A Sculpture, and My Beating Heart

Another shot of daffodil season -- this time in St. John's Wood, near the school where I work -- and a very mysterious sculpture. I can't find out anything online about this piece of art, located in the Boundary Road estate. It seems to be called "Ideas," by Leo somebody, if I'm reading the words around its base correctly. I'll try to take a closer look today.*

Our yellow daffodils are actually looking a bit tired, and our white ones are about to come out. They're always a couple weeks behind.

Have I mentioned that Dave and I are off to Luxembourg this weekend? There's an honor band concert there on Saturday night, so we're going to fly out early tomorrow, check out the (very small) country and go to the concert. Then we'll be back here on Sunday. Miss Olga will be cared for by one of Dave's coworkers, who's going to house-sit.

Yesterday evening we fulfilled a bit of medical bureaucracy, registering with a new doctor in our neighborhood. You may remember we've been going to our old doctor in Notting Hill every time we've gotten sick. Well, that situation became untenable, and there's an NHS clinic right around the corner in West Hampstead, so we switched. I gathered all the required paperwork and numbers and picture ID, and we both walked over there after work. We had to do a little health assessment that included getting our blood pressure taken -- mine was 99 over 77, with a pulse of 60 beats per minute. Dave's was 109 over 76, pulse 95 bpm. Why does my heart beat only 2/3 as much as Dave's? Am I dead?

* I went back on my lunch break. It seems to say "'Ideas' : Leon U : 1970."

Toys and Politics

When I walked Olga yesterday morning we came across this pile of small toys, sitting on someone's garden wall. They were all quite dirty, as if they'd just been dug out of a garden. Which I'm betting is what happened. Some kid probably moved and left them behind, and the new resident of that flat found them and put them out for others to take.

I didn't take any, though I was tempted by that giraffe.

I got the weirdest stack of mail on Tuesday -- about six identical envelopes from the investment company holding my 401K. They turned out to be proxy ballots for selecting the board of directors and making changes to some of the funds. Why I got six envelopes I'm not sure -- one for each fund, maybe? I tried to skim the documents but I couldn't make heads or tails of them, so I went online and voted the board recommendations. At the end of the day I have to hope these people know what they're doing, and aren't leading me down the Lehman Brothers path.

Speaking of voting, I'm glad to see the Dutch didn't go for their far-right candidate in their elections yesterday, though his party did apparently gain some seats in government. And the Scots, meanwhile, want another independence referendum. They don't want to be dragged along into Brexit, and I don't blame them.

It's funny -- when the first Scottish independence referendum was held, I was so happy when they stayed. Now I hope they vote to go, just to give the finger to this agonizing, unnecessary Brexit process. That comes from my own anger about Brexit, though -- deep down, I'm still not sure independence is economically the best thing for Scotland.

Meanwhile, Trump has been thwarted again by the courts for his racist travel ban. Good!

No More Clark Gable

It's foggy out this morning -- the back of the garden is shrouded in white so I can't tell whether the marauding foxes visited our new plants again. Yesterday morning we found one dug up for the second time. We put it back in the ground, but surely every time it's unearthed its chances for survival grow slimmer.

There's lots of yellow out there now -- the daffodils, the mimosa/acacia tree that I walk past every day, and now the forsythia by our bedroom window too. And trees like the ones I posted Monday, like big pink clouds.

Dave and I finished the second season of "The Man in the High Castle." I've decided to read the book, by Philip K. Dick. I'm curious to see how much of the TV show is in the original work. It's a pretty complex show and the book is slim enough to be called a novella, so I'm thinking the TV folks have beefed it up. Which is fine -- I just want to compare.

Speaking of books, we're weeding the biography section in the library. We have a parent volunteer who was a librarian in a past life, and she's doing it for us -- she's been making good choices so far, though we have final approval. Jennifer Love Hewitt? Out! A gigantic, tiny-type, read-only-once, 40-year-old biography of Cromwell by Antonia Fraser? Out! Clark Gable? Out!

We have a lot of old biographies, especially of Hollywood types, that I think were probably donations at some point. The fact is, students are not likely to ever use them for research -- especially now that we have the Internet. And kids just aren't going to read huge tomes like Ms. Fraser's, as authoritative as she is. (I did save her book on Henry VIII's wives, and of course we have her classic "Mary, Queen of Scots" around somewhere.)

In photo news, Lonely Planet used a couple of my pictures in a feature about buildings that look like faces. (For free, natch, but I did give permission.) I also allowed a health-care authority in South London to use one of my pictures on their web site (which isn't live yet). I gave it to them for free, but they've now offered to give me a £25 restaurant voucher, so that's a nice little unexpected reward.

(Photo: Restocking a pub in West Hampstead, a few days ago.)

Deconstructing a Cadillac

Yesterday was not a good lunch day in our cafeteria at work. Mushroom stroganoff -- which tastes good, but looks like a pool of lumpy brown goo. Dave, ever erudite in his assessments, said when I sat down at our lunch table: "That looks like a big pile of sick." The alternative to the stroganoff was a shiny, viscous-looking hamburger that I couldn't bear to look at, much less consume.

