Peanuts

Our Nelly Isler Red Velvet Cambria orchid has completely opened, as you can see. It certainly brightens up the kitchen on these dark autumn days!

Actually, the last few days have been sunny, but of course I've been at work so I can only look out the windows and enjoy the brief, bright midday light. That's better than nothing, though. I'm glad I work in a room with big windows.

Yesterday my boss showed me a website called Canva that we could use to create posters for the library. I made a couple for a new display, and they turned out pretty well if I do say so myself, but I wrestled with some of the features of the program that just did not seem intuitive. (Part of the problem was that certain templates and images are only available with the paid version of Canva, which we don't have.) I'm sometimes afraid I'm losing my ability to figure out modern technology. I swear I used to be able to open up a new program and just click around a bit, and then I'd know how it works. Lately I've found myself staring at the screen, thinking, "Wha?" I suppose it's good exercise for my brain, but like the rest of my body, my brain seems less adaptable and flexible than it once did!

Remember those controversial books I wrote about a couple of weeks ago? Well, I finally successfully found a copy of "Lawn Boy" by Jonathan Evison. I had to order a used copy because there are simply no new ones available -- Amazon is out, bookstores are out, the publisher is out. So I'll be reading that after my next Newbery, "The One and Only Ivan" (which thankfully looks very short). I'm curious to see what all the fuss is about.

Oh, and I signed up to get a flu shot at work. So that should also be happening some time in the near future.

Olga and I have a routine when I come home from work. I make a tonic (with or without gin, depending on the day I've had) and I eat a handful of salted peanuts on the couch. I always give Olga a few peanuts, and on Tuesday she was so funny because she wouldn't even lift her head to eat them -- she'd just lie there against my leg, waiting to be fed individual morsels by hand like Caesar.

Incidentally, I experimented with iMovie in making this video. I filmed it in a relatively dark room, so it was murky and grainy, but I adjusted some settings to brighten it up a bit*. I guess my brain is still capable of learning some new things!

*It doesn't look nearly as bright on my work computer, so, hmmmm...limited success!

Church Door

This is the doorway of a church I walk past in Kilburn on my way home from work. Love the dramatic lighting! You can see how dark it is in the afternoons now. If I need to do something in the garden on a weekday, I have to do it in the morning before I leave the house, because by the time I get home it's already night.

This is my current Newbery read, "Adam of the Road," from 1943. It's about a boy in medieval England, and it's OK. I'm about two-thirds of the way through and I'm not exactly champing at the bit to find out what happens, but I'll finish it. This is one of our older volumes, as you can see, printed in 1962 and first checked out -- according to the date stamps inside the cover -- in November 1975.

My favorite thing about it is the careful repair job someone did to the dust jacket. See how they found yellow and black paper to go beneath the torn cover in order to keep the colors consistent? They really made an effort! I wish we tried so hard to fix things in this day and age. Now we're much more likely to simply discard a worn book and buy a new one.

A Late Hydrangea

I think this is the last hydrangea flower in our garden -- all the others have dried up and turned brown. I wonder why this one is hanging on? Dave always complains about this plant because he says the flowers are supposed to turn from white to pink as they age, and he doesn't believe they do. But I see a subtle pinkish tinge to this one, don't you?

For some reason this morning I woke up with a song stuck in my head and it WILL NOT GO AWAY. It's "The Girl That I Knew Somewhere" by The Monkees. Why am I singing it at 6:30 in the morning when I haven't heard it in ages? Your guess is as good as mine.

Geography Lesson, with Squirrels

My little pal the curious robin was back yesterday as I worked in the garden. I got a lot done, trimming the neighbor's gigantic rose that overhangs our patio (aka "the monster"), putting away some of the dahlias in the shed, and raking leaves. That's what got the robin most excited -- lots of bugs and worms are revealed by leaf-raking, I suspect.

I also pulled the zinnias, which were done, and do you remember the mystery plant I repotted last weekend -- the one I eventually identified as a crassula? Well, I've been thinking about that plant all week. I decided that I put it in the wrong soil by planting it in garden compost. From what I've read it prefers rockier, grittier, less nutritious soil. So I unpotted it and repotted it again, using dirt from the rock garden (where it was growing before) mixed with grit and cactus compost. And this time I removed the cyclamen so it really is alone in its own pot. I may have demolished the cyclamen in the process, but we'll see.

I was going to water the indoor plants as I usually do on Sundays, but they don't really seem to need it. I think everything goes a bit dormant during these dark days of almost-winter. I'll wait a few extra days until they dry out a bit more.

Isn't this exciting?

Oh, some of you said you wanted to see a map of where I'm walking on the Green Chain (which I wrote about yesterday). So I made this using Google Maps:

It should enlarge if you click it. The purple point (upper left) is where I live. The red point (middle right) is Thamesmead, where I began walking last weekend. See what I mean about how it's diagonally across the city from me? Now you can understand how it takes me a while to get out there via tube and train. You can see Erith, where I walked on Saturday, even further downriver at the very edge of the map.

Finally, I took Olga for a long walk on Hampstead Heath. She was funny -- I intended to go to the main Heath but she kept pulling me toward the West Heath, so that's where we wound up. (Because Olga RULES.) I have no idea why she wanted to go in that direction.

I took some video because the Heath is so beautiful right now. My footage includes a couple of squirrel-chasing sequences. You can tell that Olga's ardor for squirrels is somewhat diminished these days -- she lets a few of them venture pretty close without being challenged, and she can't run as fast as she used to! At the very end, when she's sniffing around the base of that tree, she's looking for water -- the tree's roots form a small pool where she sometimes drinks, but the water was too low this time around.

