I'm a Birthday Failure

Yesterday was Dave's birthday. I had a restaurant dinner planned but I wanted to get him a gift or two as well, and yet I seemed completely incapable of making that happen. I have no idea why I just couldn't get it done.

I was going to get him some cooking gear -- he's mentioned wanting to replace some of our pans and our baking sheets -- but I felt overwhelmed by the options and the task of trying to source the right things. I went to some shops and didn't see what I wanted, and I really didn't want to order online because I don't know brands and wasn't sure what I was going to get. At the end of the day I just bought him a gift card at our local kitchen supply store and I gave that to him. It feels silly since it's just me spending our money on something that he has to go choose anyway. Why couldn't he just walk into the store and buy it without my involvement? Know what I mean?

It feels like kind of a non-gift, in other words. But that's what he got.

For dinner I chose a restaurant in Mayfair that has a Michelin star and promised contemporary British cuisine. Unfortunately, when I made the reservation, I neglected to notice that Sunday was "jazz night." So we went in, sat down, and within half an hour a jazz trio gathered right behind Dave and began to play.

"You brought me to a jazz club for my birthday?" Dave asked.

Now, Dave hates jazz. I know this. So I explained that I didn't know about the jazz and we just rolled with it and laughed it off. The musicians were not intrusive and played softer pieces by the likes of Antonio Carlos Jobim and Miles Davis, so the music -- to me anyway -- was enjoyable. The dinner turned out OK -- Dave was happier with it than I was. But overall, I feel I didn't do a great job managing this birthday.

Here's an evening portrait of Olga in the garden -- the picture of happiness.

And here she is yesterday morning in front of one of the more unusual homes on our street, with its garden wall decorated with playful gargoyles and statuettes. This is the domain of the bathing beauty, who you can barely see in the background above Olga. (Her tub is obscured by all the shrubbery but trust me, it's still there.)

I had an unsettling dream last night. Dave and I were sitting on the couch in my childhood home in Land O' Lakes. We're talking and suddenly I hear what sounds like distant gunshots. We decide to close the sliding glass doors, which were standing open facing the lake, but I cannot pull them closed -- when I try some unseen force pulls them open again. I'm getting frantic at being unable to lock the house as the gunfire comes closer. That's when I woke up.

It doesn't take a degree in Freudian or Jungian psychology to interpret this as a reaction to what's going on in Iran, and the fear that the conflict will eventually threaten us. I saw yesterday that Keir Starmer came out in support of the Iran operation, though the UK did not participate. I can't see anything good coming of this but I trust Starmer more than I do Trump, so maybe there was some sound reasoning behind it. Then again, even if Starmer opposed it, would he say that after the fact? All that would do is antagonize Trump. So maybe his support doesn't really show agreement.

I am going to try to be very Zen and calmly exist amid uncertainty.

(Top photo: A shopping arcade across the street from last night's restaurant.)

Nixon and Trump

Yesterday was our hottest day yet -- about 90º F or 32º C. It was too hot to do much. I know many of you in North America are experiencing temperatures hotter than that, but here in England most people (including us) don't have air conditioning. So when it's 90º F, we're feeling it all day. It's draining. My only escape is taking a shower, which I happily did last evening once things began to cool off.

I kept reading "All the President's Men," which I am still enjoying a lot. The parallels between Nixon's time and now are so stark. Like the current president of the USA, Nixon was considered a somewhat coarse individual, and he was full of resentment against a power structure he felt had long mistreated him. He and his administration spent a lot of time sowing seeds of doubt about the media. They depicted reporters as representatives of a coastal elite who didn't understand "real Americans." It's exactly the messaging we hear from Trump now.

And despite all the evidence about the dirty tricks being employed by the Nixon White House against its adversaries, voters overwhelmingly re-elected Nixon in 1972. Again, parallels with Trump and our last election -- Nixon ran against a weak Democratic candidate and voters went with what they knew. Somehow it makes me feel better about Trump's re-election. We've done this before and survived, though admittedly not without a huge governmental crisis.

