Nature's Jewelry

Olga and I walked to the Heath yesterday, where we found this colorful pair of thick-legged flower beetles (Oedemera nobilis). I don't recall ever seeing a gold variety of this insect before -- only green ones. And so cool to find them together! I always call these "David Bowie beetles," with their glittery shiny shells and those expanded legs. They're like jewelry.

Anyway, we had a good walk. (When do we not?) Olga never used to be a barker, but now she barks all the time. It's the strangest thing. If we ever stop momentarily she drops her ball and barks repeatedly, but she won't let me pick it up or throw it. She's saying, "Ha! I have it and you don't!"

Here's yesterday's bit of found pottery. I have quite a bowl of these chips accumulating on the dining room windowsill!

Last night I subjected Dave to another old movie -- "Farewell, My Lovely" from 1975. We watched it in honor of Sylvia Miles, who died this week. I know her mainly from "Midnight Cowboy," one of my favorite movies, where she plays Cass, the high-rise glamazon who seduces Joe Buck and then wheedles cash out of him. She has some of the best lines in the film. I'd never seen "Farewell, My Lovely," which features her other most prominent movie role. It's a noir murder mystery based on Raymond Chandler and truthfully, it's over the top -- it's so noir that it's almost a parody, with the hard-bitten detective uttering crisp one-liners in between hails of bullets. (About ten people die during the course of the film.) But she's great, as is Robert Mitchum, who plays Philip Marlowe.

So, yeah, we toasted Sylvia. Or I did, anyway. Dave tolerated her.

Also on the pop culture front, I finished Jeannette Walls' book "The Glass Castle" yesterday -- an excellent read. It reminds me of Tara Westover's "Educated" in that it's about a girl with a very unconventional, isolated, even abusive family who somehow manages to extract herself and go on to great things. Definitely recommended.

This is what summer is going to be -- me, wandering around with the dog and discovering nature and reading and watching movies and gardening. After this week, that is. I haven't mentioned it yet, but this week I'm going to Germany for a five-day teacher-training course at the European Institute of Applied Buddhism, part of the Plum Village community led by Thich Nhat Hanh. One of my colleagues is leading the course, and as I used to practice Buddhism when I lived in New York, I thought it would be interesting to attend. (My professional development allowance through school even pays for it!) I leave on Tuesday, and I'll take you all with me! Should be interesting!

Fox and Egg

Finally, FINALLY, school is out for the summer. The end of school always seems like such a protracted affair. There are assemblies and parties and speeches and more parties and then a final, all-together-now assembly for staff and faculty -- that was yesterday morning. And that entailed more speeches, and then there was another party, in the school's gym. Wine was served, but I didn't have any. After Wednesday, the very thought turned my stomach.

I ducked out of the party after about half an hour, and came home to work in the garden. I picked up a ton of squirrel-gnawed walnuts from our tree, and deadheaded the roses. I admired our big yellow lupine (above), which is new. For some reason our blue lupine died over the winter, so we got yellow and red ones to replace it.

I also discovered our Solomon's seal was once again infested with sawfly larvae, which (as you can see) were making quick work of eating the leaves. We don't spray, so I had to get rid of them the old-fashioned way -- squashing them with a paper towel. Probably the least appealing of all gardening tasks.

I hate to kill anything, and will usually go out of my way to avoid it, but those guys are just too "belligerent and numerous," in the words of Morbo. Well, OK, maybe not belligerent, but certainly destructive. If I let them live our plant would be stripped bare.

This is blooming now in the wildflower garden, amid the blue borage and the bright pink valerian. I haven't a clue what it is. Anybody know?

Finally, I'm posting late today because I wanted to edit and upload this video from our garden cam. We had an egg in the fridge that was a bit past its expiration date -- still perfectly good, but we thought rather than eat it ourselves, we'd give it to our garden fox. So we boiled it, cooled it and set it out in the back of the garden by the shed.

As you can see, our little fox appreciated it! I'm pretty sure this is the same fox that ventured into our house several days ago. You can see he appears in the video even before I put out the egg -- just his tail, disappearing behind the shed. Then I set the egg out and about an hour later, the fox discovers it and nibbles away for several minutes. (As usual, the dates and times on the garden cam videos are wrong. I just can't be bothered to reset them every time I turn on the cam. The real time was about five hours behind what you see there -- so the fox discovered the egg around 10:45 p.m.)

Doesn't "Fox and Egg" sound like the name of a pub?

