Drought and a Mystery Object

It's definitely summer again, because my arms are itching like crazy. This happens to me every year, and I have gone back and forth about the cause, vacillating between sun exposure and insects. I'm now back on the insect hypothesis. I seem to develop this problem when it's blackberry season and I'm reaching into the bushes to pick berries, so I think some kind of little no-see-um is biting me. Once again I suspect insidious flower bugs, aka minute pirate bugs, though I haven't seen any of the bugs themselves.

What's funny is, the area where I'm being bitten (I think) is also the area where Bailey killed Ratthew the other day:

She is now fixated on this part of the garden and is running into those bushes every few minutes to make sure there's not another Ratthew lurking there. And we've noticed that she is also itchy! I wonder if those pirate bugs are biting her?!

Even when she's lying on her bed, her eyes are locked on the Ratthew zone.

Dave departed yesterday morning for the USA, and texted me later that he arrived just fine. He thoughtfully scheduled a grocery delivery for me yesterday afternoon that I somehow missed. I'm not sure what happened, because I was home -- I was in the garden but I still should have heard the doorbell (and Bailey definitely would have heard it). I wonder if the guy came early when I was running errands.

Our water shortage is becoming increasingly dire. The other day, when France and Spain were burning, I said to Dave, "It's only a matter of time before we get similar fires here." And sure enough, a 200-acre fire sprang up on the Suffolk coast. The Environment Agency says we are in an "exceptionally serious" drought and Wales apparently had its driest July since record-keeping began, 200 years ago. Southern England has had one percent of its expected July rainfall.

Even scarier is that this may be the new normal. We've had an officially declared summer drought in three of the past five years. I've been watching an apocalyptic BBC show called "The Rapture" which takes place during a heatwave, and it's all shot in a sort of yellow-orange tone with the foliage looking dried out, and frankly it's all hitting a little close to home for me!

We are respecting the hosepipe ban -- though I did use the hose to wash the dog yesterday. Is dog-washing allowed? I have no idea. I could do it in the bathtub but why let that water go down the drain when it could benefit the garden?

A certain neighbor is running her sprinkler as usual and her lawn is as fresh as a green carpet.

Speaking of the garden, I keep finding these things when I dig, and I've never known what they are. 

I knew it wasn't very old, though, because it has a recycling symbol on it.

I took these pictures and searched Google, and turns out it's a plastic lawn-mower blade for a brand of mower called a Flymo. I think this was the plastic mower that came with the flat, and that I got rid of (with the landlord's permission) several years ago. We never used it. The blade seems so small, doesn't it? The cutting radius must have been incredibly narrow, unless there were multiple spinning blades.

Coming from Florida, I find the idea of a plastic lawn mower hilarious. A Flymo would positively explode mowing a lawn there. But I guess here in England, with our wimpy northern grass, it can do the trick under certain circumstances.

I'll stick with our metal one. And as I said, I've found several of these plastic blades lying around out there, so even on our lawn they're apparently not super-durable.

RIP Ratthew

We finally have a successful sunflower! And this is not the biggest one, which is yet to come. I grew four of them from seed, and one -- the weakest and skinniest -- bit the dust while we were in Italy. The other three are powering along, two in the garden and one in a planter at the side of the house.

I always feel like I've had success once a plant blooms and I've posted its picture to my blog.

The Bailster and I took a couple of walks yesterday, once around the neighborhood in the morning and to the cemetery in the afternoon. I'm trying to make this our routine.

She's a little harder to photograph than Olga because I have to keep ahold of her leash. But she is gradually learning her name, and I've ordered a long (10-meter) training lead from Amazon which hopefully will let her roam a bit more widely while still giving me control (and making sure she returns to me). I also ordered a label for the lead that says "No Dogs -- I Like People," which should warn away any canine owners who want to put their dogs nose-to-nose with Bailey.

We had some excitement yesterday in the garden when she killed a rat right in front of me. Dave was inside with a visiting nurse, learning how to self-administer his new Crohn's injections, and I was sitting on the garden bench reading. Bailey wandered into some bushes and suddenly I saw her pounce, and next thing I knew she had Ratthew in her mouth. I will spare you the picture. That dog is earning her keep! We buried Ratthew.

Speaking of garden benches, this was yesterday's project. Our new bench, meant to replace the deteriorating one that has become a source of wasp building materials, arrived and Dave and I put it together. (Bailey was very helpful too.) This one is made entirely of metal, so hopefully it will hold up in the weather better than the wooden one did, although it lasted ten years so I can hardly complain.

