Cuba Car

Look what Olga and I found on her walk this morning -- a papier-maché car from Cuba!

It's about six inches long, and the wheels even roll.

It was lying on the sidewalk with a bunch of scattered, discarded toys from a kids' charity shop, waiting for the trash collection. This doesn't seem like a toy, though. More like a charming little souvenir...

...which now graces my bedside table. (I've never been to Cuba, but it's on my list of places to go. I guess this is an aspirational souvenir!)

TV Viewing and Other Midweek Drudgery

Dave and I are tearing through "The Good Wife." What a great show! We watch two episodes a night, at least. Kalinda is our newest super hero -- who needs Batman when you have Kalinda? (You have to say her name in a kind of booming, super-hero voice.) I took to this show much more readily than "Dexter" or "Game of Thrones."

Netflix has disappointed us on many levels, but at least they've given us "The Good Wife," "Breaking Bad" and "House of Cards."

Over the weekend, when Dave suggested we watch "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy," I made him a deal -- I'll watch "Anchorman," I said, if you agree to watch "Rosemary's Baby." (I'm not normally a fan of horror movies, but I do love old classics. I hadn't seen "Rosemary" in years and Dave had never seen it.) So he agreed, and we watched "Rosemary" on Monday night. It's still a great movie, and Ruth Gordon -- with her crazy colorful '60s outfits -- steals the show.

Aside from TV, there's not much excitement around here. Monday was a holiday, and we took Olga to the park together and had coffee at the Lido cafe on the Serpentine. That was our major outing.

Now work has resumed. I'm trying to track down some long-overdue library books before the end of the school year, in just a few weeks. I spent yesterday afternoon e-mailing students with delinquent accounts. We'll see if it's productive!

(Photo: Alley near Wood Green, north London.)

Not-So-Smart Phones

Designers of smart phones have gone a step too far.

That's my conclusion after having a couple of experiences with phones that text their own messages, apparently unbidden. Have you ever seen this phenomenon?

The other day, before I turned over the job of sub coordinator to my successor, I was trying to contact a substitute teacher who was working in school. I sent a text to his phone, and got an immediate reply: "I'm at the cinema."

That seemed weird, because it was 10 a.m. and he was supposed to be in school, teaching a class in 15 minutes! I texted back, "Oh, sorry, but aren't you supposed to be teaching this morning?"

He wrote back that he was on his way, and minutes later he was indeed in class. I was mystified. Did he have a Star Trek transporter in his pocket?

The same thing happened the next day. I texted him, and received an immediate reply: "I'm driving."

That also seemed weird, because I was pretty sure this sub didn't have a car.

The next time I talked to him, I asked about these peculiar texts. He laughed and said his phone does that all the time. In fact he had been neither at the cinema nor driving -- he'd been trying to pull his phone out of his pocket, and it sent those texts seemingly by itself.

I wrote this off as a peculiarity of either his phone or his cell provider. And then the same thing happened to Dave.

The other day he e-mailed a real estate agent about an available apartment. The agent texted back, and Dave's phone shot back a response: "Can't talk now. What's up?"

We didn't realize he'd responded that way until later, when we were sitting in a pub and looked at his phone. We laughed about the idiocy of that response. Who says they can't talk and then asks the other person to continue the conversation?

Maybe Dave, in trying to check his phone, hit a button or a certain combination of buttons that fired off that text. I suspect that's what the sub did, too. But seriously, someone needs to make it harder to do that kind of thing.

The real estate agent has not yet written back!

(Photos: A colorful doorway in Ladbroke Grove, and a close-up of the poster on the wall. Poor Kujo!)

Scaffolding

Scaffolding seemed to be one of the themes of my photo walk yesterday. I went up to Arnos Grove, in north London -- which, incidentally, has one of the most architecturally interesting tube stations -- and walked southeast to Tottenham Hale, a distance of a bit more than five miles.

And, yeah, scaffolding. Lots of it.

I guess we're at the time of year for outside maintenance projects!

After my walk, Dave and I stayed in with the dog and watched a couple of movies: "Unbreakable" with Bruce Willis (meh) and "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy" with Will Ferrell, which Dave chose and which I completely disavow. (I did laugh at it a couple of times, though.)

