Lots of Questions

Another picture taken earlier this week during our short erstwhile spring, which now appears to be in retreat. Here's what we're in for, according to Weather.com:

Those temps are in Fahrenheit, obviously. Despite living in the UK for almost seven years, I still haven't managed to learn temperatures in Celsius. If someone says to me, "It's going to be 18 degrees today," I have no concept of what that means. It could mean boiling hot or freezing cold. I'm like an old immigrant grandma, wearing her babushka and stubbornly unable to speak the local language.

Anyway, the point is, the weather's not looking so great. I'm trying to keep in mind that "April-showers-bring-May-flowers" cliché.

Speaking of which, my wildflower bed is doing a whole lot of nothing. I've put four packages of seeds on it, and I have some tiny, tiny sprouts, but they're not really growing. Is it just too chilly out there? Maybe I didn't prepare the soil enough. But I keep thinking, they're WILDflowers. How much preparation do they need?

And what is Kim Jong-un up to, anyway? How did he go from being a swaggering tyrant threatening to blow us all off the planet to a cuddly, smiling peacemaker? Once again I feel, as I have so often felt over the last two years, like I'm navigating the Twilight Zone.

I'm sad about Bill Cosby -- not that he was convicted, because I believe those women and he should have been convicted. But I'm sad that someone I looked up to for so many years, someone I thought had his heart and morals in the right place, turned out to be such a hypocrite. I mean, we all make mistakes and we're fallible beings, but his behavior goes beyond mistake-making. I've admired Bill Cosby since the days of "Fat Albert," and I hate to have to let that go.

And now apparently Trump is coming to England. One of my colleagues has an apartment near the U.S. Embassy and she has pledged to have a party for anyone who comes and protests his visit. I would protest anyway, but who can resist the added enticement of a party?

I made an appointment to go back to the dentist in about a month to have my temporarily-filled tooth crowned. As I lay in bed last night I thought about how absurd this whole procedure has been -- if you count my last few checkups with my previous dentist, when I began complaining about pain in that molar, it all adds up to seven appointments to get this tooth fixed. Does that not seem completely insane? To get the tooth crowned I need two, and I needed two for the root canal, plus the initial consultation with the new dentist after two failures by the previous dentist to find anything wrong. SEVEN appointments. And actually eight, because I had to pop in a month and a half ago for that extra round of antibiotics.

Sheesh.

iPhone Photo Parade

Well, the weather is yucky today and I have nothing much to say, so how about some random iPhone photos?

First, a peculiar piece of metal with magnetic white squares stuck to it, apparently left out for the trash man. I have no earthly idea what it could be.

Dave and I found this poster on the way to Homebase one morning. I thought it had something to do with a religious cult, but then I found out Baby Blue Aura is a band.

At Homebase we found...hedgehog kibble? Who knew?

(We didn't buy any. I'm sure we don't have any hedgehogs in our garden, and with Olga around we wouldn't want to attract them even if we could. As I understand it the only population of wild hedgehogs in London is in Regent's Park.)

I found a fiver while walking Olga! Woo hoo!

Remember the "free zone" near the library, where someone would set out peculiar stuff for others to take? Well, it's disappeared, and this sign was left in its wake. Apparently the free zone has come to an end, at least at that location. (I haven't seen it surface anywhere else.)

Thames Water has been doing repairs to a water main on the high street. The project seems like it's been going on and on for weeks, though I'd be hard pressed to say exactly when it began, and the hole is gigantic. The road is already a traffic nightmare through here, and the construction has closed off a handy pedestrian crosswalk, so here's hoping the work ends soon.

I found more old carvings in a tree trunk on Hampstead Heath. Looks like Chenille and Ken, maybe? I'm not sure why there are two years mentioned -- maybe they dated for six years, or maybe they weren't there at the same time!

An old-fashioned wooden sign on a garage near Wormwood Scrubs...

...and finally, another sign that I found on my way home from work last night. The other side was blank. Strangely ambiguous! I wonder if anyone congregated?

Plugged In, Part 2

Remember that artwork I posted a few weeks ago, the stencil of the electrical sockets on a dirty wall? Well, I found a cleaner version that shows the full piece, with the wires running from one plug to another. So this is what it's really meant to look like. Circle of life? Futility of purpose? I have no idea.

