Olga Investigates the Muddy Heath

Yesterday, Olga and I walked over to Hampstead Heath, the nearest large park to our new flat. I was afraid it would be too far to walk regularly, but as it turns out, it's only about a mile and easily doable. Olga is thrilled that she won't be confined to concrete streets for the rest of her life. (Not that she doesn't like them too, particularly on garbage day.)

Hampstead Heath is much wilder than Hyde Park, and hence -- on rainy days -- much muddier. Olga's undercarriage was thoroughly blackened by the time we came home. I had to hustle her immediately into the bathtub.

With a web of forested paths, the Heath is also much harder to navigate. I got pretty well turned around and we came out of the park much farther north than I had intended -- but that was OK. It gave us a longer adventure! It felt great to take a good long walk.

Other landmark events yesterday:

-- I researched our garbage and recycling schedule just in time to get everything out for collection. Thus we are now free of the cardboard Mount Everest of moving boxes that had built up in our entrance hall. I wasn't sure the collectors would take them all, and I couldn't find out ahead of time because when I called Camden Council on Thursday to ask, the workers were on strike! So I just risked it and put everything out and it went. Woo hoo!

-- Our broadband was installed. A technician came by in the morning and put in a new phone jack, as well as turning on the line at the junction box on the corner. Not very complicated, and now we're no longer pirating our neighbor's free WiFi. I'm sure they're thrilled, if they even notice.

Friend to Tend, or Foe to Hoe?

In addition to the roses and hydrangeas that I already mentioned, we have a lot of peculiar things growing in our garden. Dave, Olga and I stayed home yesterday, the gray and mildly rainy weather discouraging exploration farther afield, and I spent some time trying to identify these mysterious plants. We'd eventually like to tame our wilderness a bit, but I want to allow room for wildflowers too. First we need to know what's what.

This (above) is a wild geranium. We have it in just one place so perhaps it doesn't fall into the weed category.

This is some type of aster. According to this page, most asters in the UK were imported from America. There is a purple variety called a sea aster that's native, but this one doesn't seem purple enough to be that species. We have just a few, and I like them.

This is called green alkanet (Pentaglottis sempervirens). We have tons of it -- and I'm finding articles online about ways to control it, so I suspect we're not the only ones who wonder if it's a bit out of hand. It's pretty, though.

I have no idea what this is. It grows on long stalks and appears quite weed-like.

This is a day lily -- or, I guess, a double or triple day lily. We have a small clutch of them, but they're a bit choked out by the other vegetation.

Blackberries! Again, we have lots of them. Probably too many, but they'll be great on cereal a little later in the summer!

This scary-looking thing is not a Body Snatcher, as I first feared, but rather a seed pod from an iris. We have tons of iris right around the patio. They appear to be done blooming for the year and now we have lots and lots of seeds bursting forth. More iris next year, I suppose!

Rescuing the Horseradish

Dave and I tied up a few move-related loose ends yesterday, traveling back to Notting Hill and giving our old flat a thorough final cleaning. We treated ourselves to lunch at Tom's, a favorite nearby brunch spot, where I had chilled green pea soup with yogurt. (Terrific!) Then we collected our vacuum cleaner, our cleaning products and our two forgotten plants, and hailed a cab via an Internet app that eliminates the need to stand on a street corner frantically waving our arms.

The Internet app said our cab's driver would be named Stephen. "Well, that's auspicious," I said to Dave. But Stephen turned out to be a garrulous driver who offered his version of the state of the world with the slightest prompting. He started telling us why the cab business is so terrible these days, and in the few short miles to West Hampstead he expounded on the evils of technology, his childhood on a Kilburn housing estate, the banking and financial crisis and social alienation. His windshield and rearview mirror were actually flecked with dried spittle that he'd sprayed during previous lectures to unlucky passengers.

We got out of the cab and Dave said, "You know why the taxi business is bad? Because of guys like that."

We got home, dropped everything off, took the keys to the old flat to a friend of the landlord's, and then went grocery shopping at a nearby big-box supermarket. (Yes, we're far enough out of town that we have a suburban-style shopping center nearby, for better or worse.) I picked up a drain plug for the kitchen sink -- which, wouldn't you know, doesn't fit -- and a pedal-operated trash can that already doesn't seem to work all that well. But on the upside, I found a £5 bill in the parking lot!

I wrapped up the day by taking Olga on a walk around the new neighborhood. We found a veterinarian right around the corner, some promising-looking restaurants and pubs, as well as not one, not two but FIVE thrift shops. Woo hoo!

(Photo: One of my last pictures from Notting Hill, taken Monday morning.)

Our New Home

Well, here we are, in our new flat in West Hampstead! The move went very smoothly. All the boxes arrived and there was no breakage. Our mover, Danny, and his assistant, Kieran, were models of efficiency, as was our friend Gordon, who was in charge of transporting Olga and our plants.

The most difficult moment, as with our move-in, was getting the dining room table out of the flat in Notting Hill through the narrow living room doorway. (More carpentry was required.) Here in West Hampstead it sailed through the door with no problem. We didn't even have to turn it sideways.

After we unloaded the truck at our new home, we paid Danny and Kieran and then took Gordon to lunch at a local pub with a huge outdoor back garden. Olga tagged along and got her own bowl of kibble, and astonished me by leading the way back home again -- even returning to the correct doorway. The dog is a wizard of navigation.

