New Bedspread

Yesterday was the last day of the Royal Photographic Society's street photography exhibit in Mayfair. I had a stewarding shift at the gallery, from its opening at 11:30 a.m. to its closing at 3 p.m. We had pretty steady attendance (about 35 people overall) including my pals Colin and Shannon from the school where I used to work. I put an announcement about the show on Facebook and, lo and behold, they came. There are a host of legitimate ills associated with social media, but it does work!

At the end of the afternoon I brought my mounted photo home, and I must say, I'm happy to put this show behind me. Now we have Dave's nephew and his girlfriend coming to stay with us for several days beginning Thursday, and then I'm off to Florida.

While wandering around Mayfair I came across this building, obviously an old tube station. I don't remember ever seeing it before. It's about midway between the Green Park and Hyde Park Corner stations, on Down Street. Apparently it was only open for tube service from 1907 to 1932, and then used as a government shelter during the Blitz. Nowadays it's open for occasional tours, and I might try to do one of those at some point. Sounds pretty cool, doesn't it?

I grabbed a quick lunch at Pret a Manger, where the utensils were so tightly packed into a container on the counter that they made intriguing patterns.

On the home front, Dave and I got a new bedspread. The old one, which had pale green, gray and blue stripes, was at least ten years old and falling apart. Now we have a much brighter one which we actually really like, even though, as I told Dave, it's sort of "Laura Ingalls Wilder goes to Bombay."

I finished "Jackass 3" last night, mainly because we rented it and by golly I was going to get my money's worth. It made me laugh, I must admit, but it made me cringe too, and a few of the stunts are indescribably vile. I think I've had enough of that for a while, and possibly for the rest of my life.

Lost or Damaged Balls and Stray Arachnids

While walking Bailey through the nearby housing estate yesterday morning, I noticed these stray footballs on the other side of a very high fence, as impenetrable as a barrier surrounding a prison. It's at least eight feet high with sharp metal at the top to prevent anyone from climbing over. I suppose if your football or basketball somehow winds up on the other side of that fence you just have to live with it, because there's no way to get it back. Of course, my mind immediately set about trying to figure out ways to defeat the system -- a long pole? Chewing gum?

Yesterday was another quiet day at home. I read a New Yorker, including a profile of Johnny Knoxville, the ringleader of the gang behind the "Jackass" films. Apparently there's a new one, which seems improbable to me given that Knoxville is practically my age and thus a little long in the tooth to be pulling Jackass stunts. But it made me think Dave might appreciate this franchise, because he loves juvenile humor and, basically, fart jokes.

Years ago I saw the first two Jackass movies and I thought they were pretty funny -- more so than I cared to admit. So last night we rented "Jackass 3," which I'd never seen, and even though it featured Dave-like humor (one gag involved a guy with a trumpet and the above-mentioned bodily function, which seemed written specifically for Dave), he did not like it at all. We turned it off halfway through. Oh well. I would have finished it, at least -- and might still if I have a spare hour over the next day or two.

It's the lowest of low culture, but hey -- I was inspired to watch it by The New Yorker! Doesn't that count for something? The intelligentsia have taken notice!

Here are the owls that guard our patio from their perch on the fence. I found them both in the cemetery years ago and they've hung there for ages, getting gradually more and more rusty. You can see how bedraggled our climbing hydrangea looks after the dry summer.

I walked the dog in the afternoon and I'm proud to say that once again, she didn't bark at any other dogs. She does this thing where she perks up, points her ears and stares, as if to signal "I SEE YOU and I will CUT YOU," but she's now less likely to let loose with a volley of barking. Some of you have suggested that's because she feels more relaxed and less threatened now, and I hope that's true.

It's so funny because she's the opposite with me and Dave -- warm and cuddly to the point of being annoying. She's in my lap all the time.

It's a gloomy morning here -- we may have had a bit of rain, I can't quite tell. I'm off to Mayfair later today for my last shift of stewarding at the RPS street photography exhibit. It's the last day of the show so hopefully we'll get some visitors. There's a 90 percent chance of rain for the day, so at least I'll be indoors.

Dave snapped this photo of a household visitor on Vivian Swift's watercolor portraits of Olga. Surprise! It is spider season, after all.

Black and Yellow

Here's an example of how a photographer sometimes depends on luck to get a shot. What caught my eye here was the bright yellow van, and how the yellow of the license plates on the motorcycles echoed the same color. So I began taking pictures, and as I did so, this woman in a black sweater walked by, and that black car passed simultaneously on the street. Voila! It was all very fortunate -- a composition in yellow and black. If there'd been a passerby in a blue shirt across the street, or a green car passing instead, the shot wouldn't have worked.

