was not my idea, and I usually dislike displays that focus on the aesthetics of books as opposed to the content, but having said that I think it turned out pretty well. I'm waiting for students to ask, "Who's Roy G. Biv?" There's a learning opportunity here.

I just looked out the window to see Olga rooting around in the flowerbed by the back door, which is fenced off to prevent that. I have no idea how she got over the fence but I had to go shoo her out of there before she trampled everything.

I hope this day improves.

(Top photo: Some new graffiti on Finchley Road, yesterday morning.)