Erith to Bostall Woods

I walked another segment of the Green Chain in South London yesterday, about four miles. Once again I started at the river, but this time in Erith, southeast of where I was last week in Thamesmead. The Erith area is somewhat industrial, as shown by this old crane and the broken-down wharves.

The Thames is supposedly much cleaner than it used to be, but there are still a distressing number of shopping carts, bicycles and other items visible in the soft mud beneath the riverside walkway. There are signs all over warning people not to try to walk on the mud -- apparently it's really soft.

The ducks like it. They were shoveling their faces right in there, scooping up who knows what. Clams, maybe? Shrimp?

At nearby St. John the Baptist's Church, a commemorative plaque dated the church wall to 1887. I checked out the cemetery there before continuing on.

Here's a short residential street in the Belvedere area. That's a "resource recovery" plant (incinerator) in the background along the Thames. Some of the houses in this area have quite dramatic views over the Thames Valley.

I found myself back in Lesnes Abbey Woods, where you may remember last week I visited the ruins of the abbey. This time I spent more of my walk in the forest. The area above is called the "tumulus," or earthen mound. (I couldn't readily see a mound but I think that's because I was basically on top of it.) That guy in the photo was walking his 16-year-old staffy, who isn't in the picture because she was waddling beside me.

I stopped at the abbey ruins for lunch, a cheese panini and coffee from the cafe. Some kids from the The Hundred Club -- a local creative club for 7- to 11-year-olds -- were giving away a colorful free newspaper, and that kept me busy during my meal. The club uses "arts and play to explore social justice issues," and I got a kick out of their artwork and writing on ecology and other matters.

I continued on through the woods and around a pond with a weeping willow growing in the middle (above).

In Bostall Woods, where my walk ended, I found a tangle of feral nasturtiums, probably escaped from someone's garden. They were quite well-established and had a lot of flowers.

I had hoped to continue on and do another segment, but by this time it was 2 p.m. and the light was already beginning to wane. The days don't last long at this time of year! So I caught a train in Plumstead and headed home, where I had just enough time to take Olga to the cemetery before darkness fell.

Garden and Crane

Just in the last few days, it seems, the Japanese maple at the back of our garden has turned fire-engine red. Things are looking quite autumnal out there, aren't they? I have more work to do this weekend, clearing and trimming and preparing for winter, but it won't affect this view much at all.

The £200 DVDs have not surfaced yet. I'll tell you if they do. Some of you asked what they were, and honestly I'm not exactly sure -- I wasn't involved in the purchase. But I don't think they're anything that anyone would steal. They're instructional videos, not the kind of thing you'd watch at home with a bowl of popcorn and your feet on the coffee table.

Academic materials sometimes cost a ridiculous amount of money. We get a few academic journals in the library, and without fail their subscription costs run into the hundreds of pounds, often for quarterly issues -- as opposed to £40 or so for your typical monthly magazine. I assume this is because they have smaller circulations and don't make much if any money from advertising.

Yesterday morning I was walking the dog (yes, she wanted her walk!) and Dave, who was on his way to work, pointed out this gigantic crane that rose up seemingly overnight behind the houses at the end of our street. It's got something to do with the housing development that's being built on the site of the old council office building. There will eventually be multi-story apartment buildings there, which will change our streetscape quite a bit.

(That's Dave on the sidewalk on the other side of the street, and you can see that the blue car is still in its parking spot underneath the tree, now devoid of leaves. I have realized that's a permitted space, so I guess it's set aside for just that person. Oh, and it was trash day yesterday, hence all the bins.)

The Missing Box

My workday yesterday was consumed by an unsolved mystery.

Several weeks ago, we ordered a couple of hard-to-find DVDs for the library, at the request of one of the administrators. They were not cheap, and we grew increasingly concerned when they didn't arrive in the mail. My co-worker looked into it and found that they'd not only been shipped from the USA but supposedly delivered on Oct. 22, and sure enough, one of our security guards had signed for them.

We looked into it more and found CCTV images of the package in our loading bay, and then in the process of being delivered inside the school by one of our staff members.

So where the heck did this box go? Normally, library deliveries come to my desk, but I was shelf-reading that day and wasn't sitting there. My boss and co-worker were also in, but neither of them remembers seeing it arrive. It has completely vanished.

I went down to the loading bay yesterday morning -- before we were certain the box had made it into the school itself -- and looked everywhere I could think of. I got down on my knees and peered beneath pallets and cleaned up randomly scattered catalogs and newspapers to make sure our package wasn't somehow among them. We then looked everywhere in the library we could think of. Nothing.

I did, however, find...

...this bag of baked pita chips in the depths of my desk, behind my bottom drawer. I never eat chips, so it seemed kind of weird. And then I looked at the expiration date.

They expired in January 2013 -- or perhaps October, if the date is written American style, which seems unlikely. In any case, they're really old. They've been there since before I took this job in autumn 2013! They were my predecessor's chips!

No, I did not eat them. I'm not that adventurous. They're now on their way to the landfill or the incinerator or wherever our rubbish goes.

Meanwhile, our DVDs are still lost. We've put an announcement in our internal newsletter asking people to keep an eye out for them, in case they were simply delivered to the wrong office -- but it seems weird in that case that someone wouldn't have discovered them by now.

It's just amazingly bad luck that of all the packages to go missing, this is the one that did. Most of our deliveries are £5 paperback books. Why did it have to be the £200 DVDs that disappeared?

(Top photo: Outside the Swiss Cottage tube station on a recent rainy evening.)