Miscellany, Featuring a Pterodactyl

Here's a view of our patio from our bedroom window. Yes, there's a patio under all that, though you can barely see it. It's been so damp I haven't weeded and swept it like I usually do when the weather dries out a bit. Maybe after school ends I'll get around to it. I'm sure it horrifies the Russians.

For those interested in the plants: The purple flower in the right foreground is toadflax, and progressing back from that you'll see an agapanthus (not yet in bloom), a pink geranium, an orange Peruvian lily, the stolen citrus tree and our banana. A foxglove is beside the geranium. 

Mrs. Kravitz surprised us last night by making us a dinner of Indian food. (Remember that Kravitz is not her real name -- that's just what I call her, after the nosey neighbor in the TV show "Bewitched." If you knew her real name, it would make sense that she's cooking Indian.) I don't know what motivated this sudden burst of neighborliness. I said to Dave, "What does she want?"

She asked to borrow our hedge trimmer the other day, and I said yes, but then she never came to collect it, so it couldn't have been in thanks for that. Unless it's thanks in advance. Anyway, the food wasn't bad but it was so hot that we had to get some yogurt -- on Mrs. Kravitz's recommendation -- to tone down the peppers. I'm sure it did wonders for my gastritis. It was nice of her, in any case.

Also yesterday was the end-of-the-school-year picnic for our LGBTQ employee affinity group. I felt a sense of obligation to go, since the group's coordinators bothered to organize it. It began in mid-afternoon when I was still working, so I missed the first hour or so, but when I finished work I went to Tesco, bought a bottle of London Pride and joined the group in Regent's Park. We sat on some blankets in the sun and chatted, and I had an ice cream, which conflicted with my beer but what the heck.

Steve Reed · Green Woodpecker

As I was lying in bed blogging yesterday morning, I heard an ungodly sound outside the bedroom window. "What is THAT?!" I thought. It sounded like a cross between a bird and a dinosaur. (And birds are dinosaurs, I suppose, so that makes sense.) I dangled the phone out the bedroom window and made the recording above, which my Merlin bird app promptly identified as a green woodpecker. I don't think I've ever seen a green woodpecker in our garden, though I've seen them on Hampstead Heath, in Hyde Park and in other large parks. What brought it to our garden is anyone's guess. It didn't reappear this morning.

I dealt with an e-mail yesterday from my mom's attorney in Florida, and I noticed his assistant's name is "Hallie Justice."

An Angel's Trumpet

I hope I haven't used this picture already -- I don't think so. Somehow in 18 years of blogging (!) I don't think I've ever accidentally repeated a picture, and I don't want to start now! This is one of our foxgloves, and it's unusual because the flowers are pure white. Normally white foxgloves have some kind of pattern inside the blossom -- spots or streaks, or maybe a slight pink tinge -- but not this one.

And then there's this foxglove, a different plant, which is also white -- and which has that weird, trumpet-shaped flower at the top. It reminds me of the golden figure of the Angel Moroni that stands atop Mormon temples, blowing a horn.

This is the strangest crop of foxgloves I've ever grown in my life. So many white or pale ones, and many of them seem very spindly. I cannot remember where I got the seeds, but I'm pretty sure I harvested them from one of our earlier plants -- maybe this one?

Meanwhile, our Rachel de Thame lupine is looking quite...robust. That weird little flower at lower left is what's left of a flower stalk that got eaten by slugs. Only a few little nascent blooms survived to grow to maturity.

The library was slightly calmer yesterday, but we still had numerous classes of kids coming in and ransacking the shelves. I really want to talk to the kid who thought it was OK to leave a shelf looking like this:

I mean, seriously. Do you put books away like that at home, kid?!

So, yeah, there's a lot of perpetual shelf-straightening going on, and in between I'm writing to graduating seniors and departing students and trying my best to get everything back. Whew!

