Special Guest Star Provides Fish Cakes

Well, I had a little lie-in (as the British say) this morning, so now I'm running behind schedule. I have to leave the house in about 30 minutes. No walk for Olga! (Her dog-walker comes at midday, so she'll be fine.)

My morning lethargy is no doubt a result of the wild night I had with fellow blogger Mitchell and his husband, known to us in blogland as San Geraldo. First we had some drinks at a pub, and then we went to a strip club, and then we went dancing and I was out until 4 a.m.!

OK, none of that is true. Well, except the pub drinks. And the fact that I did meet up with Mitchell and SG, both of whom are generous and charming. I went down to Kensington, where they are staying during their sojourn in London, and met Mitchell at the Gloucester Arms pub, where we sat for nearly four hours talking about our expat lives, learning languages, Palm Springs and, of course, blogs. SG joined us midway through and they even treated me to dinner (the titular fish cakes) which was completely unexpected but welcome!

There we are, about to leave the cozy pub, where none of us watched that football game in the background. (I didn't even realize it was on until I took the picture!) I think I told SG I wasn't going to post our selfie but it's a good one and none of us look silly so I'm gambling that he won't mind.

Blogging is so funny. I'd never met Mitchell in person, but just as when I first met Mary Moon and John Gray, I felt like I'd known him for years. I guess you can't read about a person's life in such detail for so long and not develop a pretty deep sense of who they are. I felt like I already knew not just informational details about Mitchell, but what he's like as a person, deep down. So it was a first meeting, but it didn't feel like a first meeting.

Plus they're good storytellers, which is a skill you need to blog effectively! And I'm just realizing, looking at that selfie, that I was wearing the shirt I bought at the Bad Girls Get Saved By Jesus thrift store while I was visiting Mary in Lloyd -- yet another blog connection.

Anyway, it was a very fun evening, and on the way out of the pub we zipped across the street to take photos of that colorful and ornate pizza restaurant in the top picture. With a lighting scheme like that, who could resist?

And now, off to work!

Comments and a Kilner Jar

This is another shopfront from my walk through East London a week ago. That guy was gesturing to someone inside to open the side door for him. Don't you love that hand-painted sign?

Blogger is giving me fits this morning, not letting me upload photos in my usual way. I'm having to drag and drop them from my desktop rather than using the upload tool. Let's hope it's a transient problem.

I had a very low-key day yesterday. I walked Olga in the morning but otherwise we didn't leave the house. The weather was damp and gray and I stayed mostly on the couch reading "Barnaby Rudge." I'm 150 pages in and it's not bad, though there's no sign of the Gordon Riots yet, and they're supposed to be the centerpiece of the book. Dickens does like to set the stage.

I considered going on another photo walk and even had some ideas for where to go, but the weather was so uninspiring I just couldn't do it. As I'm sure you've read there were massive protests over Gaza in London this weekend and I sure didn't want to get in the middle of those. As I told someone not long ago in the blog comments, I don't feel like I have a dog in that fight -- at least not more than I do in any humanitarian disaster -- and it's such a poisonous issue with so many opinions being bandied about that mine isn't likely to make a bit of difference. Perhaps that's cowardly, but seriously, is there any more toxic subject for debate than Israel and the Palestinians?

I got mostly caught up on blog reading, which is a plus. Oh -- someone asked me when I answer comments on my blog. Here's the deal on that: I do answer them, in most cases, but it often takes me a while. My blogging routine is to get up in the morning, make coffee, and sit down and write a post. Somehow I work a shower, breakfast and a dog walk into the schedule, and then I go to work. Once there, I answer the previous post's comments, unless I'm too busy, in which case I may not get to it until the next day. The afternoons I reserve for reading and commenting on other blogs. If I don't answer comments by the second day, I usually just let them go -- no one's going to be looking back any earlier than that for my responses, anyway. I do read them all, though.

So, long story short, I try to answer them and I'd estimate I do about 75 percent of the time. But sometimes, life happens instead!

Here are some items I found on the street while walking the dog on Saturday. A neighbor put them out with some other stuff by their trash bins, and I first passed them walking Olga to Fortune Green. I thought, "If those are still there when we come back, I'll take a look." And they were, so I grabbed the heavy cut-glass relish tray and brought it home to Dave. I told him about the jar and he sent me back for it. (So in this case, he can't complain about me bringing stuff home!)

The jar is a Kilner, which is an old name in British canning -- kind of like Mason jars in the states, I think. You may remember I once found a broken fragment of an antique Kilner jar on Hampstead Heath that I kept on our windowsill for a while. This new one is quite nice. I told Dave we should use it for Olga's Dentastix!

