Dragonfly Sex

I deadheaded our burdock yesterday, cutting off all the spent flowers. I'm trying to prevent the plants from re-seeding too much. I wouldn't mind having some more burdock but I want to be in control of how many and where they grow, because they're such gigantic plants. Here's a bee feasting on one of the remaining flowers -- you can see the cut stems to the right where I took some old flowerheads off.

Handling those spiny little seedheads left my fingers feeling like I'd rubbed them with sandpaper.

I also finished "Smoky the Cowhorse." Believe it or not, it got better. The first 100 pages were just about the slowest I've read in any book, but after Smoky grew up and began working some conflicts developed and things got more interesting. I even teared up at the end. Animal books always do that to me. (And SPOILER ALERT: He doesn't die!)

There are some dicey references about halfway through the book to a "halfbreed" horse thief -- "dark complected," as the book put it. Here's how he's introduced: "All of him, from the toe of his gunny sack covered boots to the dark face which showed under the wore out black hat, pointed out as the man being a halfbreed of Mexican and other blood that's darker, and noticing the cheap, wore out saddle, the ragged saddle blanket on a horse that should of had some chance to feed instead of being tied up, showed that he was a halfbreed from the bad side, not caring, and with no pride."

Yikes! The book was published in 1926 so I guess it shouldn't be a surprise. But this illustrates why even prize-winning old books can pose problems for modern librarians. I'd be reluctant to recommend "Smoky," not only because kids nowadays would never put up with that slow start, but because of the emphasis on the bad guy's dark skin. An adult can read it and realize it's a product of its time, but a kid may absorb a different message.

In the afternoon I took Olga for a walk in the cemetery, and saw this speckled wood butterfly.

I also saw these two mating dragonflies. It's not a great picture, but they were very hard to photograph, constantly moving and pretty fast, too. I think this is actually post-coitus. I wondered why one bug's abdomen was attached to the head of the other -- because that doesn't seem right, does it? But apparently during mating the rear dragonfly's abdomen would also be bent forward to attach to the underside of the front dragonfly. I guess they're done with that part. Now they're having a cigarette.

I also heard the turaco and briefly saw it fly from a treetop -- but again, I wasn't fast enough with the camera.

I brought Olga home and gave her her nightly can of food. We used to give her canned food as a special treat, but in her old age we've been providing it more regularly, and now she's come to expect it at around 6 p.m. I am amazed at how accurate her internal clock is. Within about 15 minutes on either side of that time, she always starts looking at me with yearning eyes.

My evening movie was "The Mission" with Jeremy Irons and Robert de Niro, from 1986. It's another one that I saw many years ago but couldn't really remember. Good, and beautiful to watch, but of course tragic.

A Very Complainy Post

This is another picture from my trip to Hastings. In front of the battlefield entrance were these bollards, which someone had sheathed in fun knitted coverings. These are only a few of them -- there were similar bollards all around the square. I wish I'd had time to get more photos, but we were already in the car and driving away when I asked Chris to pull over so I could grab a quick shot.

I just heard the recycling truck come by. We've been having some trouble with our rubbish collection. They usually come on Friday mornings, but they've been a few days late for the past few weeks, and last week they didn't even pick up our garden waste (a service for which we pay extra). I went on their web site to complain and found a note that said, "We are currently experiencing recycling and waste collection delays." Which makes it sound like the delays are something being inflicted upon them -- that they're just passive victims. When in fact, it seems to me, it should read, "We are currently delaying recycling and waste collection." Aren't they in control?

And while I'm complaining, let's talk about Blogger comments. Have any of you noticed, while commenting on a blog, that sometimes your comment just disappears and doesn't post? I've had this happen several times recently, and no amount of reloading the page or closing the browser window solves the problem. I can even comment on other posts on the same blog, but not the one I want to comment on. The only thing I can do is wait -- and often, if I go back in ten minutes, the comment posts just fine. I have no idea what's going on there but it's annoying.

