Alvin's New Home

Our avocado seedling has finally graduated from a glass of water to a flower pot. Alvin (as Dave named it) has taken up residence on the living room windowsill, possibly the sunniest place in the house. Hopefully it will be enough to pull a tropical tree through a dark English winter.

My strategy is to initially provide lots of water to help get its roots established, tapering off before it develops root rot. Hopefully I'll gauge that correctly. Advice is welcome from anyone who's grown a potted avocado!

(FYI, I already took a bit of soil off the top -- I read online that the seed should only be covered about halfway. So it sticks out more now.)

John McCain

On Thursday John McCain came and spoke at the school where Dave and I work. I am no fan of McCain or his politics, but we went to hear him nonetheless. I expected to disagree with him on virtually everything, but he struck a fairly moderate tone.

On foreign policy, he pretty much towed the Republican line (unsurprisingly). He argued that the U.S. should provide weapons and perhaps a safe zone for rebels fighting the government of Syria. When China and Russia are providing weapons for that government and innocent civilians are dying, including many women and children, the U.S. has an obligation to back those fighting for freedom, he said. But he added that he was not arguing for U.S. soldiers on the ground.

He also told the students that the Arab Spring is really part of a larger, global revolution based on the free exchange of information through social networking -- a revolution that unnerves governments that depend on the control of information.

I was compelled to roll my eyes only when he asserted that he believes life begins at conception, but he's not trying to force that view on anyone else. Please! Only if he were in support of upholding Roe v. Wade and allowing access to legal abortions would he not be forcing his view on anyone else.

I don't have an answer on Syria -- it seems to me that providing support for the rebels would simply encourage more conflict and involve us in a proxy war against other superpowers. But I'm not sure doing nothing is the right response, either.

Surprisingly, McCain didn't say much about the presidential race, at least not directly.

Dave and I then watched the vice-presidential debate last night on YouTube. I thought both candidates did well, though Joe Biden was more lively and less scripted (and probably more truthful) than Paul Ryan. The debate made me see an additional side to the Syria question -- the Syrian government is allied with Iran. No doubt that's the real reason Republicans want us to intervene.

Addendum to yesterday's post: I saw an article in a newspaper just this morning about the wedding ring scam. Apparently it's flourishing in certain parts of London and is also well-known in Paris. This woman got taken too!

(Photo: In England, the word "Oriental" doesn't seem to have the negative connotations it has in the United States. You see it everywhere. This restaurant is near Euston Road.)

The Ring

A few weeks ago, when I was walking in Hammersmith, I found a gold ring.

Well, actually, a guy walking in front of me found it. He bent down and picked it up, and showed it to me with a surprised expression. It was a wide gold band, and sure enough it had "18K" stamped inside it.

"It's your lucky day!" I told him, and kept walking. I figured someone must have dropped it while standing at a nearby bus stop.

A few seconds later he came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder. In halting English he said he wanted some money for cigarettes, and would I buy the ring? I looked at it again, and thought, "This looks like someone's wedding band. If I buy it, I can put it on Craigslist and maybe return it to its rightful owner."

So I gave him £5 for it.

When I got home that afternoon, I put an ad on Craigslist. But no one contacted me to claim the lost ring. I wondered whether the guy I bought it from had stolen it somewhere else. After all, I hadn't actually seen it lying on the sidewalk -- I only saw his motion to stoop down, and then saw the ring in his hand.

Finally yesterday I took it down to Hatton Gardens, London's jewelry row, to sell it. I figured I could at least get my £5 back.

You see where this is going, I'm sure.

I walked into a random jewelry shop and showed the proprietor the ring. He put in a loupe and looked at it closely.

"This ring is brass," he said.

It's so funny -- it never occurred to me that the ring would be fake. You'd think that would be the most obvious suspicion of all. But that "18K," along with the ring's overall color and weight, fooled me completely. The jeweler said it happens all the time.

Fortunately, I also had some scrap silver -- an old bracelet I'd worn for years that recently broke in half, as well as a silver chain I found on the sidewalk -- and the jeweler bought that for £5. So I've fooled myself into believing that I made my money back!

(Photo: Virginia creeper over a doorway near Russell Square, yesterday.)

Denton & Bubble Tea

Need a chandelier? I know just the place.

I photographed this shop in Kensington during the day a few months ago. But when Dave and I passed on Saturday night and I saw the window, I realized I really needed to get a night shot. So I went back on Tuesday night and hovered suspiciously across the street long enough to take about 20 shots, of which this was my favorite.

I have a weird tendency to take photos that are just slightly askew -- I have to straighten almost all of them about half a degree once I get home. Why is that? I came to suspect my old camera had some kind of internal flaw, like a tilted sensor. But it happens with the new camera too, which makes me think it's my eye that's tilted!

Anyway, on the way home I popped into Bubbleology, a relatively new shop on Portobello Road that specializes in Taiwanese-style bubble tea. It seems like an awfully narrow product range and I'm not sure how much profit there could be, so I hope the place makes it. I like a good bubble tea now and then.

I took our unnecessary new router back to the store yesterday. It felt good getting that £129 back!

I've been seeing the polls on the presidential race, and the apparent "bounce" that Mitt Romney received from the debate. I'm mystified by this. Are there really voters who are so on the fence that one debate can change their mind? And why would one debate be enough to do it? I reject the premise that anyone "wins" a debate -- I think it's more of a discussion, and I think Obama did a good job and sounded presidential. Romney was deemed the "winner" just because he didn't fall on his face, which is what everyone expected.