Here's the new bench in situ. It's comfortable! I set the wooden one in the far back corner of the garden for now, so the wasps can continue to chew on it, but I'll have it taken away later in the autumn.

Here was my other garden project for the day. Several months ago I planted a teasel in a big plastic pot, and I recently noticed that Nicole the Nicotiana apparently also dropped a seed in there, so then we had two plants competing for space in the single container. Yesterday I put them both in the ground, where hopefully they can coexist with room for their roots to spread. (In the process I found two more toadflax brocade moth caterpillars, which I was careful not to harm.) This is about the worst weather I could imagine for planting a plant -- the ground is as hard as a paving stone -- but I used lots of water so that helped a bit.

Our afternoon walk in the cemetery was warm, and when I turned on a spigot to give Bailey some water, she promptly rolled around in the puddle just like Olga used to do. I guess this is a staffy thing -- luxuriating in mud! Needless to say, bathing was required when we got home. Only a dog can manage to get muddy in a drought.

Paperwork and Baileywork

I found this little crab spider nestled in one of the blossoms on our "Poodle Skirt" dahlia. Can you see it in there, waiting for an unsuspecting bee or fly to come along? I wonder how it manages to find blossoms -- are these spiders just out there, migrating from flower to flower?

Yesterday was a day for getting things done. My mental inbox has been full of a bunch of stuff that I had to get cleared out.

First of all, I had to mail my ballot for the Democratic primary election in Florida. The election is August 18 and I just realized the other day that I never received an overseas ballot as requested. So I sent a message to the Supervisor of Elections in the county where I vote, and they e-mailed me a ballot. I filled it out, printed and mailed it yesterday. Done!

I don't care much about the Democratic primary but I want to stay active on the voter rolls and also get a sense of how this will work for the general election in November.

Second, I had to file the insurance claim for my camera. Dave had to sign, scan and copy some documents, which he did yesterday morning, and I pulled everything together and filed the claim electronically yesterday afternoon. I don't think I need to send paper copies as well but I'll double-check on that. I hope everything I sent will be sufficient; we shall see.

So that's two big items off my plate. In addition I caught up on some e-mails and blog-reading.

And of course I took care of this beast. She lay in the garden with me after an eventful neighborhood walk. She really does not like other dogs. She ran into Olga's black lab and spaniel pals from the nearby housing estate and I thought she was going to take their heads off. I see what the rescue place means about her needing to stay on a lead. She is a very different dog from Olga, and who knows what dark things may have damaged her psychologically in the past.

Fortunately she is very sweet to both of us, and to the other people she meets. It's only dogs she can't stand. She is happy to lie on our laps, submit her belly for rubbing and sleep with us in bed.

In the afternoon we took her to Fortune Green and the cemetery, where we walked the forested paths and she could watch the squirrels (above). She looks tiny in that photo but she's really not that small; about 22 kilos, roughly the same size as Olga. It's just a matter of perspective, I guess.

Afterwards we went to Sweet Corner, the corner cafe, and had a coffee in the air-conditioning while she lay by our feet.

And remember that alligator chew toy that we bought for Olga years ago? Olga never knew what to do with it; she much preferred her Kongs. But Bailey loves eviscerating a soft chew toy. We gave her the alligator and she made short work of it, first methodically gnawing a small hole in the tough outer covering and then pulling out all the stuffing and the squeaker. After that, she beheaded it.

Here's some of the action, in case you'd like to see the carnage first-hand.

She still has a lot of puppy in her. Fortunately she doesn't chew anything she shouldn't. (So far!) I hope I can redirect some of this chewing energy to the Kongs, because they are very sturdy and will hold up, unlike the soft toys. Remember how Olga used to gnaw Kongs apart as a young dog? We've been through all this before!

Her world is about to be shaken again, because Dave leaves tomorrow for a ten-day trip to the USA to see his parents and attend Drum Corps events in Indiana. She's very bonded to Dave so I hope this doesn't unsettle her too much. Fortunately the rest of her new routine should remain more or less the same.

Bailey

Meet the newest member of our household -- Bailey.

As you know we applied several days ago to adopt her from a local dog charity called All Dogs Matter. We got Olga from the same organization back in 2012, so it was only natural for us to return to them. The process unfolded smoothly -- because they know we've been dog owners in the past -- and yesterday the woman who runs the group told us we could come and get Bailey at their kennels in Waltham Abbey in far northeast London.

