Squirrels, Hedgehogs and a Box Turtle

Look! We do have at least one squirrel wandering around our garden! This one was nibbling on our walnut tree yesterday, and I've seen it around a few other times recently -- but only by itself. Whatever squirrelpocalypse has befallen our other garden rodents apparently hasn't touched it yet.

I spent yesterday morning in the garden, reading and mowing the grass. I'm reading a book that I love called "Only This Beautiful Moment" by Abdi Nazemian, about three generations of an Iranian family. The action takes place in Tehran and Los Angeles, and at least two of the men are gay, which is an interesting theme. You don't read much about homosexuality in Iranian (or Iranian-American) culture. I've been enjoying it.

As for mowing the grass, we're doing "No-Mow May" again, but I've started it early -- so the area in back around the teasels we're not mowing at all. In fact, I may not mow it all summer. That's at least a third of the lawn, so the territory to be mowed is reduced significantly! Hopefully this will boost our population of friendly bugs.

In the afternoon I tried to get Olga interested in a walk, but she wasn't having it. She'd gone out that morning, so she was content to lie in the sun on her dog bed. I went by myself to Sweet Corner for a coffee and then walked around the cemetery and the neighborhood beyond. It's very strange to walk in the cemetery without Olga, but I must say it's easier and faster.

This smug-looking balloon was lying on the playing fields just beyond the cemetery. I think it was an escapee from a children's party, which I could hear going on in a nearby clubhouse.

And I passed this "hedgehog crossing" sign, which may be unofficial. I'd be impressed if there are hedgehogs in that area. I've lived in England 14 years and I've still never seen a wild hedgehog. There's a railroad line and some woods nearby, so maybe that's enough wilderness to sustain a population, or maybe it's just wishful thinking.

On the way home I popped into Waitrose thinking I'd buy a foxglove for our patio planter, but they didn't have any. They did have a Tiarella (foamflower) though, so I bought it to replace the one we lost over the winter.

And here's the princess, back home and sleeping underneath her blanket. She was really crashed last night, but this morning she seems bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. In fact, she's giving me the stare-down right now, expecting her morning walk. Must be off!

If you'd like some happy supplemental reading, check out the story of Rockalina, the half-a-century-old rescued box turtle, who hadn't been outdoors since 1977 but can now once again feel grass beneath her feet. (That's a gift article link so it should work even if you're not a Washington Post subscriber.)

A Wandering Fox

Thanks for your many ideas yesterday about how to gain some leverage with students to get them to return overdue library books. We do use a few methods of mild coercion, mainly not giving them yearbooks until their library accounts are clear. We don't charge late fees and we don't bill for lost books through our finance department, because both options are bookkeeping nightmares. And we don't withhold grades, perhaps because that's an academic punishment that seems too punitive. But a yearbook is a purely social thing, so we can use that -- and we do, but unfortunately that opportunity doesn't arise until the end of the year, so in the meantime there's a lot of procrastinating.

I kept myself busy yesterday, finishing "Freewater," another Newbery medal winner. Remember how I read all the Newbery winners several years ago? Well, there have been a few awards since then, so I decided to update my Newbery page on the school website by reviewing the newest medal-winning books. I've done all of them now except this year's, which hopefully I'll get to soon.

A few months ago blogger Mitchell wrote about his cousin's daughter (is that a second cousin?) who is an artist and printmaker. I was taken by one of her designs depicting a fox -- certainly appropriate for our English garden where we see foxes all the time. I ordered one of her woodblock prints and waited. And waited. And waited.

A few days ago I wrote her to ask if she'd received my order. Turns out she'd not only received it -- she'd already shipped it, and the postal service showed it had been delivered. Very strange! I'd had it sent to work, so yesterday I dropped in to search the parcel room and the mail area, and there -- happily -- I found the print, sitting atop the staff mailboxes on a shelf where it wasn't visible and where I would never have thought to look.

Ta-da! Isn't it great? Now I just have to get a frame for it. I think I'll hang it in our bedroom, above my bedside lamp.

