A Tornado of Inefficiency

I just can't seem to get things done these days. Allow me to be boring and enumerate the handful of important tasks that I'm having trouble bringing to completion.

-- I still have to get Dave a Christmas present. It's ridiculous, I know. I am the lamest partner ever. I know what I want to get him, but can't seem to get to the shops. Since I'm either on my way to work or working from 8:30 a.m. to 5:45 p.m., it's easier said than done, at least during business hours.

-- The state of New York sent me a notice saying I owe more income tax for 2010. They contend that my H&R Block tax preparer made an error on my return, and that I need to send the state an additional $600. I've contacted the tax preparer and sent her the notice, and I'm waiting for her response. I'd really like to get it resolved. I'm tempted to pay it just to get it to go away.

-- Dave and I have to get visas for our trip to China next month. We need an assortment of completed paperwork as well as passport photos and some other stuff. I'm hoping I can get this all pulled together today, so I can drop it off tomorrow at the visa office in Marylebone. We walked down Portobello Road in the pouring rain last night to get our photos taken, and I look really annoyed in mine, which is probably more or less accurate.

-- Olga had another bout of her periodic gastric illness over the weekend. We suspect that she has giardia, a water-borne parasite that causes cyclical episodes of diarrhea, gas and other fun symptoms. Dave is taking her to the vet tomorrow.

-- Next week, I have to speak to four first-grade classes about interviewing. (You may remember that I did this last year, too.) Not a huge deal, but I have to think about what I'm going to say.

Meanwhile, there's all the business of day-to-day living -- the laundry, the cleaning, the working. And while I don't want to turn reading into a negative thing, I do feel some pressure to finish "The Goldfinch," which is a huge book, because several people are waiting in line behind me to read the library's copy. Gah!

(Photo: Mile End, on Sunday.)

Lost Weekend

Where did the weekend go? I had wonderful plans to lie around the house, read "The Goldfinch," have leisurely meals and relax. Instead, most of Saturday was consumed with preparing for and cleaning up after our dinner party, and yesterday vanished in a combination of sleeping late, going on a photo walk and going to a movie with a neighbor.

I can't complain about the photo walk -- after all, that was my time, to do with what I wished. I needed to get out and take some pictures, because I'd done very little post-Florida. I went to East London and walked near Hackney Wick, in areas I hadn't seen before, and got some good shots which you will no doubt see here in coming days.

Our movie yesterday evening was "The Butler," with Forrest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey. It was OK -- a bit predictable, I thought, and more interesting when it focused on the characters and their relationships rather than the larger social issues of the day. Excellent performances, though.

Afterwards we went to The Churchill, a local pub, where our World War II-obsessed neighbor Chris regaled us with stories of Pearl Harbor (it is a standing joke that we can never have a conversation with Chris that does not involve World War II). To hear Chris tell it, Britain was partly responsible for Pearl Harbor by leaking aircraft carrier technology to the Japanese years before. Or something like that. I wasn't really listening. We left after an extremely drunk woman tried to draw us into conversation with her companions at an adjacent table -- we stayed just long enough to learn they'd all gone to school together at St. Andrews, one is getting a doctorate in psychology and one works in petroleum trading in Africa (but, ironically, has not yet visited the countries where he trades). The drunk woman's occupation remained a mystery. Dave and I looked at each other and telepathically communicated the same message: "Let's go home!"

(Photo: "Hahn/Cock," a sculpture by German artist Katharina Fritsch, in Trafalgar Square, on Friday.)

Green Woodpecker

Yesterday, while out with Olga, I discovered a completely new (to me) bird in Hyde Park. This is a green woodpecker, which apparently lives throughout southern Britain.

You'd think a green bird would stand out like a sore thumb in winter, when all the trees have lost their leaves. But with that mossy tree trunk as a backdrop, he blends in perfectly! Evolution is amazing.

I saw him and took some photos, and then a group of birdwatchers came over to check him out. And then Olga got too close, and that was that. He flew. I shrugged at the birdwatchers, as if to say, "I'm sorry but I cannot control the wild impulses of my dog."