We were initially thinking we might go Wednesday, because Dave had Zoom meetings yesterday and today for school. But I volunteered to go on my own, because I wanted her here as soon as possible -- so that's what we did. (I also picked up Olga on my own, so there was precedent for this!)

I met Bailey at the shelter and walked her around the grounds, and played with her a bit. Here's what we know: She's about a year and a half old, she's had at least one litter of puppies and she's only recently coming out of heat. She was apparently abandoned after producing those puppies. She has a microchip but it's blank -- there's no owner information registered -- and the chip itself is Romanian. We don't know whether this means Bailey came from Romania, or whether someone imported Romanian chips and implanted them here.

There's been some confusion over her name. The shelter office named her Bailey and put her on their web site with that name. But apparently the carers at the kennel called her Tali, as in Natalia, because of her Romanian connection. Dave and I had already agreed that Bailey seems a good name so I think we're going to keep it. The dog doesn't seem to know either name, so I'm not sure it matters to her.

After meeting her, I called the same taxi service that I took from the tube station to the shelter, and a nice guy named Graham who is a fellow Staffy enthusiast himself drove me from Waltham Abbey all the way back to West Hampstead, at what seemed to me a bargain rate. The odyssey took all afternoon but I finally got Bailey home around 4 p.m.

Dave, meanwhile, was out buying some supplies, including food, treats and poop bags. He gave Bailey a stuffed hot dog with a tuggy rope inside, and she promptly eviscerated it (as you'll see in the video below). I got out Olga's old Kongs and her old bed, and we still have some of her other belongings, so we're good to go with dog equipment.

Bailey is about the same weight as Olga, but her legs are shorter and she's a bit stockier.

I told Dave a better name for her might be Sherman or Pershing. He didn't get the tank reference, but she really is shaped like a tank. Or, as Dave said, a torpedo.

So now, it's getting-to-know-you time in the PapenReed household! Bailey has already showed a fondness for Dave's chair, which was also one of Olga's favorite retreats.

I'm both excited to have Bailey with us and sad, deeply sad, that she's not Olga. I know that's unfair and I think the feeling will go away with time, but it is what it is. Bailey seems more hyper-vigilant and laser-focused, with a bit of ADHD, but I think some of that will subside as she relaxes. 

The rescue people made a big deal about Bailey's nervousness around other dogs. They said she has a strong "prey instinct" and always chases squirrels and cats (which, again, is something we're used to). Yesterday evening, as we watched TV in the living room, she kept leaping at houseflies.

Apparently she doesn't tolerate yappy dogs very well and the rescuers recommended I keep her on a lead while walking. She's still very young, so I'm hopeful that as she grows up and calms down, and gets more comfortable in our household, she'll be a little less triggered by other dogs and we can eventually let her off-lead. I got such joy from watching Olga romp through the woods on Hampstead Heath that I can't imagine not doing the same with Bailey. Just not right away.

Meanwhile, I'm thinking I'll order one of those long leads from Amazon so she will be attached to me but with some freedom to run.

She's got a lot of puppy energy but she seems well housebroken and she's shown no destructive tendencies, aside from thoroughly killing her toys. Here's what she looks like as I'm typing this post:

Garden Life With Caterpillar

We had a very, very light spattering of rain yesterday, which was a nice surprise. It's the first rain we've had in all of July but it wasn't enough to matter. It lasted about four seconds, just enough time to leave drops on the windows and remind us what rain looks like, and then vanished.

According to our local NW3 weather web site, this is the driest month on record:

But that doesn't mean things aren't growing in the garden. The inulas (above) are blooming...

...as are the red-hot pokers, or Kniphofia. This is the one that I dug up last year because it was being shaded out by surrounding plants. I put it in a pot and moved it to a sunnier space, and now we're seeing a tiny developing flower. It hasn't bloomed in years, so I'm glad that work paid off.

The African daisy is still producing blossoms. It's having a banner year.

And these, believe it or not, are chrysanthemums. Remember the ones I bought for the front porch last autumn? When the flowers faded I simply kept them, and they died back to almost nothing, but then they came out again this summer and they're covered with buds. I've always treated chrysanthemums like annuals but it's nice to know they'll bounce back if overwintered.

On the indoor plant front, remember the yucca I pruned back in May? It has finally, finally sprouted from the cut-off stalk. So next year, after these little sprouts have grown a bit, I'll cut the other stalk down and we'll have a rejuvenated (and much smaller and more manageable) yucca plant.



