Misdemeanant

Yesterday morning, bright and early, I got myself out the door to go to work. I gave myself plenty of time, so I could walk and listen to my "Q-Anon Anonymous" podcast (which analyzes and challenges the insane conspiracy theories of the far right, and which I love). I arrived at work refreshed and exercised and I was just putting my day in order when I got a phone call.

It was the contractor who's supposed to finish our bathroom renovation. Remember how we still had that unpainted wall in the hallway, the damp one that's had six months to dry out? Well, he was here to finally paint it. I had completely forgotten he was coming. He was supposed to arrive before I left for work but he got held up by traffic.

So I had to race home and let him in the flat, and then race back to work. More excitement than necessary on a Wednesday -- or any day, really.

But the good news is, he's now finishing the job, and it should be done by Friday.

I'm also getting more things fixed around here. The zipper on my winter jacket broke the other day, so I dug out my old winter jacket only to remember that it had a four- or five-inch tear across the back. (Probably something I did gardening, or swashbuckling through the brush on Hampstead Heath with Olga.) Months ago I'd considered throwing it out -- in fact I'd actually put it in the trash can -- but I pulled it out again on the slim chance I might need it. And here was that slim chance. I wore the torn one while I got the zipper on my normal jacket repaired, and then switched to that one and left the torn one to be sewn up. Long story short, I will soon have two functional jackets.

Also, the sound system on our TV died some time ago, and I finally arranged with Bose to send it back for repair. It's out of warranty and will cost £79 to fix, but I'd rather keep it working than buy a new one. The world does not need our Bose sound system in a landfill -- at least, not yet. (Meanwhile we've been using our TV with its inbuilt sound, which is tinny and unsatisfying.)

The one upside of having to come home yesterday morning is that it gave me a chance to grab the citrus tree. Yes, you all talked me into it, and if I get charged with a misdemeanor* it will be YOUR FAULT.

Seriously, the more I thought about the situation, the more certain I am that whoever owns that plant was inviting me (or someone) to take it. I can't see why else they'd have left it where they did. If they wanted to keep it warm they'd have moved it closer to the building, not closer to the street. (Or they'd have brought it inside.)

I'm definitely rationalizing, but anyway, it's done now. As Dave said, because he was sick of hearing me argue with myself about the ethics of the situation: "Whatever you do, make a decision and STICK TO IT."

So I have.

*By the way, did you know that someone charged with a misdemeanor is known as a "misdemeanant"? I've never heard this word, but I looked it up, because I knew I wouldn't be a felon and I wondered what the counterpart would be for a minor crime. There you have it!

(Top photo: In Chiswick, a couple of weekends ago.)

I Am (Not) Straight

I've been writing a lot lately and you're probably sick of my whining and grumbling, so how about another post of miscellaneous photos? These have stacked up over the past several weeks, so -- enjoy!

First, this little Christmas/Thanksgiving cactus lives in our library. It's a cutting from one of mine, which in turn came from cuttings from the parent plant, which lives in the library! So this little one has come to live with its grandparent.

I was just impressed that it cranked out a flower, being so small.

I love this time of year because tree shadows become very dramatic.

Falling leaves can also make interesting impressions, in this case in the grime on someone's car.

This was the lid on our ice cream the other night. I pulled it off the carton, set it upside down on the counter, and saw that little face staring back at me! The tendency to see faces in inanimate objects is known as pareidolia. Psychologists suspect it's a side effect of our human ability to quickly recognize moods and danger from the faces of other people. In other words, we're highly sensitized to faces and, by extension, face-shaped objects.

Not your typical autumn leaf. Someone's craft project gone wrong, maybe?

Methinks thou doth protest too much!

I could not resist yet another picture of the ever-growing and -changing pile of garbage on the next street over. Garbage stacks up on this corner like nobody's business. I reported it to our local garbage collectors via the "Love Clean Streets" app -- which I can use to alert the garbage guys to refuse on the sidewalks -- but they didn't promptly collect it. They said it would be picked up on the regular collection day. So then I sent a picture to our local councillors and asked why this situation couldn't be handled better. Why don't the residents of this corner have a bin for their garbage?

(Which is what that graffiti on the wall behind the trash pile says -- "Buy some bins, filthy gits!")