One More Day

Well, we're down to just one more day, and then it's "No more teachers, no more books!" Today isn't even really a workday. It's our year-end assembly, where we recognize all the people who are leaving or retiring, and then we have a buffet lunch -- usually out on the playground, but the weather is so terrible we'll probably wind up in the gym instead.

And then we're free!

I survived yesterday, but only barely. I felt like the walking dead -- so tired and fuzzy-minded and burdened with toxins! It's been a long time since I've had a true hangover. I don't know what I was thinking, spending eight hours at an office party. On a boat. In the rain.

My former co-worker Lindsey stopped by yesterday to say hello. She and her husband now live in Yangon, Myanmar, where they both work at a school. It was great to see her and hear about her adventures. She's going to be in and around London for part of this summer, so we'll get together again before she heads back to Southeast Asia.

This is Olga's morning nap spot, on the rug in the dining room. That's when there's any sun -- which, at the moment, there's not. I took this picture about two weeks ago.

Dave and I started watching "When They See Us," Netflix's show about the Central Park Five, last night. It's excellent. I remember that case, and the scary depictions of "wilding" (whatever that meant) in the press at the time. I didn't immediately realize what a miscarriage of justice it was -- few people did -- although some of the players dispute the facts as presented in the series. It makes me want to find a good objective account (does such a thing exist?) to read about what really transpired. There's certainly no doubt those kids were wrongly convicted, and seeing the trial and dearth of evidence as depicted by the show, it's hard for me to imagine how a racially mixed jury reached a guilty verdict.

(Top photo: A colorful driveway at a construction site in Hampstead.)

Wine and More Wine

Yesterday was our last day with students, and the library was surprisingly busy through the morning. (The girl with six overdue books returned them, by the way. Whew!) But school ended at noon, and business dropped off by 1 p.m., so I closed up shop and walked with a colleague to Little Venice, where our department held its end-of-year party on a canal boat in the Paddington Basin.

It was an interesting venue -- a colorful bar and restaurant docked canalside. It would have been a lot nicer if the weather had cooperated. The door was open onto the boat's deck, and though there was an awning it was pouring rain and not very warm out. But I drank enough wine that I eventually didn't care. The party started at 2 p.m., and I wound up staying well into the evening.

I feel like a zombie this morning. Fortunately, although I have to go in an hour early, I don't think much will be expected of me today. And I'll get to leave earlier in the afternoon. Maybe by then my headache will be gone.

(Photo: Isleworth, West London.)

Mock Orange

We've had a lot of rain over the past few days and we're supposed to get more. It hasn't been a problem for us personally, but some areas have experienced flooding and transportation breakdowns. The worst Dave and I have seen is that the rain has beaten down some of the plants in the garden. A big branch on our mock orange, already heavy with blossoms, is now drooping low over the lawn with the added weight of water droplets.

The library has continued to be busy with people coming in to get books for the summer. Fortunately the kids are pretty much done so I'm no longer being pestered by demand for computer chargers! We still have middle school students around for half of today, but then they're finished and the next two workdays are just for staff and faculty.

I'm boxing up all the discarded biographies. I went through them with my boss and coworker yesterday, just to make sure I wasn't tossing anything of value, and they agreed with almost all my decisions. I am quite proud of how good the section looks now, I must say!

We had some very strange stuff -- a never-used biography of the band Black Sabbath, for example. Who bought that?

You may be wondering (I'm sure you are!) how well we did getting overdue materials back from kids. As of now, there are still a handful of students with books out -- maybe eight? So not a complete victory (and in fact my worst year so far in terms of retrieving stuff), but not a disaster, either. One ninth-grade girl still has six overdue books, but I'm not seeing any sign that she's going to bring them back until fall. All I can do is ask, write the parents, that kind of thing -- and I did all that. So unless they turn up today, these kids will start next year with frozen accounts. Oh well!

Weeding the Biographies

I spent yesterday weeding the biography section in the library. It hadn't been done in years and the shelves were getting so full that it was hard to put away books -- full, I should add, of volumes that in many cases no one reads.

Our biographies seem to fall into two categories. There are the gigantic, 800 page tomes that relate every possible detail of their subjects' lives and families. And then there are the slim 40-page books for young readers about famous scientists or musicians or whatever.

Many of those 800-pagers were old and yellowed, and frankly unappealing. What high school student, for example, wants to launch into a gigantic 30-year-old biography of Baudelaire? And some biography subjects are just a little too obscure -- like Jane Boleyn, sister-in-law of the famous Anne. I don't want to seem anti-intellectual, but who cares?

