Brazil, Two Ways

Yesterday was a "bank holiday," one of those nameless, purposeless holidays that the English have worked into their calendars. (And thank goodness for that.) The weather was great, and since Dave volunteered to take over primary Olga duty, I took a long walk through East London.

I specifically wanted to see Roa's newest wall, but after riding all the way across the city on the tube and navigating tiny back streets, I found it blocked by a moving van. *sigh*

So that will have to wait.

But I found lots of other neat storefronts, street scenes and pieces of street art. London is such a photogenic city.

Last night, inspired by "The Stepford Wives," we watched the movie adaptation of another Ira Levin novel, "The Boys From Brazil." Also very entertaining! I watched it so many times as a kid that I remember some of the lines. Possibly Gregory Peck's only evil role.

Dave and I are trying to make our plans for the summer. I need to go back to Florida for a bit, and Dave has a conference in Las Vegas, of all places. (I'm skipping that one!) Aside from those two outings and some brief commitments here in London, we have a few weeks free, so we're thinking about our travel options. We're leaning toward Turkey. We were also considering Brazil and Argentina, but that seems like too much to take on at the moment -- and Brazil has been on my "bucket list" for so long that I'm actually a little weirded out by the idea of going. What would I do then? Kick the bucket?

(Photos: Decrepit shopfronts in Shoreditch, yesterday.)

Spring Violets

I was surprised to find a couple of violets growing in a corner of one of our courtyards.

I used to see wild violets all the time as a child in Florida, where they grew in a field near our house. The woman who took care of me and my brother during the day, Mrs. Kirkland, would walk us over to the field so we could pick them. We haven't seen them there in years -- maybe we're just not looking anymore, or maybe they're gone. (I'm sure picking them all didn't do them any favors.) In any case, I left these alone!

The weather was beautiful yesterday morning. Dave and I took Olga to the park and let her run free, and then walked to the Lido Cafe on the Serpentine and had lunch. Olga was a bit overstimulated by chasing sticks, and by other dogs, and by all the people around us at the cafe -- she could not relax, although she appeared to be having a great time. Then some clouds blew in and the day got chillier, so we made our way back home, where she collapsed and slept the rest of the afternoon.

Last night we watched an impromptu Katharine Ross double feature -- "The Swarm," which has to be the worst Irwin Allen disaster movie ever made, followed by "The Stepford Wives," which is actually pretty good.

Today is a bank holiday in the UK, so we technically have the day off! But I need to do my weekly report for work, so I'll need to invest an hour or two in front of the computer.

(Photos: The violets, and a cup advertising the Lichtenstein retrospective at the Tate that I saw a few weeks ago.)

Wonders of Web Wandering

Did you hear that someone in New Zealand actually named their child "Number 16 Bus Shelter"?

That's one of the fascinating tidbits I learned yesterday via my Internet browsing. I ask you, where would we be without the Web?

It's an excellent teacher of the unexpected. For example, one of my Facebook friends recently linked to an interesting blog post by a guy who taught writing to murderer Lyle Menendez in prison. I went to the blog to check out the post, and while skimming along found another post by the same blogger that recommended several novels by a little-known writer named Earl Thompson. They sounded intriguing, so I went over to Amazon and found one of the novels, "A Garden of Sand," for sale for one penny. It was nominated for the National Book Award when it was published in 1970. How had I never heard of this writer? I bought the book, while marveling at the Internet's ability to connect disparate people and ideas. (We'll see if I'm still marveling after I read it.)

Here's an even better connectivity story: I was walking home with Dave from a friend's house on Friday night when I found a purple leather wallet lying on the sidewalk. "Leave it there," Dave advised, but I did not. I picked it up and brought it home, and set out to find the owner. I Googled her name and found that she had a Twitter account. I don't have much use for Twitter, but I do have an account, so I logged in and Tweeted her. Yesterday, she came over to retrieve her wallet -- minus one credit card, and who knows where that went. (She lost the wallet in a nearby bar and was unsure whether she left it behind or was pickpocketed.)

So yeah, the Internet is handy. My only concern is what it's doing to my attention span. I have become so used to clicking around, following every online whim and answering every micro-question, that sitting down to read a book -- even a good book -- can seem like a somewhat ponderous task. I have to fight the urge to jump up mid-paragraph and check e-mail. Why is that?

(Photo: More spring color in Notting Hill.)

Arachnophobes Beware

Remember Pat, our Arachnopet, who lived in one of our balcony shrubs all last summer? After hanging around for months, feasting on flies and growing ever-larger, Pat -- so named because we were uncertain of gender -- disappeared when the weather changed in the fall. I remember seeing her hunkered down under a leaf on a cold, windy, rainy day, and then she was just gone.

