Nothing Special on a Sunday

Our orange azalea is blooming up a storm right now. Dave and I were looking around the garden a couple of days ago and he gestured to the azalea and said, "I think that might be my favorite plant." While I like the color, I'm not crazy about the rumpled texture of the flowers. They all look like they just came out of a washing machine. But it is a profuse bloomer and gives us a nice splash of color.

I was out in the garden yesterday morning, weeding and neatening some things up, when I discovered that our passionflower vine at the corner of the patio is, in fact, dead. We suspected as much. It didn't exactly prosper last year. Fortunately, we have a second one that came up from seed in the pot that houses our olive tree, so hopefully it will contribute some passion to the garden this summer.

There are a couple of other plants that haven't made it, so I think I'm going to clean out some pots sometime soon. It's incredibly liberating to throw out a potted plant that has died on its own despite my best care. It makes me feel like I get the last laugh.

And yet, I also cannot resist a challenge. I found this poor hydrangea, dry as a golf ball in Palm Springs, sitting next to a trash can on Fortune Green Road. Dave loves hydrangeas so I brought it home and soaked it in water overnight. It looks terrible but I think it will survive. The stems are healthy and green and once it puts out new leaves I'll trim it and it will be good as new.

If you're squeamish about bugs, skip the next picture!

One of our peony buds has quite a collection of aphids on it, as well as ants that seem to be "farming" them. I am always impressed at how a single flower can contain its own ecosystem. It's Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom! I suppose the aphids may stunt the flower, but if they do, c'est la vie. We have more on the way.

Around midday it began to rain -- not hard, but steady and enough to give everything a good soaking. It relieved me of any guilt I felt for not at least trying to walk the dog. I sat and listened to music and worked on my stamps, and Olga seemed happy to snooze at my feet. I'm almost finished putting the stamps in my albums, and then we'll regain the dining room tabletop, which has been covered with them for the past few weeks. (Not that we ever eat in there.)

I've been putting out four new fat balls every day for the parakeets, who devour them completely in no time. This is apparently going to be the summer of the parakeets. They're around so much I don't even bother to photograph them anymore. Occasionally something else can squeeze in for some food -- I saw a woodpecker on the feeder a couple of days ago and a robin was on it just now.

Oh, and starlings. We have no shortage of those.

Last night, we watched "Four Hours at the Capitol," a documentary about January 6. It was excellent and appalling and infuriating, and it showed exactly who did what despite all the obfuscation and conspiracy theories that right-wingers have spouted since alleging ANTIFA and FBI involvement. The producers did a great job getting a variety of people to talk, including members of Congress, policemen and protesters. Definitely worth watching, if you can stomach it.

No-Mow May, by Accident

Remember how I said we weren't going to do "No-Mow May" this year? Well, I was wrong.

This wasn't by design so much as circumstance -- I just haven't gotten around to mowing -- but since we're already halfway through the month I plan to just let it happen. The daisies are thanking me!

I did, however, weed more of the flowerbeds yesterday, which seems perhaps antithetical to the no-mow philosophy. I simply cleared areas around some plants so we could see them better and they could get more light.

I also planted almost all the rest of my seeds, including zinnias, sunflowers and Nigella. I'm really not trying very hard with these seeds. I'm just sticking them in the ground and if they grow, so be it.

Speaking of which, I planted some a couple of weeks ago, and look at this:

There are seven seedlings within that copper slug ring (meant, as the name suggests, to keep the slugs away). I have no idea how that happened. I normally don't plant seeds that closely. I'll have to thin them, which I hate doing -- especially since many of the others I planted in that first round either didn't come up or got eaten.

In the afternoon Olga and I went to the cemetery. I'd read that one of the graves there is for children's book illustrator Kate Greenaway, and I wanted to try to find her headstone. This involved wading into a brushy area where Olga declined to follow (above). I did find it, but it's covered in brambles at this time of year so I didn't get a very good picture.

I thought maybe it would be one of the stones mysteriously decorated with children's toys, but no.

She's such a goofball.

The cemetery, by the way, does its own version of No-Mow May, clearing around headstones with a weed-whacker (known as a "strimmer" here) on a rotating basis, which allows grass and flowers to grow up and blossom in the intervening time. The rear section (where Greenaway's grave is located) is much wilder than the front section.

Cross and Crown

About 20 years ago, my extended family sold the white wood-frame house where my great-grandparents had lived in Avon Park, a small town in Central Florida. It hadn't been occupied for years; my great-grandmother died in 1974, my great-grandfather well before that, and the house passed to my great uncle and his wife, who lived in Miami. They'd come up now and then for a short stay but I believe it was mostly vacant. Selling it made sense.

Some time afterwards, the Realtor who handled the transaction contacted my mom and said he had four boxes of stuff that had been found in the house, and did we want them? We drove over one afternoon to pick them up.