Also, remember that kerfuffle earlier this year about how Blogger was going to stop e-mailing posts to subscribers who had signed up via their widget, powered by Feedburner? That was supposed to happen in July. But I'm still getting my own posts in my e-mail every day, so apparently it's still working. A mystery!

Well, geez, I didn't mean to be so grouchy in this post. Here's one of our roses -- we're seeing a second flush of blooms on some of the plants. See the little bug on the petal to the right?

Other flowers haven't performed well this year at all. I already mentioned the cardoon, which only has one good-sized blossom and a few smaller ones that look like they never matured. Our Chinese lanterns haven't done well either -- the one in the pot only sent up a few shoots, and the one in the ground had one or two flowers but that's it. I don't think we're going to get any lanterns this year. Everyone says this plant is so vigorous but that has not been our experience.

My appointment at the dentist was yesterday. It went fine -- just a cleaning, and it seemed a bit perfunctory but I guess it's better than nothing. The hygienist said she'd only worked there two weeks, and she was a bit overeager in her instructions to me. I felt like saying, "I've been brushing my teeth successfully for more than half a century, and I'm not about to change my methodology now!" Old dog, new tricks --right?

Last night I watched "Missing," the 1982 Costa-Gavras film starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek, about Pinochet's violent 1973 coup in Chile (backed by the USA). It's one of my favorite movies, but it's surprisingly hard to find streaming. I've looked for it several times over the years with no luck, and finally yesterday I found it on a site called Chili that I'd never used before. I "purchased" it for £5.99, but I'm unclear whether that means I own it in perpetuity or I merely rented it. Anyway, I was glad to finally get a chance to see it again.

Hydrangeas and Applesauce

This hydrangea reminds me of the hats I used to see on some of the older ladies at church when I was a kid. All it needs is a little bit of netting and bingo -- you've got a hat. Maybe I should try it for the first day of school?

Yesterday was very domestic. I did laundry, I vacuumed, I did some minor gardening. I trudged through another 20 pages of "Smoky the Cowhorse." I talked to Dave, who is in Indiana and preparing to take his pre-flight Covid test to come home. I know he's ready.

Last night, perhaps because my visit to the Hastings battleground put me in a medieval frame of mind, I wanted to watch "The Name of the Rose," the 1986 Sean Connery movie about a series of murders in an Italian monastery. No one is streaming it, but I found a version dubbed in Spanish uploaded to YouTube. I tried the "auto translate" function to get English subtitles, and they were wonky and occasionally nonsensical. One random sentence fragment read "use Bulgarian people to take classes of their effects," and I'm pretty certain the movie didn't actually mention Bulgarians at all -- and any rhythmic sound or background noise generated a subtitle that said (applause). But I followed the plot just well enough to keep track of the movie, and in a way the wonky subtitles even added to it. They forced me to pay attention.

I mentioned yesterday that I'd show you what I bought at the antique store in Hastings:

Do you remember the onion pot and celery jar that sit on our kitchen windowsill? Well, this was made by the same manufacturer, a British pottery company named Sadler. I couldn't resist adding to our set! And it was pretty cheap -- only £8.

I also got this great old beer bottle with a figure of Britannia on the front. It says "G.E. Andrews, late J. F. Bray, Shrewsbury." I figured I'd keep it and discard some of the broken glass bottle fragments I've found here and there -- it's probably not a great idea to have them lying around!

Hastings

I've long had a goal to visit Hastings, where William the Conqueror defeated the Anglo-Saxon King Harold back in 1066. It was perhaps the most transformational battle in English history -- everything from laws to language to architecture would be completely different throughout the English-speaking world had the Normans not conquered the Saxons. And it's not far from London, just south of us on the coast in East Sussex. So what was I waiting for?

I made plans with my co-worker Chris to visit yesterday. To make things even more interesting, Chris has a UK driver's license and participates in a car-sharing network, so we could drive down. A road trip in England! That was a first for me in a private car.

We met up about 9 a.m. and got on the road half an hour or so later. The drive was long, to say the least. Hastings is about 65 miles southeast of London, and it took us more than 2 1/2 hours to get down there. But we were in no rush.