Here's the whole garden. As you can see, our grass is not happy. I mowed the "No-Mow May" area in the center rear of the garden, because the grass had gone to seed and I don't think there were any bugs doing anything meaningful in there. The insect world is already beginning to decline as we move toward autumn.

Dave discovered this fellow on some toadflax in a pot. It's the caterpillar for the toadflax brocade moth. (This is where I wish I had my macro lens -- the camera phone photo doesn't do it justice!) Anyway, I'd just pulled up some toadflax so I went rushing to the yard waste bin to make sure I didn't inadvertently throw away any caterpillars, and I didn't see any. Close call for this guy, who fortunately is on a plant I left behind.

A Sunny Heath Day

Yesterday was mostly quite joyful, if a little sweaty. I spent the morning trimming the shrubbery around our patio. The bushes need to be knocked back every month or two in summer or they'll swallow the patio like the Yucatan jungle swallows Mayan ruins.

Then I went for a walk on Hampstead Heath, taking my new AirPods so I could catch up on my podcast episodes along the way. The fireweed is mostly spent by this time of the year (above).

And the pond on Sandy Heath is once again paved with green duckweed.

I walked a route that I often walked with Olga, and although I missed her as I always do when I walk on the Heath, this time I could also look forward to having another dog to bring with me. Dave and I have applied for one through the animal rescue organization where we got Olga all those years ago -- we'll see if we get her. We're waiting to hear back.

One of the best things about walking like this is just letting my mind wander. My dad used to call it "cycling his mind," and he'd do it sitting at the breakfast bar in his house, often with the television on. I prefer to cycle my mind while on my feet.

I walked all the way up to the northern part of Hampstead Heath Extension, and then back through Golders Hill Park, where I stopped for a quick coffee. The park was bustling, especially the line for ice cream.

This has been a banner year for Jersey tiger moths. I've seen several of them, including three just yesterday. One was in our house, and another was lying on a path on the Heath with damaged wings. I lifted it up onto some ivy but sadly, although its body appeared fine, it will probably die. I wonder what happened to it? Bird? Dog?

I captured the one in our house and set it free outside.

The pigeons are roosting in this willow in the middle of the pond at Golders Hill Park. I guess it's an ideal spot for birds, surrounded by a moat and thus safe from predators. I like the way that bird at top left was zooming in for a landing just as I snapped the picture.

I came home and put on some music while Dave made pasta and meatballs in the kitchen. He used a bag of pasta he brought back from Amalfi, a brand recommended by our guide as authentic. It tasted pretty much like most pasta, we thought, but that doesn't mean it wasn't good.

Anyway, while he was cooking, some songs by Bobbie Gentry came across my iTunes, and I wondered what had ever become of her. Turns out she's now 83 years old and retired, and good for her. Most people know her from "Ode to Billie Joe," her gothic song about mysterious events on the Tallahatchie Bridge, which made her a star in the late '60s and was even turned into a movie starring Robby Benson. But she actually wrote a lot of excellent songs.

While sipping my martini in the golden light of evening, I was struck by the beauty of this song (once past the weird violin opening). Give it a listen. Maybe it will strike you too. And if so, you can follow it up with this one and this one.

Additions Rather Than Subtractions

Our hollyhock is continuing to produce flowers. My history with hollyhocks has not been great, so I'm glad it seems happy again this year. We have another one at the side of the house but it's still in its first year of growth, so it won't bloom until next summer.

I'm blogging from the back garden, sitting on our bench, and I just looked up to find myself face to face with a strange cat, staring me down from across the lawn. It might have been Tabby, who you may remember from my wildlife videos, but it's hard to tell in daytime. I got a little primal jolt from looking up and seeing a predator's eyes fixed on me! Then it ran off.

Yesterday I came to the realization that my life has been in a process of subtraction for a while now. First Olga, then my stepmother, then my job, then my photography (or at least the main tools of it). Is it any wonder I feel a little shell-shocked?

Time to get out and make some additions. I started with the smallest thing -- my AirPods. I decided to walk up to Brent Cross, to the Apple Store, and get some new ones. That walk would both get me out of the house and help restore some of my routines (since I can't listen to podcasts or music without AirPods, unless I want to annoy everyone around me).

I also hoped to return a useless unopened cable I purchased about six months ago, but learned upon arriving at the store that they don't accept returns after 14 days. That seems a little stingy to me, for a multibillion-dollar corporation like Apple, but whatever. I got my AirPods, brought them home and paired them up with my devices, and now I have my podcasts back for my walks.