When an afternoon rain began to fall, we left the avocado outside to soak up some moisture while Dave and I launched into a frenzy of unpacking.

I put my pottery vases -- including my two Roseville vases from the 1920s that were wedding presents to my grandmother -- on a windowsill by the front entrance, where they will greet visitors.

Blackie, my father's childhood toy, took up residence on a shady windowsill in our new bedroom.

Olga, meanwhile, explored the back garden and played with her long-neglected egg toy. The garden blows my mind, I must say. It's relatively gigantic and comes with all kinds of flowering plants -- roses, hydrangeas, and a few I cannot yet identify. We have a patio that looks out onto this space, and a living room with big glass windows onto the patio and garden.

It's completely enclosed, so Olga can romp around to her heart's content with minimal supervision. She was having so much fun yesterday she was even hesitant to come in out of the rain -- and she has never been hugely rain-tolerant.

Wabi, Sabi and Bobby guard the garden door, to keep away the foxes.

(Olga and I did see a fox in the garden this morning. The fox high-tailed it -- and what a funny expression that is, when you think about it literally, but completely truthful -- when Olga appeared in the window. I suspect it will keep a healthy distance!)

Today we're going back to our old flat to finish cleaning and to pick up our horseradish and heather plants, which we forgot (!). Then we're turning in the keys and we're done.

Oh, and yes, surprisingly, we already have WiFi access in the new flat. One of our neighbors appears to have an unlocked router. We're still getting our own installed, though, in order to play fair!

Farewell to All That

Well, this is it -- my final post from our humble flat on Portobello Road. I'm leaving you with an image of the stairwell, which is the last thing we'll see as we descend to the moving van and motor out of here. (Someone takes care of that geranium but I have no idea who. It's been prospering on the stairs the whole time we've lived here -- it looks a heck of a lot better than our geraniums.)

I took Olga for a last jaunt to Wormwood Scrubs yesterday. I also did some research and discovered that Hampstead Heath is closer to our new home than the Scrubs is to our current one, so Olga will not lack for outdoor running space.

Not much else to say and there's lots to do, so I will report back when we're moved! (Oh, and we won't have Internet for a couple of days. I'm going to try to find some WiFi but my blogging may be a bit haphazard.)

I was amused by two items from the "Talk of the Town" section in a recent issue of The New Yorker. One was advice from literary critic L.A.G. Strong to author Jane Gardam early in her career to "write about everything -- even linoleum." (In other words, there are no details or characters too minor.) The other, in a separate article, was a little lesson on cockroach genealogy: The German cockroach is actually from Asia, and is known in Germany as the Russian cockroach; the American cockroach is actually from Africa, and is apparently known to some as the "Bombay canary."

Here's hoping we have neither in our new flat!

Chaos Reigns

Moving day is tomorrow, and Dave and I have entered the final, frenzied stages of packing, where we don't know where anything is and we're sleeping on the floor. (The bed has been dismantled.) Nearly everything is in boxes but somehow the stuff just keeps coming.

One of my blog pals was correct when she said a couple of days ago that in her experience, packing starts out organized and by the end it's just a matter of pitching stuff into boxes. I began by packing objects of a type all together, clearly labeling the boxes with a Sharpie: photo albums, drinking glasses. Dave did some labeling of his own:

(Should there be a comma after "dishes"? I think so.)

However, the last box I packed contained two rugs, the dog bed, a camera bag, a picture, a library book and our plastic grocery bag holders. Oh, and a container of gardener's rooting gel. All organization is now out the window.

I spent yesterday afternoon cleaning the kitchen cabinets -- wiping down all the shelves and doors and door handles. You don't realize how grimy things have become until you take away all the objects and you're left with just the residue of daily life! I'll come back and do the rest of the cleaning tomorrow afternoon, and then we'll be done with this place.

(Top photo: Street art in Shoreditch, June 20.)

Short Takes

-- Only after I posted yesterday did I realize I've complained about that Dean Martin song before. I'm turning into a repetitive old man who tells the same war story over and over.

-- Some of you asked a few days ago, after the wine-breakage incident, why we use plastic bags from the grocery store rather than bringing our own cloth bags. I completely agree with the idea of cloth bags, and we do have some. But the logistics of keeping cloth bags handy, when we don't have a car to keep them in and don't carry a backpack or briefcase to and from work each day, has defeated us. Plastic bags are simply much, much easier when we're popping into the grocery store while walking home or otherwise out and about. To make up for consuming them, I reuse them as garbage bags. I don't buy any Hefty.

-- We went out with our neighbors Chris and Linda last night for a meal to celebrate our move. They say they're sorry to see us go and they kindly gave us a cheese board, some champagne and chocolate as a departure gift. (More to pack! Criminy!) We promised to have them around to the new place. Chris, as usual, talked about World War II while Linda reprimanded him for harping on about history again.That's their regular shtick.

-- I just recently passed the 20,000-photo mark on Flickr! Yes, since 2006 I have uploaded a ridiculous quantity of pictures. (Not as many as some people, though. I came across a guy yesterday who topped 50,000, and I'm sure he's nowhere near the record holder. My blog pal Lorianne is right behind me at 17,723.) Here's my 20,000th one, which I kind of like. Think of the sheer volume of photographic material online these days. I mean, I'm just me -- prolific, but not as prolific as some!

(Photo: Soho, on Thursday.)