Olga woke me up at 5 a.m. this morning, practically scratching at the back door to go outside. I had a feeling she'd heard or sensed (smelled?) a fox, and sure enough, when I opened the door I saw one bound away across the garden and disappear behind the shed. Olga didn't see it, but she had a good time following its scent through all the shrubbery. I'm amazed she sensed it from indoors. Sometimes her senses seem dulled by age, and sometimes she still seems pretty darn aware.

Now I'm going to try to catch up on answering the last few days' comments. Sorry I've been so delinquent!

A Ladybug Massage and Pride Hair

I am in the thick of it at work this week. We have a steady stream of classes coming in to check out books for summer, and meanwhile I'm trying to collect overdue books from kids (or renew them if they want to keep them). I really do try to have everyone's account settled by the time school ends. We had 356 total circulations yesterday, which may not seem like a huge amount, but it is!

So while I deal with all that, it's time for another round of "Steve's random photos"!

First, I saw this piece of street art in Shoreditch when I went out with Dave and our co-workers Max and Staci a couple of weekends ago. I tried to Google and find out who that kid is, but no luck. Do any of you know? It's kind of a terrifying portrait, mostly because of all the red.

I was walking Olga on the high street a couple of weeks ago when I found this critter near some spilled trash bags at the curb outside a charity shop. I assume they'd cleaned out their stock and discarded some stuff that didn't sell. A massager, I think? I grabbed it.

I guess some passerby, armed with an ink pen, wasn't happy with the position of this rubbish bin. Or maybe it's a confession by the owner?

Another penned rubbish-bin note. I identify with this one. We've had our food waste caddy stolen too. Ours even had a big sticker bearing our house number on it.

More stuff outside a thrift shop, this time clearly a donation (since it's by the door and not by the curb).

I've posted our neighbors' pig figurine before, sitting on their garden wall. When I went by the other day it was almost completely engulfed in ivy. It looked on the verge of drowning. The ivy has since been trimmed, but it's still about waist-high on the pig. (Do pigs have waists?)

This woman was walking in front of me a few days ago and I had to get a photo of her rainbow locks. For Pride Month, I assume?

And finally, just a close look at a single rose petal in our garden. I love the yellow tip, and the way the pink flush grows toward the edges. We have detached petals lying all over the place during rose season and I try to appreciate them as much as the whole flowers!

A Full Month Ahead

I had a doctor's appointment after work yesterday, so I wound up with some time to kill. I took a long walk from school down through Regent's Park, and I passed this picturesque bend in the Regent's Canal. If you watched the TV show "Slow Horses," with Gary Oldman, you may recognize this area as the place where he regularly met up with his boss, played by Kristin Scott Thomas. They'd sit on one of those benches at left and have their clandestine conversations.

As usual, I found some interesting graffiti along the canal:

I wound up down at Cavendish Square, near Oxford Street, with another hour or so to spare. So I bought some fresh mango at Pret and sat in the park, nibbling on that and listening to music.

I was presided over by this guy, whose mouthful of a name is William George Frederick Cavendish Bentinck, but who was known as Lord George Bentinck. A politician and horse racer, he was an "an 'aristocratic dandy' who wore a new silk scarf every day," according to Wikipedia. Apparently he was known as George because all the boys in his family had the first name William, so they went by their middle names. He was also unmarried and "there were rumours that he and his brother Lord Henry were, in the phraseology of the time, 'woman haters.'" Hmmmmm...he certainly has a fabulous cape.

Anyway, I got to my appointment and I am indeed having a colonoscopy in a week and a half. Add that to the already-full calendar I have for the month, including wrapping up school, going to Madrid for the weekend on the 22nd, and having a couple of doctor's and business appointments before we leave for Argentina on the 30th. Whew!

The Madrid thing, which I haven't yet mentioned, was kind of a whim. Basically we're going for a dinner party, which sounds a little crazy, but we'll combine it with some sightseeing too. We have a friend who lives there and who has come to several dinner parties with us, and now he's decided to host. Our friend Warren is going to dog-sit for Olga. Never a dull moment!

