Juggling and Dancing

Thanks for all your feedback on yesterday's post. (Except for the Thai spam commenters who keep leaving links to mysterious football blogs that I suspect are actually phishing scams or something. You have been deleted.) I will certainly keep everyone up to date on our discussions! I hope I don't come across as a whiny brat -- I'm perfectly aware that I'm privileged to even be considering buying in this place and time.

Dave and I took Olga on a rare joint outing yesterday to Kilburn Grange Park. The Kong was enthusiastically pursued.

Oh, and speaking of the Kong, remember how it disappeared overnight from our back garden several days ago? Well, we gave Olga another one, and that disappeared too! This time I was really kicking myself, and then yesterday morning I saw it in Mrs. Kravitz's back garden, lying in the long grass. Apparently whatever fox absconded with it didn't get very far. Mrs. Kravitz and her family are away somewhere, so I wound up climbing over the garden wall to retrieve it. Let me just say: Climbing a garden wall is a lot harder than it looks. And then, as I struggled back over the wall to our own garden, a neighbor in one of the apartments behind us leaned out his window and said laughingly, "Everything OK, gentlemen?" He probably thought we were up to no good and was checking up on us. So we explained the situation and fortunately everything ended without the involvement of police or an ambulance.

I also bought two more Kongs from Amazon, just to be safe. And by the way, I grossly overstated their price the other day. I got two for about £14, so that's not so bad.

At Kilburn Grange Park, we came across this guy juggling five balls at once. Pretty impressive! Olga laid down next to him, because he was standing in the shade, but then she tensed up the minute he began throwing those balls around and I was afraid she would spring for one of them. We had to lead her to a less stimulating shady place.

On the walk back home, we saw this. I love the Burt Reynolds tire cover. Unfortunately no mac n' cheese was being served at the moment, or we might have had some.

Speaking of '80s nostalgia, on Saturday I got a sudden urge to watch the movie "White Nights," from 1985, with Gregory Hines and Mikhail Baryshnikov. I don't think I'd ever seen it before. It was pretty good, with a youthful Isabella Rossellini and lots of Cold War intrigue. It's so weird to watch a film like that, produced when the Soviet Union seemed mighty and mysterious, and think that the country lasted just four more years. (Of course, it didn't go away entirely -- now we're left with its mysterious, meddling successor, Putin's Russia!) It was also great to see Baryshnikov and Hines dancing to Twyla Tharp's choreography. A worthwhile rental!

Real-Estate Tycoons?

What I was getting at yesterday, when I mentioned Dave and I debating whether to stay in our current flat, is that age-old question: Should we buy a place of our own?

We've been talking about it. We're committed to our current flat until next July, so there's no need to make a quick decision. But in my mind there are some barriers that have me thinking it's actually better to keep renting, at least for now.

One of them, as you all pointed out in comments yesterday, is the garden. We've put a lot of work into this space and we have some more ideas for things we'd like to do. And the simple fact is, wherever we buy in London, we would never be able to have a private garden this big -- not on our budget. This garden is immense by London standards, at least at our socio-economic level.

It's also very likely that as buyers, we'd have to move to another part of the city, which is perfectly feasible but not as convenient. It's nice to be able to walk to work. It's amazing to walk the dog to Hampstead Heath. I would hate to give those things up, but West Hampstead is a relatively expensive area.

There are the practical concerns -- as buyers we'd be responsible for maintaining a house, and given London's housing stock it would quite likely be 100 years old or more. We'd have to buy insurance. We'd have to budget for major repairs. We'd have to get a mortgage, and as two 50-year-olds, that could be a challenge, with our working lives abbreviated to the next two decades or less.

And finally, we'd have to put all our eggs in one basket. London housing prices are astronomical, and buying something here -- at least in our area -- would mean liquidating some or all of our stocks and other savings and pouring the money into a downpayment. Dave and I were looking online at half-a-million pound properties -- which, in theory, we could just barely afford -- and in our region that gets us a ground-level two-bedroom flat on a busy road. That is a hell of a lot of money to pay for something that is, frankly, uninspiring and not nearly as nice as where we live now.

Obviously, buying would be an investment and theoretically, at least, we would get all that money back and then some when we eventually sell -- whereas renting simply sends money down the drain. But when the real-estate options are as high-stakes as the ones in London, uncertainties rankle. What about, for example, Brexit? There's a lot of debate about whether London is poised to continue its international role when Britain exits the European Union in a couple of years. Is now a bad time to pour all our savings into London real estate?

Renting, on the other hand, gives us freedom. And we could say we're pouring our money away by renting -- or we could say we're buying that freedom. There is a purchase being made. By renting we can live in a convenient area in a house that we would otherwise never be able to afford. (If this place went on the market I'm guessing it would fetch, maybe, £900,000? Or more?) And we don't have children to educate or any need to build a "nest egg" to leave to the next generation. We only have to pay for our own retirement.

