Inaugurating the Lawn Mower

Dave broke out our brand-new lawnmower for the first time yesterday. Remember what a nightmare it was to have that thing delivered? Well, now we're glad to have it. The back garden is looking pretty good, I must say!

The roses in the middle are all sprouting after their winter pruning and we already have tons of flowers, mainly daffodils and grape hyacinths.

The white camellia is busting out all over. Dave and I both agreed, though, that if it were up to us, we wouldn't plant a white one. I much prefer pink or red. Oh, well -- it's just a rented camellia.

The green flowers in the foreground are euphorbia. We like them, but man, those things are prolific.

Yesterday I did some weeding while Dave mowed and I accidentally weeded one of our plants, a geum. Dave put it back in the ground but I think its survival is in doubt. I feel very guilty. So many of our plants are so small it's hard to tell them from weeds. Dave accidentally weeded one of our Japanese anemones, thinking it was a blackberry. The hazards of gardening!

Short Takes, with Syrup

-- Remember the red beetles we removed from our fritillaria (above)? Well, true to my prediction, there were more (or maybe the same ones) on the plant the next day, and another one yesterday. I had Dave remove them and kill them with tweezers. I'd still really rather not do it myself. Farming out my bad karma!

-- Yesterday I was weeding the garden when I spotted this huge bumblebee hanging beneath a leaf on our butterfly bush. He seemed to be asleep. I was working around the bush, and after leaning over it realized the bee was no longer there. He was on my shirt! I brushed him off, panicked, and then he seemed stunned and I was afraid I'd killed him. I put him back on the butterfly bush, and soon enough he was crawling around again and found his same spot beneath the leaf.

-- Someone at work donated all nine seasons of Seinfeld on DVD to the library. We're not really cataloging DVDs anymore, though, so rather than put them in the charity box I grabbed them. (I'm not sure about the morality of that, but it's a very Seinfeldian question, isn't it?) Dave and I have been watching them each night. I miss that show.

-- Dave's sister sent us maple syrup (real, homemade maple syrup) for Easter! We were going to eat some last night but Dave decided he didn't want to make pancakes so we had Chinese takeout instead. (Without syrup, obviously.) We'll do breakfast-for-dinner another evening.

-- I just read a disturbing article from last September about predictions that the human population will reach nearly 11 billion people by 2100, higher than previously estimated. (And possibly as high as 13 billion!) Much of the growth will be in sub-Saharan Africa, where Nigeria alone is expected to go from 175 million to 900 million people. ("Of the people added to the planet in this century, according to the U.N., one in five will be Nigerian," the article says.) It's difficult to process those kinds of numbers, and what they will mean for the remaining wildlife in Africa, not to mention the rest of the planet. I came across this article because someone linked to it from a recent related piece in The New York Times, about some European countries encouraging pregnancies as a way to combat an aging population. If there's any positive news from these pieces, it's that readers of the Times, in the comments section, were uniformly aghast at the notion that anyone would encourage more births.

The Peace Box

I was thinking last night about how hard it used to be to buy a book.

Remember? The only book stores in many areas were tiny mall outlets like Waldenbooks or B. Dalton, which stocked current best-sellers and classics but would have to order anything even remotely unusual. When I was a kid in Florida we had no Books-A-Million, no Borders and no Barnes & Noble, and certainly no Amazon.

Used or out-of-print books were even harder to source. We could visit Haslam's, a huge used book store in St. Petersburg. New Yorkers could go to the Strand and Portland residents could go to Powell's. But what we found in any of these places was largely just a matter of chance. (Indeed, my reading life in college was partly defined by what I could scrounge up in Goodwill and other used book outlets!)

To find specific out-of-print books, we had to go to book finders, people who advertised in magazines that they would track down whatever book you needed. I used a book finder a couple of times.

One occasion was to complete this set of four small poetry and art books by Joseph Pintauro and Norman Laliberte, from 1970. I bought three of them, "A Box of Sun," "The Magic Box" and "The Peace Box," when I went with my friend Suzanne to a used book sale in the mid-1980s. But the fourth volume, "The Rabbit Box," was missing. (According to the copyright pages, all four were sold together "with a poster and a cube" to make something called "The Rainbow Box." I never tried to follow up on the poster or the cube, whatever it was.)

Anyway, my book finder -- who I located through an ad, I believe, in The New Yorker -- was located in Alabama. I snail-mailed my request, they spent weeks looking for the book, and eventually snail-mailed me back that they'd found it at x price. I then snail-mailed them a check, they ordered the book and snail-mailed it back to me.

I don't remember how long this process took, but good grief -- doesn't it seem complicated now? When we can just hop on Amazon and order practically anything with next-day delivery?

As you can see, I've kept those books ever since. I almost never look at them but they're so bright and cheerful and kind of hippy-dippy that I love just seeing them on my shelf. They make me think of Suzanne and that wonderful book sale.

Years later, at another used book sale -- this time in New York, around 2001 -- I found the volume above. It's also by Pintauro, this time working with another artist, Corita Kent. It's by the same publisher, also from 1970, and clearly in the same vein as the other four. So I bought it too.