You're getting this picture from my walk around Mayfair on Thursday because I took only one picture yesterday, and it was no great shakes. I spent the day at home, mostly on the computer, catching up on blog comments and reading. I feel like I was so busy all day, but then Dave came home in the afternoon and asked what I'd been up to, and I had trouble answering. "Laundry?" I said lamely. It's amazing how you can blow a whole day doing inconsequential stuff that doesn't even merit discussion.

Here's yesterday's one picture, taken on our morning dog walk, in case you're curious:

I just got the funniest e-mail from Mrs. Russia, our former upstairs neighbor: "Sorry to bother you. A KFC order was delivered to the wrong address by mistake and has been left outside the door. Would you mind throwing it away, please, before the foxes get to it? Thank you so much, and sorry for the inconvenience."

She sent it at 9:30 p.m. last night, and I didn't get it until just now, so of course I had visions of fried chicken strewn all over the front steps. But there's nothing there, so I suppose her tenants found it. Poor foxes lost out!

We have successfully arranged for a dog-walker for Bailey, which I'm happy about. I've been concerned about how she'd fare during my absence in Florida later this month, with Dave at work all day. The walker will take her to Hampstead Heath every morning, which will be a treat for her -- and hopefully he can also help train her how to behave better on a leash and in the presence of other dogs. (Though she has improved a lot already. I walked her to the cemetery yesterday and she didn't bark once at another dog -- and we saw several!)

Random graffiti from my walks last week.

I'm just about to start a new book -- Ike Eisenmann's memoir about being a child actor for Disney. Eisenmann was an omnipresent film star in the '70s, appearing in multiple Disney movies like "Escape to Witch Mountain," as well as ABC Afterschool Specials and various TV shows (and eventually a "Star Trek" movie). He was an early and innocent crush for gay boys of my generation, and co-starred with other tween heartthrobs of the time like Lance Kerwin. I'm intrigued to read this book and see what stardom looked like to him, from inside the Disney machine.

The Gallery

Blogger photo uploads seem to be working again, which is a relief. I came across this building yesterday near Bond Street -- it's a restaurant called Drunch, and I have no idea why it's festooned with teddy bears. I guess because people then mention it on their blogs! (Or, more likely, Instagram.)

Why was I in Mayfair? Well, the street photography exhibit that I entered and for which I judged photos, sponsored by the Royal Photographic Society, is on display this week in a gallery there.

And here it is, or about a third of it anyway. My photo is on the right-hand wall, the top picture of a set of two to the right of the corner. (In other words, just two pictures to the left of that nearest man.) It's this photo, in case I never mentioned which one was chosen. I have two others on a rolling digital display in the rear gallery.

I was there for about three and a half hours in the middle of the day, "stewarding" the exhibit, which basically just means sitting at that little table and answering questions about the photos and the RPS. We did get several visitors, so that was encouraging. I have another stewarding shift on Sunday.

And then last night was the opening party, so I was back and packed into that gallery with seemingly about 100 other people that I barely knew, having wine and meeting and greeting. I kind of dreaded that event, to be honest, but as my mother said whenever I shied away from any social outing, "You just have to do these things." It turned out to be pretty fun -- I stayed for about an hour, I think, and then beat a retreat home. Dave woke up yesterday with uveitis, an eye problem that required medical attention, so he didn't accompany me as planned.

The after-work pub crowds were out in Shepherd Market, near the gallery. Westminster has been considering rules that would regulate "vertical drinking" like this, but I'm not sure where those proposals stand. The idea raised an uproar because standing outside a pub on a summer night is practically a British social requirement -- and it's a really nice way to have a beer. Killjoys!

You're probably wondering how Bailey's spaying went. Well, it didn't. She's still having her "false pregnancy," so we've delayed it another three weeks. The vet said she doesn't want to wait too long because Bailey might go into heat again, God forbid. I'm going to take her in on Oct. 6. This dog is exhausting!

Last night Dave and I rented a fascinating documentary on Amazon, "32 Frames: A 9/11 Mystery," about the discovery of a camera in the rubble of the World Trade Center and the effort to identify the photographer based on the salvaged images. Each picture offers clues, and it's a good photographic mystery. It was mentioned in this article in The New York Times, which is worth reading if you haven't already had too much 9/11 news. (I was living in New York on 9/11 and I've blogged about those experiences here, here and here.)

Out and About in Chelsea

Blogger is on the fritz again today. It seems many people are unable to load photos, given what I'm seeing in the community forums. I couldn't load them myself in the usual way, so I'm uploading them to Flickr and then embedding them here, which seems to be working. Hopefully you all can see them too.

Blogger seems creakier and creakier these days! Or maybe we're just having a run of bad luck.

I was out and about in Chelsea yesterday, which is why I was largely absent from the blogosphere. I met up with my friend Sally for lunch and a visit to the Saatchi Gallery, where the Royal Photographic Society mounted its International Photography Exhibition. The show is just about to end, so I wanted to be sure to see it this week.