And finally, here's Olga, passing the sad citrus tree I wrote about yesterday. You can't see the pot because it's too close to the wall, but the leaves are visible just to the right of Olga, below that dried hydrangea. My plant app says it's a mandarin orange (which Wikipedia notes is "tender and damaged easily by cold").

So, funny thing -- after I returned the tree, whoever owns it moved it closer to the wall, making it more accessible to passersby on the street. Do you think that's an invitation to take it?

The Citrus Tree

I'm going to tell an embarrassing story.

You know how I like to rescue plants, right? I often see houseplants in someone's trash bin or yard waste bag and I bring them home and adopt them. We've obtained a whole jungle full of plants that way.

Well, the other day, I took things a step too far.

A little citrus tree was sitting in a pot in the hedge of an apartment building down the street. It didn't seem to be attached to any particular apartment -- it was in the general green space around the building. I've had my eye on it for a while, wondering what its erstwhile owner would do when the weather got cold. (Citrus trees can tolerate a light freeze but anything else will damage or kill them.)

Basically, the owner did nothing. And last Thursday, when we were supposed to get freezing temperatures that night, I impulsively reached into the hedge, extracted the citrus tree and brought it home. This occasioned much hilarity from Dave, who went around telling everyone I was a plant thief.

For the next three nights, when we had heavy frost, I kept the tree indoors by our dining room window. But I hadn't really thought any of this through -- I was simply trying to protect it. What should happen next?

I could have just kept the tree. I am 98 percent sure no one would ever miss it. But I also knew if I did that, I'd feel guilty every time I looked at it. I had stolen it. Let's be honest.

I tried to knock on the door of the ground-floor apartment and tell them that I had the tree. I thought there was a good chance they might give it to me, or at least point me to the correct owner. But no one answered the door the few times I knocked.

Or, once the immediate danger of a freeze had passed, I could return the tree.

I stewed about this quandary. I hated to put the tree back where it would almost certainly be damaged if not die when temperatures dropped again, but there was a chance -- a tiny, tiny chance -- that its owner was actually missing it. Why did I assume that same owner wasn't capable of protecting it themselves? After all, it looked perfectly healthy.

So that's what I did. On Sunday I carried the tree back to the apartments -- in broad daylight, because although my behavior was morally ambiguous I'm not skulking around in the dark of night here -- and plunked it back in the hedge. We'll see what happens next.

Here's my newest Florida Memory postcard, and maybe the last one, assuming my mystery sender is doing this for a calendar year. It's a film still from "The Creature from the Black Lagoon," a 1954 monster movie that was filmed at Wakulla Springs. As Florida photos go I think it's a bit of a bust, because it doesn't really show any scenery, but hey -- you can't look a gift horse (or monster) in the mouth.

(Top photo: Hostas and hydrangeas near our back garden bench.)

Cable Clips and a Bad Martini

I took this in St. John's Wood last night as I went out to dinner with Dave and a couple of his co-workers after their students' holiday concert. Only now, looking at the picture, am I realizing that car travel on St. John's Wood High Street apparently now goes from north to south, rather than south to north as it used to. Which means cars could have run me down from behind as I was standing in the middle of the street taking the photo. Fortunately there's not much traffic!

The concert generally went well, though there were a few slip ups. One of the drummers dropped his drumstick during a furious solo, and a sax player's instrument crashed to the ground when the lanyard holding it around his neck apparently failed. He was not happy.

Even though the performances were none of my doing, I celebrated with everyone else when it was over. I ordered a martini at the restaurant, and once again, I am reminded that a restaurant martini can be a disappointing thing. A martini should be, at most, one part vermouth to four or five parts gin -- in other words, nearly straight gin. The one I got last night was the wettest, most vermouth-heavy martini I've had since last May. I don't know why bartenders tend to overdo the vermouth, except maybe they're stingy with the gin for cost reasons.

Anyway, I ordered an extra shot of gin and threw it into the glass and that improved (but did not correct) the ratio.

For dinner I had an Asian salad with watermelon (better not think about the carbon footprint of that), blackened sea bass and mini mince pies for a Christmasy dessert.