Dave is frustrated because the interior of our flat is showing some wear and tear -- not from us, but from previous tenants -- and trying to get anything repaired tends to be a time-consuming (if not entirely futile) process. But I think we should simply renew our pressure on the management company to fix what needs to be fixed -- and perhaps continue to overlook some of the cosmetic issues, like the cracked floor tiles in the bathroom and the fact that the bathtub's enamel has worn down to a dull coating that is frustrating as hell to clean.

Dave gets itchy for change. He likes to refresh and renew his surroundings. He wants to put more stuff on the walls and to paint, for example. I think we need to find ways to accommodate Dave's need for a fresher environment (which I, frankly, do not share) while staying put. Meanwhile we continue to build up some savings, we wait out Brexit, we enjoy our garden and we see where the future leads us.

But who knows. The discussion continues!

(Photos: From my walk with Olga in the cemetery yesterday. The middle picture is a common blue butterfly -- that's actually its name -- in the cemetery's butterfly meadow.)

Hyper-Hydrangea, and Others

A little plant update for you. Above is one of our hydrangeas, blooming away. It wouldn't be all that remarkable except it's the same plant as in the second photo of this post. As you can see, it miraculously recovered after being unearthed by ravenous foxes!

And this is verbena, which we didn't (officially) have in our garden this year. We used to have a couple of verbena plants and they bloomed last summer, but this year they didn't come up at all. And then this one appeared all on its own, between the patio stones outside the back door, of all places. It must have seeded itself. Seems like a few others may be growing there too. We're stepping around them, carefully!

Meanwhile the offspring of my ancient houseplants are doing well, too. Above is the purple heart...

...which is so happy, it's blooming.

And here's the bird's-foot cactus, doing quite well on the windowsill!

Yesterday was uneventful. I vacuumed, I mowed the lawn, I read a lot. That's pretty much it. Dave and I are wrestling with questions about how long we want to remain in this flat. But that's another subject for another day...

Holland Park and Alma-Tadema

Well, I did get myself out of the house yesterday. I went to Holland Park, took in an art show and had a long, long walk through the city. It was a fantastic day.

When we lived in Notting Hill I visited Holland Park fairly frequently, but I hadn't been there in years. It was like visiting an old friend. The peacocks in the Kyoto Garden were strutting their stuff for visitors:

Then I went to the Leighton House Museum, which has a show of works by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, a prominent Victorian artist. I was curious about Alma-Tadema because his former home is near the school in St. John's Wood where Dave and I work. The house has a blue plaque bearing his name, and until I saw that plaque I swear I'd never even heard of Alma-Tadema. So when I got wind of this exhibit I thought I'd check it out.

I was very pleasantly surprised. Alma-Tadema was a brilliant painter whose dreamy scenes of antiquity conjure an idealized, lost world. His perspectives, compositions and level of detail -- the mosaic floors, marble surfaces, draped fabrics, embroidery -- are amazing. His wife and daughters were artists, too, and some of their paintings were on display as well. (I'd post a picture, but photography isn't allowed in the museum. Still, Google him.)

When I got out of the show I went walking through Kensington, Brompton and Fulham, winding all the way to Fulham Palace on the river. This took me the rest of the afternoon -- I didn't get on a tube for home until almost 5 p.m. I stopped in a little restaurant along the way and had an "earth bowl" for lunch. It did not contain, as Dave later surmised, twigs, bark and snail shells, but instead broccoli, carrots, quinoa, kidney beans and walnuts.

It felt great to get out and move around! I'm going to do more of that as our vacation winds to its inevitable conclusion. (I go back to work in a little more than a week!)

Splooting and Scooby Doo

I have done little the last two days but lie on the couch and read. It poured rain yesterday afternoon, which is one of the reasons I've been more or less housebound. I'm also trying to catch up on a bunch of stuff -- magazines, saved news articles, small household tasks -- and make progress on those two books I mentioned Tuesday.

Yesterday's rain began just as Olga was about to go on her walk -- she was not happy and the whole time she was gone we thought about how miserable she must be. But then she bounded in the door in late afternoon, none the worse for wear, requiring only a brief rubdown with a damp cloth and some dry paper towels.

I don't know how those dog-walkers do it. It's got to be miserable parading around with a bunch of dogs in the pouring rain. They earn my unending admiration and gratitude. (Yes, we kept Olga's dog-walkers on through the summer, even though Dave and I are both home. We'd have to pay a small amount to maintain her slot anyway, so we figured, why not just let them keep walking her? It gives us more freedom to go out during the day, and it certainly helped while I was in Florida. Dave still doesn't have the energy for daily dog-walking.)

Incidentally, we learned that Olga's method of lying down -- with her back feet stretched out behind her and her belly flat on the ground -- is called "splooting." I never knew there was a word for it. But there you go.