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, in the afternoon I met up with my friends Colin and Shannon to see "The Brightening Air" at the Old Vic, a play about an Irish family in the 1980s. I enjoyed it a lot -- it was very well-acted and dealt with lots of family drama in a humorous and yet poignant way. I took the photo at top not far from the theatre, when I got a coffee at Pret and sat in a nearby park waiting to meet my friends. A colorful, sunny day out in London!

Rose Geranium

I have just learned via Picture This, my handy plant app, that this is called a "rose geranium." I had no idea. It's one I found discarded several years ago and brought back to life, but it looks a little stressed these days -- I think its pot is too small or maybe it needs some fresh soil.

I like the Picture This app and I recently went ahead and paid the roughly £25 annual subscription to unlock all its features, like a diagnosis tool for plant illnesses. This is pretty unheard of for me -- I have never paid subscription fees for an app -- but why not? I think I'll use it, and I suppose the app developers are entitled to some income.

So, what a week! Dear God. The end of the school year is always a busy time for us, but this year is giving me even more agita than usual. I finished the inventory and we have 28 missing books -- which is not great, even out of a total count of about 27,000 volumes. We know of about five additional missing books that were checked out to a high school department, for use by students with research projects. Hopefully some of them will come back before the end of the year when people are cleaning out classrooms, lockers and offices.

I am still having a terrible time getting overdue books back from students. I write them e-mails, I talk to them personally, I e-mail their parents and school advisers, and still nothing happens. No one can seem to resolve the situation. It's not as if the kids don't have the money to pay for the book. They just can't follow through, for whatever reason. We've long blamed pandemic-related developmental delays in executive functioning for problems like this, and maybe that still is partly the problem. I'm trying to take it lightly -- I can't be ultimately responsible for what other people do or don't do.

I suppose I've been complaining about this for ten years. But the lassitude really does seem worse this year.

This weekend should be pretty chill. I'm going to a play this afternoon because a friend offered me a spare ticket -- "The Brightening Air" at the Old Vic, about an Irish family in the 1980s -- so that will be the big excitement for the day.

Our Flat, Staged

I came across this picture while cleaning out our old paperwork. The room looks familiar, right? And yet not quite?

Well, that's because it's our flat, but before we moved in eleven years ago. It's also before the previous family moved in, because we saw their decor and it wasn't this. I'm guessing it was taken in 2010 or so, if not before. These photos were then used to list the flat for rent. Yes, you too could live here!

What's up with the very '80s glass and steel table and stereo equipment? And all that white furniture -- you can certainly tell this was long before Olga. I note that they took down all the terrible drapes before taking the photos.

Just for comparison, here's the living room now. (We also took down the terrible drapes, as has been discussed in previous posts.)

The dining room was very sparse -- more like an ironing room, from the looks of things.

Here's what it looks like now.

The old photo of the bedroom has the most furniture of any of the shots. I guess some previous occupant was in the process of moving out, but hadn't quite yet.

Here's the bedroom now. Those armoires came with the flat but they're not in the older photo, so I'm not sure when they came on the scene. Note that the carpet is the same. 🙄 And here we do have some unsightly drapes.

The kitchen looked very white. I could not figure out what that dirigible-shaped thing is on the left. Dave thinks it's a speaker for a phone, like a docking station, sitting on top of the microwave. (Addendum: He's right. It is in fact a Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin Air speaker.)

Here's the kitchen now. We had it painted yellow and all of the appliances have been replaced over the years.

And finally, this is what the garden used to look like! It was so empty.

Here it is today. That hazel tree on the right has gotten huge, despite several trims, as has the Japanese maple and some of the other plantings in the back. Overall it feels much more private and secluded, I'd say.

Anyway, just thought you'd enjoy this look at the flat before we lived in it -- particularly if you're into before-and-after real estate shots!

Bouquet

When I was at Tesco last weekend, I bought this Easter bouquet to brighten up the living room -- a mixture of lilies, iris and chrysanthemums. Yesterday evening the sun was hitting it just right and a photo was in order!