Anyway, I read about Watergate until I couldn't anymore, and then in the evening I watched the movie version again. It was very interesting to see how the movie condensed all of the detail in the book into a coherent script that was by and large very accurate. As far as I can tell, the only scene in the movie that's not in the book is the one in which Woodward and Bernstein knock on the door of a woman who supposedly works at the Committee to Reelect the President, and she welcomes them in (unlike all the other people they've approached), only for them to find that she doesn't work at CRP at all but at the Garfinkel's department store. I don't know whether the script writers made that up, or it really happened and "Woodstein" left it out of the book.

Oh, and Deep Throat's famous advice to "follow the money" is never uttered in the book, either. Not in those words, anyway.

I made a tomato sandwich for lunch with an heirloom tomato I bought at our local produce market. It was good but not as good as I thought it might be. I love a tomato sandwich in summer but tomatoes in England are just not like tomatoes in Florida. Dave would say it doesn't get hot enough here (except yesterday!), and maybe he's right.

Through all of this, I was hearing the sounds of packing tape being ripped upstairs, as the Russians prepare for their move. It filled my heart with joy.

(Re. the graffiti above: Funny, because I have the exact opposite reaction.)

Although it's cooler this morning, I'm seeing that we're not going to have any rain for the next few weeks, which includes our week away in Pevensey Bay. I feel like we're going to have to figure out some way to get the plants watered during that time. If only we had reasonable neighbors I could ask!

Apple Tree Yard and a Pavilion

As you may remember, I just read a novel by Louise Doughty called "Apple Tree Yard." She named it for a street near St. James Palace in London that really exists. I was curious what Apple Tree Yard looked like, so I began a walk there yesterday morning, taking the tube down to Green Park.

There is no apple tree in Apple Tree Yard, or even a sign that there ever was an apple tree. There's no tree at all, in fact. It's a dead-end street surrounded by big buildings. In the book, a fateful assignation occurs between two characters in one of the doorways. (Way too many people around for that to happen in real life, it seems to me.)

But there is an interesting monument to Sir Edwin Lutyens, the designer of New Delhi, who apparently presented his plans for the new city in Apple Tree Yard. Why this would be true I'm not sure -- perhaps there was a colonial government office or architecture firm there back in the days of the Raj.

From there I got a coffee and walked to St. James Square. If I've ever been in this park before, I don't remember it. It was exciting to find a little corner of London that I'd never seen. I sat on one of the benches with my coffee and wondered who on earth Gulielmus III could be. I thought maybe he was some obscure Saxon king from antiquity, but no -- turns out that's a Latin rendering of the English name William III. I had no idea!

From there I walked through Green Park to the Wellington Arch at Hyde Park Corner, and then on into Hyde Park itself.

Near the Serpentine I and a group of other people had to pause for this gaggle of geese to cross the path and get in the water. None of us were sure what to do until the woman in front of me blazed a trail right through them, and I followed suit. By the time I got to the other side they were mostly all in the pond.

I wanted to check out this year's Serpentine Pavilion, an annual construction associated with the adjacent Serpentine Gallery. This year's pavilion is called "A Capsule in Time" by the Bangladeshi firm of Marina Tabassum Architects. According to a nearby plaque, it's inspired by architecture in the Bengal Delta, where structures are ephemeral in an ever-shifting landscape of land and water. The pavilion itself only exists for five months in the summer, and apparently part of it can move.

Here's an interior view. There's a cafe and bookstore at one end, so visitors can get a drink and relax beneath the shady canopy.

I kept walking across the park and decided (ambitiously) that I would walk all the way back home. I wound through the part of the park where I used to walk a very puppyish Olga when we lived in Notting Hill, long ago, and then up along Queensway and through Maida Vale and Kilburn.

Here's a pub I passed on the way. I blogged this place before, many years ago, when it was being refurbished. I've still never been there, and it was closed when I passed late yesterday morning. (Too early for a beer anyway!)

