Tally Ho!

It's been so damp lately, baby teasels are sprouting from seeds still in the pod. I may put some of those in their own pots to cultivate them for spring!

Well, I'm back on a computer -- a new one, which I went out and bought yesterday. I usually go to the Apple Store in Covent Garden, but I suspected Covent Garden would be insane on a sunny Saturday, so I instead I took a bus up to the Brent Cross shopping mall. And wouldn't you know, that was insane too! Heaving, as the British would say. I navigated the mysterious sign-up-and-wait system of Apple Store shopping, and used my waiting time to pretty much settle on the machine I wanted.

After a painless transaction I emerged with a new 13-inch MacBook Air running the Sequoia OS, with 16 GB of memory (quite a bit more than my old machine). I can see all the keys -- they haven't been worn away by too much frenzied typing! And the screen is so new and clear and free of blemishes! It's also much lighter than my old machine.

So I'm pleased all around, except for one thing: I cannot get Lightroom, the Adobe software I use to edit my photos, to run on this new machine. You'd think it would be as easy as going to their website and downloading an update, but no. Nothing downloads, even when I'm signed in. Apparently this is a known problem. So I have to monkey around with that today.

I also had a bit of a kerfuffle about cables. The new Macs are so smooth and minimalist that they only have two cable ports, both requiring USB-C cables. There's no place to insert a flash drive or memory card or any regular USB device, like my camera. So I had to go back to the Apple Store to buy an adapter, and I realized moments after I bought one that it really wasn't what I needed, which they didn't seem to stock. So I took the tube to work and picked up the adapter I use there. Thus I was at least able to shift all my data to the new machine via my back-up drive.

I took the photo above outside the Brent Cross mall. I was amused by the "Tally Ho!" -- apparently that's the last stop in North Finchley, outside the Tally Ho pub. But it also seems like a friendly greeting!
 
I did a lot of other stuff yesterday too -- cleaned the kitchen, where the painters had splashed some stuff around the sink, repaired a picture frame that was damaged when it fell off our newly-painted wall (the nail was loosened by the painting), and re-hung two pictures with new hooks. I took care of some houseplants and trimmed some stuff back in the garden too. It's about time to prune the roses and the buddleia, but I'll give them another week or two.

Do you remember me blogging about Ben Wilson's chewing gum art? He's a street artist who paints on hardened bits of chewing gum left on the sidewalk. The piece above is located near the school where I work. I first wrote about it 13 years ago, and revisited it again eight years ago. As of yesterday, it's still there, albeit looking faded and worn. Its companion piece, also shown in those posts, is long gone.

Oh, the police arrested some guy for our neighborhood stabbing. Still no word on who was stabbed or why, or who was arrested, but I'm virtually certain this was not a random thing. It's likely to be a beef over drugs or women, as is often the case.