Oh, and some more exciting vacation plans are in the offing. It's a long way away, but Dave and I have reignited our plans to visit Brazil and Argentina. You may remember we had a trip to Brazil planned in 2020, before Covid hit and derailed everything. I've made a reservation on a new package holiday that will take us to both countries next summer. I'm not crazy about the idea of leaving the dog for two weeks but here's hoping we can sort that out without too much trauma for her. We have to live our lives, after all!

I've Written an Encyclopedia

Olga explores the autumnal garden

Well, I went out yesterday to take a look at the dahlias, in preparation for lifting the tubers, and they all still have leaves -- in some cases quite a lot of leaves. They're still big and bushy. Which makes me think it's too early to lift them. I'm going to hold off another week or two. There's no frost in the forecast, so no rush.

Instead of lifting dahlias, I lifted the bed in our bedroom and performed my semi-annual cleaning beneath it, including vacuuming up a Sahara's worth of dust and combing through Dave's ridiculously large and cobwebby collection of shoes. He owns about 15 pairs and wears about three. He did agree to get rid of some of them, which is progress.

I also changed the sheets and towels and took everything to the laundry, vacuumed the rest of the house and took care of all the plants. Look!

That's our light pink Thanksgiving cactus, which grew from a cutting that blog reader Frances sent me a couple of years ago. It's got lots of buds this year and seems to be prospering.

Remember the prayer plant I repotted a couple of weeks ago? Suddenly it has a little crop of mushrooms growing in the pot. Hmmmm...maybe I'm keeping it too damp! The plant seems happy, though, and has several new leaves.

In the afternoon, after reading some Dickens and eating a bizarre leftover-driven lunch (basically refried beans on toast), I took Olga to the cemetery. She chased her ball and had a good time. No sign of the turaco -- it has vanished once again to wherever it goes in the winter.

Here's a strange story. This place took over a vacant shopfront near Fortune Green way back in the spring. The owners brought in furniture, erected a nice sign and put in a bunch of planters and filled them with beautiful flowers. And then -- nothing. For months, every time I passed this place, it was locked up and there were no signs of life. Last week I did actually see a human being inside the shop, but the furniture is still stored haphazardly, the windows are filthy and I have yet to see any baked goods.

In a sign of how unreliable Google reviews are, I was amused to find two reviews for this place. One of them gave it five stars merely for existing, and the other gave it three stars and said "the bakery was excellent and good but the windows looked very dirty." I don't see how that person could have a clue how good the bakery is, unless it was actually open for about five minutes at some point and I missed it.

Anyway, it's a mystery. They seem in no rush to open, or if they are open, to make that more apparent.

This morning, when I opened my e-mail, an ad for Maserati cars popped up. I must have triggered some algorithm by being a fifty-something male who's likely to be having a mid-life crisis. That's better than some of the spam e-mail I got, including one with the subject line, "Four signs that parasites are living in your body." Maybe they know I was in the Peace Corps?

Oh, and Fresca recently posted an interesting link to a company that will turn a blog into a book. You can upload a blog's URL and they'll show you a sample of the printed version and tell you how much the whole job would cost. In my case, it would cost $3,294.78 to print my blog in 24 volumes. HA!

The Covenant

Here's what greeted me when I set out for work yesterday morning. Fortunately I brought my umbrella, as that rainbow quickly turned into a drizzly rain. November!

I'd already taken Olga for her walk, so she stayed dry. She was full of energy yesterday, demanding to be taken to the high street and than on our neighborhood loop -- basically about twice as far as we usually go. She was very insistent. Some days she's just in a mood.

I thought sure I was coming down with a cold yesterday morning. Two of my co-workers are sick and I was feeling a suspicious tickle in my throat and had some sinus trouble. I was bummed because I was supposed to meet Mitchell and his partner for lunch today, as they're visiting London from Spain. But I didn't want to infect them with anything, and certainly not right at the outset of their trip! So I postponed. I'll catch up with them later this week.

And of course today I feel fine. Go figure.

Today is supposed to be sunny and I'm hoping to get the dahlias lifted. I'm going to take each one out of its pot, rinse off the tubers, wrap them in newspaper and put them in dry storage in our shed. Next spring they'll go back into their pots with fresh soil. I haven't lifted them for a couple of years -- I've taken the lazy way out instead, storing them in their pots, soil and all -- but I think next spring they will really need new dirt. So that's the plan.

Here's a colorful (if slightly blurry) autumn leaf for you. Doesn't it look like a sunrise?

A Question of Balance

The parakeets on the garden bird feeder were doing a sort of weird, parallel movement thing yesterday morning. It was like interpretive dance, or an Esther Williams synchronized swimming routine (minus the swimming).

Perhaps it helped them stay balanced on the swinging feeder.

These are the birds that Mrs. Russia intensely dislikes because they're "too loud." She told me that's why they put out their weird beach ball thing. Well, either it doesn't work or they haven't re-hung it after our recent windstorms because the birds are back, squawking away. And of course I feed them which probably annoys her to no end.