I also passed the vast housing estates in South Kilburn that are being redeveloped by Brent council. The project seems to be moving at a snail's pace. A year and a half ago I visited a couple of vacant structures there, Exeter Court and Hereford House, and photographed the graffiti. Those structures are still standing and look exactly the same, except now there's a more secure perimeter fence around them so you can't get as close. At the time I wrote that new homes were supposed to be developed on the site by 2026. Clearly that's not happening -- the current plan, if I'm reading it right, says they'll be finished in 2029.

Anyway, from there I walked up to West Hampstead. By this time I was super-thirsty -- temperatures were in the mid-80s (F) again yesterday. I stopped at a grocery and bought a cherry Coke, which is not something I would ever normally drink, but I was craving both sugar and liquid and let me tell you, those chemicals were good.

Just before I got home I bought a hunk of watermelon at our local produce shop, and Dave and I enjoyed it in the garden last night. All told I walked about seven miles, according to Google maps.

Olgapalooza

Several Olga photos today. She and I have been taking short neighborhood walks and yesterday she even went on the loop through the nearby housing estate, which she hasn't done in months. As expected, she seems to have more energy than she did when she was going out daily with her dog walker.

Not that yesterday was a particularly energetic day. It got up to 87º F (31º C) and we mostly sat in the garden and tried to stay comfortable.

Olga found a bag of discarded bagels among the trash stacked on the corner. I let her have one. She was very excited. She's a freegan!

As usual when we walk through the housing estate, she looked for the cats. Her main nemesis has been gone for ages but there's still at least one other cat at this address, and she never passes the door without checking.

We walked up a street parallel to our own with this beautiful blooming rose arching over the pavement.

As usual in summer, when the sun comes up early, Olga is our alarm clock. She's been getting me up right at 5 a.m. pretty much daily. The sun is up even before that but I try to draw a pretty strict line at getting up before 5 a.m.! I love these long days right around the solstice but there is a drawback to an early sunrise -- an early dogrise.

Yesterday I used the cool early-morning hours to do some gardening. I dug up a kniphofia, or red-hot poker, that had become buried in overgrowth from surrounding plants. It's been struggling for a couple of years, not getting enough sun, and I finally decided to put it in a big pot and move it to a sunnier location.

This is what it looked like ten years ago, and here it is now:

Hopefully we can get it thriving again.

During the heat of the day I sat out in the garden and read "All the President's Men." As you may remember, Alan Pakula's screen adaptation with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman is one of my favorite movies, and it even helped inspire me to pursue a journalism career. But believe it or not, I've never read the book, which obviously goes into much more detail about Watergate and the investigative processes of The Washington Post. It's pretty easy reading and quite compelling.

It's also interesting to read it now, in the Trump era, because it shows that many aspects of Republican politics just haven't changed that much. (Not surprising, considering Nixon's "dirty trickster" Roger Stone is still around advising the Trump camp.) For example, did you know that in the early '70s some Republicans insisted the 1960 election had been stolen by the Democrats? Sound familiar?

It goes back to that certain strain of paranoia that permeates American politics -- a fundamental distrust of government, of "tyranny," which many Republicans in particular feel. I think Democrats, by and large, don't think that way. We have more trust in the system and in our fellow human beings. We see government as beneficial, not oppressive. Even when the Supreme Court ruled against Al Gore in the knife's-edge election of 2000, changing the course of the country forever, the Democrats went along with it. We were skeptical, but we relied on the system and we didn't storm the Capitol.

Anyway, it's making for interesting reading!

Lilies and More

The garden suddenly seems to be entering a new phase. Gone are the peonies and many of the roses. Yesterday I deadheaded the Martha Washington geranium, whose flowers had mostly gone brown, and the brook thistles. And in their place we have a whole new crop of flowers coming on.

The pink Asiatic lilies were just starting to open yesterday morning.

The bear's breeches, or Acanthus, have sent up towering spikes of flowers. We have at least six spikes on this single plant -- more than ever before. The flowers always remind me of mussels.

