The Big Reveal

It's raining quite steadily as I sit in the pre-dawn darkness. What a wonderful sound! I feel rain-deprived after our drier-than-normal summer. Our rainfall is still lagging -- I'd like to say by how much, but I'm having trouble parsing the charts on this page, which monitors our local weather. In an abundance of journalistic caution I'm just going to say we're behind and leave it at that.

I hope yesterday's blog post didn't seem too slap-dash. I woke up at 7:07 a.m. and I have to leave for work at 8 a.m., so I sat down and cranked it out in about half an hour -- and during that time our new couch was delivered and I was trying to eat breakfast! There was a lot going on and I didn't have time to "finesse" it. Today I can sit and write a leisurely post.

Yes! The new couch is here, as is the new rug:

Dave stayed home yesterday to intercept the deliveries, as well as deal with the drain engineers, who had to come back because the first guy didn't fully reopen the drain. As my mother used to say, everything has to be done at least twice.

I really like the couch's appearance, but I confess I'm still getting used to it. By the standards of our conversation the other day, this is really more of a sofa than a couch. It's structured more for sitting than for lounging. I knew it would be smaller than the Big Brown Behemoth, but it seems very small when I'm sitting on it, and it also seems to have a very slight forward rake, maybe to help older people like me get in and out of it. My mom's couch was like that too.

I love the rug. The design is called Robin's Wood, and it goes well with all our plants and our general garden theme in the living room. Dave seems a little unsure about it -- "it's very colorful," he said -- but again, I think it's just a matter of getting used to it.

Overall I'm very pleased with our updates.

There's a lot of other stuff going on related to my job and potential retirement. The school has agreed to my application and presented me with a proposal, which I have informally accepted, so it looks like it's going to happen. I have to have the whole thing legally vetted now, before signing a final contract, and then next spring I'll be done. It's a weird and frankly scary feeling, but I think it's time.

(Top photo: An autumnal hydrangea in our garden. Oddly, this hydrangea is pure white when it first blooms, so it's interesting that it picks up some color as the season progresses.)

Autumn and an Elephant

It's getting downright autumnal out there, with the leaves on the virginia creeper and grape vines changing. There's a bit of a chill in the air. That was the scene (above) as I walked to work yesterday.

I found this little popsicle stick creature on my way. I have no idea what that's supposed to be. It looks like a poodle with human hands and feet. Or maybe a clown? Anyway, I left it on the sidewalk, in case its creator comes back looking for it.

Oh, and look what arrived!

Woo hoo! I am indeed a citizen and now I can prove it at the airport.

Speaking of traveling, did any of you see the recent news item about an elephant charging a group of tourists in canoes in Botswana? This story hit home with me because, back in 2006, I was in nearly the same situation.

We were canoing in the Okavango Delta when a huge bull elephant began coming toward us. It checked us out, and scared us, but ultimately passed by harmlessly. The video above was taken by a French guy also on the trip -- hence his occasional French commentary. It's dark and grainy because it's 20 years old, and that was the technology then, but you can see me in an adjacent canoe with my friends Jessica and Liz, and you can see how annoyed I look at the end of the clip. That's because our canoe guy took his sweet time getting us out of there!

Anyway, I thought I'd share this because when I saw that news story, it resonated with me.

And now, off to work!

The Cartoon

Well, the old couch is no more. When I left for work yesterday morning just before 8 a.m., it was still sitting on the sidewalk in front of the house. I called the council's large item disposal office when I got to the library about half an hour later, and asked if they were coming to collect it that day. There was some hemming and hawing and keyboarding, and then the woman said, "This shows it's been collected. It was picked up at 8:02 a.m."

So literally minutes after I left they must have shown up. That's great. We didn't have to look like the Beverly Hillbillies all day.

Otherwise, yesterday was busy but uneventful. I did get some texts saying my UK passport application was accepted and it's been printed and is on its way back to me. Woo hoo!

Oh, and I got a funny call from an 80-something-year-old author who was trying to track down a New Yorker cartoon from decades ago. She wanted to include the cartoon in an upcoming book and she knew she'd need copyright permission, but she didn't have enough information to approach the company and ask. She only had a vague memory of what it said and a belief that it ran some time in the mid-1960's.

This woman wasn't affiliated with our school but she called us because she thought it likely we'd have a New Yorker subscription. We would have, a couple of years ago, but we cut it from the library budget. We still get it electronically through our e-book provider but that doesn't include online archives. We do have all the old issues through about 2000 on CD-ROM, though, so I told her I'd try to help.

My boss and I tried to search the CDs, which of course are antiquated technology and turned out to require some special program that we didn't have and which wasn't even compatible with our modern Macs. I was also skeptical we'd be able to search cartoon captions. So we abandoned the CDs.

Instead, when I got home, I logged in with my personal subscription and went to the online archives. And lo and behold, I found the cartoon! It appeared in 1977, not the mid-60's, and this is it:

I'm not sure why she is fixated on this particular cartoon, but one person's hilarious cartoon is another person's head-scratcher. Anyway, I sent it to her, and I haven't heard back yet but I was pretty freaking proud of myself. (Credit really goes to The New Yorker for having such well-indexed archives. All I needed to do was search for the word "truthity," which the author remembered, and it popped right up. Captions are searchable after all!)

On the way home from work I stopped at Waitrose and bought...

...two exotic little Portuguese dessert cakes. (That's mine above. Dave got the other one, of course.) I'd never seen these before but they were good -- white cakes with lemon filling and lemony icing, made at least partly from rice flour. They were like a triple hybrid of vanilla cupcake, rice pudding and lemon meringue pie. I'd buy them again!

(Top photo: A sticker on Finchley Road.)