Birds and Mermaids

This little bird, or maybe several little birds of his kind, has been visiting our living room windows over the last week or so and tap-tap-tapping on the glass. It's a long-tailed tit, and I can't tell whether it's territorially attacking its reflection or harvesting the tiny insects that probably live in the corners of our window frames. It is getting to be mating season out there, so he may be defending his turf from what he believes is another bird.

Look at that head. That is a tiny, tiny brain.

This morning my phone says it's 28º F (or -2º C) outside. I just went out for a second in shorts and a t-shirt and it didn't feel that bad, but there's frost on the lawn and the bird bath is frozen solid, so I guess I should trust the data.

I spent most of yesterday reading a book of short stories by Israeli writer Etgar Keret. I'd never even heard of him, but I found the book on a bench while walking the Thames Path on Jan. 29 and it looked intriguing so I picked it up. It had been "released" by someone on BookCrossing.com, where people register books, put a sticker on them and send them out into the world. Other readers who come across the book are supposed to go to the website and leave comments about it. This book, a simple paperback, had been launched in Germany and then traveled to Finland, the Netherlands, Ireland, California and Canada before coming back to the UK for me to find.

It's a cool idea. I left a comment on the site saying I had the book now and I'll leave it somewhere in West Hampstead for others to find when I'm done with it. The stories are eccentric and mostly quite short. I'd rather read a novel, to be honest, but I'll plow through and finish.

Oh, and this came in the mail.

Yet another installment in the mysteriously anonymous Florida Memory postcard series. I still haven't received No. 1. (The postcard had my complete address on it -- I've just blocked part of it out.)

I grew up about 25 miles away from Weeki Wachee and I've driven past it countless times, but I've never actually visited. It's a state park where, for many decades now, there's been a water show featuring women dressed as mermaids -- very "Old Florida." It was advertised on TV a lot when I was a child and I always longed to go there but I still haven't. I should make it a priority sometime when I revisit my old stomping grounds.

Last night Dave and I watched "Triangle of Sadness," a quirky but riveting movie about a luxury cruise that goes wildly wrong. It's all about class and wealth and the invisibility, in such circumstances, of many of the people who shoulder the burdens and the responsibilities. I'm not sure I'd call it a comedy but it's darkly amusing. My only complaint is that the ending was too abrupt. It's one thing to leave viewers with something to ponder but another to just leave them hanging.

At Home With Topol

I woke this morning feeling much better. I really think I detected this Covid infection toward its end -- I've probably been walking around with it all week. Unfortunately, because I tested Wednesday, Thursday was my first of five recommended days of isolation. Under current NHS guidelines I'm not supposed to return to work (or do anything else) until Tuesday.

I did break my isolation yesterday morning to run one essential errand. I had to send my old phone back to my phone supplier for recycling and credit on my account. They were getting pushy about it, e-mailing to ask where it was -- apparently I'm required to send it back within 14 days of signing up for my new plan. I didn't even get their mailer until Wednesday, so I had to turn right around and send it off. Fortunately that entailed just walking into a local shop and dropping off the phone in its package, with no contact and minimal opportunity to infect anyone.

It was a rainy day so I texted our dog-walker and told him to skip us. Olga hates going out in the rain and since we were home, we could keep an eye on her and let her out when appropriate. She must think Covid is wonderful. It kept us home all through the lockdowns and it's keeping us home now.

I took some photos in the garden and around the house, like the bouquet of daffodils in our front window (top) and crocuses in our back garden. I've noticed that our lawn is chock-full of moss. I don't know whether this is a problem, exactly -- I don't care whether we have moss or grass, as long as it's green. But there really does seem to be a lot if it, perhaps because our drought last summer stressed the grass and now we have lots of moisture.

In the afternoon I watched the movie "Fiddler on the Roof." I'd never seen it, believe it or not. I heard about it a lot as a kid and of course I know most of the songs, and I'd heard of the actor Topol, who plays the central role and who died this week. (I always wondered why he shared his name with a brand of toothpaste.) So, anyway, I was inspired to rent it, and it was the perfect matinee diversion.