The Senecio, or Dusty Miller, has produced large, flat clusters of yellow blossoms...

...and one of the "Bishop's Children" dahlias has bloomed. (First dahlia of the year!)

Here's one of the hogweeds (native, not giant) that I put in the ground last March. This one sent up a big flower spike, but the other one is hanging back. It will no doubt bloom next year. Insects love these flowers.

Here's Nicole Nicotiana, producing her white trumpet-shaped blossoms. Nicole has had a rough year. The drainage holes in her planter somehow got blocked up and she became waterlogged. We didn't notice until she began wilting, and although I cleared the holes and got her drained she's not looking too good. This is a bonus year for her anyway -- we didn't expect her to live through the winter -- but I hope she perks up. At least she's blooming.

And here's the Asiatic lily this morning -- all six of those flowers opened yesterday! Funny how they pop at the same time. In the background is a Peruvian lily (Alstroemeria) and a single purple geranium -- the "Rozanne" variety.

I had a very quiet day yesterday, hanging around the house. I finished my Louise Doughty mystery, "Apple Tree Yard," which was ultimately very good. It took a little while to get going -- the first part mused ad nauseam about marital infidelity -- but ultimately I liked it.

Today I have the hazardous waste people coming to pick up a box of old pesticides. When we first moved in here, ten years ago, we bought some bug spray and slug pellets, which we used occasionally in the garden. Our thinking on that evolved pretty quickly, though, and within a few years we stopped using any of it. I would occasionally still use the spray on houseplants -- never outside -- but even that seemed risky and largely ineffective, so we're discarding it all. (The slug pellets aren't even legal anymore.) 

I much prefer a pesticide-free approach. Most pests won't really harm plants. They might make them slightly less productive or attractive, but really, who cares? They're all part of the ecosystem. And in the rare instance that a plant dies, c'est la vie. We have room for a new one!

The Kid on the Trellis

Here are some of the old snapshots I picked up at Covent Garden market on Monday. Some of you mentioned that you didn't know Covent Garden had an antiques market -- it's only on Mondays, in the Jubilee Market section. There's lots of knickknacks, china, glassware, stamps and coins, books, old jewelry, stuff like that -- and invariably someone will have a box of old photos.

I liked the strong light and graphic patterns in the photo above. It was only after I scanned it that I realized there's a kid climbing the trellis! (Most of these photos are very small in real life, as a lot of old snapshots used to be, so it's not easy to see details.)

A very 1930s-looking tennis game. Remember Monty Python's skit "Salad Days"?

Again, this picture is tiny in real life -- no bigger than a postage stamp. Thank goodness we can wear more comfortable clothes nowadays. That collar seems awfully stiff.

(Late edit: Is this the same guy as on the left in the tennis photo above?)

This is the only one of these photos to have a note on the back: "Eileen with Francis, Lucy and Martin Cassar, Villa Shangrila, Ta' Xbiex, Malta. April 1965."

More kids, on a distinctive duck-shaped bench. Speaking of which, the kid in the back looks like he's goosing that girl. I can't tell what the older girl is holding in her hand. I tried reverse image-searching this photo to see if the duck bench turned up a location, but no luck.

And finally, a typical '60s-looking beach scene. Someone's little brother is creeping into the frame from the left. Are we still in Malta, or back in England? Or somewhere else? Who knows.

I have a few more, and as usual, they'll all go on Flickr.

A Butterfly on the Tube

Yesterday I decided I had to get out of the house, so I headed down to Westminster for a photo walk. How long has it been?! I've taken lots of incidental pictures here and there on other urban outings, but it's been ages since I've deliberately walked with photography as my primary purpose. I needed the exercise, and I brought my big camera rather than my phone, to make it a more intentional effort.

I started at Green Park and walked east through Soho to Covent Garden. Along the way I stopped at a Caffè Nero on Old Compton Street, where I sat outside with my Americano and watched the world go by. This Italian cafe was across the street. The blue plaque on the wall says John Logie Baird first demonstrated television in that building, in 1926. Talk about opening Pandora's box!