Our camassia lilies, which are new in our garden this year, are blooming. They're native to North America, so they make us feel right at home! Dave bought some camassia bulbs for one of his coworkers as a housewarming gift a couple of years ago, and when we saw them in her garden we decided to get some of our own. They got nibbled when they first came up, but whatever ate them didn't persist so they grew just fine. The biggest risk seems to be the dog breaking off the flower stalks.

And here's our latest gardening dilemma. It's an inula that sprouted between some paving stones on our patio, of all places. Inulas get very large -- at least as tall as I am, which is six feet or so -- so we've been debating whether to move it (which would entail pulling up the pavers on the patio), kill it or let it alone to do its thing. It's an excellent example of the right plant in the wrong place. Dismantling the patio seems extreme but if the inula survives there I think it will do its own damage, so...

...stay tuned on that one.

A Bright Cow, via Twitter

I've been experimenting again with Twitter. I know, I'm a decade behind, but I've learned that it's a good way to keep up on very local news and events. If you can "follow" a couple of people who are observant about what's going on in your neighborhood, you can learn a lot.

I've tried tweeting a bit -- I asked what those hay-covered cages are at the cemetery, for example -- but I didn't get any responses. Maybe because no one follows me? I tried to direct the questions to others using the @AccountName method, but maybe they still didn't see them. I did find out, though, that there was a wildlife habitats workshop at the cemetery a week or two before those cages showed up -- so I'm sure they're somehow related to that.

I also learned about the existence of this groovy cow (above) in a mews in West Hampstead. I've taken pictures there before, but that was before the cow showed up. I photographed it yesterday morning on my way to work.

I'm still ambivalent about Twitter (I deleted my seldom-used original account several years ago) and I don't think I'll be on it a whole lot, but I think it might come in handy here and there. And no, I'm not going to follow Donald Trump.

Speaking of things that make us cranky, I had the crankiest morning yesterday. It was just one of those days when everything annoyed me. We're coming up on lease renewal time for our flat, and I always get tense at about this time, imagining that we'll be evicted and have to go live somewhere else. So that was part of the problem...

...and then I snarled at a woman at work. I was trying to get coffee in the staff lounge, and a gaggle of people were standing around the machine, taking their time and chatting and not really getting coffee, so I was waiting for access. And another teacher swept in, pushed through the gaggle and set her cup on the machine. I stepped up to her and said, "I WAS WAITING" in a not very friendly voice. And then I felt terrible, thinking, "Oh, Lord, I need to work with this woman." So I walked it all back and apologized, and told her I was having a bad morning, and she let me get my coffee, and then I sent her an e-mail apologizing again and she came down to the library and we had a good laugh about it. So all's well that ended well.

But, just for the record, she did jump the queue.

The Collecting Impulse

More adventures in home maintenance yesterday morning: We had to have a plumber in to clear an external drain where the upstairs neighbor's washing machine empties. The wash water comes down an outside wall through a pipe and into this ground drain, which had become blocked. Consequently the washing machine was emptying all over the concrete alleyway at the side of the house. (It was even flowing partly onto Mrs. Kravitz's patio, and I'm astonished she never raised a ruckus about it.)

Anyway, the plumber came, mucked around with the drain, and now we think it's working -- although there was still a damp area when I came home from work yesterday afternoon, so I'm not 100 percent convinced.

As my mother says, "Everything has to be done at least twice."

Yesterday, one of my blog commenters mentioned the apparent contradiction between my minimalist decorating sense (as shown in the link to pictures of my old New York apartment) and my tendency to pick things up, like the t-shirt I found.

It is absolutely true that I am a collector at heart. I always have been. As a child I collected stamps, leaves, beer cans, bottles, bottle caps, seashells, rocks, coins and stickers, among other things. And I didn't just accumulate them -- I curated them, looking up proper identifications and, in some cases, typing up records of where I found them and under what circumstances. I was an obsessive little kid.

As you've seen, I still have those tendencies -- on Sunday, in fact, I picked up these beautiful feathers while walking the dog at Wormwood Scrubs. (I think they're from a pheasant -- probably a pheasant who met a bad end. I've never seen a pheasant at the Scrubs but I guess they could be there.)