See that little thing? That's called a cable clip. I spent yesterday morning doing something I should have done literally years ago -- taming our sprawling internet cable. It's a long phone cord that runs from our phone jack near the front door through the entire flat to our router, which is in the living room (where we spend most of our time). This cord has been loosely coiled and running across our floor for ages, but it was unsightly and a trip hazard. So I bought those little clips at our local Homebase (which is closing and selling stuff at fire-sale prices) and tacked the cord to the baseboards.

Now it's out of the way and more or less out of sight, but man, that was a tedious process. I thought it would be easy, but can you see how tiny those clips are compared to my fingertips? Now imagine trying to hold that tiny tack next to the floor and pounding it in with a hammer, especially in a confined or awkward place like an inner corner or behind a door. Infuriating!

Anyway, now it's done and I don't have to worry about the dog walker or a repairman or a guest tripping over the internet cable and breaking their face and then suing us. As a product of litigious American society, I worry about these things.

The Mop-Head

Olga and I went to Kilburn Grange Park yesterday, and the weather being what it was (cold and misty) there weren't many people out. We had the park pretty much to ourselves, which was fantastic until a little white mop-head of a dog ran up and started yapping and running in circles around us. It would charge toward me, bark and retreat, charge, bark and retreat, over and over.

The owner, meanwhile, was standing on a sidewalk about 30 feet away, looking down at her phone.

I tried to walk away from the mop-head, but it followed us. This went on for about five minutes, and seemingly an eternity. Olga finally stood stock-still, her ball in her mouth, looking at me as if to say, "Get this thing away from me."

So I called over to the owner, "Would you control your dog, please?"

She trudged over and grudgingly leashed up the mop-head, grumbling about how its behavior was "normal in a park." I said nothing, but I disagree. Allowing a dog to charge people and follow them around while barking is not normal, especially when the owner can't be troubled to look up from her phone.

It occurred to me that the last time we went to this park, we also had an uncomfortable experience. Maybe we should stick to the cemetery.

I found this button while walking on the high street. It appears to show an egg tobogganing on a strip of bacon. I wondered if it was a "piece of flair" from some waiter's apron, but I reverse-Googled the image and apparently these buttons are for sale on Threadless. In fact, you can also buy it on a t-shirt, a mug or a skateboard. Just FYI.

I called our broadband provider yesterday and got them to drop part of our package that gave us television content, because we never used it. In fact, we never even unpacked the receiver. We stream all our TV these days, but we don't need a dedicated receiver, and getting rid of that and our landline (which we apparently no longer need to maintain internet service) will save us about £150 a year. Not too shabby.

This broadband account has a ridiculous history. It used to belong to our former landlord in Notting Hill, and when we moved into his flat in 2011 we simply started paying the bills. When we left that apartment in 2014, we took the account with us (with his permission), and I tried to put it in my name, but bills continued to arrive addressed to "Tong Xia." (Which isn't quite our former landlord's name, but it's close.) It became kind of a joke -- Tong Xia, our phantom roommate -- but yesterday I finally managed to get Tong taken off the account.

Of course I expect that all these changes will somehow result in our internet being disconnected. Stay tuned.

First Flurries, and Becky

It felt so good to sleep in this morning. I was tired because of my sleeplessness the night before. Maybe because it's the weekend (THANK GOD) I slept pretty soundly last night.

Yesterday, for World AIDS Day, I broke out my red ribbon once again and wore it, as did several co-workers. Many of the kids had no idea what it meant. "What's that ribbon for?" was a question I heard multiple times.

Considering that the red AIDS ribbon was once one of the most famous symbols in the world, this blows my mind. But it just shows how AIDS has diminished as a medical crisis and political cause, at least in countries where people can afford the medicines to keep it at bay. I have friends who have remained perfectly healthy even after decades with HIV. Thank goodness the bad old days are over, but they're not over everywhere, which I always try to remember.

Around noon, a teacher was speaking to her class in the middle of a lesson in the library when she suddenly said, "It's snowing!" We all looked out the big windows and sure enough, flurries were coming down. It didn't last long and nothing stuck, but still -- our first snow of the season.

Which was appropriate, because yesterday was also our faculty/staff holiday party. The library closed a bit early, all the teachers gathered and we broke out the wine and prosecco, and the parents provided trays of cheese and nuts and other food. (A ridiculous quantity of food, to be honest. I feel a little guilty about it because I'm sure a lot of it didn't get eaten.) I even convinced Dave to go, which was a monumental undertaking, but I think it's important that we at least show our faces at such events.