Normally our lunches are pretty good. The stars just weren't aligned yesterday.

I think I've solved my problem about what to do with the items from our garden shed that are too large for the trash bin but too small to call the council to take away. When I walk Olga in the morning, I'll take one item with me each day, and I'll put it in a dumpster along the way. It's not really the correct thing to do, I suppose, but I figure just one item a day won't get anyone's hackles up, especially when spread among different dumpsters ("skips" to you British readers). We'll be rid of it all in a week or two.

When I told Dave my plan, he likened it to the Johnny Cash song about the man who works in a Cadillac factory and takes a part home each day in his lunchbox to build himself a car. I'm simply reversing the process!

(Photo: A party supply shop I passed on my walk home from work yesterday evening. I photographed the devil here a couple of years ago.)

Urban Spring

Olga took me on a long, mysterious walk yesterday morning. She followed her inner compass, or scents on the wind or voices in her head or something, to an area near Child's Hill where we haven't been before. I just let her lead the way, and darned if she didn't find a park!

Because I'd been negligent and left the Kong at home, she monopolized another dog owner's game of tennis-ball-fetch with his labrador, Spidey. (The guy was very nice about it, and fortunately had multiple tennis balls with him.)

And we saw all sorts of signs of spring, like pink trees (above)...

And flowers...

And bunny rabbits. Well, spray-painted ones, anyway.

I had a busy weekend, doing some spring cleaning. On Saturday I cleaned out and organized our garden shed, and threw away a big bag of stuff. (Nothing chemically dangerous -- I got rid of all that a few summers ago!) We have some awkward items like broken long-handled tools that won't fit in the trash bins, and I haven't yet figured out what to do with those.

I also found a huge bag of peanuts we bought for the squirrels and birds. The peanuts look OK -- maybe a little buggy, but probably still suitable for wildlife consumption.

Then I purged our kitchen pantry drawer, where I found two bags of flour that expired in 2010! We moved to England in 2011, and we didn't haul any expired flour across the ocean, so this is a bit of a mystery. I think they were given to us years ago by the parent of one of Dave's students when she cleaned out her pantry in preparation for returning to the U.S. They must have already been expired at that point. Anyway, they went in the trash, along with a rusty can of condensed milk that I know we've had at least five years. I'm not a strict adherent to expiration dates, but 2010 is beyond the pale.

The foxes left our garden alone last night. Maybe after all that digging they realized there are no bones there. Or maybe having Olga streak into the darkness after them gave them a fright!

Fox Damage

Success! I gave away the glass-topped table yesterday morning. A guy named Simon contacted me via Freecycle and sent his phone number, which told me that he was the real deal and not just an e-mail collector. So I made arrangements with him.

This table was not small -- the oval glass top was 4.3 feet by 2.8 feet. It was too large for me to carry easily by myself. I posted the measurements in the ad, but nonetheless, the optimistic Simon showed up with his wife (I guess) in a Smart car! It was interesting to see them wrestling to fit that table into what is essentially a golf cart, but somehow they managed. The wife had to take a bus home.

Dave, meanwhile, spent the whole day in the garden, planting his new acquisitions -- a couple of foxgloves, some lavender and hydrangeas. He put bone meal in the holes to nourish the plants. Well, a four-legged vulpine critter visiting in the night was sure interested in that bone meal. Olga woke us at 4 a.m. in a state of red alert, and when I let her out she streaked across the garden, chasing something. When dawn arrived, we saw that the garden had been transformed into a miniature version of a World War II bomb site.

To quote Dave: "Bastards!"

This morning, we'll be replanting. We also have slugs already attacking our sea kale and our teasels. Didn't someone once say that gardening is a continual process of pleasure and heartbreak? If not, I'm saying it now.

(Top photo: A launderette in Pimlico.)

Pink Camellias and Green Garages

I've been so lazy about carrying my camera lately. All I have from this week are iPhone photos! And that's also pretty much all I have for this post, because there's just not much news around here. Work, work, work.

I did go to a wine tasting event last night at a colleague's house. A guy brought around a selection of 10 different wines -- 4 whites, 4 reds, 2 sparkling -- and we sampled them all. I ordered three bottles, and then we drank the remainder of the samples. It was quite fun!

But anyway...on to the photos...like this one of the colorfully lit exterior of Cadogan Hall on Thursday night.

Workers are still renovating that big ol' house I pass on the way to school. But the scaffolding has come down and it's looking closer and closer to completion. (And when I look back to its appearance a few years ago, it's obvious how much has been done!)

I like that pot of daffodils in this otherwise rather forlorn doorway. I've got to get some high-res shots of this with my real camera.

The pink camellia is blooming brightly outside the synagogue.

This is a neighbor's garage. I've long been intrigued by this building. I think it's all those shades of green. Again, I need to get my real camera on it.

Conspiracy theories at the ATM machine!