No Blood Moon for Me

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

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

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

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

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