A Sleepin' Bee

Dave crept in the front door very gently on Friday afternoon, and waved me over to come and see a bee that he thought was sleeping on one of our blanket flowers. I brought the camera and we found that the bee wasn't asleep at all -- it was merely punch-drunk, feeding on the nectar. The bees do love those flowers.

So, yeah, sorry about all the confusion over "Little Women" yesterday! Not to belabor this, but here is a thing that I have learned, and which I find quite interesting. Louisa May Alcott wrote "Little Women" in two parts. In the USA, the book sold as "Little Women" usually consists of both parts. But in the UK, the title "Little Women" refers only to Part 1. Part 2 is sold as "Good Wives," the title by which it was apparently first published here. (Wikipedia explains this in more detail, as does this article that blogger Jeanie found.) They can be bought together in a single volume -- and indeed we have a combined volume in our library, still using the "Good Wives" title -- but the copy I checked out is only Part 1. Which is why Beth didn't die.

Anyway, I must admit I feel like I've only run half a race, finishing just one of the two books. But I can't quite bring myself to take on the second one right away.

Instead, yesterday I read "The Eyes & the Impossible" by Dave Eggers, which won the most recent Newbery Award. I loved it. It's an animal story, about a dog who lives in a park, but it isn't cutesy or cloying. Instead it's quirky and well-written and fairly sophisticated, about taking risks and living our best lives. I wish I'd read it before I talked to the 7th Graders last week, because I would have recommended it to them.

I read in the garden, with Olga lying in the sun nearby. After a while she got hot and moved beneath the gigantic, shady leaves of the burdock. She weaves among the plants in the flowerbeds at will and I've had to put stakes next to many of them to keep them from getting trampled. She's like a bulldozer. A bulldog bulldozer.

Here's something I'm excited about -- one of our hollyhocks is growing an actual stalk! It's not very big and it's nestled amid a burdock, which is constantly threatening to overshadow it. (I have to keep the burdock's leaves trimmed back.) But this is a sign that we might get some actual hollyhocks this year. They grow like wildfire for many people but they have never done well for us, so I'm holding out hope for this one.

I saw my first red admiral butterfly of the year yesterday, on our wallflower. Unfortunately it didn't stick around long enough for a picture, but it will be back.

In the afternoon I finally got motivated enough to water all our potted plants, inside and out, and to take our sheets and towels to the laundromat. I wasn't feeling great yesterday, which I attribute to my prematurely celebratory "Beth Didn't Die" martini on Saturday night. I'm supposed to have a followup appointment with the gastroenterologists next week, and I may ask about getting a colonoscopy. It's been five years, believe it or not, and given my family history of colon cancer, I'd rather be safe than sorry.

The title of this post, by the way, comes from a standard of the American songbook, composed by Harold Arlen and with lyrics by Truman Capote (!), and famously sung by Barbra Streisand in her national TV debut on "The Jack Paar Show" in 1961. Even though our bee was actually eatin' and not sleepin', I couldn't resist using it.

What I Thought I Knew

Well, I did finish "Little Women" yesterday. And (spoiler alert) I was astonished to find that BETH DOES NOT DIE! Her death is literally the one thing that I knew about that book going in, and it turns out to be completely fake news.* I'm sure I have believed it pretty much all my life. I have no idea where I got this impression. She does get very sick, and maybe I somehow extrapolated that to mean dying. Someone probably said something innocuous like "poor Beth" when I was a kid and I assumed from then on that she was a goner.

At any rate I am very impressed with all of my blog readers who no doubt knew this when I mentioned Beth's impending demise the other day and yet didn't spill the beans. I guess this shows the value of reading classics even when you think you know the plot.

And again, though it wasn't my favorite book, I can definitely see the appeal. Louisa May Alcott was quite forward-thinking for her time, sending a message that young women and girls have interior lives and more to look forward to than just marrying and having babies. I loved Jo, who kept pet rats in the attic and cut her long hair off, talking about how refreshingly light she felt with her "boy's cut." It must have been fairly revolutionary.

