Floral Lips, and More Family

 
This is a hair salon down in Marylebone. It took me a while to figure out the name -- I mean, "dye" is obvious, but "knots"? Turns out they do hair extensions.

I haven't left the house and haven't done much except routine housekeeping and reading.  I feel like I'm in a weird state of suspension -- I go back to work in just two days, and meanwhile I'm in a holding pattern like a plane circling the airport, waiting for that chance to land. As many reservations as I have about going back to school, I'm really eager to get to work again.



I've mentioned my maternal grandfather a couple of times on this blog, but I've written less about my dad's family. Here's a picture I love of my dad's mother's parents (my great-grandparents). They lived in Arkansas, I believe, and here they're posing with their Christmas money tree. This must have been 50 or 60 years ago. I don't quite know the tradition of money trees, but from looking online I gather that it's a clever way to give cash -- you turn the dollar bills into a tree. I'm not sure whether they were giving the money or receiving it.



My dad's immediate family all lived in California, where he grew up and where my grandfather (who died before I was born) was a mail carrier. Since we lived in Florida, I barely knew them. In 1969 my parents drove us out west, and I had a rare opportunity to meet my paternal cousins. (Obviously I don't remember this -- I wasn't quite three!) I'm standing on the left (above), with my cousin Linda holding my shoulders. My older cousins, L to R, are Randy, Dennis and Marty. The younger ones are Jimmy and Chris.

There are a lot of photos from this film roll of my older cousins trying to teach me, Chris and Jimmy how to play baseball. Sports-phobic as I am, I never appeared very interested!

I saw most of my cousins again in 1983, when we visited the summer before I turned 17 -- except Linda, who lived elsewhere by that time, and Jimmy, who had died in a car crash. Other than those two times, I've never seen or communicated with them, and now Dennis and Marty are dead as well. I did keep in touch with my paternal grandmother and my aunts via occasional letters, but my California relatives always seemed so distant -- as they were in those pre-Internet days. Maybe sometime when I'm feeling adventurous I'll get in touch with them via Facebook.

Rain and Metaphysics

We had another really good rain yesterday. I tried to make a video but most of it came late in the evening when it was already too dark. I swear I could hear the plants almost singing with joy.

The rain is tough on our red-hot pokers (above), which tend to flop over with the weight of the water.

We're still getting new flowers on our dahlias. They can range from bright red to light orange, depending on their age and which plant produced them. (These seed-grown dahlias are all the same variety, "Bishop's children.")

I was walking Olga on Saturday morning when I found this plant (above), as well as some empty pots, sitting on the curb next to someone's rubbish bins. The plant looked terrible -- its leaves were rolled up as tight as cigarettes. I brought it home, watered it and put it in a shady spot, and over a couple of days it has opened up. We'll see how it does in the long term. I think it's a variety of prayer plant.

This is a variegated geranium I picked up at the store at the beginning of summer. I love the colorful leaves.

This is our mystery tree, which we replanted to the back of the garden six months ago. It's done well after the transplant and we think we've figured out what it is -- Prunus cerasifera, or cherry plum. (It's one of the purple varieties, obviously.)

The Japanese anemones are blooming, always a sign for us that it's time to go back to school.

I took Olga to the Heath yesterday. She was quite insistent on going, actually, and basically led the way. We had a good long walk and then on the way home we were joined by a random guy who approached me on the street and asked, as an opener, "Do you believe life is an act?" I thought, Oh lord, who's this lunatic. He was wearing a cross and I thought he was going to proselytize. I said, "I'm not sure I believe that." Undaunted, he walked with us, talking about sentient plants and the psychic Ingo Swann and remote viewing and some other stuff -- but never Jesus. I just nodded and responded as little as possible, and was beginning to wonder if I would ever get rid of him when he kept going toward our high street as I turned toward home. Thank goodness.

The Prince and the Snail

Here's our kitchen windowsill at the moment. I brought the dahlia in because somehow it broke off one of our plants, and I didn't see any reason to waste a perfectly good flower. It looks nice with the green glass, don't you think?

I don't know who that guy is standing at far left. I found him on the street one day, months ago. I think he might be a Disney prince.

Don't mention his war wound. He's very sensitive about it.

Finally, finally, we got some rain. I can no longer complain about it falling all around us and not on us. It rained steadily yesterday evening as Dave and I watched (appropriately) "Gardener's World," our favorite BBC show. And then we turned off the TV and just listened to it for a while. Such a wonderful sound.

This morning, I woke up, came into the living room and saw:

Yes, that is a garden snail. On our ceiling. How he got in -- much less onto the ceiling -- is anyone's guess. He must have been delirious with happiness over the rainfall and then equally bewildered that he was suddenly back in a bone-dry environment. (Assuming snails are capable of happiness and bewilderment.) I stood on a chair and eased him off the ceiling and put him back out in the garden, where he will probably demolish some of our plants, but after that traumatizing adventure I think he's entitled.

Otherwise, no real excitement yesterday. I walked Olga in the cemetery, where I took no pictures for a change. I also listed some of my found milk bottles on eBay. I'm feeling like we have way too much stuff sitting around the house and I'm trying to thin some of it out. We'll see if they sell. If not I'll just box them up and put them away for a while.