Before my rendezvous with Sally in Sloane Square, I wandered from Victoria through Chelsea taking pictures. It was my first real photo walk with the new camera, and it felt good to experiment with that. Above are the rail yards leading to Victoria Station with Battersea Power Station (actually on the other side of the Thames, invisible from this perspective) in the background.

It was a bright, sunny morning, perfect for good shadows and colors. I inadvertently had my camera set to take JPGs rather than RAW images, and I much prefer RAW, which are higher resolution, so I need to change that. This camera seems quite fiddly with all of its controls -- it's really easy to hit a button and change something without meaning to, in the process of taking it in and out of the bag, for example. There's a "lock" function to prevent that and I need to use it more.

Anyway, all this will become clearer the more pictures I take.

The exhibit was interesting. My only complaint is that some of the photos on display are clearly part of a series, but the series itself wasn't shown -- so we were seeing just part of the whole. I guess that's always a challenge with gallery shows, where wall space is limited.

We had lunch at Ottolenghi, and then coffee at a cafe on nearby Duke of York Square. The guy above was painting en plein air in Sloane Square.

I was worried how Bailey would cope with my absence all day, but when I got home the house wasn't demolished. She was very excited to see me when I came in the door. But I was greeted with a bizarre mystery -- there was a dead bird, a little blue tit, on the floor of our bedroom! I can only imagine that it flew into the house through one of the windows, which we leave cracked open for ventilation, and then Bailey killed it. It's just bad luck that it came inside on a day when I wasn't home to free it right away. We haven't had a bird in the house in years so this was truly a freak thing, unless Bailey somehow drew it inside with her supernatural powers. Is she a canine Lorelei, luring not fishermen but birds to their death?

In the evening I called my stepmother's bank and pleaded my case regarding their most recent demands. To my surprise, the woman on the phone agreed with me that the date of the apostilles is not an issue. She suggested that the "business office" was having trouble keeping track of all the relevant documents because of the way they'd been scanned as a single batch by the notary, and she suggested re-scanning them into individual packets, one for each account. So I did that -- even though I had to buy a fancier version of Adobe Acrobat to make it work -- and I resubmitted everything. Fingers crossed this puts an end to their shenanigans, but I'm not holding my breath.

Bailey is getting spayed today, assuming her false pregnancy has subsided. We shall see.

Rain and an Old Movie Memory

I take back all my skepticism about yesterday's rain. It turned out to be exactly what we needed -- a full day of steady, soaking drizzle -- almost 16 mm worth, according to our local weather site. It was by far the rainiest day we've had in months. I couldn't even begin to think about going outside until about mid-afternoon, when I spotted this discarded tin while walking Bailey. (I did not try to salvage it!)

Here's where Bailey spent most of her day -- perched on the end of the couch, where she can easily see outside and be entertained (or tormented) by passing wildlife.

I caught up on answering blog comments and read a New Yorker. And I wrestled with yet more demands from my stepmother's bank. They're now arguing that the notary seals and the apostilles have to have the same date, so they want me to go back and re-sign and re-notarize all the beneficiary forms I've already submitted. I'm going to call them today because a) this is bullshit, and even a simple Google search would tell them that a notary seal and an apostille don't need to be completed on the same day to be valid; and b) this imposes a hardship on me because I'd have to spend another £300 (about $400) on notaries, in order to inherit less than $2,000 -- my tiny share of her accounts. It's enough to make a person crazy. I really do believe they're acting in bad faith, and this is a disgraceful way to treat family members who have endured the death of a parent.

On a brighter note, I'm kicking around the idea of transcribing my childhood journals into a private blog -- not for anyone to read, but for me to be able to search when I want to remember something. I did this many years ago for my adult journals, and it helps me rapidly look up memories (like the encounter with Gloria Steinem I related recently). I'd have to edit them pretty heavily because they're full of gibberish and childhood in-jokes between me and my brother that no one else would understand, but it could be done. I took one volume down yesterday and read a few entries. Here's a sample, from when I was 13:

July 2, 1980

Last night I typed a card for the Andeker, which Dad drank on Monday. We also got ready to send off for the cans we need from that guy in Arkansas. We packed up the Fischer's Light and the 16-ounce Pabst Blue Ribbon and a letter telling him we wanted the Old German can and the Boh can. Boh is short for Bohemian, which is the can he's sending us. I also told him about our extra Puerto Rican cans and our extra Andeker. I told him to write back if he's interested. So maybe we'll get a reply! Jim also let me take home the Beer Can Bible to read.

I scoured that dingy bathtub today. What a pain! I never did get all the rust off. I got a lot of it off, though. At least it looks like a bathtub, and not a 16th-Century washtub!