We had a dinner party last night with some folks from the music department. Yesterday afternoon Dave and I went on an expedition to Whole Foods especially to get beef short ribs, and as it turned out, they didn't have any, so we provisioned ourselves with the rest of the supplies and replacement lamb shanks. (Yes, I still feel guilty eating anything lamb-related, but they were good.) Gordon brought over some special bottles of Cote du Rhone wine -- a 2001, 2005 and 2007 -- and they were excellent, but to be honest, the differences between the three seemed minimal to me. I'm sure I'm horrifying a wine connoisseur somewhere by saying that -- or I would be, if any wine connoisseurs were intrepid enough to stumble onto my blog.

I slept in this morning until 9 a.m., and now the sun is shining and the church bells are ringing. Dave and Olga are still in bed!

Whitehall, Then and Now

Two views of Whitehall in London -- one from my Dad, taken in 1957...

...and one taken by me yesterday morning. It's pretty amazing how similar they look, right down to the location of the trees. More street lighting, more street markings, wider sidewalks and cleaner buildings, but otherwise pretty much the same view!

Bail Bonds

Here's another Florida photo, taken on the highway near my mom's house. Needless to say, the county jail is not far away!

I don't have anything else for you today. Yesterday was pretty mundane and I haven't even taken any photos in London since my return. I suppose no news is good news, right?

As John Denver famously sang, "Some days are diamonds, some days are stones."

A Non-Event Involving A Car

We had a bit of excitement at school yesterday when this happened. Apparently someone spotted a suspicious car parked nearby -- I am not sure what made it suspicious -- and the authorities were summoned. Fortunately the hubbub turned out to be unwarranted. (If there was any sort of "controlled explosion," as the BBC story says, we saw no evidence of it. In fact the car was still parked there when I left work yesterday evening, with only a small broken window as testament to the police investigation.)

What it meant for us was simply an hour or so of standing outside at a safe distance. I guess you can never be too careful. Fortunately our winter temperatures are much milder than those in the states this week.

Coincidentally, bombs have been turning up in unexpected places recently, at least partly because of bad weather.

Other than that, yesterday was uneventful. I finally finished "The Charioteer" by Mary Renault, a remarkably subtle novel about gay men published back in the early 1950s. It only barely mentions homosexuality by name -- I believe "queer" appears a handful of times, in dialogue -- and much of the romantic action is alluded to, rather than specifically spelled out. Renault asks us to read between the lines in many scenes in order to understand what's going on. I suppose such circumspection was necessary back in those days. Anyway, I liked it a lot -- I became aware of it only after reading this fascinating article in The New Yorker several months ago. (The link leads to a synopsis, not the piece itself.)

Oh, and my dad's Europe photos have been making the rounds via Facebook. Everyone seems quite excited about them, which will make him happy!

(Photo: Wild broom growing in Norfolk at Christmas.)

Europe, 1957

I mentioned that while I was in Florida, I scanned some of my dad's old photos from a trip he took to Europe in 1957. These pictures are amazing -- a real time capsule and photographically impressive to boot. My dad has a great eye!

He was 20 years old, and traveling with three friends. They drove cross-country in a Volkswagen from California -- where he grew up -- to New York, where they boarded an inexpensive freighter bound for Europe. They slept in hammocks somewhere in the bowels of the ship, and when they arrived in England, they began a journey that took them to Scotland, France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.

They stayed in hostels or camped out -- once running afoul of the police in Germany when they tried to camp in the woods. (They were rescued by a friendly German woman who stuck up for them, and then fed them.) They drove a little rented Citroen and ate as cheaply as they could.

Dad has two trays of slides from the trip, but I only scanned about 30 photos -- mainly those featuring people, cars and fashions of the era, like this shot of a little girl feeding pigeons in the Piazza San Marco in Venice, and the top photo of Vatican City.

It's hard to imagine now, but Dad was there only 12 years after the end of World War II. He said war damage was evident in some cities, with massive rebuilding and modernization projects replacing the rubble. The face of every adult in his pictures makes me wonder what that person saw, and lived through, in the years prior. Dad also photographed a new generation of Europeans too young to have seen the war, like this child in France coming home with the day's baguette.

He saw the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, which doesn't look a whole lot different these days, except the palace itself is cleaner and the tourists don't dress as well. It's amazing to think he was there just five years after Queen Elizabeth II ascended to the throne!

If you're interested in checking out the rest of the scanned photos from this trip, you can see them here.