I don't have much news. I was busy as all get-out yesterday, re-shelving a couple of cartloads of books, covering new ones and spending an hour in the Lower School. Barely a moment to breathe! But none of it was very interesting or yielded any blog-worthy stories.

Today I'm hoping to get back to inventory once again. I've been wearing my pants with a hole in the knee in preparation -- since kneeling for inventory always ruins my pants, why ruin a second pair? I'll just completely demolish the ones that are already damaged, even though I might look like a hobo in the meantime. I want the kids to look at me and say, "Gee, someday I want to be a prosperous librarian like him."

Fungus Among Us

I tweaked my blogroll again yesterday, restoring the blogs of a few bloggers who had died. The comments from all my readers made me reconsider removing them. After all, if I died, I would hope my blog would live on in one way or another, and I suppose that happens when living bloggers preserve the links. So yes, Mage and Miss Edna have returned.

That's our broom plant, above, which I don't believe has bloomed in recent years. I'm glad some things in our garden are thriving because there's a fair amount of doom and gloom out there this year. I think two of our landlord's roses have given up the ghost, or are in the process of doing so, including one of my favorites, and I am at a loss how to prevent it. We've watered and fertilized and pruned but they still seem determined to expire.

Also, our canna lily is showing no signs of life, but that is a minor tragedy. I bought that thing for Dave for his birthday five years ago and never expected it to live this long. England is really no place for an outdoor canna lily.

The pot where I planted that sprig of ginger from our kitchen has sprouted a crop of mushrooms. It's a stir-fry!

St Clement Kills the Toaster

In Britain the Easter weekend is bracketed by two holidays -- Good Friday and Easter Monday -- when many businesses are typically closed. Yesterday was Easter Monday, so it's back to routines today. It was a quiet Easter Monday around here, mostly involving gardening and reading.

I was sorry to hear about the death of the pope. I am not Catholic so I have no direct personal stake in the pope or his theology, but I thought Pope Francis did an excellent job embodying the positive aspects of Christian love and trying to open the church to communities that had been marginalized and underserved. Of course he took a lot of heat for this, and the polarizing impulses that we see sweeping politics are also dividing the church.

It's interesting how this polarizing tendency is being felt all around the globe in a variety of contexts. Is it all because of the Interwebs and social media, where we find people (and algorithms) to fuel our more extreme views, stoking them like a white-hot oven? Or does it have something to do with a quintessential difference in the way progressives and conservatives think, and the way those differences are felt more strongly and loudly in our media-saturated modern society? Who knows.

Anyway, RIP Francis. You were the right Pope at the right time.

Our hideous camellia is blooming. As you can see, when the blooms are fresh they're not bad, though this one is already beginning to brown just a touch on its outer edges. The plant only becomes hideous when those old blossoms are still hanging there weeks later, brown and droopy. I think white flowers in general are uninteresting so this is not a bush I would choose to plant.

Dave fertilized the roses, the citrus and the tree fern yesterday. I have more plants that need repotting but I am out of compost, so for the time being everything is just going to have to cope.

In the afternoon I went to toast our last St. Clements hot cross bun, and when I turned on the toaster it flipped the circuit breaker. What?! I reset the breaker and tried again, and the same thing happened. I was concerned the outlet was to blame, so I moved the toaster to another outlet, and this time when I turned it on I could see an arc of electricity at the bottom of the heating elements. (And it tripped a different breaker.) Clearly it had a short of some kind, so I took it right down to the council electronics recycling bin on the high street and threw it in. So much for that. A replacement toaster is on the way, and I ate my St. Clements bun untoasted.

Here's Olga brutalizing our candytuft plant in her evening face-wiping ritual:

I cleaned out the blog list in my sidebar yesterday, shedding about ten old blogs that were mostly inactive. Either the bloggers had died or had gone silent, and a few are still blogging but for whatever reason I found myself unlikely to read them anymore. It happens. Relationships evolve (or devolve) and we go our separate ways, hopefully with best wishes all around. No harm, no foul.

(Top photo: Colorful doors on Oxford Street, last week.)