It's been so long since I've been able to get out and do some street photography. Maybe once I retire this is something I'll focus on more (no pun intended, honest).

Finally I got to Covent Garden and went to the market, where I spent some time combing through old photos. I bought a handful to add to my online archive of anonymous found photos, and you will no doubt see them in coming days. The guy charged me £7.20, and I gave him £12.20 thinking I could get rid of some coins and he could give me a £5 note back. But no! He gave me £5 in even more coins than I gave him! So ridiculous. Why didn't he just tell me he didn't have a fiver?

Weirdly, I ran into a guy named Patrick who I met the night I went to The Moth. He's a friend of my co-worker Staci's friend Chrissy (if you can follow that). So basically, a friend twice removed. We chatted a bit about good antique markets. So random.

I'd intended to buy Dave a birthday present, but I didn't find anything he'd want. I went to Nisbets to get him some new baking sheets but I couldn't find any. I wound up buying a cutting board instead, to replace one that Dave bought that doesn't fit in our dishwasher -- good to get but it didn't address the birthday issue. And then I had to lug it around.

On the way back to the tube in Bond Street I passed the Mexican embassy, which is all decked out for Pride. It's heartening to see that Mexico has joined the modern world, while the United States of America furiously backpedals against it.

On the way home I was surprised to see a red admiral butterfly trapped in the tube car. Considering we were underground this was a bit of a surprise. I'm sure it flew onto the car when it was parked in a train yard at either end of its route. Well, I couldn't leave it there, so right before I got off in West Hampstead I gently captured it in my hands. By that time we were above ground, so all I had to do was step off the train (a bit awkward carrying my camera bag, a cutting board and a butterfly) and release it into the air. It flew away in the sunshine.

"Thank you!" called a woman from the train just before the doors closed.

That's the first red admiral I've seen this year, and in such an unexpected place!

Magenta Spreen Lambsquart

Dave and I went to breakfast on the high street yesterday morning. Along the way, we passed this beautiful plant growing beneath a street tree. I took a photo and ran it through my plant identifier app. The answer came back "tree spinach," aka "magenta spreen lambsquart," which gave us a good laugh.

"That would make a great password," Dave said. "No one would ever guess it."

Turns out "magenta spreen" and "giant lambsquarters" are common names for Chenopodium giganteum -- the app somehow combined and truncated them. It's also called "purple goosefoot" and "fat hen." It's an amaranth, a relative of quinoa.

We want to try it in the garden. It grows five feet tall, and you know how much I love my dinosaur plants! We might try to transplant this one, or we might wait to collect seeds. Like many amaranths they are apparently prolific re-seeders so we might have to keep them in check.

Anyway, we went to breakfast, and Olga came along. We tried to sit outside but in the early morning the breeze was still too chilly, so we moved indoors for our pastries and coffee at Gail's. As the hours passed the temperatures warmed and by afternoon they were perfect, in the low 70's (F) with a partly cloudy sky.

The Solomon's seal sawfly larvae are back on the Solomon's seal. I'm leaving them for now. Biodiversity and all that. I used to worry that they'd kill the plant and I'd try to remove them, but they reappear every year and the plant always bounces back. Cycle of life!

I did some routine garden trimming, mostly deadheading and cutting blackberries out of the flower beds. I also had a Facetime call with my brother so I could fill him in on my retirement plans. He's retired already himself -- and he's younger than I am -- so he wholeheartedly approves!

It continues to be a banner year for ladybirds/ladybugs. Here's a little video to show you the many stages I'm finding -- larvae, pupae and mature adults, some of them just emerged. Oh, and a bumblebee, busy on our Turkish sage (Phlomis). I like the way it has to lift the lid on each flower to get to the good stuff.

Many years ago I plucked this lantern from someone's trash and brought it back to our garden. It's been hanging there ever since and it had become filthy, and yesterday I almost threw it out. But then I scrubbed it up with an old toothbrush and it looks respectable again.