On Tuesday the neighbor's gardeners were working on her back garden, and I ran out and asked if they could trim the monster bush that hangs over our patio. (Remember how we paid to have it cut back last year?) They agreed and came over with their ladder and did the job in no time. It's only fair, since it's the neighbor's bush. (This isn't Mrs. Kravitz -- this is the neighbor on the other side, who we barely ever see. I wouldn't know her if we collided in the aisle at Tesco.) We tried to give the gardeners an extra £20, but they wouldn't take it. Anyway, I'm so glad to have that done, and the patio once again feels much more open and sunny.

For dinner last night, Dave made pasta. He bought a bag of Italian noodles for bambini, and although the package doesn't say so, aren't they definitely derived from Scooby Doo? That middle noodle is clearly Scooby's profile, and the one on the right is the Mystery Machine. I suppose the one on the left could be a random ghost. What do you think?

We binge-watched the rest of the second season of "Fargo" -- it got so good we couldn't stop! So we're done with that show, now. We're also watching "Designated Survivor" on Netflix, which I have mixed feelings about but it's not bad, and "Ozark," which I like a lot. And we're still working on "Mad Men," which is consistently terrific, but we must be near the end by now -- maybe a season or so to go.

I have to get the heck out of the house today.

(Top photo: Hackney Wick, last weekend.)

iPhone Offloading

Here are some more photos from my iPhone, taken over the past few weeks. First a couple of discarded chairs in West Hampstead. K's chairs, apparently.

Here's another chair at my brother's house in Jacksonville. I liked the evening shadows on this one, particularly the red shadow. It's from light coming through this glass vase, which was once my grandmother's and now belongs to my brother.

When I took this photo my brother was not impressed. "Desperate," he said.

More shadows, at night in downtown Jacksonville.

While we were in Jacksonville we encountered this several times -- a flock of geese, moving very slowly, meandering around in the road. They'd stop traffic, even on the busiest thoroughfares. My brother said the geese population has really become a problem. Which makes me wonder: Why don't people eat Canadian geese? They must taste really terrible.

Back in West Hampstead now -- a big bin of construction debris on the street.

Here's Olga, enjoying yet another sprawl in the mud on Hampstead Heath. I have a million pictures of Olga in mud and I can never resist taking another one.

I picked a bunch of blackberries in our back garden and Dave turned them into Eton Mess, a dessert featuring berries, crumbled sweet meringues and whipped cream. I love Eton Mess and this was delicious, but I had to eat mine over two nights because there was too much for one sitting.

Eton Mess, by the way, is supposedly named because a student at the posh private school Eton once dropped a tray of meringue desserts, smashing them and mixing them up. Someone discovered they still taste pretty good that way! (That's the explanation for the name that I've heard, anyway. It could be legend.)

Finally, I don't know what the heck they're doing to this house down the street, but they've ripped out its innards and the other day a crane actually had its boom extended inside the front door, apparently installing or delivering something heavy. Some serious renovations!

This house had been the home of the orange azalea. For a while it remained in the front garden, even when the other bushes were cut down and construction had begun, and I thought the owners were going to save it. But when I came back from Florida, all this rubbish was piled where the bush had been. I don't know if they dug it out or just gave up and cut it down.

Questions

I was doing dishes when Dave walked into the kitchen last night with the news about Scaramucci. I was aghast. I don't know why Trump's actions continue to surprise me. I should have ceased to be surprised long ago. But does the man realize he's running a vast and powerful country, and not just making staffing decisions on "The Apprentice"?

Unbelievable.

It's this kind of reactionary instability that really gives me the willies about Trump. Because if he'll do this, what else is he capable of? Not that Scaramucci is any knight in shining armor.

That was by far the biggest news of the day yesterday. Otherwise, we hung around the house all day. I vacuumed and did housework and read a lot -- I'm in the unenviable position of reading two books simultaneously, one for work and one for pleasure. The latter is Arundhati Roy's new novel, which I'm enjoying so far. The assigned work book is called "A More Beautiful Question," and it's an exploration of the role of questioning in personal and organizational growth. I hate books about business and process and organizational health, but this one isn't too terrible so far. I'm going to try to read a chapter a day. Kind of like kids in the old days taking cod liver oil -- a little each day, and get it over with.

The author mentioned how questioning little children are, and it reminded me of my young niece Kate. I noticed when I was in Florida that her default question has become "Why?" Whenever I said anything to her, "Why?" was often the response. I must admit I was struck by that -- because of all questions, "Why?" and "How?" are probably the most complicated and the ones most likely to bring deeper answers. Pretty impressive (but also pretty typical) for a four-year-old!

Then again, I'm not sure we want to emulate little kids in our workplace questioning. We'd drive our bosses nuts!

(Photo: A canoe on the Regent's Canal, Hackney Wick.)