She still has not reappeared, if, indeed, she survived the winter. But yesterday morning I found a swarm of tiny, pinhead-sized spiders on the pot of the shrub where Pat lived. She apparently left an egg sac -- at least one -- and it had hatched.

The spiders swarmed out onto their own little web, and after an initial period of exploration and dispersal, seemed to coagulate into two little clumps. I wondered if this had something to do with protection from the sun and the heat of the day. No telling.

To make a long story short, it looks like we'll have more Pats hanging around this year. Surely all these guys won't make it -- that would be a little much, the stuff of horror movies. But I could deal with one or two or even a handful, as long as they don't come inside.

I guess there's no question about Pat's gender now!

Genesis

I am trying to leave Olga alone a bit more often, so she gets used to being home by herself. I don't leave her for very long -- no more than a few hours -- but we think she needs to build up a comfort level with being solitary. After all, if I get this full-time job, she'll be left alone for a good part of the day, probably with a dog-walker coming in to care for her.

So yesterday, after taking her for a good long morning walk, I left her at home and went to the Natural History Museum, where there's an exhibit of photos by Sebastiao Salgado called "Genesis." Salgado traveled to some of the world's most isolated places, like the jungles on the border of Brazil and Venezuela, or islands in the South Atlantic that are home to penguins and elephant seals and not much else. His photographs of those locales are meant to show how big the world still is, and how much is relatively undisturbed and deserves protection.

It was an interesting exhibit. I spent a couple hours there, and took photos on the way there and the way back. I must say, it was nice to get out without the dog. And it was another stunningly beautiful day, weather-wise. This is our reward for persevering through the dreaded English winter -- the warm, lovely English spring.

(Photos: A red-haired, red-shoed woman walked in front of me for a short distance in Kensington.)

Of Trees, Blooming and Not

Spring is really bursting here at the moment, with all the pinks and whites and yellows and fresh greens at their brightest and most radiant. Dave accused me of amping up the color in this photo, and I swear I did not. That's honestly what it looks like out there right now.

One street not far from our flat is lined with those pink cherry trees, and I take Olga there every day just to walk beneath them. At every other time of year, it's an ordinary street, but in May it's magical. I took Olga for two long walks yesterday because it's so nice to be outside in this weather.

Not all our trees are doing so well, though. This one on the corner was mysteriously felled just a few days ago. I'm not sure when it happened -- one minute it was there, the next it was gone. And I'm not sure why it happened, because it looked fine to me. (You can see it in the center-right of this photo.) But street trees disappear around here with dismaying regularity. The government powers-that-be seem quite aggressive with their chainsaws.

As you can see, someone attached a little memorial to the tree's stump -- a sort of yarn doily and a copy of Joyce Kilmer's poem "Trees." But even that was gone in a flash. I took this photo about 6 a.m. yesterday morning, and by 9 a.m. the stump had been ground down to sawdust.

To quote Kurt Vonnegut: "And so it goes."

Mugs I Have Known

What object most closely represents the comforts of your home? You know, the thing you long for most when you travel. Your bed? Your shower?

For me, it's a good cup of coffee in one of my favorite mugs.

My recent travels made me once again realize how much I value brewing my own coffee. Europeans drink tiny little cups of espresso or milky cappuccino squeezed out of one of those noisy steam machines. They're good, but not as good (from my American perspective) as a mug of good strong brewed coffee.

I have had a series of favorite mugs over the years. In the mid-'80s, I loved my purple cup, which I once photographed on a matching bedsheet. (I took a whole series of these photos, and a few years ago I posted them here.)

I no longer have my purple cup. I eventually gave it to charity because it was too small. It was replaced by this -- a Laurel Burch mug I bought in Tampa in 1992. I loved this mug so much I took it with me to Morocco when I served in the Peace Corps, and the joke among my fellow volunteers was that when it broke, I would quit and go home.

Here it is sitting on the big cushion I used as a bed, in the courtyard of my Moroccan house. (I slept outside in the summers because it was so hot indoors.) Fortunately it never broke, I stayed my full two years in Morocco, and I still have the mug.

I don't drink out of it as much these days, though, because I have these -- Starbucks mugs from my hometown of Tampa and my brother's current city of residence, Jacksonville. They're even larger than the Laurel Burch mug. I use these or one of my other Starbucks mugs almost every day.

Finally, there's this monster, which is even larger still. (It really is ridiculous how big mugs have become.) We have two of these, which Dave's mom bought us while his parents were visiting last summer. I like them and use them often, but they're almost too big. I can never finish my coffee when I drink out of them.

Ah yes, the comforts of home!