Then, last night, Dave and I streamed "The Whale" with Brendan Fraser. I've been wanting to see this movie for months, and thank goodness for Curzon Home Cinema! It's very good (though dark) and Fraser is remarkable in his role -- definitely an Oscar-worthy performance and a far cry from "George of the Jungle."

Superspreader

I went to work yesterday. I just couldn't face another morning of trying to find a library substitute, and besides, I just had the sniffles. An itchy, stuffy nose, basically. I didn't walk to work like I usually do, given the weather, but instead navigated the newly-fallen snow to the tube.

I worked all day, mostly feeling OK. I checked out books, I re-shelved. I helped manage a shelter-in-place drill, which is meant to rehearse our actions should be have a school shooter or some similar event that requires us to hide out in the building. (Those drills are creepy. I hate them.) And I put the finishing touches on our book display about dragons, using an old tapestry banner I found years ago in one of our library cabinets:

No one knows where this banner of St. George slaying the dragon came from or who made it, but it's pretty fabulous and I was glad to finally be able to use it. I think it's two or three decades old, at least, and it could use a good cleaning, but the age spots aren't readily noticeable when it's hanging up. (We also have similar banners featuring the Statue of Liberty and an eagle with the American flag.) Its only real flaw is that the shaft of George's spear is missing. Let's see if anyone notices.

Anyway, I plugged along until mid-afternoon, when I began to feel a bit worse. Just woozy and, well, sick. While talking to my boss, she mentioned another of our colleagues who recently tested positive for Covid and he'd been surprised because it "felt like allergies."

Alarm bells went off in my head.

Throughout this cold I've dismissed the possibility of Covid because I didn't have Covid symptoms -- no loss of taste, not much of a cough, no shortness of breath, no apparent fever. I just feel a sort of malaise and mostly nasal congestion. Dave feels the same and he was equally dismissive (and also went to work yesterday).

I saw the day through and came home, and the first thing I did was take a Covid test. Dave took one too. And of course, they were positive.

So, yeah, both of us basically super-spread Covid all day. I think I probably had it Monday too, when I also worked. I am SO mortified. I called my boss and confessed I'd tested positive, and e-mailed my co-workers with an apology. It's probably too much to hope they won't get it, but maybe we'll be lucky.

(Top photo: From my walk in the cemetery with Olga on Saturday.)

Winnie-the-Pooh and the Snowy Day

As I write this at not quite 6 a.m., it's snowing outside. When I looked at the forecast last night it was unusually neat and conclusive -- 0º C with a 100 percent chance of snow. It was pretty clear what kind of morning we were going to have around here.

Fortunately the ground is warm enough that the snow isn't sticking much. I went out last night and covered the canna lilies -- which are cut down to the ground anyway -- but the Chinese banana is toughing it out.

I did stay home from work yesterday, due to my cold. I called my co-worker and said I could come in or stay home, either way, depending on what she was comfortable with. She told me to stay home, but it wound up being such a drama -- my boss wanted me to get a substitute, but the sub coordinator said one wasn't available, and I called a guy who used to sub for us but he's no longer on the list, yadda yadda -- that I think I'm going in today. It's a mild cold and I can't really justify missing another day. I doubt I'm still infectious, anyway. I'll wear a mask.

I got some stuff done around the house, so it wasn't an entirely wasted day. I changed our bedsheets and took them to the laundromat, and left Dave's suit and shirts from his Oman trip at the dry cleaners. He had another bag of miscellaneous laundry but I had no more room on our drying rack, so I just left all that at the laundromat too. And I stopped by the grocery store for milk and soup.

I washed Olga's pink blanket, and wrapped it around her when it came out of the dryer. She loves that.

I spent most of the day on the couch reading Christopher Milne's book "The Enchanted Places," about his life as Christopher Robin from the Winnie-the-Pooh stories. He talked about life with his parents and how much of the physical world around their farm in Sussex wound up in the Pooh books written by his father, A. A. Milne. It made me want to visit that area for a walk.

Christopher Milne was uncomfortable with his role in the Pooh phenomenon. He was shy and as he grew up he didn't appreciate the expectations that came with his fame. I suppose it must be bizarre to be a grown man who's best known to the world for playing with stuffed animals.

