iPhone Gallery: Birds and Lanterns

On this Thursday when not much else is happening...how about another lineup of random iPhone photos?

First, a chalk drawing I found at the local housing estate of a colorful little bird in flight.

And then a real bird, sitting forlornly on a dog-watering bowl outside a local dry cleaners. It looks like it's not feeling well.

While we had to be content with one lantern on our Chinese lantern plant, another West Hampstead neighbor has boatloads of them! We must be doing something wrong.

Nearby, the dahlias were still looking good, especially with those dramatic stripey shadows in the background.

I walked past Abbey Road Studios the other day, and I always try to check out the graffiti. (It's a thing to write on the wall along the street in front of the studios -- I have no idea why.) I liked Bethany's rendering of George Harrison, obviously in his Sgt. Pepper getup.

More graffiti on a telephone box on Finchley Road -- mostly with a positive spin, like a very Melania Trump message to "just be the best" and a request to "kill the virus."

I found this school uniform and bag hanging on a hedge on my walk home from work one day. At first I thought some kid had shed them to play hooky, but then I figured they're probably being given away. Maybe the student outgrew them or moved to a school with a different uniform.

And finally, "High School Musical" is so 2006! One day's trendy butterfly chair is the next day's rubbish.

The Treasure Hunter

On my walk home yesterday I found both this orange-red leaf and this purple flower, which was lying in a gutter, having evidently broken off someone's bouquet. An autumnal tableau!

I had a very physical day at work yesterday. I had to move around the shelves in the bookcases that house our graphic novels. Although the kids can still browse our catalog online and request books, which we then deliver to their classrooms, the quantity and frequency of our checkouts is definitely down, and the graphic novels illustrate this point. They're very popular, and normally the shelves are continually ravaged. But now a lot of the books are lingering, and I think it's because the kids can't look them over before choosing one. (We're also allowing kids fewer books because we have to quarantine them for five days after their return, to allow any virus on them to die.)

Anyway, in practical terms, this means a lot of the books are staying in the library for longer, and the graphic novel shelves were so packed that books couldn't be properly organized. So I rearranged the shelves and made more space, and this turned out to be a major project involving not only moving books but finding a hammer and some screwdrivers. After about an hour, though, it all looked great, and I was thinking to myself, "Check out my mad carpentry SKILLZ!"

I got an e-mail from the USPS saying my ballot was delivered to the election office yesterday morning. My vote is in! Woo hoo!

Olga found a tennis ball on her morning walk. We always pass a tennis club on the next street over, and sometimes there are stray balls lying in the street, evidence of someone's overstrong returns. Olga grabs them like she's playing Pokemon Go, finding treasures in her path.

A Snug Bug

I went out in the garden yesterday after work and found this little green shield bug hiding out in our insect house (the same one where the bees were nesting earlier this year). Can you see him, tucked between the wooden cylinders?

This must be a rough time of year for insects. It's getting chilly and rainy and I wonder if they sense that their time is coming to an end. Actually, I doubt they have much concept of time -- or of themselves, for that matter.

I got an e-mail from the USPS this morning saying my election ballot has arrived in Tampa and is on its way to being delivered. Woo hoo!

I also see that Trump has been delivered back to the White House, all thumbs-up and dismissive of his infection (as we knew he would be). I'd hoped this experience would teach him something about respecting science and medicine, but I guess not. Instead he's walking around maskless with an active case of Covid. Argh!

As his doctor said, he's not out of the woods, though. Apparently the latter part of the infection can be worse than the beginning as the body's immune responses peak. 

The Times quotes another doctor saying it doesn't seem safe to allow him to go back to the White House, given that emergency situations can quickly arise in vulnerable patients with that latter-stage disease. But I'm sure Trump blustered and badgered everyone at Walter Reed into letting him go. They were probably happy to see the back of him.

Speaking of masks, we got our annual library portrait back the other day. We all take a group photo every year, and this year, of course, we're all wearing matching masks made by one of the librarians. You can't really tell in the (slightly blurry) picture, but the fabric is decorated with images of books.

I look a little wild-eyed, don't I? Then again, who isn't, these days?

A Sheltering Sunday

It rained pretty much all day yesterday. I ducked out into the garden with my camera to get a picture to blog -- this is one of our dahlias, still blooming when many of the others have pretty much stopped. Other than that, I didn't leave the house.

I had plenty to do, though -- laundry, vacuuming, cleaning the bathroom and kitchen. I threw away our shower curtain, which was in a truly deplorable state, just as our replacement arrived from Amazon. Perfect timing!

On the news, Boris is now advising us to live "fearlessly but with common sense" with regard to the coronavirus. How that translates into practical guidelines is apparently up to us. The consensus is that this government is remarkably ambiguous.

I also trimmed our gigantic dracaena, which was literally scraping the ceiling. (It looked like this a year ago, and it was even taller when I finally took the secateurs to it.) New sprouts will emerge at the top of those stalks -- there's already one on the middle stalk, which we cut a few months ago. I saved the cut pieces to root and turn into new plants, which maybe I'll take to work.

That stalk on the right is still a little tall, but I wanted to leave some leaves on the poor plant.

I spent the morning reading in bed, with Olga by my side:

It was that kind of a day!

Demonic Baby Revisited

Apparently we've had another named storm -- Alex. He brought us heavy rain yesterday morning and again all evening and into the night. It's pretty rainy even now. I'm not sure what determines whether a storm gets a name or not -- a certain wind speed, maybe? But I'm happy to have all this moisture.