We went to a movie with Mom tonight called "The Empire Strikes Back," which is a "Star Wars" sequel. I even saved my ticket stub! There was one creature in the movie which Mom really liked, named Yoda. He was a Muppet creation, and Frank Oz did the voice. (I knew there was a reason why he sounded like a cross between Fozzie Bear and Grover!) He really fools you, because he looks so real. All the Muppets do, and whenever I watch them, I keep forgetting that. I don't think I'll ever get the fact that Kermit the Frog isn't real through my thick skull. (Good grief, I must really be tired. I just insulted myself!)

A few essential notes, in order for that to make sense:
-- My stepbrother and I, at the time, collected beer cans. We would have our parents buy any unusual beer we spotted in a store, which my dad then wound up drinking before giving us the can. We traded these cans with people around the country as members of the Beer Can Collectors of America (BCCA), and we typed up notecards noting the source, condition and brewery of every can. It may seem like needless work but it taught me to type!

-- The well water where I grew up was heavy in iron and would routinely stain our fixtures, appliances and dishes rust-red.
-- Of course I knew the Muppets weren't real, but my point was that they seem very animated!

And here's the ticket stub for "The Empire Strikes Back." You gotta love the fact that going to the movies in 1980 cost two dollars!

Black Backgrounds

One thing I am learning about myself in retirement is that my natural waking-up time is about 7 a.m. I always thought I was a very early riser -- like 5:30 a.m. or so -- but apparently not! And maybe even this will change over time.

That's one of the cosmos in our garden, above. I've been experimenting with photographing flowers from behind -- a new way to see them. One of my commenters asked several posts back how I get that black background. It's easy -- I place the flower against a shadowy or shady part of the garden, set the exposure for just the flower, and the background naturally stays very dark. I don't even need to adjust it in processing.

Here's the same trick used on our bluebeard (Caryopteris), to less absolute effect. In looking up past pictures of the bluebeard I came across this post -- look how green the garden was in September 2023. So different from this year!

It's raining out there now, actually, though it's a very light rain -- maybe too light to do much. We are still in dire need of several days of good, long, soaking rain.

I spent yesterday morning trimming and neatening plants on the patio. I trimmed The Monster, the next door neighbor's climbing rose, and I cut blackberry out of the rock garden and dying leaves out of Barb the banana. She has mites again, which happens in very dry summers, so she's looking a bit ragged. I have two bags of garden waste sitting out at the curb now, waiting for collection.

I also finished "Our Evenings," Alan Hollinghurst's latest novel. I liked it the least of all Hollinghurst's books, to be honest. I loved his earlier works like "The Swimming Pool Library" and "The Line of Beauty," and I even liked his previous book "The Sparsholt Affair," which seemed to get mixed reviews from some readers. But this one felt dry and rather tedious, all the way to the somewhat abrupt ending.

In the afternoon I took the dog out for a walk. We passed a residential building near the railroad tracks with some remarkable graffiti on the side. HOW did they DO that?! They must have been hanging off the side of the building with ropes. Whether you admire graffiti as an art form or not, you gotta acknowledge the skill required to produce pieces like those -- and to be able to keep the letters uniformly sized and styled at such close range. I believe they say "Leak SMT" and "Alks."

The dog seemed sore yesterday after our long Heath walk on Sunday, and still a bit wobbly on her back legs, poor girl. Doesn't stop her from streaking across the garden after squirrels, though!

Upper-Body Workout

This little garden spider wove an elaborate web among the purple heart plants just inside our back door. I felt a little bad for it, because surely there won't be many passing insects there. (I hope not, anyway!) I was going to move it outside but the next time I looked it was gone. Maybe it made the move on its own. Either that or the dog ate it.

Speaking of the dog, Bailey and I had more adventures on the Heath yesterday, including swimming in the duckweed pond on Sandy Heath. (Well, I didn't -- she did.) That black dot by the big clump of irises in the distance is a labrador retriever who was swimming toward us. As you can see Bailey is on full alert and ready to plunge toward the other dog -- I held her back on her long lead.

Walking her with that lead is a workout. I've been musing lately about going back to the gym, because even though I walk a lot I want to keep my upper body in shape. After yesterday, I'm thinking I don't need the gym at all! I am seriously sore this morning from managing Bailey on that leash!

We visited the old Pitt House gate, also on Sandy Heath...

...and Bailey was constantly patrolling and lunging after squirrels. Things get a bit dicey when she runs into copses like the one above -- the lead can easily get tangled in the trees. When she ran into one especially dense thicket, I took her off the lead for a moment in order to untangle it -- and like a rocket she was gone, chasing squirrels with wild abandon. I ran after her thinking I would never catch her, calling her name (which she ignored), and caught up with her only when she paused at the base of a tree containing a terrified squirrel.

Now we know that she does not come when her name is called -- at least not when there are squirrels around.