Then there's the stuff that's out of date and needs to be replaced. We had books on Marie Antoinette and Mary Shelley, but they were both at least 40 years old and sadly decrepit.

Some people's legacies have been re-evaluated over time. Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, is still considered a great architect, but his personal life has been the subject of recent scrutiny. We need a new biography that addresses his reputation for womanizing.

The slim volumes, on the other hand, are also ignored, because nowadays, good cursory biographies of most famous scientists, explorers and musicians are available online. Kids just don't check out those skinny books anymore.

So basically, I pulled a heck of a lot of stuff. Maybe a quarter of our biographies overall.

I saved the newer ones that are still getting read, and the classics -- like Robert K. Massie's "Nicholas and Alexandra," or Antonia Fraser's "Mary, Queen of Scots," or Billie Holiday's "Lady Sings the Blues." I still have to go through everything with my boss to make sure she's comfortable with the weed, but I think she will be.

I got so absorbed in the task that I worked all the way through lunch and into the afternoon. When I finally came up for air, it was 3 p.m.! I thought the clock was wrong, but no. I haven't lost track of time that significantly in ages.

(Photos: A shuttered pub in Richmond, southwest London -- reportedly one of the oldest in the area. Hopefully someone will reopen it!)

More Flowers, and a Furry Visitor

Saturday evening, I was lying on the couch reading, with Olga snoozing next to me. The back door was open, and Dave was somewhere else in the house. I saw movement out of the corner of my eye, and at first I thought it was a trick of my glasses -- it was right at the point where the corner of my lens met "real life." I turned slightly, and it was a fox -- INSIDE THE HOUSE, about five feet from the back door and two feet from me!

The fox was watching Olga, whose eyes were (fortunately) closed. I wish I'd thought to try to get a picture with my phone, but instead I said, "Get out!" and waved my arms. The fox scrambled, just like a character in a Bugs Bunny cartoon -- it ran in place for half a second on our smooth wood floor before its feet found purchase. All I could think was, "Oh my God, Olga is going to kill this fox in our living room." I was picturing the blood and wondering how I would clean it up.

But by the time Olga looked up from her nap, none the wiser, the fox had shot out the door. She didn't pursue it. I don't think she realized what happened.

I've heard of foxes coming indoors, but we've never before had it happen here. It was a young fox, maybe even a first-year cub. I had a package of cookies sitting on the floor, and I wonder if that's what brought it in.

I spent yesterday in the garden. As you can see, there's still a lot going on. Our first poppy bloomed (top), and the first flowers opened on the hawkweed (above). Yes, that photo is oriented the right way -- the stem was bent sideways by the weight of the blossom.

The pink petals of our "Bowl of Beauty" peonies unfolded to reveal the shredded coleslaw at their centers:

I mowed the lawn and did some weeding, and I FINALLY planted out the rest of my seedlings -- three burdocks, five honesty plants and three hollyhocks that had been growing in pots. All my seedlings are now in the ground, and it's sink or swim. The honesties seem to do pretty well once they're planted, so I have high hopes for those. The burdocks, on the other hand, tend to get nibbled by snails (or something) -- which is surprising since burdock is basically a weed. Some hollyhocks do better than others -- a few have been eaten -- but we have enough (18!) that at least a couple of them ought to grow big enough to bloom next summer.

Our blue skylovers, a type of pimpernel, are flowering once again. They're supposed to be annuals, but this is their third year! They live in a pot on our patio and just keep coming back, and we haven't been doing anything to protect them in the winter.

Dave and I are watching a terrific TV show called "Chernobyl," a dramatization of the events following the explosion at the Russian nuclear reactor in 1986. It's a British production so I don't know if it's on in the states, but it probably will be at some point. I remember the day Chernobyl blew up -- I was a college student, working as a clerk in the tiny Tampa bureau of the St. Petersburg Times. (That's St. Petersburg in Florida, not Russia!) One of my colleagues heard about it and I think we turned on the TV to find out more. No one was sure how bad it was or what would happen -- there had never been a nuclear accident that big, but we'd all seen movies like "The China Syndrome" that predicted the worst. I don't know that I felt any sense of personal risk, but that might be because I was young and stupid.

I'm also still watching "Bloodline," which in last night's episode featured a murder with a conch shell -- fitting for a show set in the Florida Keys! (Key West is often known as the "Conch Republic.")