Hastings is still a fishing town, and there's an area called the Stade where for hundreds of years fishermen have pulled their boats onto the pebbly beach and hung their nets to dry (above).

We walked along the beach and out onto the pier, where we had a good view of the town. It's a typical British seaside resort, with hotels, restaurants and attractions along the waterfront.

Further along, at Rock-a-Nore Beach, we walked out onto a jetty and while I was taking a picture, a gust of wind lifted my cap from my head and sent it sailing into the ocean. There wasn't much I could do but watch it float away. Even though it was tattered, I was bummed -- it was a cap I bought at Blue Heaven on our cruise five years ago in Key West.  So it goes.

Some of the architecture along the beachfront was interesting...

...and this game on the pier made us laugh. 'Merica!

We had lunch in this pub courtyard, which featured a cat with a partly-amputated tail and a risqué mural of a white bird flashing its rather human-looking buttocks at a leering cormorant. I had a black bean burrito -- not something I often find on a menu in England.

We also stopped at an antique store where I picked up a couple of treasures -- I'll tell you about those tomorrow. And then we got back to the car just in time to catch a parking warden giving us a ticket. We'd overstayed our welcome by 15 minutes or so. Those treasures wound up costing us an extra £25!

From there we drove to the site of the actual Battle of Hastings, about seven miles from town. It's now an English Heritage site and includes the ruins of an old abbey that William the Conqueror supposedly built to atone for the bloodshed there.

This is a view of the battlefield from the abbey, the position of the Saxon battle line. Supposedly, on October 14, 1066, the Normans came marching up that hill. The battle sounds awful -- it took all day and killed thousands of men in hand-to-hand combat with swords, arrows, axes and spears. It's hard to imagine how gruesome it must have been.

(Can you see the big arrow sticking out of the ground out there in the field? Kind of a funny touch.)

These are the remains of the abbey, which continued functioning until Henry VIII broke from the Catholic church in the 1500s. Parts of it were then turned into a country house and, today, a school. Other buildings still stand as ruins like the dormitory (above).

Visitors can walk through medieval rooms with columns and vaulted ceilings where the monks gathered. There's also a large, flat engraved stone marking the spot where King Harold supposedly was killed in the battle.

By this time, it was 6 p.m. and we had to get in the car and get back to London. I didn't get home until about 9 p.m. and no doubt Olga was wondering where I'd been! (She'd been out with her dog walker, though, so she was fine.)

The Maw

This is the entrance to the pedestrian footbridge that goes over the railroad tracks near the tube station. It's a little intimidating, isn't it? So dark! So jungly!

Here's what it looks like inside that cavern of Virginia creeper and graffiti.

And this is what it looks like on the bridge itself, once you've climbed up those steps. I don't mind this vine, actually, and it looks beautiful in the fall, but I'm kind of surprised it's been allowed to get so unruly. I think some people might be hesitant to enter that dark space. I wonder whose job it is to maintain this bridge -- the tube's? The council's? Neither of them have any money these days.

I crossed this bridge yesterday because I walked to work, for the first time in weeks. I met up with my co-worker, who is starting to get the books organized on their new shelves in the wake of our library remodeling. The construction is mostly done and now it's just a matter of putting everything back together. I was only there for half a day to help her decide how to proceed with the project; I don't officially go back until a week from tomorrow.

I came back home and spent the afternoon reading. My current book is a Newbery winner from 1927 called "Smoky the Cowhorse," and it's about to kill me. It's written in a sort of cowboy lingo with peculiar spellings like "crethure" (which appears to mean creature) and usages like "he knowed it was wrong." And it moves very slowly. It starts with Smoky's birth and I swear it took him ten pages just to stand up. So far it's been almost exclusively horse-focused; I'm hoping once human characters enter the picture it will move a bit faster.

Foxgloves and a Snoring Dog

I ask you: Are there any more peaceful sounds than rain on the roof and a gently snoring dog?

I took that video on Saturday, but I could just as easily have made it yesterday, because that's what things looked like around here in late afternoon. The rain was coming down again and Olga was snoozing away.