A Bird's-Eye View

Another late start to blogging, mostly because I didn't sleep well last night and thus stayed in bed later than usual. I woke up around 1:30 a.m., rolled over and began feeling a sharp pain in my chest -- which of course had me concerned right away. I got out of bed and walked around, and felt fine standing or sitting up, but then when I returned to bed I got the same pain again. I reasoned that it couldn't possibly be my heart, or it would be constant, right? But in an abundance of caution I called the NHS medical advice line, which fortunately for me is a 24-hour operation, and they seemed to believe it wasn't an emergency but they're going to have a doctor call me later today. (Of course, it being the weekend, my regular GP's practice is closed.)

I did eventually go back to sleep, but not before reading the news. I saw that Robin Morgan died -- her ground-breaking anthology "Sisterhood is Powerful" was a popular book among some of my women friends in college. It seems significant that she died just a few days after Gloria Steinem. It's been a tough week for second-wave feminism.

Here's a view of our garden that we don't often see. Our upstairs neighbors, Ian and Sarah, had us over last night for some snacks and drinks on their terrace, so we got a bird's-eye perspective on our growing space. You can see some dry sticks to the right of the bird-bath -- that's one of our big buddleias, which pretty much died in the drought. I cut it back yesterday, even though it's the wrong time of year, in the hopes that it will leaf out again, but we shall see. I think we may have lost it entirely. You can also see the whitish-silvery look of the dahlias, in a row to the left of the central flower bed. They're that color because once again they've become afflicted with powdery mildew. It's just something that seems to happen to them late in the season.

Here's our patio from above. A regular jungle, isn't it? There's the avocado on the left, the tree fern bottom center, the banana top center, a bay tree upper right, the Brugmansia on the patio table in the middle and the neighbor's climbing rose, aka "The Monster," at right.

There really is a patio down there somewhere.

And here's the view to the north out one of their attic skylights, looking up the street. I've never seen any of these perspectives so it was neat to see the neighborhood and the garden from a new angle!

An Anemone and More Bureaucracy

When I was walking Bailey on Thursday we passed a house where someone had thrown away several pink anemone plants, or at least cuttings from them. Why anyone would do this I have no idea, but I broke off a stalk with some flower buds on it and brought it home, and stuck it in some water, and yesterday morning was rewarded with this flower.

Our own anemones are having an off year, partly because of the drought and partly because they've been relentlessly trampled by the dog. In fact, I'm not sure they're all going to survive. But at least we now have this one flower and maybe we'll get a few more. Maybe the stalk will even root, though I doubt it.

Yesterday morning as I walked Bailey we got caught in an absolute downpour, the likes of which I haven't seen around here in a while. It didn't go on long but it really came down -- we got 1.8 mm of rain yesterday and I think it all fell in the span of about ten minutes. Anyway, Bailey and I ran part of the way home and then ducked into a doorway on Finchley Road for shelter and watched passing traffic in the deluge.

Apparently I'm going to have to get back in the habit of carrying around an umbrella, or at least looking at the weather forecast. This is a good thing, though. Maybe our drought is gradually easing.

Then I got a terrible jolt when the mail came. My stepmother's bank sent me a letter outlining the documents I needed to re-submit to claim my portion of her estate, and in addition to everything I've already submitted, including the recent apostilles, they asked for a "US Transfer Certificate" from the IRS. Now, I'd never heard of this -- and when I looked online, it seemed obvious that this document does not apply to my stepmother. It's needed when a US citizen or non-citizen taxpayer dies while living overseas. My stepmother lived and died in Florida! In addition, the IRS clearly says the certificate is not needed if a decedent's estate is being administered in the USA -- as in this case, by my stepsister. So what the heck was this bank talking about?!

I was tied in knots about this all morning, because if I'm required to get this document, it will mean waiting up to 18 months (!) according to the IRS, not to mention notarizing and certifying a whole raft of additional paperwork. And it MAKES NO SENSE. Some idiot at the bank either just looked at my London address and assumed my stepmother died here, or doesn't understand what the Transfer Certificate is for.

Finally, the clock ticked around to afternoon when I could call the bank in the USA, and I did. I explained the situation and the helpful Miriam "put in an expedited ticket" to get the "business office" to re-examine their demand for the Transfer Certificate. I'm supposed to call again next week to get the verdict.

And then we had the whole Blogger commenting situation. Like many of you, I couldn't comment on my own blog and I couldn't comment on anyone else's. I spent a bunch of time clearing my cookies and trying different browsers and my phone and restarting my computer, all to no avail. Eventually it became clear that this problem was bigger than me, so I left a complaint with Blogger, as did a bunch of other people, and these were consolidated into a single thread in the help center which tracked the problem. Now it appears to be fixed, insha'allah.

But bloody hell -- it was one of those days. By the time Dave got home yesterday evening I was in dire need of a martini (or possibly two) and a couple of episodes of "Keeping Up Appearances."

Daily Minutiae and Gloria Steinem

I had a productive morning yesterday. I got my documents for my stepmother's estate sorted out and sent off (again), and I packaged up and returned Dave's oversized clothing from Land's End. It feels good to get those two tasks off my plate.