We're at that time of the year when the garden is pretty much being left to its own devices. Everything is on the downslope, so I just go out now and then to see what's still blooming and take note of the slow yellowing, slumping and deterioration. It's very freeing! I don't have to lift a finger!

Olga and I went walking in the cemetery during the relatively dry afternoon. We stopped back by the mosaic so I could get a better look at Baby Jesus -- several of you thought he looked demonic in my previous picture. I wiped some schmutz off his face and photographed him again. I think he looks pretty respectable now, don't you? He certainly has a healthy head of hair.

Aside from our cemetery outing I spent virtually the whole day on the couch, plowing through a New Yorker and doing some reading online. There was an interesting article about space debris -- there are thousands, if not millions, of objects circling the earth left over from humankind's various space missions. Some of them are pretty big, many are just a bolt or a fleck of paint, but they can all do catastrophic damage should they collide with a satellite or the International Space Station. There are people who track all this stuff, much of which has its own numerical designation, to prevent those collisions. Wasn't space junk part of the plot in the movie "Gravity"?

I'm sort of disappointed in our patio chrysanthemum. It's blooming really well but the color is so meh. It's a sort of dead beige. When I bought it the flowers looked like they were going to be dark reddish, but it turns out that's just the backside of the very outermost petals.

Oh, and look what came for me in the mail! A personalized postcard from Katharine, whoever she is, reminding me to vote in the upcoming election. This is a thing now, to send postcards to overseas voters or those in critical swing states -- I've heard of people volunteering to do it but I've never received one before. This one looks like it's commercially printed but hand-colored. Katharine, rest assured, my ballot is already in the mail. (And the last time I checked the tracking, on Thursday, I believe, it was in transit through New York -- so it's already in North America. I'd check it again but the number is at work so I'll have to wait until tomorrow.)

Thinking Like Q

When I walked past the ol' Nautilus last weekend, it looked like someone had taken out its windows. Wonder what the story is there? We had a guy walking around bashing out shop windows many months ago, but I think the police eventually caught him. Hopefully this was just an accident.

Dave and I have still never been to this place. One of these days we need to try it.

So, yeah, what about the news of Trump and Covid? Karma, baby! I don't want to see him die, but I hope it at least makes him ill so he can see that it is real and it does affect people. (Apparently he is feeling symptoms and is enduring the inconvenience of hospitalization. Good.) Of course my mind, so primed for conspiracy thinking these days, immediately suspected the diagnosis was a hoax to excuse his debate performance and/or allow him to emerge in a week saying, "See? I had the virus and I'm fine! It's no big deal!" (There are apparently other people voicing similar suspicions.)

I told Dave that the right-wingers are going to assert that the Democrats somehow gave it to him. And yes, apparently that's already happening as well.

We've all become so insane. I'm not immune to it.

Remember that jimsonweed I photographed a couple of weeks ago? It got mowed down a day or two after I took my photo, but I found a limp stalk that included a seed pod, and I thought I'd bring it home and see if I could get the seeds to ripen. Now it's living quite happily in a milk bottle, putting out new leaves, and I'm wondering if it will even take root. Dave says, "That's why it's called a weed."

I'd love to have some in the garden. I think it's a very cool plant. (Yes, I know it's poisonous. I promise we won't make tea with it.)

I finally finished "I, Juan de Pareja." It wasn't my favorite Newbery book, I gotta say. A bit dry. But the author gets credit for creating a whole novel about a relationship that is apparently very poorly documented, historically. Velazquez didn't leave a whole lot behind besides his art, and neither did his erstwhile servant.

I love looking at the date stamps in some of our older library books. The library acquired this book in 1976, ten years after it was published, and it was first checked out the following April. I was nine years old! It spent my high school years -- the early '80s -- pretty much sitting on the shelf, but it was borrowed a couple of times in 1988, my last year of college. A couple more times in the early '90s, when I was in Morocco. When it was borrowed on March 21, 1994, I was actually in Seville, Spain -- where part of the book takes place! What are the odds? And it's interesting that after 2000 it sat untouched for seventeen years before being borrowed again.

A lot of our older books seem to suffer a dry spell after the late '90s. By then, kids were all over the Internet and playing video games, I suppose.

Dolphin Caravan

I came across this camper van while walking Olga yesterday morning. (She went out for her regular walk, all the way around the neighborhood! I guess she was feeling energetic.) I like this kind of retro dolphin graphic on the side. It looks like something from an early '80s Ocean Pacific t-shirt.

Here's the whole thing:

It's a Mercedes Sprinter. Apparently the driver has had some clashes with the local parking authorities...

...as he makes clear in the passenger-side window.

Anyway, I don't think Olga will be walking this morning, as it's raining again.

I was sorry to see that Helen Reddy died this week. She was almost my mother's age, and such a phenomenon in the '70s -- I remember seeing her on "The Muppet Show" and Carol Burnett, and I distinctly remember her appearing on some awards show wearing a dress with a radically plunging neckline. In fact, I'm not even sure it had a neckline -- I think it plunged all the way to her waist. My dad had her greatest hits on 8-track and we sometimes listened to it in his car. (He was that kind of a cool, liberated dad. He could listen to "I Am Woman" and appreciate it, though I'm not sure my mom would agree that he completely absorbed the message.) Did you ever see the surreal animated video for the song "Angie Baby," made for some '70s TV show? Very creepy. But then, it's a creepy song.