And of course, as previously mentioned, Dave is doing an initial survey of available dogs -- another pending addition.

After I posted yesterday's video of the wasp gnawing the wood on our garden bench, some of you expressed concern that we might fall through it! You are not wrong. The bench is in sad shape these days. We bought it ten years ago, which seems astonishing to me now, and even though I refinished it once during the early days of the pandemic -- when we all had lots of time on our hands -- it has lived its life. It's missing slats and many of the joints are rotten.

So I've ordered a new one which should arrive in the next week or so. It's rust-proof metal, which I'm hoping lasts better than the wood. We shall see.

As I was walking back from Brent Cross I found this hammer-and-sickle graffiti. For some reason it immediatelty brought to mind Gil Scott-Heron's song "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." Granted, that's more about black liberation than worker uprisings, but anyway I had to listen to the song right away because I love it so much. Power to the people!

I'm only just now catching up on news from the last few weeks, and I saw that Randolph Mantooth died. Remember him, from "Emergency!" back in the '70s? He was the hottie paramedic, while Kevin Tighe played the capable one. (Well, I guess they were both capable, but Mantooth had hotness in his corner too.) Anyway, I remember going in high school with some fellow drama students to see a production of "Kiss Me, Kate" in Pinellas County -- I believe at the now defunct Showboat Dinner Theater -- and Randolph Mantooth was in it. I was so star-struck to see someone from HOLLYWOOD near my sleepy corner of suburban Florida! I think I even got his autograph. He might have been the first "famous" actor I ever saw in person.

Teasels and Bugs

This is a tiny wild teasel that grew on its own in our lawn near the birdbath. When I say tiny, I mean it's only about a foot high. But it still produced a flower, because it's a teasel, and they are nothing if not determined survivors.

We also have several blooming at the side of the garden, and they appear to be the white "giant" variety, even though the plants themselves aren't very big. I think it's just too dark over there, in the shade of the hazel trees, for them to flourish.

We had a nice big giant in the middle of the lawn, but it mysteriously and spontaneously died before flowering, as they sometimes do. I'm not sure why. (OK, so they're not always survivors!) At least with the ones above we'll have seeds for next year.

There's not much to say about yesterday that's exciting. I did a big load of laundry in the morning, hung it out to dry, and found that it dried incredibly slowly. The clothes hung like limp, damp paper towels for hours. The humidity was only 44 percent, but there was no breeze -- so they sat out pretty much all day before I could bring them in and even then two pairs of Dave's pants had to hang inside overnight. Now I've got our last post-cruise load churning in the washing machine.

I did have some interesting video experiences with bugs!

The first video clip shows a Jersey tiger moth on our bay tree. (Sorry it's so shaky -- I was standing in a precarious place. The weird color comes from my camera flash, which activated because it was late evening and quite dark.) The second clip shows a wasp gnawing its way through the wood of our garden bench. I was actually sitting on the bench at the time and I heard its little chewing sounds -- you can also hear them in the video if you turn up the volume (and ignore the noises of the city and our neighbors in the background). Apparently wasps chew wood not to eat it but to build their nests with it.

Finally, the third clip shows an interesting (but sadly dead) caterpillar that I found while walking home from the high street. Turns out it's a larva of the lime hawk moth, which feeds on lime trees and then drops to the ground to pupate in soil. Unfortunately, in the city, many of them encounter pavement when they fall, so they wander looking for loose dirt. I suspect this one got stepped on, poor thing. I like its little punk hairstyle, that blue horn on its forehead.

I did finally catch up (mostly) in blogland, answering comments from the last several days and at least touching base with most other blogs. It's going to take me some time to get back in the swing of things!

I also worked on the insurance claim form for the camera, which of course is not as simple as I'd hoped it would be. They want my original purchase receipt, which I really did save for many years, but I finally tossed it some time ago because it had faded so badly that it couldn't be read. What do you do when your receipt self-destructs, like something out of "Mission: Impossible"? Even my bank and credit card statements online don't go back as far as 2012. I'm going to send them a later receipt for having the camera repaired and hopefully that will be enough proof of ownership.

I haven't taken steps to replace the camera yet. I'm trying to make do with my phone for the time being until I have emotionally detached from the theft and can look at my options more objectively. Right now I have a (possibly insane) urge to repurchase exactly what I lost! I may in fact do that in the end, but I need to take at least a few days to simply breathe first. There's no rush, right?