St. Clement and Document Shredding

Not to keep going on and on about the dining room window, but I thought you might like to see how it looks without those awful drapes. A distinct improvement! I was in there again yesterday cleaning beneath the buffet, where I store all my photo books. I pulled out the books and dusted them, then moved the buffet and vacuumed beneath and behind it. Spiders be gone!

So how was your Easter? I would have completely forgotten it was Easter except when I went to Waitrose to get some milk and dog food I found a package of "St. Clements hot cross buns," which I bought on a whim. They're good sliced, toasted and eaten with butter -- a lot like raisin bread.

Apparently hot cross buns can come in multiple varieties, and I tried to figure out why these are specifically called "St. Clements" buns. (As are the ones sold by Tesco.) I'm still not sure, but Jamie Oliver seems to suggest it's because of the presence of lemon and orange in the dough. Do any of you know?

Dave got home about 9:30 a.m., and as I was showing him around the garden we checked on the tree fern. It's showing new growth -- you can see the curve of new fiddleheads coming up from the middle. Those weren't there just two days ago. Talk about rising from the dead! Hallelujah -- an Easter miracle!

Dave spent most of the day sleeping, and in fact he's still asleep as I write this. He and his sister Dawn and his niece and nephew went through tons of stuff from his parents' house, arranged to have their deck repaired and to clear unwanted possessions through an estate sale, and to put the house on the market. I'm sure it was an exhausting process. They kept his parents apprised -- they're both now in assisted living in Florida.

I spent the afternoon going through paperwork in our files. I've set aside a big stack of it to shred. Is there any point in keeping bank statements or investment records from 2017? Or ten-year-old leases or utility bills? Ten-year-old passport photos? It feels good to get rid of all that stuff. If I ever need an old bank statement I can go online to get it, and in fact we get everything electronically now. Most of this paperwork is a decade old because that's about when we stopped getting stuff in the mail.

Here's what Dave brought me from Michigan. They were in his parents' house. What's funny is, they're made by a London company, so we've repatriated them. They have names on their bums -- Mitch, Brad and Josh are the three we can see. The identity of the others is still a mystery, but my money is on Chad, Biff and Zack.

Let the Sunshine In

Here's who should be eating our suet balls, instead of our canine vacuum cleaner. (Who, by the way, suffered no ill effects from her bird seed snack. She's a machine.)

We visited the Welsh dragon around the corner yesterday morning on our walk. Olga was very annoyed that there was no garbage to be found anywhere. We must have come right after the garbage men departed, because there is always trash lying around up there.

So what did I do yesterday? Well, aside from walking the dog, I didn't leave the house at all. I cleaned the bookcase in the dining room, taking down all the books and cleaning the shelves and then moving it to vacuum beneath it. This is a once-a-year task, at best.

Then, as I looked at my newly-cleaned windows, I realized how terrible the drapes looked. They've always been terrible but we've left them up in that room because if anyone stays with us, that's usually where we put them to sleep. The truth is, though, no one has stayed overnight with us in years. I can't remember the last time.

So I took down the drapes, and the room looks so much better. We're rarely in there anyway, and if we are we're sitting at the table, so who cares if people can see in from the street? Plus the house is elevated, so from the street really all that can be seen is the ceiling. The only people with a view straight into the room would be in the houses opposite. And I don't really care.

Now the only room in the house with drapes is our bedroom. I am not much of a fan of window coverings, especially when they're as dreary as the ones we have here. (All owned by the landlord.) Give me daylight!

One of my dahlias is sending up little purple sprouts. Signs of life! The others haven't sprouted at all yet, at least not above the soil, but it won't be long.

I ate two leftover fortune cookies yesterday at coffee-time, sitting out in the garden, and here was one of the messages. I thought it especially appropriate since Dave lands this morning, back in London from his adventures in Michigan.

I Can See Clearly Now

As I sat on the back garden bench yesterday morning, this was my view. The sun was so bright, backlighting the green alkanet (on the right) and the teasels in the parts of our garden that I leave purposely weedy, and Olga was soaking up every ray.

I stayed home all day, doing work around the house.