He spent most of his early childhood in the company of his nanny and in those years barely knew his parents, though as he grew he spent more time with them, playing cricket and catch with his father and listening as his mother read to him.

I was shocked by Milne's references to his farm cats. They had about four cats, and of course those cats periodically had kittens, but the kittens were then routinely drowned. He said they probably drowned 50 or 60 kittens over their years there. He recounted this so casually, as if everyone does it, and maybe they did back then. (Dave said his family used to drown farm kittens too, in Michigan.)

Despite the PETA triggers, I enjoyed the book overall, and its evocation of a bygone England in the quieter years of the 1920s. I loved the Pooh books as a kid so when Milne mentioned the Pooh-Sticks Bridge, for example, I knew exactly what he was talking about. In fact, when I read my own childhood journals I see language right out of Winnie-the-Pooh -- exclamations like "Bother!" and references to "hums." I must have been a weird child.

Special Weapons and Tactics

I think I have a little bit of a cold. Yesterday it was in my nose, but it was so mild I wasn't even sure it really was a cold. But today I'm coughing just a little bit, and I'm debating calling in sick to work -- not because I'm too sick to work but because I suspect my co-workers don't want me there.

Yesterday I was re-shelving and my mind was wandering, and suddenly some brain cells activated that contained the memory of a TV theme from the 1970s. And then I could NOT GET THAT MUSIC OUT OF MY HEAD! And I couldn't remember what show it was from. It was driving me crazy. I toyed with singing it to Dave last night, but he wouldn't know, because his family didn't live on television the way mine did.

This morning, I woke up, and I thought, "S.W.A.T."! And sure enough, that's the music. I think it's probably the only thing I remember about S.W.A.T., which I don't recall ever actually watching. Maybe we played the theme in band, or was it on the radio?

Anyway, am I glad I solved that mystery.

I also read some book reviews for "Fleishman is in Trouble," trying to get at why that novel troubled me so much. I read The New Yorker's review and The Guardian's review, both quite positive. It made me realize that perhaps I responded differently to the book because I'm a man, which is a somewhat troubling conclusion. I like to think of myself as an enlightened guy, sympathetic to the feminist perspective. But the point at which the book began to feel askew to me -- when the author shifted perspectives to the wife and then to her narrator -- was apparently the vital fulcrum of the plot. As The New Yorker put it, "The women’s perspectives provide a corrective to the man’s, and Brodesser-Akner’s true project begins to emerge."

So I'm writing this only to acknowledge that the book may be better than I gave it credit for being. I concede the possibility that the things that troubled me about it may trouble me because I'm seeing it through a male lens.

And with that, enough about the Fleishmans. I promise I will not mention them again.

When Dave got home from work last night, Olga had been sick on the carpet in several places. (For some reason, when her stomach is upset, she goes into our only carpeted room and throws up there.) So Dave spent time sponging the carpet clean, and then I took over when I got home, and now the room is closed off and the dehumidifier is running. Olga, meanwhile, perked up in the evening and just before bed ate half a can of food, and then ate the other half this morning. So whatever was troubling her seems to be past.

A couple of nights ago she went into the garden and ate something -- I couldn't see what -- out of a flowerpot. What could possibly be in a flowerpot that she would want to eat? All the possibilities seem pretty gross, and I'm thinking that's what got her.

(Photo: A blooming tree in West Hampstead on Saturday.)

Taxes in Bed

This bergenia sprouted several years ago all on its own, beneath the fence that separates our side return from Mrs. Kravitz's house. It's in a crack between her pavement and ours, and when we had that area repaved a couple of years ago I thought sure that would be it for the bergenia. But no, it came right back, and now it's blooming.

My major accomplishment yesterday was filing our US income taxes. It's mostly just a bookkeeping exercise, because our income gets excluded as foreign income anyway -- so we usually don't pay anything. We just have to tell Uncle Sam how much we make as US citizens, even though we're living abroad. (We also have to tell him about our bank accounts, which I suppose is meant to keep people from hiding money offshore. Of course, we do pay British taxes.)

I filled out the forms while lying in bed, a vision of indolence.