Last night I couldn't help checking the location of my AirPods (and hence possibly the camera, since they were in the camera bag), and they're still sitting in that bastard's car on the Via di Porta Labicana in Rome. They haven't moved an inch.

The Crispy Garden

Thanks to all of you who made it through yesterdays TL;DR post! I won't do that to you again, I promise. I just had to write all of that down to help me process the day. I seriously think I have a little PTSD from the camera theft, but it is easing.

Here's what the garden looks like upon our return. Warren, our house-sitter, did a good job keeping most everything alive, but as you can see the grass is getting brown and many of the plants are sagging. It's not even hot at the moment, though it apparently was during our absence. Now it's just bone-dry. We have watering restrictions so all our maintenance for the foreseeable future will have to be done with watering cans.

It appears we did lose one of the ferns I planted earlier in the spring, and one of my sunflowers was somehow broken off at the base. Oh well.

The indoor plants are mostly OK, but I suspect Warren watered a bit too lightly because a few are in a sad state -- mainly the maidenhair ferns, which like dampness. Or maybe it got too hot in the house. In any case, they should bounce back.

On the plus side, our orange dahlia is blooming...

...and we have some new zinnias coming out...

...and this geranium, which I bought from Waitrose in the spring because it was wilted and looked so pathetic, is now doing great and has given us flowers. I didn't know what color they'd be but I like this light orangey-pink.

I spent yesterday doing laundry, and I'm only about halfway through the task. It's amazing how many clothes two people can go through during a two-week trip, and we had a bag of laundry washed on the ship! Ninety-plus degree weather didn't help. We had to change twice a day.

Speaking of laundry, here's a new t-shirt that Dave bought me, in honor of our recent unwanted garden guests:

I thought it was hilarious. We haven't seen Ratthew since our return. I hope we've successfully driven him (and all his family) away by getting rid of the bird feeders.

Dave asked yesterday if he should start looking at dogs to adopt. I said yes, though my head is still spinning from the trip. Getting a dog will help break me out of my PTSD, forcing me to look forward rather than back. Besides, it's going to take some time to find one we like, get approved by the animal rescue group, and start the fostering process. Dave has to do the initial screening because I'll want to adopt every single animal. As I told him, I'd have happily taken any (or all!) of those dogs we saw at the Villa Borghese on Tuesday (photo in yesterday's post).

Anyway, time to get that ball rolling. It's been just over a year since Olga died.

At the risk of making you all crazy, I will say one more thing about the camera. I think what hit me so hard about this experience wasn't just the loss of the object, but the scary feeling that my brain just isn't working as well as it used to. It freaks me out that I have no clear, specific memory of carrying that camera into the restaurant or where I put it when we sat down. Did I put it on my left or my right? Why didn't I keep the strap over my leg as I always do? Why didn't I set my hat on top of the bag, as I always do? Did I even really have it with me? Could it have been taken from our hotel room, or did I leave it in the lobby during our chaotic check-in? I cannot definitively answer any of these questions, which makes me feel diminished and maybe even a little loony.

I did file a claim with our travel insurance company, so we'll see where that goes.

Arrividerci, Roma

I’m writing this post Tuesday night, on the flight back from Rome. Among the things I lost in my camera bag were my two newest issues of The New Yorker, which I’d planned to read on the plane! So now I have nothing to do but write. I guess I could have bought another magazine, but never mind...

Today (Tuesday) was a busy day! After the nightmare of our Monday afternoon and evening, followed by a mostly sleepless night for me, I was determined to make it up to Dave by doing some sightseeing with him and enjoying Rome. We got up and out around 9 a.m. and went to the Trevi Fountain (above), which he had never seen. In fact, he’d never seen Rome at all, so anyplace we went was somewhere new.

We then walked from Trevi to the Pantheon, and then to the Piazza Navona, where we stopped for coffee. We sat and watched a couple of guys clean the famous Fountain of the Four Rivers in the middle of the plaza, sweeping up the loose coins and ridding it of algae and stains.

I thought we might also check out the Colosseum and the Roman Forum, but Dave decided he’d seen enough and was ready to return to the hotel. To be fair, it was rapidly becoming hot as blazes and sweat was running down our backs. Also a thunderstorm was brewing overhead, but it never quite materialized, at least not where we were.

