Cooking With Gas

Apologies to any arachnophobes in the house, but here's one of our garden spiders. They come out in force at this time of year and one of their favorite spots to build a web is over the red flower spikes of the persicaria, which are usually humming with insects.

I wound up making my Morocco earthquake donation through the High Atlas Foundation, a charity founded by a couple of Peace Corps volunteers I knew when I was in Morocco. The organization has existed for about 20 years and focused many of its efforts -- tree planting, water projects, community economic cooperatives -- in the very area that was hardest hit by the quake. They are appealing for money for those communities and have infrastructure and contacts to help. Because I know them I was confident making that donation -- and the HAF also has a solid charity rating. But of course, any reliable charity is a good choice if you're thinking of giving.

While walking Olga yesterday morning I came across this box of discarded (I guess?) books. I didn't take any of them because a) they all seem to be about astrology and the occult, which I think is balderdash, and b) I wasn't sure they were being thrown out. An interesting assortment, though.

Yesterday I had to take a half-day off work to get our gas appliances inspected and serviced. This happens every year around this time and it's an inconvenience, but I suppose if it prevents a gas leak or malfunction it's worth it. (Although I'm always a little afraid the inspection will cause a malfunction, like the engineer will forget to close a valve somewhere and the house will explode. Am I a catastrophist? Probably.)

Next up: I made an appointment next Tuesday for the contractor to visit and assess the hallway wall to see if it's dry enough to finally, finally paint. If it's not dry by now I think we have to assume there's a deeper problem!

Being Social

Yesterday was a bit cooler than Saturday, thank goodness, and I think after today we'll be back down in our "normal" temperature range -- an ideal high 60s and low 70s during the day.

I went to Willesden Green yesterday for a librarian gathering at the home of our co-worker Staci. She and her husband Max just bought a house there, so we got to see it and all the work they've done to it. It's a great place with a nice garden (about a third of the size of ours, but they own it) and beautiful architectural details like fireplaces, original windows and ceiling moldings. We sat in the back garden and had snacks and chatted for an hour or two.

I walked home from there to get myself some exercise, and on the way passed this guy, painting a shopfront near the tube station. Someone is also inside painting the interior -- you can barely see them on a ladder through the window. The heat wasn't stopping them!

Ms. Moon often talks about making "purple cows" for her grandsons. I feel certain this is not what she has in mind.

It's an interesting quirk of the English language that you can remove vowels from a phrase and still pretty much make it out.

Anyway, I had a good walk home. And then, surprise surprise, the Russians knocked on our door and wanted to paint the dining room ceiling. It was about 5 p.m. and Dave wasn't crazy about the idea, but I said, "Let them do it! Let's get it done!"

The backstory is that I e-mailed our landlord in the morning saying the ceiling -- which you may remember was damaged NINE MONTHS AGO by a leak caused by the Russians' renovations upstairs -- remained unpainted. I sent photos and said it wasn't too bad looking since it had been cleaned and we were leaning toward leaving it alone rather than pressing the Russians to finish it. But apparently the landlord had other ideas, and sent a rather forceful message to the Russians, who almost immediately wound up on our doorstep.

Anyway, they painted the problem spot in less than an hour and it looks fine now. As far as I'm concerned the matter is settled. The landlord is still rattling swords about whether they did a good enough job, but I'm going to send photos and say we're satisfied. I'm ready to move on.

Heat and Quake

There are very few days in England when I wish I had an air conditioner. Yesterday was one of them! We got to around 90º F (32º C) in the afternoon, with not a whisper of moving air. I spent pretty much the whole day out on the garden bench in the shade, reading "Demon Copperhead." (I'm about halfway through it.)

We have a second flush of roses on some of our rose bushes. The pink ones above pair well with the purple Michaelmas daisies...

And the young teasels are flourishing in the unmowed section of the lawn. We're going to have a teasel forest out there next year.

This video pretty much sums up the day -- a red admiral butterfly on our plumbago, Olga dreaming on a blanket on the lawn, and the same red admiral back on the same bush later in the afternoon.

Of course it sounds whiny for me to complain about the heat amid the disaster unfolding in Morocco. As many of you know I lived in Morocco for a couple of years when I was in the U.S. Peace Corps in the early 1990s. (More on that here and here, among other posts.) I lived south of the current disaster zone, in the Anti-Atlas Mountains, but I knew volunteers who were stationed right in the middle of what is now a devastated area. I've communicated already with one Moroccan friend who says his family in Agadir is safe.