Allow me to explain this photo. See that opened box of suet balls for the bird feeder? Well, it wasn't open -- at least not that much -- before Olga wandered past unsupervised. And see the crumbs of suet on the floor on the beige rug and the purple rug by the table?

Yes. Someone had a bird-food snack. And she isn't a bird.

This was my major project for the day. I hadn't cleaned the front windows of the house in a long time. They're hard to do because they're quite high off the ground, especially those top ones, and until recently we had some very large and overgrown shrubs beneath the window. But after the Russians insisted on having everything pruned within an inch of its life, I could finally get in there to clean. (I hate giving the Russians credit for anything, but this was a plus, I admit.)

I tried using a ladder, but the ground is too uneven and there was no place to safely brace it against the wall. So I switched to a chair, which worked fine. I still couldn't reach the top ones, though, so I had to do those from the inside, leaning out the side windows and sticking my arm out the top.

If I'm making this sound like a major project, IT WAS! Indoors, the window area is normally crowded with plants and the sill is full of orchids and tchotchkes. So I had to move all that stuff out of the way and do a thorough wipe-down not only of the glass but the window frames and the sill. I ran the tchotchkes -- vases and whatnot -- through the dishwasher, and then put everything back.

The windows look so good now! I keep wandering into the dining room just to admire them.

I also did the little alcove next to our front door, where I keep a collection of vases and my Rhipsalis cactus. Can you believe how big that thing has grown, from a tiny cutting?!

This all took me a couple of hours, believe it or not.

Afterwards I read blogs and finished a book and watered plants. The jury is still out on the survival of our tree fern. I still can't believe how quickly it gave up the ghost -- it went from looking fine to entirely crinkly and dry in a matter of days, but it was probably suffering from a deficit of water for a long time and we just never realized. I feel so guilty.

Today is my last full day of alone time. Dave returns tomorrow morning, and while I'll be glad to see him, I must say I have really enjoyed being able to listen to my own music, and keep the end table next to his chair clear of detritus, and access the bathrooms anytime I want.

From Wheeling to Westminster

Yesterday morning, I dreamed that the school where I work decided I need to learn to snow ski. It's a relatively wealthy school and many of the students ski, and they felt I needed to better fit into the culture. So for professional development they decided to send me to Wheeling, West Virginia, to learn to ski. I remember thinking, "Wheeling? Is there even a mountain there?" I mean, why not Switzerland or the French Alps? I was distinctly disappointed in the destination and also a bit worried about trying to get on skis for the first time at almost 60 years old. I planned to use the children's ski runs, because I had no enthusiasm at all for breaking a limb.

And then I woke up and realized with great relief that I didn't have to learn to ski or go to Wheeling (where I have admittedly never been and it may be a perfectly nice place).

I spent the morning in the garden, sitting out with the dog and reading despite the fact that the temperature was something like 50º F. (Not that warm.) It got much more comfortable fairly quickly, though. Our camassia lilies are blooming (above) and every day the garden's growth is more lush and the flowers more abundant.

Olga went with her dog-walker at about 11:30 and I decided to go to the Tate Britain, where I hadn't been in ages. There's an exhibit of British photography from the 1980s that I wanted to see. Also, a few years back the museum re-hung its collection -- an effort that not everyone appreciated -- and I was curious to see what it looks like now.

The photography show was interesting, particularly the earlier rooms devoted to photojournalism about the strikes and economic turmoil of those years. I took a few photos of the photos but I don't feel I can post them, given copyright laws. My favorites included some of Tish Murtha's work from Newcastle in 1981. There was also an emphasis on the use of photography by British black and/or female and/or queer artists in developing and exploring their individual identities and communities.

Then I went to the member's room under the museum's central rotunda and had coffee and carrot cake. That was the view from my table, above.

In the permanent collection I visited "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose" by John Singer Sargent (on the right above), one of my favorites. It now shares a corner with works by, from left, Herbert Draper, Annie Louisa Swynnerton (top) and Henry Scott Tuke, famous for his paintings of naked teen boys bathing in the waters around Cornwall.