Before that, I had a fairly busy day. I vacuumed the house and even cleaned beneath our bed, which involves tipping both the mattress and the bedframe against the wall. I only do it a couple of times a year and it was once again time. I probably reduced the quantity of dust in our bedroom by 80 percent.

I found a pile of shoes under there, some with a heavy "patina" (to make it sound elegant) of dust. I threw away one of my pairs and I'm going to have to ask Dave about some of his. If they've gone unworn this long they probably would not be missed.

Then I got out in the garden and finally, finally repotted all the rest of the foxglove seedlings. Now they're all out of the seed trays, where frankly they weren't doing too well, and in their own pots.

As you can see, we're not talking about a small quantity of plants. Some of them are still so little you can barely see them, and they may not all survive, but such is life. I have more than I know what to do with anyway.

I don't know why they didn't grow better in their seed trays as they have in past years, but whatever.

The ones I potted out a few weeks ago are looking good:

But then, they were bigger to begin with.

(That little one on the right, with the flower, isn't one of the repotted seedlings. It just naturally sprouted in that pot so I put it with the others. I don't know why it's blooming now.)

In order to complete this task I had to make a midday journey to Homebase for more potting soil, and while there I picked up a new pot for that  prayer plant (or whatever it is) I found on the street last year. It's the thirstiest plant I've ever had -- it can absorb water like no one's business and that's partly because it was fairly root-bound.

Here it is, post-repotting. It looks deceptively huge in that picture but that's because I'm crouching down. It's about three feet high.

I Skyped on Sunday night with Dave and his parents, and we texted yesterday as he was about to board his flight from Michigan to Indiana. He still has a week left in the states, attending Drum Corps finals in Indianapolis. I feel like he's been gone forever.

At night I watched "Trial By Fire," a movie with Laura Dern on Netflix, which was based on a New Yorker article that I remember reading years ago about a guy in Texas sentenced to death for setting a house fire that killed his three daughters. His trial was a travesty and there are lingering questions about his guilt, but of course he was executed years ago because...Texas. Don't even get me started on all the ways the death penalty is wrong, but its finality is certainly one of them.

Late-Blooming Garden

More rain this morning. More time lazing around in bed.

For lack of anything better to write about, here's a look at how some things are doing in our garden. First, our cardoon is blooming (above), a relative of the artichoke. We have only one mature flower so far this year, which is a paltry crop for the cardoon. The plant itself doesn't look as vigorous. I wonder if it didn't get as much heat and warmth as it likes.

When I walked the dog yesterday morning it was 59º F (15º C) which seems crazy cold for August. By 2 p.m., just about the warmest time of the day, it was 64º F (17º C).

I bought a new dahlia! (Because seven just wasn't enough.) The variety is called "Souvenir d'Ete."

The Peruvian lily has bounced back after being rather brutally divided by Dave back in March. Both new plants survived and are blooming.
 

This campanula grew in a crack in the patio near the steps that lead up to the lawn. It's in a really bad place -- every time we run the garden hose out to the garden it gets flattened, and you can see where it's been broken off -- but it has persevered. Perhaps because we haven't had to use the hose, with all this rain, it's had time to flower.
 

The stargazer lilies, in a rare moment of sunshine.

And then there are a couple of things that are lagging, I think because of the chilly and damp weather. This is what my zinnias look like. I planted them months ago but so far we don't have flowers -- just these tiny little buds. I think this coming week is supposed to be warmer and sunnier, so I hope that gives them a chance to come into their own.

Likewise, the sunflower hasn't yet bloomed. It grew up in a pot on its own, perhaps deposited there by a bird, and Dave pulled it up thinking it was a weed. I saw him do it, and I put the seedling back in some soil in its own pot and this is what it's turned into. Hopefully we'll get a flower when the sun finally shows itself.

We also have a couple of wildflowers that have yet to bloom, and our red-hot pokers -- which are normally sky-high by this time of year -- are still just buds. I haven't seen any blossoms on the passionflower or the Japanese anemones, either. We're definitely running a bit behind!