When I lived there I was always aware an earthquake was a possibility. Morocco suffered a legendary quake back in 1960 that leveled most of Agadir and killed 12,000 people. But at the same time, it seemed like a very remote risk, one I just didn't think about in day-to-day life. I lived my first year in a modern but probably not very well built concrete apartment building in a small town, and my second year in an old rock-and-mud walled house in a village -- the same kind of construction that collapsed in the old city of Marrakech in Friday's quake. I was never worried about the village house's stability. I was more concerned about the scorpions that lived in cracks in the rock walls.

Anyway, I will be looking out for ways to help the Moroccans as they recover from this disaster.

A Case of Mistaken Identity

I had the funniest exchange with a parent from work.

A mother wrote me an e-mail titled, "Garnet Stone's contact details." She said, "Henry is trying to get in touch with Garnet. Would you happen to have his contact details?"

Now, I had a vague memory that Henry is her husband, but I had no idea who Garnet Stone is. I figured Garnet must be someone associated with the world of books and for some reason she thought our library might be able to get in touch with him. So I did a Google search and found that there is indeed an apparently self-published author named Garnet Stone.

"No idea!" I wrote her back. "I can only suggest trying to contact him through his publisher." And I sent her the same link.

Anyway, she wrote back and said, "Apologies! Wrong Steve. Garnet is an elderly gentleman who sells us wood in Quebec. Garnet Stone is his improbable name."

Which left me laughing because what are the odds there would also be a book author with the same improbable name?! I wonder who she meant to send that message to?

Here's my haggard little foxglove, rescued from the sidewalk grate where it took root. It doesn't look like much now, but foxgloves are hardy plants so I hope it flourishes now that it's growing in some actual dirt. (My plant-identifier app confirms that it's a foxglove, for those of you who doubt me. 😀)

I had to track down a notary public yesterday to get a letter notarized related to my mom's estate. You might or might not be surprised to find that this is not an entirely straightforward task in the UK, which has a slightly different system for legalizing documents. I found that I could get something notarized at the US Embassy, so I made an appointment to do that next Wednesday. Believe it or not, in the 12 years we've lived in London, I've never been inside the embassy. It's not even in the same location it was when we moved here, on Grosvenor Square -- it's now in a fancy new building down near Vauxhall. So that should be interesting.

Meanwhile, happy weekend, everyone!

(Top photo: Fallen rose petals on teasels in our garden.)

A Foxglove and a Controversy

Remember that orchid I found in the trash in Fortune Green Park last January? Well, it's blooming -- so this is the first flower I've seen from this particular plant. Not too shabby!



Olga and I had an interesting walk yesterday morning. Not because she wandered around next to the (fenced) railroad tracks behind the housing estate -- which she does almost every time we walk -- but because I was carrying a foxglove plant at the time.



At least, I think it's a foxglove. It was growing in a recessed grate in the sidewalk where it would surely never get any bigger than this because people would keep trampling it. So I gingerly pulled it out and brought it home and stuck it in some water, and I'll move it to a pot after I finish this post.

Wasn't I just complaining about all the foxgloves I had to plant?

Yes, I know. I am insane.

Here in the Beverly Hills of West Hampstead, my celebrity neighbors are apparently up in arms about a scheme to tear down and replace a house that, frankly, I didn't even know existed. It's tucked behind the houses along our street, and not visible from the road. I've lived on this street for almost ten years and I had no clue! But I can see how its demolition and replacement would be a huge headache for people who overlook that property -- including several of the celebs. Plus it poses concerns for the nearby cricket club.

This is not the first time controversy has visited our street. About nine years ago one homeowner was forced by the council to replace the pebble dashing on the outside of her house after a renovation left a smooth (and I think nice-looking) exterior wall. I didn't know about it at the time -- we hadn't even moved in yet -- but I read about it later.

Isn't it ridiculous that I live on this street? Life is unpredictable, that's for sure.

Disco Doesn't Suck

My neighbor down the hill has the most beautiful cosmos plant in her front garden. Unfortunately, my phone couldn't figure out that it was the flowers I wanted to photograph; it focused instead on the Bathing Beauty, the mannequin in the bathtub in the background. You can pretty clearly see her legs sticking out of the end of the tub. Her head is at the other end, mostly concealed behind that lavender.

