Surprise!

I was having a busy morning yesterday -- doing laundry, walking Olga, photographing a few more streets for Bleeding London, getting things organized after my Florida trip -- when my phone rang at about 10:30. It was my boss.

"I just wondered if you were planning to come in today," she said.

Was I supposed to come in? I thought I began work next Tuesday.

Incorrect, as it turns out! Despite the online school calendar and various circulated e-mails that specify an Aug. 19 return date for staff, I was expected a few days early. How I was supposed to know this, I am not sure.

But no big deal. I threw on some long pants and went to work, and spent the whole day logging and organizing the magazines that stacked up over the summer. Vacation is officially over! I'm back at work today, too.

Here's my $5 coffee table -- the one I had shipped across the ocean for $250 -- complete with reattached legs. As you can see, it is now our TV stand. Not too shabby, right? Very clean-lined.

Also, we did get back all but £100 of the security deposit on our Notting Hill apartment. That was a relief. I was concerned because our new landlord basically demanded that we occupy our new flat in early July, forcing us to move a few weeks early from the old place. But the previous landlords worked with us, which is all I can ask. (The £100 was for unspecified "repairs," which is fine with me. Having dismantled the door frame twice, I can imagine a bit of fine-tuning was needed.)

Now we need to hire a dog-walker, pronto! Dave had intended to work on that while I was gone, but I think he was a bit distracted by the garden. So that's got to happen today, because we are out of summer.

(Top photo: An older lady and her older dog on Mill Lane in West Hampstead.)

From a Great Height

I'm writing this 35,000 feet over Detroit, having just taken off from Chicago on the second leg of my flight home. I've already had a mildly eventful trip.

I was on the noisiest plane in the world from Tampa to O'Hare, with a great whistling wind-machine of a ventilation system that drowned out every announcement made by the flight crew. And in Chicago, we were held at the gate because the pilot had to wait for the plane's maintenance log. ("This is ridiculous!" he opined over the loudspeaker to all of us. "The plane has been here at this airport for 24 hours!") The paperwork finally showed up, we pushed off, and I watched the distant John Hancock Building and Sears Tower (which I think is now called something else) as we taxied to take off.

And then American Airlines had the audacity to try to charge me $7 for a gin and tonic, my customary transatlantic indulgence. Seven dollars! On an international flight! What is the world coming to?

I opted instead for the white wine, which was terrible but free. (For the record, British Airways always gives me a gin and tonic.)

Many hours later...

Now I'm back in London. This may be my first bi-locational blog post!

The rest of my flight was uneventful. I read, and watched "The Color Purple" and "The Other Woman," a vapid but surprisingly funny movie with Cameron Diaz. It was a chick-flick kind of flight.

I endured rush-hour tube traffic, always a challenge with even a small amount of luggage, and got home to enthusiastic greetings from Dave and Olga, who would not stop licking me. (Olga, that is, to be explicitly clear.) I got a tour of our newly elaborate garden, picked some overripe blackberries and took Olga to Hampstead Heath for a good long walk.

People say dogs don't have a sense of the passage of time, but I can tell you that Olga greeted me much more energetically than she does when I'm gone for a standard workday. She practically climbed me, she was so happy to see me! It's nice to be missed.

And on a side note, as Dave was showing me the garden, we found a dead squirrel in the grass. It had obviously been there for some time, stiff as it was, but Dave swore it wasn't there the day before. We don't know whether Olga got it or if it died some other way. The former seems most likely and obvious, but the squirrel looked strangely undamaged to have met its maker in Olga's jaws.

Nonetheless, I guess I can't say anymore that she never catches squirrels!

(Photo: Pipes and shadows on a street near our flat.)

Robin Williams and Monkey Box

Isn't the news shocking about Robin Williams? I was so sorry to hear it. Many comedians, I suspect, have dark undercurrents that propel their skills and talents, and Williams certainly had a manic, almost desperate intensity that, in retrospect, perhaps hinted at such undercurrents. But still.