I tried my best not to think or talk about the camera kerfuffle but I wasn’t very successful, and as we sat in the Piazza Navona I felt a strong compulsion to search for it again. I was still getting a signal saying my AirPods were on that street near the back of the Termini train station, and I was convinced they were in that trash bin — perhaps still inside my camera bag. If Dave was just going to rest in the hotel, what was stopping me?

So I told him that was my plan. He tried to talk me out of it — he was worried about my safety, both from any criminal element and from environmental dangers like broken glass. But I had to be able to tell myself I’d done all that I could, and so far, I still didn’t have that feeling.

Sticker art on a street near the Pantheon

We took a taxi back to the hotel, where Dave got out, and then I rode on to the street with the bins. I began digging through them again, and this time — without Dave telling me to stop every three seconds — I really focused on the task. I pulled bag after bag out of the bin and got down deep enough that I’m sure I would have found the camera bag, had it been there. I might not have found the AirPods alone, because they’re small and I couldn’t get them to make noise like they’re supposed to do when lost. (Every time I tried my phone just said that function was “off,” whatever that means.)

At one point three workers in neon orange pants and maroon shirts, perhaps garbage men, came up and one started yelling at me. I showed him my phone and explained what I was trying to do. He didn’t seem to speak English but he understood, and he and his pals walked away and came back a few minutes later with a rake. They pitched in and helped me! Together we excavated that bin thoroughly, to no avail. I looked in the adjacent recycling bins too, but they were much emptier — apparently Romans, at least in that neighborhood, aren’t big on recycling.

I also checked out the nearby parking lot again, and I did get a signal showing that I was practically on top of the AirPods while standing next to this white Land Rover, which was parked off by itself (and is apparently parked there all the time, given that it's on Google Street View). It seemed very possible they could be in that car but I couldn’t see them through the windows or underneath it, so what could I do? I felt out of options.

Perhaps I could have gone back to the Carabinieri with my scant evidence, but even if they took me seriously, what would they have done? Called the Land Rover owner, who would in all likelihood have told them to piss off and get a search warrant, and then moved the bag? All with me leaving the country in hours?

After more than an hour digging through rubbish and then loading it back into the bin, and surveying parked cars in the hot sun, I finally, finally felt I had done all I could do. I had to accept defeat. If the bag was there, it wasn't accessible to me. So close and yet so far.

I walked back to the hotel and took a long, welcome shower.

(Not your typical Roman vacation, I know!)

We had to be out of our hotel room by 1 p.m. but our transfer to the airport wasn’t due until 5:30 p.m. So we decided to spend the afternoon in the Galleria Borghese, which we knew would be air conditioned. We stored our bags at the hotel, took a taxi to the museum and settled into the cafe for a leisurely lunch. To give you an idea of the temperature, this is what the dogs looked like in the surrounding park, limp in the shade of trees full of chirring cicadas.

We began exploring the museum at 3 p.m. and it is a very grand place. Unlike the sights we saw in the morning, the galleria was new to me. Not really my kind of art, for the most part, but I did appreciate the Caravaggios and this stunning sculpture by Bernini of Apollo and Daphne, from 1622. Certainly better than rooting around in a garbage bin!

Finally, we headed to the airport and arrived in plenty of time for our 9:20 p.m. flight. (Why so late? What were our tour organizers thinking?) I was sad as we took off, knowing my camera bag wasn’t at my feet as always.

Oh — but there is one more happy side note. Remember my fear that the bag had my address on it? Well, I realized the luggage tag provided by the tour company did NOT use our address — just my phone number. So the fear that someone will arrange to burgle our house with my lost keys is now moot.

-----

And now, Wednesday morning, here I am at home. We’ve arrived back just in time to cope with a new hosepipe ban (aka a garden watering ban) imposed by Thames Water because of the UK's extended period of hot, dry weather. So we’ll be schlepping watering cans from the house. Welcome to England! At least the temperature is cooler than Rome, and the garden and plants seem to have survived our absence.

Chaos and Tragedy

Yesterday was completely chaotic. It started out well enough, with this peculiar boat pulling up alongside ours in La Spezia, which made a great photo with the sunrise. Is Warner Brothers getting royalties? I imagine so.

We disembarked the cruise ship at 8:45 a.m., and boarded our chartered buses for Rome at 9:30. It took more than an hour to drive the 39 miles from Civitavecchia to our hotel, the Marcella Royal near the Villa Borghese. We all piled out of two buses, dragged our suitcases two blocks to the hotel and stepped into the blissfully air conditioned lobby to find lots of other people already there -- some leaving, some arriving, some apparently just hanging out. It was madness for a while, with many people lined up in the sun outside (on a 97º F day -- that's 36º C) just waiting to even access the lobby. Dave and I were fortunately some of the first in the group so we at least waited inside. Eventually we were shown to our room.