Last night we had leftover pasta bolognese and I set up a table in the garden so we could dine al fresco. We put a candle in the lantern and set it in the middle of the table atop a colorful tablecloth. It all would have been quite idyllic except that Olga CANNOT tolerate us sitting in the garden if we're not paying attention to her. She barks incessantly. It was a noisy meal.

Two-Spot Afternoon

Our red geranium (or, to be absolutely proper, Pelargonium) has finally bloomed after a spring spent looking rather spindly and terrible. I'm glad it's bouncing back with more sun and warmer weather. Several of our geraniums are looking a bit worn and next year I probably need to give them all a hard prune. (I say this every year but I'm always reluctant to prune anything and so I never do it.)

I had a very relaxed day yesterday. I changed our bedsheets, folded and put away laundry, and sat in the garden with Olga. The temperatures were perfect.

I couldn't decide which of these pictures to use so you're getting both of them! Although you can see my computer sitting on the chair above (I was reading blogs and catching up on comments), I spent most of my time reading "A Visit From the Goon Squad," which I finished. I really, really enjoyed that book. It was masterfully constructed and just so interesting. I have a Louise Doughty mystery to tackle next.

Some of the pupating ladybirds/ladybugs seem to be emerging. I'm seeing more mature beetles around, and the pupa I blogged about a week ago, standing on its end, is now empty. Nature keeps on truckin', to quote R. Crumb.

The ladybird/ladybug above is a two-spot, which is a native variety and not one of the Asian harlequins. I am glad to see the native species holding their own. I was reading last night that although the harlequins are invaders, there's mixed evidence about whether they out-compete native varieties. Maybe we really can all live together in harmony. At least if we're ladybirds/ladybugs (and we're not on Twitter).

I tried once again to find evidence of any protests in London and saw nothing online. Only in the evening, after I'd made my start-of-summer martini, did Dave see a post from a Facebook friend about a protest at the U.S. embassy. Drat! I knew I should have gone down there. (But when? And where? I like to have a plan before I set out on such an expedition. Next time they need better publicity.)

Anyway, I am heartened this morning to see so much visible resistance in the USA, in all 50 states. You've gotta be a brave person to attend an anti-Trump march in Alabama and Mississippi and a lot of other conservative areas, but people did it, protesting our own governmental Goon Squad. Bravo all around!

Free at Last

Yesterday was our last day of work until mid-August. Woo hoo! And it was barely a workday. I had almost no customers in the library, and everything was pretty much already cleaned up and put away for the summer, so I just did a few small tasks here and there.

I took Jerry, the library Christmas cactus, down to the Lower School patio garden and hosed him off to ease his mealybug infestation. (A fifth-grader named Jerry last year when she saw me daubing his leaves with alcohol to kill the mealybugs. She decided he needed a name. I have no idea why she chose that one, but whatever.) I did the same with another Christmas cactus that I then brought home to try to rehabilitate. It needs some work.

I discovered this dinosaur fantasy (above) in a pool or fountain in the middle of the courtyard.

And these fearsome monsters were off to the side.

We had our year-end lunch at noon, where we heard speeches and said goodbye to several departing colleagues, and then we were free!

Someone left these flowers outside the office door of a co-worker. Unfortunately I think she'd already gone home, so I e-mailed her to tell her they were there and I put them in some water. Hopefully she'll come back for them.

I walked home and found these nicely framed prints along the way, offered up for the taking. They need a cleaning but they look good otherwise. Rothko, I think? Or maybe a Rothko imitator? In any case I did not take them.

In the afternoon I lay in the garden with Olga and read. I got very sleepy, which I attribute to the two glasses of wine I had at lunch. It's certainly not the fault of the book, Jennifer Egan's "A Visit From the Goon Squad," which I love. An English teacher recommended it to me and I'm so glad she did. It's a novel made up of interconnected stories about people loosely arranged around a music producer, and I think both the construction and language use are interesting.