Here was a guy who, at first, seemed like a mere goofy comedian playing a space alien in rainbow suspenders. Then he turned around and made "Good Morning Vietnam" and "Dead Poets Society" and "The Fisher King" and "Good Will Hunting," and we were all blown away by his depth. When I say "we," I mean the world in general.

You just never know what's going on in a person's head, how deep their discontent can be -- even a person who is so successful, who has so much.

Just last week at my mom's house I was marveling that my brother still has his "Mork from Ork" sleeping bag, vintage late '70s. It's rolled up in the top of one of our closets. We certainly never anticipated, when we bought it, that it would outlast Mork himself.

On other topics:

I took both of these photos yesterday, and the Gods were not on my side. I've been wanting to shoot the fireworks store (top) for a while, but then when I finally got around to it, that grotty white pickup truck was parked out front. I took photos anyway, because the Zen of photography is that you just have to work with what's there. I passed the shop again later, and the truck was still there, so I was denied a better opportunity. Looks like it broke down. I bet the shop owners are miffed.

As for the flame car, my lens was fogged because I quickly took the camera from an air conditioned car to a humid, rainy roadside. Hence the whitish blur in the center.

Oh well.

Finally, have you ever heard of a place in Florida called Monkey Box? I hadn't, despite the fact that I grew up here, until I saw WFLA's weather map on television. This map shows tiny, tiny settlements all over Central and West Florida that are really no more than wide places in the road: Sturkey, Harrisburg, Antioch. One of these settlements is called Monkey Box.

According to its one-line entry in Wikipedia, it's "an unincorporated community in Glades County." But actually, from what I can gather, Monkey Box isn't a town. It appears (on Google Maps) to be an area of marshy wilderness on the western edge of Lake Okeechobee. An article on a fishing website seems to bear that out.

Apparently no monkeys (or people, for that matter) live in Monkey Box. It seems the only residents are bass and perch, with occasional fishermen passing through.

An Earthenware Bowl

Every time I come to Florida, I wind up carrying the strangest stuff home in my suitcase. In January it was my middle school spelling bee trophy. This time around, it's table legs, a flowerpot painted by my niece, and a bowl made by an acquaintance of my parents in 1964.

The bowl has kind of an interesting backstory, actually. In the early '60s, when my parents first moved to Florida to teach at the then-nascent University of South Florida, they lived near a couple named Jack and Rachel Roth. The Roths were apparently a bit Bohemian, at least by Tampa standards in the early '60s -- my dad tells a funny story about Jack Roth parking his car on the patio of the planetarium after he got exasperated trying to find a parking space. They were both artists, assembling a collection of found-object sculptures in their front yard that perplexed the neighbors, and Rachel was a potter. My parents wound up with a few pieces of Roth pottery.

When I was at my mom's last week, I happened to notice a bowl in her side yard that she had long used as a saucer for a potted plant. It was overturned and half-buried, but on the bottom it clearly said "Roth '64." So I cleaned it up and claimed it.

It's very earthy and minimalist, as you can see. I'm sure Dave will be thrilled that I'm bringing home yet another piece of pottery.

My mom also has a couple of mugs made by Rachel Roth -- but my brother and I use those when we're at her house, so I didn't try to claim them.

Did anyone see the "supermoon" last night? Supposedly the moon was brighter and larger, being about 30,000 miles closer to the Earth than usual. The news has been full of stories about this celestial event, but when I went outside to photograph it last night, I was underwhelmed. To me, it just looked like any full moon. I didn't even bother to download my pictures.

The spectacle may have been somewhat softened by atmospheric haze. It's super humid here and it was very rainy yesterday, as you can see above. That's a leaf floating in inch-deep puddled water on the walkway in front of my dad's house.