We put our bags down and decided to go find lunch. Now, things get fuzzy for me here, and you'll see in a moment why this is important. I think I grabbed my camera bag, because we intended to go from lunch for a brief walk around a nearby piazza, and I wanted to be able to take pictures. I don't have a clear memory of carrying it to lunch but I believe that I did.

We ate at the little restaurant on the left, behind those triple-parked cars (which is why I took this picture, using my phone). The food was great -- bruschetta pomodoro and some sage ravioli for me, and a couple of beers. Then we wandered around the piazza, which turned out not to be a piazza at all but the Gardens of Sallust, a conference and arts center built into some Roman ruins. Interesting, but we didn't stay because it was deathly hot and we wanted to get back to the hotel. I took one more picture with my phone.

We got back to the hotel, and lay down for a nap. A couple of hours later, I woke up and wanted a drink of water. I looked for my camera bag, which contained my bottled water, and it was nowhere to be found in our hotel room. This is when I realized I must have left it behind in the restaurant.

I checked with the front desk just to make sure I didn't leave it in the hotel lobby, and they didn't have it. I went back to the restaurant, and they said they'd found nothing.

So I looked at the "Find My" function on my iPhone, because my AirPods were in my camera bag. They were shown as being in a neighborhood behind the Termini train station -- not an area I'd visited. Someone had clearly found/stolen and spirited away my camera bag.

I knew immediately that I was pretty much sunk. The odds of getting it back were minuscule. But Dave and I took a taxi to the address, determined to try. "Find My" showed (and still shows) the AirPods in the middle of a street, so we looked into parked cars and checked the area. Our taxi driver even helped. There were three large rubbish bins next to the street, and his theory was that someone discarded the empty bag (or maybe just the AirPods) in one of those bins, knowing they could be traced. I tried to get the AirPods to make noise but couldn't get that function to work, and I even unloaded the bins about halfway but found nothing. (And then I put the trash back, don't worry.)

So, yeah. My camera is gone. Not a loss I take lightly, and I hate the fact that I can't be exactly sure how it happened. My best guess is that I took the bag to the restaurant and left it on the floor beside my chair. Why I didn't realize it while we were walking around immediately afterwards -- and I was taking pictures with my phone -- I don't know. I blame the heat, the two beers and the chaotic day.

I filed a report with the Carabinieri so I can hopefully claim the camera on my travel or homeowner's insurance. It's an expensive camera (with three lenses) but it's also 15 years old, and it has done yeoman's work for all that time, so I'm not too broken up about it. There were no pictures on it -- I'd downloaded everything, fortunately -- and it has felt too heavy and antiquated for a while now. Maybe I'll buy a new one that better suits my needs at this point in my life. Or maybe I'll just use my phone and/or my stepmother's camera. I once had dreams of turning photography into some sort of profession, but let's face it -- all I'm ever going to do is blog.

Likewise, I don't mourn the AirPods -- a couple of years old and easily replaceable. I do mourn the loss of my house keys, which were in the bag, but we have spares. (I don't think it's likely that someone will fly to London to burglarize us, but I may look into changing the locks because our address is on the bag.) I carried an antique key on my key chain given to me 42 years ago by one of my best friends in high school, and I mostly hate to lose that key, even though it fits no lock.

I lost nothing else of value. My passport was in my pocket, thank goodness, along with my wallet and phone -- I never put any of it in a bag for just this reason.

I have a feeling I will be mulling this over for a while, trying to figure out exactly how and when I became separated from the bag and how I didn't notice for so long. Dave never noticed anything either, and his memory is as fuzzy as mine about when and where I had it last. As I said, it was a crazy day, and Rome is a crazy city, and it is what it is.

What's really bizarre is that this is the second camera I've lost in a traveling mishap in a Mediterranean country. I lost my old Canon AE-1 (a film camera) in 2000 when a taxi driver in Greece drove away with my backpack. And that time I lost my whole bag -- all my clothes, my undeveloped film, everything! Never got any of it back. So at least this situation isn't that dire.

We are going to try to make the best of our brief Rome visit today and see some sights before heading to the airport at 5:30 p.m. for our late evening flight.