Running Late

I am having the weirdest experience this morning -- I just woke up a few minutes ago (which is an issue in itself) and I cannot focus my eyes! I mean, I don't think it's a serious problem. I think it's just old eyes. But it's so strange.*

I hear the garbage truck thundering out in the street, the crashing of all our recyclables, and Olga is lying next to me with no desire to go anywhere. And I don't blame her.

Unfortunately, I have to haul myself out of bed and go make a living. Today will involve more book weeding in the library, which is what I did yesterday too. Hopefully by then my eyes will have focused!

(Photo: An apartment building in Hampstead.)

*Addendum: An hour and a half later I'm at work and I'm fine, and my eyes are fine. They adjusted after a short time of being up and awake. There is no crisis! I'm sorry I ever mentioned it!

Dandelions and Historic Preservation

This remarkable front garden is just down the street from us on Fortune Green Road. It has been entirely colonized by dandelions, and when they're all blooming it's quite a spectacle. I'm a big believer in saving dandelions, because the bees love them, but they do run rampant if they're allowed to go to seed -- as these have been.

Here's an overview. It looks more unkempt than intentionally left wild, especially with that hunk of wood or whatever lying in the middle. The bluebells always wind up looking a little baked, because bluebells are shade-loving plants suited to living under trees in a wood. I think if this were my garden I'd plow it up and start over, and plant things that like direct sun.

So, there's my armchair gardening for the day.

Speaking of plowing things up, my brother sent me a depressing article from my hometown newspaper about a historic house that's going to be demolished. This place looks beautiful and wildly eccentric and artsy and also well-preserved; I think it's a crime to allow it to be torn down. It's another example of an older home in Florida being flattened so an owner can build something bigger and more modern with a lot less character. There are more pictures on the Zillow listing.

My brother is involved in historic preservation so he could explain this dynamic a lot better than I can, but basically, in Florida, where there's a strong tradition of private property rights and relatively little appreciation for local history, communities are often unable or unwilling to flex the regulatory muscle that would prevent such destruction. City leaders, starved of civic income by successions of tax-averse Republican-leaning governments, are terrified of expensive lawsuits. I hope they find a way to stop this place being demolished, but with waterfront land at an expensive premium it's probably unrealistic to expect the city to step in and secure it for any public purpose. (It would make a great museum, though, much like the admittedly much grander Ringling Mansion in Sarasota.)

I must say, this is one cool aspect of living in London; history is all around us, and there are strong regulations to ensure that neighborhoods remain architecturally and historically consistent. There are still controversies but the government denies planning applications or requests modifications all the time. (By the way, I think the proposed Hampstead house in that linked article is actually pretty interesting -- and unlike the Florida situation, it's replacing an unremarkable structure with no historic or aesthetic significance.)

Otherwise, it's life as usual around here. I'm starting to weed more of our library collection in preparation for the big move in a few weeks. But I believe in historic preservation, so I'm saving some old stuff, as long as it has character and remains useful!

Parakeet Sunshower

Dave and I were sitting in the living room yesterday evening when he pointed out the window to show me a parakeet on the bird feeder. As we watched a second one landed, and I went to get the camera. By the time I got back, we had a third! I don't think I've ever seen so many on our feeders at once. They were chowing on those suet balls, and all in the middle of a sunshower.

I had to take the picture through our windows, which are a bit on the grimy side, because of course if I'd tried to open them, the birds would have flown off. Photography dilemmas!

The candytuft is blooming again...

...as is the aquilegia, or columbine. See the little ant on the middle flower?

We got some news yesterday about major changes coming to the library for the next school year. Basically the school is taking some of our space to make a classroom, and the head librarian has decided to change the arrangement of the collection as a result -- so we're going to need to pack up almost every single one of our 27,000 books and move them to different shelves. We'll do some additional weeding and reorganization as needed. It's going to be a gigantic job, and we can't begin until at least June 1, because we've got students using the resources until then. I get palpitations just thinking about it!

Lying in the Leaves

We are finally having some inclement weather -- gusty winds and spatters of rain. Not really showers, which we need, but it's better than nothing. The winds have been blowing the loose petals out of the cherry trees, which are finishing up their blooming cycle, and there are big pink drifts on the sidewalks.

The primroses on our front porch have been looking fairly sad lately, so I walked up to Homebase yesterday morning and picked up a few trays of annuals. I also got a hanging basket of those "Night Sky" petunias I like, with the dark purple petals speckled with white, star-like dots.

On the way to Homebase, as I was passing the railroad tracks, I saw this:

I've seen similar "locks of love" in various famous places around the world, but I don't ever recall finding them in my own neighborhood. What does it say about a relationship when someone puts locks on a crap piece of fencing along the railroad tracks behind Homebase? I believe they're in Korean. Maybe Vivian can translate.

Anyway, this is the front porch now -- a pot of marigolds and something called Mimulus, or monkeyflower, which I've never bought before.

Here's a monkeyflower close-up. I also bought some gazanias for the back garden because I was so happy with the ones we got last summer. I didn't throw away the primroses because they'll bloom again next year -- I just moved them to the back patio.

I took Olga to the Heath in the afternoon, but she wasn't super-energetic and we didn't do our full Heath walk -- just a bit of rambling through the woods on the West Heath. We've run out of her anti-inflammatory meds so I think her arthritis is bothering her a bit.

If you're ready for the most boring one-minute Olga video in the world, you can watch her lying in the leaves and keeping an eye on things, above. Fair warning -- there's a bit of barking at the end, so adjust your volume accordingly!

I Engage With the Proletariat

Our neighbors have a couple of really nice crabapple trees, and this is what they look like from our patio on a sunny morning -- a wall of bright, vivid pink.