The boxes contained some moldering Masonic robes belonging to my great-grandfather, as well as some old pictures, bibles, scrapbooks and some other stuff. Most of it was in terrible condition, but inside one of the bibles I found this certificate (above). It was presented to my great uncle for completing a term of what was known as Little's Cross and Crown System.

As I understand it -- and finding information about this online isn't all that easy -- the Cross and Crown System rewarded children for perfect attendance at Sunday School. He was given this certificate in April 1919 -- just months after the end of World War I!

This is the back, which explains (kind of) how the system works. Apparently you could get a certificate for each of three 3-month terms (I suppose they took the summer off?) and at the end of that time, assuming you had perfect attendance, you'd get a bar to hang from your pin.

This is what the pin looked like. This one is in my mom's jewelry box. My grandparents were dedicated church-goers. My mom said that when they drove to Florida from their home in Massachusetts and then Maryland each year to see my great-grandparents -- which took a lot of time in those days before Interstate highways -- they would often stop at some random church along the way to attend Sunday School and church services. I suppose that kind of dedication is how Mom wound up with perfect Sunday School attendance.

Nowadays, lots of these vintage pins are available on sites like eBay and Etsy, and apparently new Cross and Crown pins are still being made. You can even get year bars going all the way up to 90 years! (I wonder how many people have those?) Apparently Cross and Crown isn't just a Presbyterian thing; I see pins for Baptists, Methodists and other denominations as well.

I don't remember a Cross and Crown system in the church we attended when I was a kid. No one ever offered me a certificate or a pin. But we were also more lax about our churchgoing -- we didn't bother when we were on the road traveling, for example.

So, anyway, there's a little slice of family history, complete with tangible evidence of our erstwhile Christianity!

Elron Says Yep

Time for another set of random photos from my phone, taken during my wandering around town.

First, a window decoration at the pottery-painting shop on the high street. It went up for Mother's Day, which is in March in the UK. I don't know what those creatures are, but I thought it was pretty cute.

I guess this sign is for delivery people -- because otherwise, whoever was ringing would probably know to wait, or it would be someone you wouldn't want to talk to anyway!

Come and join our neighborhood association. The Queen commands it!

A rather glam single shoe found on the road. I'm not sure where you'd wear a shoe like this, except maybe as a house slipper.

The anarchists have taken to stickering to spread their message of ungovernability.

Fun with light & shadow. Olga, once again, is thinking, "Why?"

Nope.

A commentary on society's treatment of mentally or physically ill people. A serious subject, but I was amused by the quote attributed to "Elron Hubbard." (Being a science fiction writer, he probably wished his name was "Elron," which sounds very intergalactic.)

Also, L. Ron Hubbard has said a lot of things, but I can't find any evidence he ever said that.

And finally, a rather disturbing framed picture set out with the rubbish on Finchley Road. Looks like glitter and birdshot in that person's mouth? I didn't take it away, but someone did -- maybe just for the frame, which was pretty nice.

Kaput

First, the dermatologist report. Everything is fine. He looked at the brown spots on my face, took some more pictures, and said not only are the spots harmless but one of them seems to have faded slightly since my general practitioner took photos a few weeks ago. I find that hard to believe, but I'm rolling with it. We're leaving them alone.

I also asked him about some actinic keratosis spots on my head, and he pulled out the dry ice and prepared to freeze them off. "Now, this will feel like a cigarette burn," he said. I thought silently, "Do enough people still smoke to even know what a cigarette burn feels like?" The freezing itself wasn't too bad, but for the next hour or two I felt (and probably looked) like I'd been stung by bees, which seems much more au courant as a comparison.

Bonus: He was a surprisingly sexy dermatologist! Young, fit, with alluring brown eyes above his face mask. I never saw the lower 2/3 of his face so I suppose he could be snaggletoothed or have a horrible facial tattoo or something, but I doubt it. He moved with the assurance of someone who knows he's good-looking.

Anyway, I was out of his office and back at work within an hour. I am glad to get those keratoses taken care of. They don't hurt and they're not dangerous -- although a small percentage of them can become cancerous -- but they bothered me. The last time I went to a doctor about them, I got some cream to use over a period of months to get rid of them, but it didn't work well. This doctor said that particular cream was too weak. He told me he'd write a prescription for something stronger for future use. Apparently I need the industrial-strength chemical peel to take care of these legacies of my childhood in sunny Florida.

At left is another one of the stamps I got in my mixed assortment. I liked this one (from Hungary) because it features poppies, which we have growing in our garden.

Oh, and our workplace fridge? Well, we went in yesterday morning and found it had been completely defrosted. We turned it on, put everything back inside, and soon realized that it wasn't cooling at all. Whatever was done to defrost it also completely killed it. So it looks like we need a new fridge.

The maintenance guy who did the work felt bad, but I told him it wasn't his fault -- and I really don't think it was. I suspect there was so much ice that it damaged the coils and removing it caused the system to leak coolant or otherwise go on the fritz. I had a fridge in my New York apartment that was the same way -- it was hideously frosted over when I bought the place, and I defrosted it only to find it would no longer work. It's a thing.

