Ike and Pinky II

This was the sunset last night from my stepsister's back yard, with the clouds so low and moisture-laden it seemed I could touch them. I am definitely in the semi-tropics!

My flight yesterday was pretty uneventful. I had trouble getting to the airport, though. I took a Thameslink train from West Hampstead straight to Gatwick, and somewhere around Croydon it came to a dead stop. We sat on the tracks, motionless, and sat, and sat. People all around me were starting to freak out because they had flights to catch, but I was so far ahead of my scheduled departure time that I wasn't too worried. More annoyed than anything.

Finally the driver came on and said it was a signal failure blah blah blah (which is actually what he sounded like on the terrible speaker system) and we would be moving shortly. We finally pulled into Gatwick about an hour behind schedule, and everyone sprinted from the train except me. I took it at a leisurely pace.

On the plane, the flight attendant provided me with an extra gin & tonic and an extra white wine without even being asked! As I often say of Dave, she wasn't just an enabler -- she was an enforcer! "You WILL drink this and be happy."

I obliged.

I read Ike Eisenmann's memoir of growing up as a child actor. I polished off the whole book, a little less than 300 pages, and it was quite interesting. (It's been on my blog sidebar as "What I'm Reading" for ages, but I didn't actually start it until yesterday!)

For example, I was intrigued to learn that although he starred in numerous movies with Kim Richards, including the famous Disney film "Escape to Witch Mountain," they didn't really know each other and weren't friends. Apparently they barely spoke on the set when they weren't acting. Eisenmann also wrote about his difficult father (a frustrated actor himself) and his move into voice-over work when he became an adult, a little-known but apparently lucrative dimension of filmmaking.

I also watched "Three Days of the Condor" and "Blow-Up," two of my favorite old movies which happen to have been downloaded on my computer and thus accessible without Internet.

In Tampa I collected my bag and made my way to the rental car terminal (above, with groovy fishnet wall hanging). I am now the proud driver of a very sleek-looking black Honda Accord.

I spent last night chatting with my stepsister and her husband and son, and today we're going to breakfast and maybe working on getting some estimates for selling my late stepmother's jewelry.

Oh, and we have another addition to the family. My stepmother's elderly chihuahua, Pinky, died recently and my nephew (who lives in her house) was very attached to it. So when a relative of my brother-in-law was looking for a home for her own chihuahua, they adopted it right away -- and believe it or not, its name was already Pinky! So now we have Pinky II.

This is a terrible picture because the light was so dim, but it cracks me up. Doesn't she look like a gerbil?

And one more piece of interesting trivia: My stolen AirPods, which I hadn't checked up on in ages since they disappeared with my camera bag in Rome, are now in Algiers, Algeria! I can still see them on Apple's "Find My" app. I have no way of knowing whether the camera is there as well. I guess moving around stolen merchandise is indeed an international skill.