While out and about I took my new camera and experimented a bit, shooting urban scenes like the one above. That's the shop where the Croatian sausage poster used to hang. Now the windows are covered with gigantic vaping advertisements, which are much less interesting (and hidden when the often-graffitied security gate is down).

Remember the graffiti knight that I posted a couple of days ago? Here's the full piece, which reads ALIEN -- the graffiti writer's street name. I love that little knight, who seems very apropos because Dave and I are now watching "Game of Thrones" (we're on season five).

Later, I went through our bank statements with a fine-toothed comb, just to verify that there's been no funny business other than the Avori transaction I mentioned yesterday -- and there hasn't. There were a bunch of purchases I had to quiz Dave about, and we found one item he bought that never arrived, so he's got to chase that down today. I'm not going to contest the Avori thing. I'm convinced it's something Dave bought that he just doesn't remember.

I teased him that I'm going to take away his bank card. He's way too susceptible to seeing something on social media and ordering it on a whim. He's already famous (in our household) for buying political books that he sees touted on talk shows and then never reading them. Now that extends to t-shirts with quirky phrases, though I can't complain too much because I've been the happy beneficiary of some of those impulse buys ("Rat is Short for Ratthew")! And in his defense, some of what he was buying recently were new clothes for work, and he does need those.

I don't mind if he buys things he's going to use. I just want us to think twice about whether or not we need them, and then to make sure they arrive.

When I walked Bailey to the cemetery I found three of these ceramic florist pots -- the ones on the far right above -- in the rubbish bin, and against my better judgement I brought them home and cleaned them up. I need them like I need a hole in the head, but at the same time they seem too nice to throw away. My pet peeve about these decorative pots is that they don't have drainage holes, so you can't put a plant directly into them. It needs to be in a smaller pot, which then sits inside the planter. They proliferate like crazy. That's just a tiny sample of all the ones we have lying around the house.

I once took a bag of them to our local florist, and he said he couldn't re-use them for plants that he sells, but he agreed to take them for plants he gives to charity. I wonder if he was just reluctant to admit he'd sell them on, but whatever.

I was sorry to see that Gloria Steinem died -- a hero for our age. I'm sure I've mentioned the time I went to Feinstein's, a supper club in New York, with my co-worker Ann and we found ourselves sitting at a table next to Steinem's. Here's the original entry from my journal in March 2004:

An amazing evening! Not only did Ann and I see a great show by Rita Moreno, in which she sang "I'll Be Seeing You" and other great jazz standards, but we were seated at a table next to Marlo Thomas, Elaine May, Gloria Steinem and a fourth woman who looked familiar to both of us but who neither of us could identify. Amazing! A New York moment! Rita looked great, too, in a slinky black and white sleeveless dress -- and she's 72! I had arugula and golden beet salad, red snapper and a rum bread pudding for dessert. Altogether $163 -- but worth every penny!

We later realized the fourth woman was Letty Cottin Pogrebin, another co-founder of Ms. magazine. I think they were all friends with Moreno. There was a blizzard that evening and the club was practically empty, so it seemed like a very intimate celebrity encounter, even though we never spoke to them. Moreno, though, came to our table and chatted with us. She's 94 now!

Addendum: It appears my blog (and possibly all blogs) may not be accepting comments at the moment. This is a widespread problem, based on what I see on Blogger's help forums. I've reported it, as have others. Sorry everyone, and stay tuned!

Legalese

Is it possible to have too many pictures of sunflowers? I say no.

I just woke from the weirdest dream. Somehow Dave and I were going to get married -- and of course we already are, so maybe this was taking place in the past. But I suddenly realized in the dream that I was already married, to a friend from college, and then realized I was also married to a former boyfriend. So I had not one but two husbands already! This was not a good feeling. I felt literally sick at the thought of all the paperwork and legalese I would have to endure to get me out of this fix before I could marry the person I really wanted. And then, thank goodness, I woke up married to the right person after all.

Dreams are so strange. I have noticed that on nights when I don't have a glass of wine or two with dinner, my dreams are more vivid. Or maybe I just remember them better. I didn't drink at all yesterday (given the pub outing the day before), and I think that contributed to my weird dream state. Maybe my REM sleep is better when I'm completely sober.

My dread of legalese may stem from the fact that I'm still wrestling with my stepmother's estate. Remember how I had to get some bank documents notarized a few weeks ago in order to get the bank to release the money I'm entitled to as a beneficiary of her accounts? Well, I submitted the forms and waited, and waited, and waited. I finally called the bank on Tuesday and asked what's up, and they said the notary stamp by itself was not sufficient -- I also needed an apostille (basically a certificate verifying the identity of the notary, as I understand it). So I'm getting that now, but I felt like saying (sarcastically), "Well, thanks for contacting me and telling me that!" My siblings and I have a theory that the bank is making this as difficult as possible so they can hold onto her money as long as possible.