I like to think of myself as a good neighbor, because I do stay out of other people's business -- except for complaining about them on the blog, of course. But I don't always respect their wishes. Having a bird feeder isn't a huge offense, it seems to me.

We put up a display in the library featuring all the books that have won the Booker Prize over the years -- at least the ones we have, which is most of them -- as well as several on this year's shortlist. (This is in anticipation of the prize being announced later this month.) We were missing one shortlisted book that, according to some people, is slightly favored to win -- so I bought it on my walk home from work last night. My gift to the library! It had better win, now that I've spent the money. I suppose I'll be more likely to read it, being somewhat invested.

Names, Names, Names

I have launched into my regular autumn challenge of reading a Charles Dickens novel. I'm finally tackling "Barnaby Rudge," one of his lesser-known books. I could have chosen "Bleak House," which I've also not yet read, but I thought it might be interesting to pick one that isn't as famous.

I've had Barnaby on my radar for about ten years. The first year I worked in the library, one of the other librarians tried to weed it because it had never been checked out. I fought to keep it because it's part of a matched set of Dickens that I didn't want to break up, and I've felt ever since that I should give it a try. I've checked it out a few times before with the intention of reading it but never got launched.

It's 634 pages long. I'm on page 27 -- over the first hurdle! The book is set during the Gordon Riots of 1780, a period of anti-Catholic violence that I know nothing about, so this is an educational opportunity as well.

Dave had to go get an MRI on his ear last night, so I had baked beans and peanut butter toast for dinner and watched two episodes of the new season of "Bosch: Legacy." Dave is not a fan of that show but I like it, so whenever he's not here I try to watch an episode or two. I only realized last night that Mimi Rogers, the woman who plays Honey Chandler, was Tom Cruise's first wife (and possibly the person who introduced him to Scientology). I remember being quite jealous of her back in the '80s -- she not only married Cruise but had previously dated Emilio Estevez, two of my most ardent college-age crushes. In retrospect that jealousy was silly for about three dozen reasons, but hey, I was young.

Remember that rosebud I photographed about ten days ago? Well, here's the flower it became. It had a problem known as "balling," which occurs when the outer petals get wet and then dry in the sun, causing them to contract and not allowing the flower to fully open. As you can see, the outer petals are a bit brown. I teased the rest of the blossom apart and brought it inside so we could enjoy the fragrance. It's one of our best-smelling roses and probably one of the last of the season (certainly for that particular plant).

I had a dream last night that Graham Nash got cancelled for signing his autograph on a woman's buttock.

(Top photo: An autumnal tree in Plaistow, East London.)

Seedy Bread and Glowing Wine

Here's another picture from my walk on Sunday. Hovis is a popular brand of bread in the UK -- in fact it's what I usually buy -- a variety called "Seed Sensations" with sunflower and pumpkin and poppy seeds around the outside. Anyway, I got a kick out of this old advertisement.

I am not going to talk about politics -- that got me off on the wrong foot yesterday and I felt grumpy and depressed. (Fortunately yesterday's election results are looking pretty positive!) I only worked a half day because I had to get home for what I hoped would be the installation of a new dishwasher. We had a special event in the library (this poet teaching a class) in the morning, and I left right after lunch.

The dishwasher guy had said he'd be here between 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. I hoped he'd come at the beginning of that window so I could get back to work, but of course he didn't show up until 4:45. He literally came in, asked me what the problem was, took a photo of the dishwasher, and said he'd file a report with our maintenance company. He didn't even turn on the machine. He was here about three minutes.

Mind you, this is after I filed my own report and sent them a video and photos of the machine and its model number. In other words, I can't see that this visit gave them any information they didn't already have. He decided the problem was the heating element -- the same conclusion I reached last week after Googling it. "I have read online that others using our brand of dishwasher have experienced this same problem," I e-mailed on Oct. 31. "One person attributed it to a defective or failed heating element."

So from my perspective, the whole visit was a complete waste of time. Sigh. At least I was able to catch up on some household tasks like vacuuming and laundry. I just want to get this dishwasher situation settled before Thanksgiving, because we're having six people for dinner and I don't want to have to hand-wash all the dishes. Okay, it's a first-world problem and a minor one compared to those faced by people living in Ukraine and Gaza. But still.

Here's another photo from Sunday. This street sign notes that legendary singer Vera Lynn lived on Ladysmith Avenue in East Ham from the ages of four to 21. A sign on nearby Thackeray Avenue said she was actually born on that street. A little slice of British cultural history!

And here's one final Halloween reference. I bought this bottle of wine at Tesco last week -- the label had an old-fashioned photographic portrait of a man on it, but when the lights were turned off the man turned into a glow-in-the-dark skeleton! I've never bought wine with a glow-in-the-dark label before. Hopefully it doesn't impart any radioactive properties to the wine itself.