(Top photo: West Hampstead street scene, last weekend.)

Nessie and a Bag of Ice

Today is my adventure at the dermatologist's office, and I have literally no idea what to expect. I assume it's just a consultation to assess the sun spots on my face and make sure no further intervention is needed. Maybe they'll want to do a biopsy or something like that. At any rate, I'm supposed to go to work afterwards, so hopefully they won't carve me up too much.

I heard from the Supervisor of Elections in Tampa about voting in the mid-terms, and I ordered my ballots. After all the recent shenanigans by Republican legislators around the USA, I thought it might be much harder for me to cast a mail-in ballot this year. I was glad to see I'm still on the voter rolls and apparently will be able to have my say.

Work is super-slow this week. The middle schoolers are all off on class trips, and although we have high school classes in doing research projects, they use most of their resources within the library and don't check much out. I'm trying to catch up on low-priority projects like:

We have a small, dorm-sized refrigerator in our office, where some of us keep random cans of Diet Coke (my boss and co-worker) or stuff for lunch (the woman who works in transportation). As you can see, it is in dire need of defrosting. That's a bag of ice wedged into the freezer, and it's so engulfed in ice itself that I can't pull it out. So I conferred with the housekeeping staff and arranged for them to defrost it last night. Hopefully when we go in today all the ice will be gone.

I joked with my boss that I hoped there was nothing behind that ice bag. I said, "Are we sure there's not a bottle of gin in there?"

(Top photo: Apparently Nessie has moved to a council house near our flat.)

Olga and the Chippendales

I've been trying to take a picture of Olga beneath the big Ceanothus, or California lilac, that grows on the housing estate where we often walk. This was the first attempt, which is pretty good.

But then we walked by later and the bush seemed to be blooming even more:

Unfortunately Olga herself looks a little wide-bodied in this shot. (And she really isn't.) I just can't win!

Dave and I just finished a four-part documentary on Amazon about the Chippendales, the legendary troupe of male "exotic dancers" from the '80s. I remember them from their heyday but I forgot that the whole enterprise flamed out in the early '90s amid charges of murder and arson. (I think I was overseas at the time and didn't keep up with all that news.) The documentary tells the whole dramatic story as well as the personal journeys of some of the dancers and managerial staff, and it was pretty darn entertaining.

What the documentary didn't do was even utter the word "gay," which I found interesting. The Chippendales only danced for women; men were expressly barred from the clubs until the performances were over. But I'm sure they had a huge gay following, especially for their merchandise like calendars and posters, and it would have been reasonable to acknowledge that.

Maybe I feel this way because of my own Chippendales story, which I blogged way back in 2008. Here's what I wrote then, so you don't have to follow the link:

When I was a high school senior, my girlfriend went to Spencer Gifts at University Square Mall and bought a deck of cards showing the Chippendales in various states of undress. I remember thinking they weren’t that attractive, all oiled and kind of greasy-looking, but I still wanted a deck of those cards myself. (I’m not sure what was going on in my tangled-up psyche at the time -- girlfriend, Chippendales cards -- but whatever.)

I went in to Spencer’s, picked up the cards and bravely approached the cashier, a woman. “I think these are the cards my girlfriend wants,” I said, uncertainly.

The cashier gave me a knowing look (her brain was saying, “Gay!”) and rang them up.

I kept those cards for a year or two, but like I said, I didn’t really think any of the guys were all that great. Oily men in bow ties and thongs just don’t do it for me. Call me crazy.

I got to wondering whether I could find that deck of cards online. I hadn't seen it in almost 40 years, and I was curious whether I'd recognize any of the images. It turns out there were several different decks of Chippendales cards over the years, but I discovered the one I owned was the 1982 deck. The minute I saw this picture from an old eBay listing, I knew it was the one:

And yes, I do clearly remember all those images, even though -- as I wrote above -- the guys weren't quite my ideal. (I was into nerdier types, being a nerdier type myself.) I seem to remember liking Mr. Ace of Clubs and Three of Clubs at top left, as well as Mr. Shirt-and-Tie, who made a career on the Chippendales stage as "The Perfect Man."

It strikes me now that all those cards depict white men. There were a few black Chippendales dancers but overall it was a very caucasian enterprise, despite the fact that the owner was an Indian immigrant named Banerjee. In fact there were lawsuits not only for gender discrimination but also racial discrimination by men who weren't allowed into the clubs.

Obviously I never saw the Chippendales live. There was a similar male dance troupe in Florida called the Hollandales, though, and they did perform at the gay clubs in Tampa. I saw them a couple of times and even had a harmless infatuation with one of their dancers, who I never so much as spoke to but once tipped $5, which seemed wildly extravagant at the time.

Anyway, yes, there's the entirety of my sordid history involving male burlesque. Aren't you glad you asked?