Yesterday felt very strange. We had two friends over for brunch, our first social guests in more than a year. First we both took Covid tests, just in case. Then I spent the morning cleaning as Dave made a frittata and a fruit salad, and by the time Colin and Warren arrived at 11 a.m., the place was as clean as it was ever going to get. We sat out in the back garden and had mimosas (or buck's fizzes as they're known in England), and although the skies were mostly gray and the temperatures chilly, we spent a couple of hours eating out there. Olga sat with us and got some bacon.

After they left, though, the rest of the day felt off. I guess drinking at 11 a.m. will do that, although I only had three mimosas over a couple of hours -- it's not like I was schnockered. My routines felt disrupted.

Some guy came to the door on Saturday selling newspapers for the Internationalist Workers' Club. Although I live on a fairly bourgeois street I'm generally sympathetic to left-wing politics -- a "limousine liberal" without the limousine -- and plus he was kind of cute, so I bought a copy. I bravely attempted to read it, but it bills itself as a "Journal of Marxist Analysis" offering "Proletarian Opposition to European Imperialism and Unitary Imperialism," and the banner headline on the front page is: "External Constriction and Materialist Theory." Doesn't that just make your eyes roll up into your head? I suppose there's a reason Communists have a reputation for being humorless. They need to leaven those pages with a little Kim Kardashian. (I know, I know, she's not even remotely Marxist, but I Googled "Marxist sex symbols" and nothing comes up.)

The camassias are blooming in the garden and looking pretty good despite our recent lack of rain. We're supposed to get rain today and into this week, and I hope it really happens because we could use it. The ground is as hard as a rock.

I scheduled my second Covid vaccine for June 3, which is almost exactly twelve weeks after my first one -- the standard waiting period between doses here in Britain. Dave and I were both told our GP would contact us to make an appointment, but we've heard nothing so I decided to be proactive and do it myself. I just wanted to get it on the calendar. I can always cancel if the doctor calls me in the interim. Dave also tried and the NHS's online platform wouldn't let him book, I suppose because he's in some special category of medically vulnerable people. But he should be getting a call any day because his first vaccine was several weeks before mine.

I tried to walk Olga in the afternoon, and she acted excited until we walked out the front door into the chilly, gray afternoon. She stopped on the front step and wouldn't budge. She turned right around and came back inside.

These are the foxglove seedlings I potted on Saturday -- plus two additional trays not in the picture. You can see the densely planted seedlings as they were originally grown in the green seed tray. I could grow a whole nursery's worth of plants if I pricked them all out into their own pots. Foxglove overload!

Camera and Cemetery

I took the dog and the newly-repaired camera to Hampstead Cemetery yesterday and had some fun taking pictures. Although the iPhone is fine in a pinch, I much prefer my big camera, which allows me to control for things like depth of field (giving me a blurry background above, for example) and allows me to use my zoom and macro lenses.

This area is at the very back of the cemetery, where someone has recently done a lot of clearing -- basically trying to reclaim it from the forest. I have mixed feelings about this, because that forest is undoubtedly good habitat for critters, but I guess if I were there to visit the graves I wouldn't want them to be inaccessible. (I think most of the graves in this area are pretty old -- 100 years or so.)

Olga enjoyed being out, but she was feeling quite leisurely. There was a lot of lolling around in the grass. The squirrels had nothing to fear.

Here's another pattern of lichen growth and weathering on the back of one of the gravestones.

Hampstead Cemetery is apparently known for its large quantity of Celtic crosses.

Finally, here's some wild garlic mustard, a common wildflower also known as jack-in-the-hedge. Some people consider it a weed but it's easy to pull up if you don't like it, and it's good food for certain butterfly species.

Speaking of weeds, I did some gardening yesterday morning, pricking out more foxglove seedlings into trays with individual compartments. I have nine trays of six plants each, so we should have plenty of foxgloves! And I still have a boatload of tiny seedlings in the original seed tray. I say this every year but WHY DID I PLANT SO MANY?!

I also planted a tray of sunflower seeds and a tray of jimsonweed. Apparently I was supposed to soak the jimsonweed seeds first, and I didn't do that, so we'll see how that goes. I have extras of both if these don't work.

Finally, I tried to thin the poppy seedlings in the pot, but they're planted so thickly I can't even discern individual plants! I just took out clumps here and there to try to create some space. I think Darwin is going to have to handle the culling in that particular situation. Hopefully they won't all die, but again, I planted too many, so let this be a lesson for me.

Shaking Things Up

Dave and I were walking to work yesterday when we passed this wall of brightly colored posters on Finchley Road. They're related to the mayoral election on May 6.

Valerie Brown is running on behalf of the anti-establishment Burning Pink party. I don't know about her policies -- she has a manifesto here, and it sounds to me like a recipe for paralysis-by-committee, but I appreciate anyone who recognizes the failures of the status quo and wants to try something new. Still, if I were voting I'd go for Sadiq Khan again. (I can't vote because I'm not a UK citizen.)

We have a three-day weekend because Monday is our early May bank holiday. Reading, gardening and walking the dog are in my immediate future. (So unusual, right?) We're also planning to have a couple of friends over on Sunday for a garden brunch, which will be exciting -- we haven't had company for more than a year!

I finished our library inventory and only ten of our regular books have gone missing this year, which is pretty amazing -- last year it was something like 65. (That doesn't count some little Spanish books we bought for the language classes. The students were all required to read one, and about 20 of them are still missing, but since we know who those kids are we might be able to round them up.)

In the middle of the day, the camera shop called and said my camera was ready for pickup -- so after work I zipped down to Vauxhall and collected it. Woo hoo! I planned to walk up to the Thames and take some pictures right away, but wouldn't you know, the battery was completely dead, so I had to bring it home and charge it up before I could use it. I'll take it out today when Olga and I go walking.