We still haven't done much about looking at rentals. We've scoped out some places online, but that's about it. (For those of you familiar with London, we're looking in the northwest within a relatively short distance from St. John's Wood. I think if we were buying we might have to go farther afield, but we should be able to find something to rent in the Maida Vale-Kilburn-Willesden Green area. That's our plan, anyway.) As I said, it's almost too early to do anything more at this point!

David and Ondine

This was the scene as Olga and I walked to Wormwood Scrubs yesterday morning. I love this photo. Such a great storefront, and those shoes!

Olga was in a peculiar frame of mind -- she seemed to want to explore unfamiliar streets, so that's what we did, tacking toward the park the whole time. (Usually she is all about routine and gets quite concerned if we deviate from the routes she knows.)

I must have passed this hair salon before, but I don't remember it. Olga showed me something new!

When we got to the park we found the playing fields full of people -- including lots of kids with American accents in baseball uniforms. Must be some kind of American baseball league meeting there.

So we circled around the fields to the wilder -- you could say scrubbier -- parts of Wormwood Scrubs, where things were blooming and Olga could run in the high grass.

Yesterday afternoon I Skyped with my mom and then had a big dose of banana pudding. I'm trying to put together a plan to get my Florida driver's license when I go back to the states, and my mom will have to help with that, so we talked about what will be required.

Finally, Dave and I went to see a school play last night, a very peculiar piece called "Ondine," about a water nymph who falls in love with a human soldier. The kids did a great job with it, but I must say I'm still a little confused about some aspects of the plot!

Moving Inertia

I'm kind of in the denial stage of this whole moving thing. I'm hoping it will just go away. (Intellectually I know it won't, but emotionally I am still hopeful.)

I did make inquiries into one apartment, but the owner wouldn't allow dogs. So that was that! We'll move all the way to Milton Keynes if we have to, in order to keep Olga. Dog permission is a requirement.

We have the name of a rental agent who may be able to help us, but I feel a sort of low-grade paralysis about starting the process, so I haven't called her yet. For one thing, it seems a little early. We still have three months left on our lease. On the other hand, I'm sure we could move sooner if we found something suitable.

And then I think about all the utilities, and how we have to have them disconnected and reconnected, and we have to change our address, and we have to take apart the door frame to get the dining room table out, and what about getting it into a new apartment? What about the council taxes and the water bill, which I've already paid for the coming year? Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.

I know, I know -- I have to take this step by step and not allow it to turn into a huge, exhausting tidal wave. Looking at the process in its totality is not the way to go.

I've agreed to help the owners of our current flat schedule viewings by real estate agents so they can get valuations and list it. A similar flat in our development, on a much lower floor, is listed at £750,000 -- which converts to the astonishing sum of $1.27 million. So I'm pretty sure Dave and I won't be buying this one!

In other news, I worked the hardest I have ever worked in the library yesterday. The process of weeding the book collection continues, and because we've created lots of empty shelf space we had to shift the collection to consolidate what we've kept. I shifted a lot of the books but then realized that I put too many of them onto each shelf, leaving not enough room for new acquisitions or books that are checked out. (Apparently the general rule of thumb is to fill each shelf only about 2/3 full.) So I had to shift them again, which was harder than moving them in the first place.

On the bright side: I got my workout for the day!

(Photo: Street art by Run, Shoreditch.)

Banana Pudding, Again

Can I possibly squeeze out a second blog post about making Authentic Southern Banana Pudding?

Well, yes, because this is my first domestically produced batch! You may remember that the last time I made banana pudding -- one of my favorite desserts from childhood -- Dave and I brought the Nilla wafers and the instant pudding back in our suitcases from the states.

A few months ago, though, Dave finally found a store in London that stocks Nilla wafers. So he bought a box, and yesterday I got motivated to go find some instant pudding. It's not Jell-O -- in fact, it's imported from Israel, which is a little strange -- but it worked.

Et voilà!

Dave and I both had huge helpings after dinner last night, which left me going to bed a little nauseated, but extremely happy.

I had more crazy dreams. We were packing, we were moving. I was trying to fit specific objects into specific boxes, such as: "Here is a large, flat box. If I wrap the blue platter made by my pottery teacher in Sarasota in 1999 in paper, wouldn't it fit in that box?" Clearly I have some anxiety about what's coming down the road regarding finding a new apartment.

I also dreamed that Dave served me soup in which were floating two sticks of butter, still wrapped in foil. Not that far from the truth, sometimes, and probably a reaction to all that banana pudding!