I tried to find Gerald Brockhurst's portrait of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, also a favorite of mine, but Margaret has apparently been relegated to a storage closet somewhere as she is no longer on display. I suppose being known primarily for sexual scandals and aristocratic incompetence no longer entitles one to a position at the Tate.

Of course John Everett Millais' "Ophelia" is still on display, as well as Henry Wallis' "Death of Chatterton" (top right).

This 1920s painting by Frederick Cayley Robinson jumped out at me for its unusual sunset color scheme, softly glowing lantern and old-fashioned pastoral theme rendered in a contemporary style. (Those white marks at the top of the image are reflections from the painting's protective glass.)

I left the museum in mid-afternoon and walked back to the tube through Millbank and past the Houses of Parliament. I was passing Westminster Abbey when I heard someone yell "Steve!" and turned to find one of my co-workers there with one of her daughters and some friends. I told her, "Now I know I've lived in London a long time, when I run into random people I know at Westminster Abbey!" We sent Dave a selfie so he could appreciate the chance meeting.

Meandering Through Mayfair

I was back down in Westminster yesterday, this time to meet up with my friends Chris and Gordon for lunch and do a bit of paperwork. Gordon is one of our referees for citizenship, so like Sally he had to sign a paper attesting that Dave and I are who we claim to be. We got that out of the way and had a good vegan lunch at Mildred's, which is possibly one of the most popular vegan restaurants in London. We got the lunchtime prix fixe menu, which was very good.

Then I went for a wander through Soho and Mayfair, taking photos all the way. I've photographed this dramatic lamp shadow (above) before, way back in 2014. This time a bird flew into the shot and placed itself just so, as if the shadow were some kind of laser beam blasting that pigeon from above.

In Mayfair, echoes of mid-century media at the Time & Life Building, now the home of Hermés. I wonder if the passing teens and 20-somethings know (or care) why the building is called that.

This little pub, the Coach & Horses, used to be crowded on all sides with buildings, but now the ones behind it have been torn down for some grand project or other. It makes the pub seem even more oddly isolated.

At Berkeley Square, home of the famous nightingale, I re-created yet again my photo from April 2000, which I first blogged about and re-created back in 2011. It's hard to believe that more time has elapsed between that blog post and now (14 years) than between the first photo and the post (11 years). The scene hasn't changed much.

I popped in to a Pret and ordered a coffee and some chocolate-covered almonds, and waited with other patrons in a rather disorganized group as the coffees were produced. When the barista called "white Americano" I stepped forward to take it -- not because I am a white Americano but because that really is my usual coffee order -- but she said it was with hot milk and thus belonged to a nattily dressed older gent behind me. I stepped aside and said to him jokingly, "I didn't take a sip from it, I swear."

"I wouldn't have minded if you did," he said to me, rather suggestively. Whoa! Was I hit on by a nattily dressed older gent in Berkeley Square? I believe so.

Hedonism Wines was bursting with springtime color, adorned with huge clusters of tulips, trees of Easter eggs and larger, graffiti-covered eggs down below. As the sign says in the window, "Have an eggcellent day!"

From there I walked to the Bond Street stop, took the Jubilee Line back up to St. John's Wood and stopped at school to scan the documents Gordon and Sally had signed. I uploaded all our supporting docs last night, so now the application is complete except for our "biometric meeting" on April 30. After that, it's just a matter of waiting.

The wisteria around the corner from the school, which I've photographed in years past, is once again in full, flourishing bloom. It smells heavenly.

Back to the Eye

Yesterday I got out for a little adventure in London, thanks to a friend at work and a family with kids at our school. The family wound up with four spare tickets for a river cruise and a visit to the London Eye, and they gave the tickets to my friend and co-worker. He invited me and two more guys along.

I've been to the London Eye several times, but it's been ages. I've just spent about 20 minutes going through old blog posts and trying to figure out when I was last there. I think it was July 2012, when I went twice -- once with Dave's parents and once with our friend Kellee.