I spent most of the day on the couch reading, though I did some minor garden trimming, because the stuff that's not being eaten by slugs is growing like crazy. Then Olga and I went to the cemetery.

I don't think she enjoyed herself much, do you?

(When I showed Dave this picture, he likened her to the figures in ancient Pompeii and Herculaneum, entombed and preserved in volcanic ash from Vesuvius. "She looks like in a thousand years she's going to be dug up like that. She's in one of those poses like you see in National Geographic.")

I also downloaded all the most recent footage from the garden cam. Here's a little video, mostly of foxes, including one caught in a rather indelicate moment at the very beginning.

At the very end, you'll see Olga chase a fox over the fence. That was yesterday morning -- we were sitting on the couch when suddenly she sat bold upright and ran to the back door. I looked out and saw a fox, and waited for it to go behind the shed, where they routinely go over the fence to get in and out of the garden. I then let her out, and she flew over the patio wall and through the flower bed barking. I didn't know she still had it in her!

You'll also see more cats. I am amazed (and dismayed) at the number of cats we have prowling around out there.

*Well, not completely fake news. A commenter pointed out that Beth DOES in fact die, but it's in Part Two of "Little Women," published separately as "Good Wives" and not included in the book I have.

(Top photo: A shop on our high street, taken from the upper deck of a bus.)

Just a Dream Some of Us Had

Well, never mind about the Republican leadership coming around to sobriety and abandoning their felonious candidate. They're still Trump-drunk, if the statements I heard yesterday are at all accurate. And can you believe he raised $35 million after the verdict? Apparently, peace and common sense, as Joni Mitchell once sang in a different context, are "just a dream some of us had."

I don't understand how anyone could look at not just this court verdict but a whole string of verdicts, going back years, all going against Trump, all decided by various judges and juries in different parts of the country -- from E. Jean Carroll to election theft -- and decide that he is in the right and all the rest of us are wrong. I mean, it's delusional. It's mental illness.

And now, to see Lindsey Graham and J.D. Vance and others speaking up in favor of Trump after he participated in a sordid scheme that would have torpedoed the political career of ANY OTHER POLITICIAN -- well, I just do not understand. Except that they're all grabbing at power for themselves in various ways. Vance clearly wants to be vice president.

It's up to us, people. We have got to reject these lunatics at the ballot box, once and for all.

In other news, it is freezing here. As I write at 7 a.m. it's 50º F outside (10º C) and I'm lying on the couch under a blanket. I had to get my winter jacket back out of the closet yesterday so I could comfortably walk to work. Welcome to June! I know I keep kvetching about my dahlias but I'm not sure they're ever going to grow in this weather. At least I think we'll have some sun today.

My Newbery talks finished yesterday, landing with the thud that I expected among the 7th graders. I don't think I successfully sold any of the books I talked to them about. But I have to take the long view. At least now they know about the award and these titles, and if someone mentions "Dead End in Norvelt" or "The Witch of Blackbird Pond" they can say, "Oh, yeah, I've heard of that." Maybe they'll even be curious enough to someday go back and read them.

Kind of like me and "Little Women," which I AM going to finish this weekend, after having not touched it at all the last several days.

Last night Dave and I watched "Civil War" on Amazon. It was pretty good, especially the special effects. Who doesn't want to see the Lincoln Memorial get blown up -- on film, anyway? (My question is, why was anyone fighting at the Lincoln Memorial in the first place? It's just a big hulk of marble.) It was certainly interesting viewing given our elevated political tensions.

We also recently finished "Palm Royale" on Apple TV, which given the cast should have been much, much better than it actually was. I still don't understand how a show with such fun, colorful costumes, advanced special effects and skilled comedic actors and actresses could be so dull.

Another loser was the fourth season of "Fargo," which we could tolerate for only one episode. There's now a fifth season, which is supposed to be better and we may try that. We've also started Colin Farrell's new show "Sugar" which seems promising.