Last night we were supposed to get "torrential" rains, according to the weather forecast. We got rain but it was hardly torrential, at least as far as I could tell before I fell asleep. Nothing like the toad-stranglers I've witnessed in Florida!

Authoritarianism and Australian Spam

I'm going to start right out by mentioning the scary state of affairs in the USA -- Trump's mobilizing of the military against our own citizens, and against the wishes of state and local leaders in California, not to mention the handcuffing of a U.S. senator for daring to ask a question at a press conference by Kristi Noem. I said to Dave yesterday morning, "This is martial law." Where does it stop? This is authoritarianism. It's happening now. As I say pretty much every day nowadays, Trump's America is not the country I grew up in.

If we were having anti-Trump protests here tomorrow I might go, but I'm not aware of any. (And I've looked.) As I've said in comments on other blogs, part of the problem might be that the "No More Kings" slogan doesn't really work in the UK. It's a branding problem! I bet if I went down to the embassy or maybe Trafalgar Square something would be going on. Meanwhile, I'm protesting here on my blog.

More trivially, what was up with the onslaught of Australian spam comments on my blog yesterday? Did any other bloggers experience this? I've deleted it all -- which I almost hated to do because YP made funny replies to several of them -- but it was the strangest thing. I had about eight comments trying to sell me pool maintenance and bank loans and all manner of stuff, from businesses all based in Melbourne, I think. Those crafty Australians, hacking Google's firewalls.

Yesterday at work I did my first aid training and my fire safety training. The latter was a three hour online video course, and involved far more detail than I should have to know given that my only responsibility as a fire warden is to make sure everyone leaves the library if the alarm goes off. I don't need the legal origins of the fire codes and statistics about fire casualties blah blah blah, and although it's helpful to know about the various types of fire extinguishers it's highly unlikely that I would ever be in a position to fight a fire at work myself. Not only that, but some of it was stunningly obvious. Here's one actual directive from the video: "Once you believe the fire is out, stop using the extinguisher." Yeah, no shit, Sherlock!

Today is our final all-school meeting and lunch, where we say goodbye to departing colleagues and that kind of thing, and then we're off for the summer. It's also Olga's last walk with her dog-walker. A momentous day!

Oh, and Mr. K returned from his travels yesterday. He mowed his lawn and I told him how I'd closed their shed. Mrs. K is supposedly coming back today, so normalcy appears to be returning to my little corner of London.

(Photo: A neat house I often pass on my walks to and from work.)

Beetle

Here's one of our masterworts, or Astrantia, which I divided and replanted a couple of years ago. Half of the original plant is in the flower bed in the center of the garden and half in a pot. Dave said of these blossoms the other day, "That's not a very nice color." And it's true that it's not as bright as another of our masterworts. But I still like it, that dusty pink.

Yesterday was very quiet in the library. We got a few more books back from people who waited until the very last minute -- and incidentally, there are still quite a few out. I think the student overdue list is about three pages long at this point. The kids will just have to deal with all that in the fall. I am not a miracle-worker.

I only worked through the morning and came home around 1 p.m. -- just in time to see Olga dropped off by her dog-walker. He and I had a brief chat about her age and condition. I think he's sorry to lose her as a client after so many years, but he understands that at this point she'd probably rather just lie around the house and garden. Her last day walking with him is tomorrow.

This is a scarlet lily beetle, living on one of our Asiatic lilies. A severe infestation can defoliate a lily -- in fact, you can see the leaf directly above the insect has been nibbled. The RHS advises to tolerate them if possible, and we don't have much of an infestation so for now I'm leaving it alone. (I think they're kind of pretty, actually.) It doesn't seem to love these particular lilies, but we used to have a crown imperial fritillaria that the beetles hungrily devoured. I've picked them off and killed them by hand in the past, but it's difficult -- they're really hard. Smashing them is like trying to crush a pebble between your fingers.

So anyway, Mr. Beetle is safe for the moment. If I see a lot of larvae or eggs I'll take steps.