So I was due for another visit. But first, the river cruise:

We sat on the top deck of the boat and got a look at sights along the river from the Houses of Parliament to just beyond Tower Bridge. Our helpful guide Jordan pointed everything out and told bad jokes along the way. I wondered if he ever gets sick to death of doing the same spiel over and over, and trying to get a laugh out of foreign tourists who may not even understand everything he's saying. (The older Asian couple sitting next to me clearly had no idea, though the man made a video of the entire journey on his phone.)

I texted another friend and told him what we were doing. "You tourists!" he texted back, with a laughing-face emoji.

The guide insisted that we wave at everyone on the bridges as we passed beneath them, and of course the people on the bridges waved back. This was funny because I'd just been walking over one of those bridges shortly beforehand, and a boat passed beneath me and I pointedly did not wave. What a crank I am. I did wave, a bit half-heartedly, from the boat. When in Rome.

From the boat we walked the short distance -- just a few steps, really -- to the Eye and jumped the queue with our VIP tickets. Soon we were in one of the glass pods making the roughly half-hour circuit around the wheel. I wonder what would happen if someone did lean against those doors? Surely they wouldn't just pop open. I didn't test them.

I made a video to give you the London Eye experience:

There are three clips spliced together. We begin with the Houses of Parliament and pan along the north shore of the river; we then look east toward the City of London and gradually southward to Elephant & Castle and west to show an adjacent pod on the wheel; and finally we pick up at Elephant & Castle again and look west along the river toward Vauxhall before ending back at Parliament and Westminster Bridge.

I paired the footage with a song from my iTunes, "How Do You Feel" by Wave System, which was just the right length. Its copyright holder apparently permits its use on YouTube. I had to put some music with the video to eliminate the conversational chatter within the pod, which was fairly loud because there were several little kids. (Don't lean on the doors, kids!)

Anyway, after this adventure I bade adieu to my friends and walked northward through Trafalgar Square (which was closed off for filming of some kind) and Soho all the way to Baker Street. I passed All Souls' Church (top photo) which was decorated with a special cross for Easter week.

And now, Olga wants a walk of her own!

A Spiny Surprise

I got the surprise of my life yesterday morning while watering our houseplants. Another one of our cacti is blooming -- and this one has never bloomed before! It's the left-hand cactus in this post. What's funny is, I had always imagined that if this cactus ever bloomed, the flowers would be pink. It's like I manifested them.

It's only blooming on the side that faces a sunny window, which is interesting. I feel a little bad that it's putting so much effort into flowers when there are no pollinators around, but I get to enjoy them, at least. (When I crane my neck to see them on the opposite side of the plant!)

I had a busy morning yesterday doing all the predictable things that I do around here -- cleaning the house and mowing the lawn and plant caretaking. I intended to go through our old paperwork and shred some of it, because seriously, we are saving things that are of no use to anyone. I discovered that while fishing around for documents for our citizenship application. But I just didn't have the heart to immediately tackle that project.

I will say this about computers -- it's great to go paperless and have so much stored digitally, as many things are nowadays.

Of course I would never throw away my elementary school annuals, which I came across in my rummaging. Here's my fourth grade class. Can you find me? Hint: I had the biggest forehead in the room.

What's funny is, I still remember many of these kids' names. Not all of them, but many. I don't know who that kid in the second row is with the bowl haircut, looking like Cousin Oliver from "The Brady Bunch." And I don't know why Gary wrote that I have a bad temper. He was a pal so I'm sure it was a joke. Mrs. Herb, my teacher, didn't have her photo taken so she drew herself in, with eyelashes weirdly on the bottom of her eyes.

Oh, and Melissa's last name was not "Mouse," despite being from Florida and thus potentially related to Mickey. I'm not sure she was even in my class -- her photo's not there, in any case.

My tax preparer got back to me with our completed US return yesterday. I looked it over but it was huge -- 50-something pages with worksheets and supplemental material, far bigger than any return I ever prepared myself. That accountant knows how to parse everything properly. I could really only skim through it to make sure it basically made sense, and it did. So I signed it and Dave signed it, and it's been filed and we've paid what we owe (not too much).

Next, we get to do our UK taxes! Woo hoo! (Sarcasm, in case that wasn't clear.)