I also called our own bank over a £45 transaction on our account from June that neither Dave nor I recognize. I got them to tell me a little more about it and we still don't recognize it, so I think I'm going to dispute it. It's on Dave's card, which may get cancelled but c'est la vie. I'm surprised it took me this long to notice it but with all our traveling and other excitement this summer I plead distraction. It's from a company called Avori, and there appear to be three such firms -- one focusing on foot and skin care, one on bedding, and one on hair care devices -- and neither of us have any memory or evidence of purchasing anything there. Dave even e-mailed the most likely Avori and they said they have no record of a transaction from him. So that's weird.

It's also weird that there's been no suspicious activity since on our accounts. You would think a scammer, having gotten away with one transaction, would pull more. But that doesn't appear to have happened. I do think it's possible that Dave ordered something online, possibly from a retailer who trades under a different name, and then forgot about it. There's just no way to know for sure.

In the afternoon I took the dog to the cemetery, where we found this mysterious backbone lying in the grass. Finding bones in a cemetery is always disconcerting, but this is clearly from an animal of some type. Of course Bailey promptly tried to roll on top of it and I pulled her back at the last minute, which is why she's rolling off to the side in the photo above. Google tells me the bones are from an ungulate like a sheep or deer. What either would be doing in Hampstead Cemetery is anybody's guess.

We passed this truck on our walk home. Someone didn't plan their lettering very well, did they?

And on Tuesday night, when I was at the concert, Dave sent me this hilarious picture of Bailey crashed out on our couch. She clearly wasn't anxious about my absence!

Lanterns and Pumpkins

Here's a very autumnal sight, spotted in our ivy beds yesterday. I'm astonished the dog hasn't mangled it yet, as much as she runs through there while chasing squirrels, but for the time being it's intact. It's a pretty big mushroom and Google tells me it may be something called a Freckled Dapperling. (British mushrooms, like British towns, often seem to have entertaining names.)

I'm getting a late start today because I was out last night at a concert with a friend. Yesterday was a whirlwind of a day.

Of course I walked the dog a couple of times, in the morning and after lunch. I also took care of some gardening, emptying a flower pot containing a couple of dormant hyacinth bulbs and filling it with this:

Yes! After showing off the neighbor's Chinese lanterns the other day, I decided we needed one of our own. So once again I'm trying my hand at growing this plant. We'll see if it prospers this time. The florist in the shop where I bought it said to give it morning sun but not to let it bake, and good drainage. We shall see.

In the afternoon I went to a pub in St. Johns Wood to see my former boss from the library, Karen, who lives in the states now but is back visiting. It was great to see her again, as well as her husband Rod who also used to work at the school. I was there for a couple of hours before meeting up with my friend Colin and heading down to Southbank for a concert.

Colin bought these tickets last spring and when I agreed to go it seemed so far in the future -- and then BOOM, here we were. The show was an orchestral and choral presentation of The Smashing Pumpkins' album "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness," featuring Billy Corgan, the leader of the Pumpkins himself. Anyone who was listening to the radio in the mid-'90s will remember The Smashing Pumpkins for their song "1979," their biggest hit. It came from the "Mellon Collie" album, a double-disc magnum opus of youthful angst and wonder. I owned the album, like many of us at the time, and when this concert came across Colin's radar I was excited to go.

We both agreed it was an interesting idea, presenting an alternative rock album in an orchestral form. There were several opera singers who performed some of the numbers, in addition to the musicians and choir, and they were backed by a screen projecting Steampunk-looking animation sequences depicting Chicago, the Pumpkins' home city. But the best moments were definitely when Corgan himself sang. He has a distinctively reedy voice, but he's actually a much better singer than I remembered.

Here he is performing "1979" last night, so you can get a sense of what this experiment was like.

In an ideal world, the screen for the animations needed to be bigger, and Corgan needed to be onstage for more of the songs. But otherwise, I thought it was, as I said, an interesting idea. In my opinion the classical presentation deprives the songs of a certain energy and intensity, but it was worth the experience.

That was a lot of socializing for one day. Today I'm going to huddle inside with the dog! (Who continues to show no ill effects from our recent raisin episode.)

Raisin Angst

Soon after I wrote yesterday's post, in which I blithely mentioned giving Bailey some of our bread-and-raisin pudding at the park, a reader contacted me. Raisins, she said, can cause severe and even fatal kidney damage in dogs, and it can take days for the symptoms to appear.

She advised me to Google "can dogs eat raisins," and when I did, what I read was terrifying: "Raisins are highly toxic to dogs and can cause sudden, severe kidney failure. Even a single raisin or grape can make a dog very sick or cause fatal kidney damage. Some dogs react badly to a tiny amount, while others may not show immediate signs. You cannot predict how your dog will respond. Do not wait for symptoms to appear. Call your vet or an emergency animal hospital right away."