Back Online!

We're back on the Interwebs again, thank goodness. Whatever was causing our outage seems to have somehow corrected itself. We're still not sure what happened. After I came home from web surfing at Starbucks yesterday, I called our Internet provider to find out what progress they'd made on our case. They simply said our account showed up in their system as "active" and asked me to reconnect our old router. Sure enough, it worked like a charm.

So today I'm returning the new router, an expense which happily we don't need to absorb after all.

Of course, our service could vanish again just as easily as it returned, I suppose. But I choose to believe this was a one-time fluke somewhere in the vast telecommunications network beyond the confines of our flat. Hopefully the fickle finger of technological fate won't land on us again.

After we got back online, Dave and I caught up with the latest Rachel Maddow show and watched "W," Oliver Stone's movie about George W. Bush, on Netflix. When we chose it I thought I hadn't seen it, but after it started I decided I had seen it and just forgot. Or maybe I blocked it out. Which is a reasonable response to George W. Bush, it seems to me.

Then we started to watch "A Clockwork Orange," but it was so unpleasant within the first 15 minutes that Dave asked me to turn it off. I'll finish it today. I have a stronger stomach than Dave for violence in films, as long as it has a message or purpose.

Ah, back online at last! I can breathe again!

(Photo: The maples outside our bathroom windows are turning orange for fall. The miniature tree on the windowsill is my straw baobab from Madagascar, last seen here in a post about my New York apartment in February 2008.)

Brighton

We are still cursed with our Internet outage, so I'm back at Starbucks this morning, this time with Dave. We're getting our online fix. It's scary to realize how small life seems without Internet access. It feels a little like being unable to breathe.

We've been on the phone (repeatedly) with our Internet provider, and their diagnostic tests haven't shown any fault with their system. So we bought a new router yesterday and installed it, and our connection still doesn't work. So now we're waiting to hear from the ISP engineers. This is more than just a drag -- I depend on this Internet connection for work!

As you can see, though, being unplugged from the WWW didn't stop Dave and I from going down to Brighton on Sunday as planned. We had a fun day traipsing around town. It's a terrific place for photography, starting with the strange, Moorish-looking Royal Pavilion.

There's a lot of peculiar street art, especially in the back alleys between streets. Dave gamely came along as I scurried down alley after alley.

And of course I found plenty of interesting storefronts...

...sometimes with interesting people walking past.

The beach at Brighton is very pebbly. There's very little sand, and Dave -- always the musician attuned to sounds -- pointed out that the waves make a completely different noise coming ashore on pebbles. I can't possibly convey it in writing, but it is very strange.

There's a huge pier with an amusement park at the end, complete with roller coasters and other rides. We walked out to the end but didn't ride anything. Instead we ducked into a pub and had a pint, watching a passing parade of old and young visitors, including what seemed like a lot of tattooed parents pushing strollers.

The pier included the requisite carnival games. We skipped those too. Even after a pint, I wasn't ready to climb a Loopy Ladder.

We walked back into town and found another pub where we had lunch, and then made our way gradually back to the train.

I'll have to go back down sometime when I have more time to explore -- I think there's a lot more street art lurking in those alleyways, and lots more great storefronts to find.

Sorry I'm not able to keep up with everyone's blogs at the moment. I hope we have this Internet problem sorted out soon!

Internet Outage

I feel like having a tantrum, and sadly I don't have a tiara to go with it.

Our Internet connection inexplicably died yesterday morning, just as I was beginning my standard daily round of blog-reading. It was very strange: One minute it worked, the next it didn't. I shut down my computer and the router, rebooted everything, and nothing seemed to help. Finally I called BT, our Internet provider, and the guy at the call center walked me through some diagnostics that finally revealed we do, indeed, have some kind of network problem. Theoretically BT is fixing it. I'm told it could take 48 hours.

Being disconnected is really not that bad. In fact, in some ways, it's kind of nice -- an enforced Internet vacation. But as is often said, you don't realize how much you depend on the Internet until you don't have it anymore! If there's an upside, it's that we're on a break from school until Wednesday, so for the next few days I won't need a connection to do my job.

Now I'm sitting in a Starbucks a few blocks from our flat, sipping a pumpkin spice latte, listening to Ella Fitzgerald singing "Cheek to Cheek" and being thankful for free coffeehouse wifi.

By the way, here's my beef about call centers in England: Many times, companies and utilities here make you pay to talk to someone at a call center. For example, BT charged me 14 pence per minute to talk to their call center yesterday -- and a good chunk of time I spent on hold waiting to connect to an agent. The same thing happened when I had to call Dave's health insurance company to discuss a claim a few days ago. I think it's fairly outrageous to make me pay to correct a problem caused by someone else, but apparently that's how they do things here.

Last night I went down to Greenwich for a pub outing with Sally and Mike, and the visiting Kim and her friends. It's always great to connect with distant blog pals when they come through town! I also popped into a bookstore and picked up a couple of amusing London photo books by this blogger, and I'm thinking, if he can do it, why can't I? Indeed. Motivational food for thought.

Dave and I are off tonight to see "Looper," the new Bruce Willis flick, and maybe have some Thai food. Tomorrow we plan to check out Brighton, on the southern coast of England. Photos to follow, if and when our Internet connection is restored!