Crystal Blue Persuasion

That was the sky on Friday. Amazing, right? In England, it's pretty unheard of to have a sky of unbroken blue with not a single cloud in sight. And the temperature was just right -- mid to high 60's F, perfect for walking without a jacket.

So that's what I did. I went to Hampstead Heath and had a long walk, listening to my podcasts.

I wanted to check out the azaleas in the Athlone House gardens, which are usually blooming like crazy around this time of year. But I was still a bit early. They were beginning to bloom but they weren't quite at full effect. I may go back.

This unusual yellow variety was open, though. This may be the only yellow azalea I know in London.

Meanwhile, the trees on the heath are sending out their new, pinkish leaves, which will darken to green as they mature. I believe those are beech trees.

It was a good walk and I was out for a couple of hours, a merciful escape from some of the noise happening here at home. Our neighbor (not Mrs. Kravitz; the one on the other side) is having work done on her house and/or back patio. She's had a crew out there banging, grinding and sawing -- and bantering loudly and endlessly over the sounds of the machinery -- for a couple of weeks now, and this is after a roof maintenance job that required a huge scaffold over the entire house. (Remember the guys having their picnic in the street?) I think there's been construction inside the house as well. She doesn't appear to be living there while all this is done; at least, I haven't seen her.

All told we've been listening to a couple of months of construction noise. Will it ever end? I guess I should be happy she's maintaining the place, but just once I'd like to live next to (or beneath) neighbors who weren't doing noisy renovations! There's a house across the street having a gigantic renovation done as well.

Anyway, yes, walking gets me away from that.

Just for kicks, here's a video I took on another recent walk, of pigeons congregating on West End Green. I was impressed by how many there were -- more than I typically see. West End Green is very close to our house, so I'm betting some of these birds are the same ones we see monopolizing our seed feeders.

I've toyed with the idea of buying one of those feeders that has a built-in video camera to get footage of the garden birds, but all the ones I've looked at feature easily accessible seed trays, and I just know I would get a million hours of pigeon videos.

Dave will be at school this afternoon for a band performance, and I'll be hanging out at home or possibly out and about. Our skies are not forecast to look like the top photo today; it's supposed to be cloudy and we might even get rain tomorrow, which would be a welcome development.

I'll stay in and read -- my current book is "Sunflowers: The Secret History" by Joe Pappalardo. It's something I found on the library shelf and I was intrigued, and I'm not sure why. But it's quite interesting, if not exactly riveting. Did you know that sunflowers are native to North America, but Russia has also claimed ancestral ownership of them? Even sunflowers are a tool in the Cold War!

Speaking of sunflowers, I need to get our own planted out, as well as my zinnias and cosmos seedlings. I'm a bit nervous about that because the squirrels have been brutalizing our potted plants with their digging -- and I know they'll do the same to any freshly planted bedding plants -- but they can't stay in seed trays forever. Survival of the fittest!