HOLY SH*T! Had we just poisoned our dog? Dave and I talked about it and although I was a little more panicked than he was, we both agreed the situation may not be that bad. For one thing, we weren't sure Bailey got any raisins in her two bites of bread pudding -- if she did, she could only have had a few. Also, it had already been 19 hours since she'd eaten them and she seemed fine. Finally, yesterday was a bank holiday and our vet's office was closed, so I couldn't even call for advice. We decided to just keep an eye on her.

Bailey and I went walking on Billy Fury Way, where we found some interesting graffiti (above and below), and she seemed absolutely normal. Of course, to hear Google tell it, it could take up to 48 hours for problems to develop. I didn't feel like we were completely off the hook.

But the more I thought about it, the stranger all this seemed. How had I never heard of this supposed raisin toxicity? Everybody knows not to give a dog cooked chicken bones, for example -- why isn't "raisin danger" just as well known? Are they really that dangerous? Back in the days before commercial dog food, people used to feed their dogs table scraps -- surely some of them inadvertently got raisins? Did they drop dead?

The vets seem vague about what causes the toxicity -- they think it may be a certain acid in raisins and grapes that dogs can't process, but they're not sure. They're also vague about which dogs are prone to problems. Are little fluffy teacup dogs more at risk than shelter brutes like ours? Dave found an online calculator that suggested Bailey should be fine having just a few raisins, given her weight and breed, but other web sites said such calculations are impossible to make. It all sounded a little off.

And we all know Google's penchant for scaring the pants off us when we look up information about any human health condition, so I eventually grew a bit skeptical that the dire language was really warranted.

Through all of this, Bailey was her normal self.

Also on our morning walk, we encountered a flock of pigeons gathering to feast on some cookie crumbs dropped by the pigeon man, who passed us going in the other direction...

...and we passed the home of our recently deceased famous neighbor, whose quirky front garden always charms me. Note the handwritten sign by the front door: "Bon Voyage Miraculous Fifi."

In the afternoon we walked to the cemetery, and still, Bailey was her normal self, chasing squirrels (to the extent that she can while on her lead) and showing no signs of illness.

While at the cemetery I found a nice sherd of Blue Willow pottery, showing the characteristic three figures walking across the bridge toward the temple, beneath the willow tree. It has joined my collection of pottery fragments in the bowls in our dining room.

Even through yesterday evening, I was nervously watching Bailey. Every once in a while she'd leap up and run outside to chase squirrels, barking madly, and Dave and I would sarcastically say, "She's looking pretty lethargic." She ate and drank as usual. She played tug-of-war with her blanket after dinner with her usual abandon. But then there were times she did seem a bit slower than usual, and I just couldn't tell for sure. Was it my imagination?

This morning she still seems fine, though, and she's pretty much outside the window of time in which problems typically appear. I don't doubt raisins are toxic to certain animals and I don't mean to downplay the dangers, but in our case, at least, we're declaring the episode over.

An Outing and Some Memories

Today is the birthday of my childhood friend Theresa, who would have been 60 this year. I've mentioned Theresa several times on this blog -- she lived down the street where I grew up and was one of my earliest friends. I have many good memories of playing at her house, learning about science from her biology professor father, exploring the woods and swamps, and getting up to mischief like shooting BB guns at floating glass jars in a neighborhood pond that was rumored to be bottomless. Theresa died last year, but just as we always remember our parent's birthdays and other dates that were significant when we were children, I will never forget that this is her birthday.

Dave and I spent yesterday morning at home, me washing dog blankets and reading, Dave on his computer. Finally I suggested we take the dog out for an adventure, so after lunch we leashed up Bailey and walked to Hampstead Heath.

Getting Dave to walk that far is a minor miracle -- he isn't a huge fan of walking in general -- but we had a good time and he got a chance to see Bailey on her long lead and how she behaves in the "wild." She was a good dog, for the most part. I know I've said this before, but she's gradually becoming less reactive to other dogs as she feels more secure with us. We still can't let her get nose-to-nose with them, but at least she doesn't bark and snarl when they pass.

We walked to Golders Green Park, where we sat at one of these picnic tables and had coffee. (Well, Bailey didn't have coffee, but she did have some of our bread-and-raisin pudding.) She's very concerned in the photo above because Dave has walked away from us -- you can see him in the distance, returning.

The coffee break wasn't exactly relaxing, because there's a fair amount of dog management involved in keeping her nearby and under control, but we enjoyed our walk anyway, and the main thing is...

...it tired her out. Happiness is a tired dog.

Last night we watched "Deep Impact," at Dave's suggestion. We are doing a whole lot of nothing significant with our holiday weekend! (Today is a bank holiday so Dave is off work.)