I went to the dentist yesterday for a check-up. Yes, this was my second dental appointment in a couple of weeks, but as I think I mentioned before, my dentist and my hygienist work on different days, so I can never do both a cleaning and a check-up at the same time! It's the craziest system.

Anyway, happily, my teeth are all in good shape. We're watching a few areas where I have aged fillings, but nothing needs any special attention now. They did a thing where the dental assistant ran a wand around the inside of my mouth, over the front, back and chewing surfaces of my teeth, and produced a 3-D image of them. She could then rotate my demonic, lipless grin on a computer screen and show me my teeth in great detail. It was pretty cool. I took a picture of the 3-D image but it's a little creepy -- disembodied teeth look very skull-like -- so I won't inflict it on you. TMI, I'm thinking.

When I sat down in the chair I was carrying a magazine and the dentist asked what I was reading. It happened to be an article in The Atlantic about trigger warnings, in which a feminist writer questioned whether such content warnings are actually harming girls and women by making them less able to confront disturbing information. I gave the dentist a brief summary but as I did so I wondered, what if she's been assaulted in some way that requires a trigger warning? Am I triggering her by merely describing this article?

What a tangled web.



When Jimmy Buffett died several days ago, I thought about the one Buffett album I ever owned -- "Volcano," which as I recall I got for my birthday or for Christmas one year when I was a kid. In my memory, I got it and John Lennon and Yoko Ono's "Double Fantasy" album at the same time. I decided to look in my old journals and see if I'd mentioned them, and if my memory was accurate.

Well, surprisingly, although I wrote about getting the "Moonraker" sountrack in 1979, I did not mention records by Jimmy Buffett or John Lennon. At least not that I can find. I definitely owned them both, though, and I'm pretty sure they came together.

What I did find in my journals were chips of an old record, which I glued to the page on Aug. 1, 1981. We were about to leave on vacation and I wrote about buying four rolls of film and two packages of flashcubes (remember those?) at the astonishing price of almost $17, which must have been a fortune to me at age 14. And then I'd have needed to get it all processed! What a nightmare film photography was.

Anyway, I then wrote, "(My brother) and I destroyed his disco records today. We both hate disco, see. Here's an example of what happened to Gloria Gaynor and Amy (sic) Stewart...that's what they get for recording disco. It's their own fault."

Several things are odd about this. I don't hate disco. I love disco. I've always loved disco. In fact, I bought that Gloria Gaynor record. But this was 1981, not too long after an event called "Disco Demolition Night" in which mostly young white men publicly destroyed records made predominantly by black artists, many of them women, and loved by gay listeners. It was the "Disco Sucks" era. People used to walk around with that phrase on t-shirts, and I remember my stepbrother being especially anti-disco. So apparently, I got swept up in the fervor, even though deep down I liked disco myself.

I suspect my brother and I were both just sick of those records, as anybody gets sick of a song they've heard a million times. My participation in "Disco Sucks" was purely opportunistic and prompted by peer pressure. Besides, how was it OK to hate on Gloria Gaynor while listening to Shirley Bassey singing "Moonraker"?!

Hasbulla and Tilapia

That's me in real time, pretty much, writing this post. I'm sitting out in the garden, having already washed dishes and folded laundry. And it's not even 7 a.m.!

One of my happiest discoveries was learning that our WiFi signal stretches out to the garden bench. So I can sit out here in nice weather and read blogs and (obviously) write my blog, which is pretty great. It's about 60º F (15.6º C) at the moment according to my phone, though it doesn't seem that cool to me. Olga is sniffing around the garden and under all the plants, no doubt searching out the scents of any foxes that wandered through overnight.

That photo on my desktop is one that I took way back in December 2013 when Olga, Dave and I went up to Norfolk to stay at a bed & breakfast run by some acquaintances from work. I blogged it here. God, that seems like a long time ago. We hadn't even had her a year yet.

The 10th graders didn't protest the changes in the library yesterday. They seemed to accept that their large group was a little too unmanageable for the fiction section. Or maybe they're plotting some kind of retaliation. Ha!

This cardboard cutout was standing beneath the school stairs, in an area where the seniors often gather. Do you recognize him? I didn't, but someone filled me in -- he's a Russian MMA and TikTok star named Hasbulla. Why he's standing beneath our staircase I have no idea.

That sign in the background is even more of a mystery.