That's why blogging is such a good activity for me. It allows me to type up that same record, in narrative form. Basically you're reading an account of all my daily collecting, whether objects or experiences. And I don't have to keep the objects, having recorded them here. (I didn't keep the feathers.)

Which is where the minimalism comes in. See?

I also really, really hate any kind of waste. If I can give a discarded object a second life, I will.

Here's a very minimalist plant from our garden. It's a sage that Dave planted about ten days ago, and as you can see, it was completely stripped of leaves almost overnight by our voracious slugs. I pulled it out of the ground yesterday morning and put it in a pot, giving it some protection on the patio table -- talk about a second life! -- but I'm not sure it's even going to survive at this point.

What is up with our supercharged, weaponized slugs?!

(Top photo: Shoreditch, on Wednesday last week.)

A Day in the Sun

So yesterday, Olga and I walked past the twee bakery on the high street and I'll be darned if the dog bowl didn't have water in it! What are the odds? Did they read my blog yesterday?!

I swear that is the first time that's happened.

This (above) is how we spent our entire morning -- sitting on the bench in the garden, Olga comfortably atop her Union Jack dog bed. Dave was still out of town so we had the entire day to ourselves. I sat and read an entire issue of The New Yorker, and started my newest book, "The Woman in the Window," which is good so far. Olga snoozed in the sun.

Here's the obligatory annual photo of bluebells in the garden...

...and the bleeding hearts, aka dicentra, are blooming too. In fact, so much is suddenly blooming at the moment -- the aquilegia and the candytuft, our yellow wallflower, our white camellia. It's crazy out there. And I'm seeing bees and hoverflies and early butterflies, like cabbage whites and holly blues.

Speaking of dicentra -- and there really is a connection here -- I just learned that my old apartment in New York is on the market again. I was on Zillow looking at something else, and I tried some of my old addresses just out of curiosity, and found the listing. The apartment looks much swankier than it did when I lived there. They remodeled and expanded the kitchen and put it some fancy appliances. The bathroom, however, looks exactly the same.

(The dicentra connection is that there was a dicentra in the back garden of the apartment building, and I looked forward to it blooming every year.)

And finally, at the risk of seeming completely insane, I want to show you my newest t-shirt. New to me, that is. Yes, I found it, on one of my walks. It was discarded in a field with some other clothing that I did not rescue, because after all I was walking and besides, one has to be selective about these things. As you can see it got a bit faded from lying in the sun -- but I like that. Call it fashionably distressed. The logo is pretty small, in the center of the chest. I dig this shirt, and given the message, finding it seems appropriate!

Pink Trees

It's pink tree season here in London -- the cherries are out and looking vibrant. Olga was especially impressed with this one. (OK, I was impressed and Olga was indifferent.)

And then there was this one, which we found in Hampstead on the way to the Heath. It had musical accompaniment from someone in a nearby house who was playing the flute. Not some middle-school kid, either -- someone who knew what they were doing, which gave the scene a very cultured air. I love it when spring comes and people open their windows and share their sounds with passersby.

We passed another house in Hampstead where electric guitar was pouring out of the windows. Good electric guitar. I thought, is that a record? Or maybe someone famous lives there, and they're practicing? Could I be passing the house of a '60s rock legend and have no idea?

It was a perfect day for walking, overall -- sunny and cool. And then we got quite a bit of rain in the night, and now, this morning, it's sunny and cool again! Ideal garden weather!

Speaking of which, I think the slugs are eating my wildflower sprouts. Argh! I thought, being wildflowers, they would be somewhat immune to pests. But apparently not our pests, which are seemingly bionic. I just went out to look at the seed patch and there were several little worm-like slugs crawling around on it, and some gnawed leaves on the sprouts. I also interrupted two earthworms mating, which was a puzzling sight. (Sorry about that, worms!)

Yesterday I ran some errands on the high street. A new-ish bakery moved in a few months ago, down by the Thameslink station, and I've decided I don't like that place at all. It's just a little too twee. Dave and I went there once and I think we concluded it was fancy looking and a bit expensive and just not very impressive. Plus they have a dog bowl out front that never has any water in it. It's always dry as a bone. Olga sticks her nose in it every time she passes and comes up with nothing. Somehow I find that incredibly annoying.