After I finally got up, I walked Olga, but she wasn't interested in going very far. I think she's still recovering after our outing with the Jolly Egg. (Which stayed in the shed yesterday.)

In the afternoon I finished "Fleishman is in Trouble," which sort of fell apart at the end, I thought. I really enjoyed about 3/4 of the book, but the tone seemed to shift as the focus went from Fleishman to the wife he was divorcing. The book set us up to see Fleishman as a sympathetic character and his wife as an irresponsible, angry antagonist, but then suddenly, when we see her perspective, we're meant to shift our sympathies (I think), and that seemed abrupt to me. I felt misled. Also, there were problems with the perspective. The story is told by a friend of Fleishman's, but she behaves in the beginning as a sort of omniscient narrator, privy to private exchanges between Fleishman and his wife or Fleishman and his boss, and only occasionally stepping in to refer to herself. I assume we're supposed to believe she knows all this stuff because Fleishman has related it to her, and at the end, as her perspective changes after talking to the wife, her own story becomes more central to the plot -- yet I wasn't prepared to care about her as much as I did about the Fleishmans.

I did like the writing and the language, though. The author, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, has a bright, energetic voice, just as she does in her journalism.

Anyway, I also brought our tender plants back inside, with temperatures expected to drop to 29º F (-1º C) tomorrow and snow possible (!) for the next few days. I don't think it will be much snow. Just enough to be annoying.

Dave arrived home last night shortly before 8 p.m. We had enough time to share some stories and take-away burritos from Chipotle before he collapsed into bed. The poor guy's internal clock must be a complete mess. Fortunately, I've never met anyone who can sleep as soundly or as long as Dave, so I suspect he will recover pretty quickly.

Jolly Egg Obsession

I spent yesterday morning working in the garden, cutting more things back and getting ready for spring. I cut down that buddleia in the foreground of the photo above, so it will grow back bushier. I also raked some of the moss out of what's left of our grass and threw out some of our broken flowerpots because, although terra cotta shards can be useful in the garden, we have a ridiculous quantity of them.

See Olga trying to imitate a plant?

Thinking ahead to spring is still an act of optimism at this point. Our nighttime temperatures are in the 30s (F) and we're supposed to dip down into the 20s this week with possible SNOW!

I left the shed open at one point, and Olga happened to see her Jolly Egg toy sitting inside it. We don't play with the Jolly Egg much -- I've always felt like it's just a bit too big for her, plus it's hard and in the garden it inevitably winds up in the flowerbeds. It's like a plant steamroller.

But she got fixated on that Jolly Egg. Even after I closed the shed doors she would just stand and stare at it, barking.

So we took the egg to Fortune Green and played with it there, and even managed to keep it out of the daffodils.

As you can see, Olga gets a little wild-eyed about this toy. I don't understand why she loves it so much (just as my dad's dog, Maybelline, loved hers, and my brother's dog Snoop loves his). I always try to kick it away from her -- to protect her teeth and forelegs -- and as you can see it makes her insane. If I stop kicking it she barks at me like a little kid yelling "KICKITAGAINKICKITKICKITKICKIT!" And if I put it in a bag and carry it, as I have to do to get anywhere on our walk, she can't keep her nose out of the bag. The toy is all she wants.

Anyway, we wore ourselves out on that walk.

Dave comes home tonight! Yay! I have been surviving pretty well in his absence, eating things like peanut butter and fried eggs (not together) and in fact I think I've slimmed myself down just a little bit. Dave is the cook in this family, as many of you know. My weirdest meal may have been last night -- baked beans over rice. But hey, it filled me up.

Dave also normally buys our groceries, and while I've had to pop into the store for things like milk or soup, I've avoided any large-scale shopping. My game is always to see what kind of meal I can eke out of ingredients we have here at home. (Hence: baked beans and rice.) I was going to have to buy dog food, but while walking Olga yesterday morning I found that some guardian angel had left a bag containing three cans of dog food and some unopened packages of treats on a bench on the high street, evidently for the taking. I assume they bought them for a dog that they didn't wind up feeding, for whatever reason. So I took them home and now we're stocked with dog food until our next shop.

Today my plan is file our income taxes. Ugh.