Anyway, it's just funny to think how difficult the process of locating a book used to be! Of course, there's a trade-off for our modern efficiency. Border's is gone, Barnes & Noble is suffering, I haven't seen a Waldenbooks or B. Dalton in ages, and book finders (as far as I know) exist no more. Snail-mail, of course, is largely passé, resulting in much smaller postal services. That's a whole segment of the economy irrevocably altered -- but admittedly, at least from the consumer's standpoint, probably for the better.

Olga's Bowls, and Fierce Red Beetles

I used to occasionally write about the great sunlight in our previous apartment, in Notting Hill. Well, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that we get pretty great light here, too. This is a corner of our overly large foyer, where we keep Olga's dog dishes and my former dining room table. That short door leads into a storage space beneath the stairs to the flat above us.

Our yellow daffodils seem to be on the wane, with lots of white ones coming in to replace them. I believe all the white ones were planted by Dave and our gardener last summer. I didn't realize they were white at the time. Dave put some in the blue pot occupied by the horseradish, which hasn't started sprouting yet. Just as well -- the minute it does I'll have to start fending off slugs!

Speaking of pests: Yesterday, when we got home from work, Dave found this pair of amorous red beetles on our fritillaria. He and I took pictures, thinking they were rather pretty. "I bet they're something terrible," I said, jokingly. When I looked them up, lo and behold, I was right! They're scarlet lily beetles, which attack lilies and fritillarias. (Headline on a March 2009 article in the Daily Mail: "Beware the red lily killer beetles set to wreak havoc on UK gardeners.")

I went outside and plucked off the beetles, carried them to a far corner of the yard and threw them behind the shed. I probably should have just killed them outright, but I felt bad enough breaking up their party. I bet they find the fritillaria again in no time!

Back to Routines

About a week ago I came across this guy cleaning the brass kickplate on the door of this pub near Colindale. When I started snapping photos, he asked if I wanted him to move out of the way. "Not necessarily, unless you want to!" I replied. So he stayed put and I kept snapping. I think there was a pole on the right -- or maybe a parked car -- that kept me from centering the door, but I like the unconventional framing and the books piled in the window.

Yesterday morning I took Olga for one last Spring Break romp on the heath. We found some bluebells beginning to bloom under a tree, and now I'm certain we also have them in our yard. We should be getting some interesting flowers soon!

Dave and I saw our visiting friend David off to the airport before joining our former neighbor Chris for lunch -- apparently our old apartment in Notting Hill still isn't occupied. Then we came home to enjoy a quiet afternoon of alone time. I cleaned the house and watched "Moon Over Miami."

I like having visitors, but it's always such a relief to get the house back in order, get the routines back in place. Today we're back at work, as usual, and I feel ready, to tell you the truth.

Oh, and I finally got all my Singapore photos uploaded to Flickr. You can see them here, if you're interested.

Easter Wrap-Up, with Satanic Overtones

Well, here we are, our last day of Spring Break. In fact, today is a bank holiday in the UK, known as Easter Monday -- so pretty much everyone is off work. It will probably be impossible to get anything done!

We're wrapping things up with our friend David, who is flying back to the states today. He rejoined us in London on Saturday after his jaunt around the Continent. He helped me walk Olga yesterday morning, and then he and Dave and I went out for Easter dinner to one of our local pubs, which put on an amazing roast. We feasted on chicken and yorkshire pudding and huge desserts, and then couldn't eat anything else for the rest of the day.

Easter doesn't mean much to me theologically, but the food is always nice.

In the afternoon I continued working on a photography project involving my old negatives, which took hours of sorting. I never did find a couple of old film rolls that I'm sure I used to have -- photos I took in Miami Beach with some friends back in 1989-90. Who knows where they went. I don't remember seeing them recently and it's entirely possible they've been missing for a long time. My plan is to get high-res scans made of some favorite photos from the past, and put them all together in a book.

In the evening I was supposed to Skype with my mom and brother, but Dave, David and I started watching "The Jinx" -- the HBO series about Robert Durst -- and polished off two episodes before I realized I'd missed my Skype appointment by an hour. Oops. Hopefully we can reschedule!

Finally, last night we watched "The Omen," which David had never seen. (How is this possible?!) I only belatedly realized it's a completely inappropriate movie to watch on Easter.

(Photo: Self-portrait with cat pillow, North London, March 28.)

Garden Close-Ups

One of our ongoing garden mysteries has been these clumps of strange, grass-like plants that sprouted a few months ago. We knew they weren't grass, but we weren't sure what they were, so we left them to grow. Turns out they're grape hyacinths!

To me, these are ornamental and kind of fun. But I have a feeling they might be considered invasive here, as I've seen them all over the place, growing through cracks in people's driveways and that sort of thing.

We've got a couple of other odd-looking plants that we're watching. No flowers yet, but I have a hunch they might be bluebells. I'll keep you posted!

The dewy mornings have made for some interesting photos. These water droplets are on a huge oxalis plant that sprouted at the back of the garden. We've just left it to grow. The leaves are so soft.

This is an intriguing little weed that's sprouted around our roses, bearing both blue and pink flowers on the same plant. I have no idea what it is. Dave was planning to mow this week, and I asked him to mow around them. As it turned out, it's been too damp to break out the lawn mower.

Which means our dead nettles have also won a reprieve for now, blooming in all their hairy splendor!