Oh, and did I mention my terrible martini? I went to dinner with my stepsister and her husband and son on Friday night, and I ordered a martini with olives. "Would you like it dirty?" the waitress asked. I'd never had a dirty martini, so I said, "Sure!" Well, this martini was not dirty. It was filthy. It had so much olive brine in it that it glowed greenish brown and was basically undrinkable. I sent it back, which I never do, to be diluted with a bit more gin -- and even then I wasn't pleased with it. I decided pushing a dirty martini was the restaurant's way of selling otherwise useless olive brine and saving on liquor. Never making that mistake again.

(Top photo: A wary anhinga on the lakefront at my dad's house.)

A Piano, Maybelline and Failed Architecture

Sorry about the short post yesterday. I was up to my eyeballs in family business, but I think that will subside somewhat from here on out. I'm hoping to spend the next few days relaxing and seeing two more friends, and then I'm outta here on Tuesday morning, returning to the Big Smoke. It's always good to visit but I'm looking forward to getting back to my routines.

Families can be so complicated. And the funny thing is, I suspect my family is actually simpler than many. Whew.

One failure on this trip: I did not get my mom's piano sold. She has a Steinway baby grand that belonged to my grandmother, who was a professional pianist and organist. Though we saved it after Grandmother's death in 1989, no one has played it and it has essentially served for the last two decades as an extremely large decorative element in my mother's living room. Mom has decided it's time to pass the piano to a new owner. We called a local Steinway dealer to give us some prices but they didn't seem overly eager to get back to us. I'm still in e-mail dialogue with them but I had hoped to have this ironed out by the time I get on the plane -- and it doesn't look like that will happen.

I finally finished "Life After Life." It seemed to take forever, but that had less to do with the book than with all the stuff going on in my life at the moment! I really enjoyed it, though I as I said before, I can see how the non-linear plot is difficult for some readers. I've plowed my way through the entire stack of library books I checked out at the beginning of the summer!

Apologies to the writers of blogs I normally frequent -- I am definitely behind on my blog-reading. I just haven't had much time to linger online.

I've been meaning to post a couple of extra links. Here is a video I took of my dad's dog, Maybelline, playing with her Jolly Egg toy. You may remember we bought Olga the same toy, based on how much Maybelline loves it -- but Olga hasn't taken to it quite as strongly. The egg is Maybelline's best friend!



And for those who are interested in architecture, I found a really interesting web site called "Failed Architecture." Check out the urban squatters who have moved into a once-elegant colonial hotel in Mozambique, repurposing it into a new village. Find out what happened to 1960s modernist villas in Cambodia during that country's civil war. Read about what's become of some really bizarre and unusual Best storefronts from the 1960s. It's a cool site!

(Photo: A black swallowtail butterfly at Walter Jones Historical Park in Jacksonville, last week.)

Interlude at the Lake

I think I need some quiet time. I always start to feel this way when I come back to Florida. It's important to visit everyone, but it also leads to an inevitable whirlwind of social interaction and even family mediation. Holy cow.

Back when I was sitting regularly, meditation gave me that outlet -- a dedicated period to simply watch my mind, watch the thoughts flow, be silent and without purpose or goal. Maybe I'll sit some today.

(Photo: The lake behind my mom's house, late evening.)

Out and About in Tampa

Yesterday I met up with my college friend Liz for breakfast and a drive. We went to a terrific old diner on Nebraska Avenue, the Three Coins, where I had pancakes -- and real American ones, not the skinny crepe-like European version. We stopped at a Salvation Army thrift store where I got two new shirts for work, one with original tags still attached. And we ran a few more errands before I dropped Liz back at her apartment and returned to my mom's for lunch.

It was good to see Liz, as usual, and even better to drive around North Tampa and stop whenever we saw something photo-worthy. We could not resist an opportunity for her to pose in front of the Liz Salon (top).

Ah, Tampa. The good old hometown.

Today I'm headed back to my dad's for the duration of my stay. I Skyped with Dave yesterday and he showed me some of what he's done with our garden back in England -- he's been working his behind off, poor guy. Things look great. I tried to say hi to Olga but she didn't respond much. To her ear I probably don't really sound like myself on Skype, and she certainly doesn't understand looking at a screen and what it represents. Poor mystified dog!