Here's a bit of surprising news I learned. To lay some groundwork: That photo above shows me in the '70s with my friends Theresa (left) and Becky, who lived in my neighborhood. (And three traumatized kittens.) I'm guessing I was in fourth or fifth grade.

Yesterday I was reading Ms. Moon's blog when she mentioned a friend who was taking a Master Gardening class, and that made me think of Becky's father, who lived across the street from us and who also became a Master Gardener (which is some sort of official certification but don't ask me what it involves). He used to write a newspaper gardening column, in fact.

I wondered if he was still alive, and searched for his obituary, and he's not. Which isn't surprising. He was older than my parents, who are both gone. But what did surprise me is that the obituary noted that he had been predeceased by daughter Becky. So I found her obituary too -- she died on New Year's Day in 2016 at the age of 51. Although we played together as kids we weren't close friends, and in fact she went to a different school than I did -- a private school in Tampa. I can't even remember the last time I saw her. Maybe high school, or even middle school. So this news is not a personal loss on any deep level but still a surprise, in the way that a death of one's peer is always a shock.

As my brother said when I told him the news, "Wow. 51. Don’t f*ck around with time. Do what you want while you can!"

Barnaby Rudge

It's a chilly 30º F (or -1º C) outside as I type this. I took the picture above during yesterday morning's dog walk along West End Lane. Yes! Olga wanted a walk after all! As soon as I'd posted to the blog and stood up, she leapt to attention and was raring to go. She can turn on a dime, that dog.

Here she is wandering through the frosty garden. Look at how the Japanese maple has lost all its leaves, seemingly all of a sudden. Two weeks ago it was a flaming red torch, and now it's bare twigs.

I did not sleep well last night. More work stress, about which we shall not speak. I woke up about 2:30 a.m., came out to the living room and plowed through the last 30 pages of "Barnaby Rudge." Another Dickens done! I thought it was good and very interesting, given that it was written about the Gordon Riots of 1780, an event in British history I knew nothing about. I can see why it isn't one of Dickens' more famous books -- there are a lot of characters and some of them are quite thinly drawn, especially (of course) the women. But he succeeds in making his readers care about Barnaby, the central character, and the scenes involving the actual riots (which begin about two-thirds of the way into the book) are quite suspenseful.

Dickens can turn a phrase. I liked this quote, for example, about a character who speaks in shiny but empty clichés: "Nor is this to be wondered at; for as hollow vessels produce a far more musical sound in falling than those which are substantial, so it will oftentimes be found that sentiments which have nothing in them make the loudest ringing in the world, and are the most relished."

And he can be pretty funny, as in this description of a matronly character's movements: "Mrs. Varden slightly raised her hands, shook her head, and looked at the ground as though she saw straight through the globe, out the other end, and into the immensity of space beyond."

Of course Dickens can't resist some discussion of the human condition: "The despisers of mankind -- apart from the mere fools and mimics, of that creed -- are of two sorts. They who believe their merit neglected and unappreciated, make up one class; they who receive adulation and flattery, knowing their own worthlessness, compose the other. Be sure that the coldest-hearted misanthropes are ever of this last order."

That quote reminded me of Donald Trump. I'm pretty sure he's the guy who feels unappreciated, but it's possible that subconsciously he feels he's getting more adulation than he deserves, and is thus overcompensating.

Our Christmas lights, shining through my glasses,
cast these sparkles on the book!

Finally, I liked this description of the government's attempts to quell the rioters near what is now the Holborn Viaduct, which I visited with blogger Sharon a little more than a month ago: "At Holborn Bridge, and on Holborn Hill, the confusion was greater than in any other part; for the crowd that poured out of the city in two great streams, one by Ludgate Hill, and one by Newgate-street, united at that spot, and formed a mass so dense, that at every volley the people seemed to fall in heaps. At this place a large detachment of soldiery were posted, who fired, now up Fleet Market, now up Holborn, now up Snow Hill -- constantly raking the streets in each direction. At this place too, several large fires were burning, so that all the terrors of that terrible night seemed to be concentrated in one spot."

That's what I like about London. It's living history, all around us!