A Greener Phone Box

Speaking of old telephone boxes, as we were yesterday, here's an example of one that's been creatively repurposed. I found it in Archway, a neighborhood in North London, where I believe it was rehabilitated just last year. But I've photographed similar planters in Archway in years past, and apparently the old phone boxes were first turned into green sculptures there back in 2012. It's a great idea, isn't it? Provided someone keeps those plants watered.

(By the way, I know those of you reading this blog on a phone see distortion in vertical photos, like the one above. It has something to do with New Blogger. I have no idea why it happens, but I've reported it. If you click on the photo you should see it normally. It doesn't seem to be a problem on computers.)

I think we got a bit more rain overnight -- everything is damp out there this morning -- but so far we've been spared the downpours that have wreaked havoc and flooded streets in other parts of England and Scotland. Yesterday was cloudy but dry. Dave, who was at school for a planning meeting all day yesterday, said it rained there, and that's in St. John's Wood, just a 25-minute walk away. But we didn't see a drop here -- and believe me, I was watching for it.

I spent most of the day reading and doing stuff around the house -- deadheading the dahlias, putting away the rubbish bins after our trash collection. Nothing very exciting.



The woodpecker in our back garden finally cooperated and allowed me to take its picture, rather than hiding on the far side of the feeder while it ate.

I picked some more blackberries yesterday, but the harvest is coming to an end. Most of the ones I haven't already picked have gone mushy or dropped. There are still some green or red ones so we may have a few more berries before it's all over, but soon I'll be back to buying fruit to put on my morning cereal.

Phone Booths and Dystopia

I took this picture when I walked to Hyde Park about a week ago. These phone booths, a slightly later iteration of the iconic red "K-series" type first designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott in 1924, stand near Marble Arch. They might make a nice backdrop for a tourist photo, but a closer look reveals them to be pretty sad-looking. There's a phone in only one of them, and I wouldn't touch it. The others look like this:

A year ago, there were about 10,000 of these boxes still on streets in Britain, about half of them no longer functional -- they exist for purely decorative purposes. There are campaigners who fight to preserve the boxes, arguing that they're a key component of British heritage, and some are protected under historic preservation laws. Some people have repurposed defunct boxes for uses including miniature lending libraries, art galleries, coffee or phone repair stands and even the "world's smallest nightclub."

I'm all for reusing them, and if they can be maintained, I don't mind having them around. But when they become eyesores, that's another matter. We've got a couple of old phone booths in our neighborhood that are routinely filled with bags of rubbish and plastered with graffiti and fliers from prostitutes. (Ours aren't even this cool 1920s style -- they're more modern ones.)

Apparently local governments have a hard time controlling the presence of pay phones because utility companies are given wide leeway for installing and replacing them -- often with sleek modern pillars covered with digital advertising, which are arguably worse. (Personally, I'd rather have the new pillar than a filthy old disused phone box, but that's just me.) It seems to me there's a gap somewhere in the regulations. If old phone boxes are going to stay on the street for aesthetic or historic purposes, they need to be better cared for.

As I often say, the only thing people don't do in a British telephone booth is make a phone call.

(In all fairness, this is probably true of phone booths all over the world nowadays.)

This is my purple heart plant, Tradescantia pallida, a cousin of the once-common houseplant known by the dubious name "wandering jew" (Tradescantia zebrina). I haven't seen a wandering jew plant in ages -- seems like they were all the rage back in the '70s. I wonder if it's less cultivated now because of the culturally questionable name?

Anyway, when I washed down all our houseplants on Wednesday, I didn't move the purple heart outside because it's so brittle. But I belatedly realized it was pretty dusty too, so yesterday I gingerly lifted it outside the back door and gave it a good rinse. It's now back indoors unscathed and appears much happier.

We did get rain yesterday -- about five minutes in the afternoon, and a good (but only slightly longer) downpour at about 10 p.m. We're supposed to get more this evening, and temperatures are only climbing to about 76º F (24º C), thank goodness.

Dave and I binge-watched a BBC mini-series called "Years and Years" over the last two days. It's a dystopian look at the near future -- the rise of an autocratic British populist leader (played by our neighbor down the street) and the fortunes of a middle-class family who find themselves suddenly struggling to survive amid bank failures and job and personal losses. We thought it was a brilliant show, though so realistic in places that it's scary. The latter half of the last episode fell a bit flat -- there was a lot to wrap up and it seemed rushed -- but overall it's worth watching, if you have a chance.

Houseplant Bath and Liberation Day

For several weeks, we've noticed that our eight-foot-tall avocado tree -- which lives in a pot just inside glass doors to the garden -- was developing some kind of white, crusty stuff on its leaves. It was clearly evidence of a houseplant pest. The white crust was also getting on the windows, the floor, and other plants. I'd clean it up and it would reappear.

Yesterday I decided we needed a major cleaning of that whole area. So I moved all the plants into the garden, including the avocado and an almost equally tall yucca, and hosed them down to clean off their dusty leaves and give them some fresh water. In paying special attention to the avocado, I discovered that it has a pretty severe case of scale, which is probably what produced that white crust.

Here's the area around the back door with most of the plants gone and the windows and floor freshly cleaned. It looks so open! Dave expressed approval because we get a better view of the garden.

Now we're toying with the idea of leaving the avocado outside, at least for the next few months. To be honest, that tree is becoming a bit of a problem. It's just so big. I doubt it could survive a London winter, so putting it in the ground isn't an option. Nor is leaving it on the patio, unless we decide we don't mind it dying. And we might be at that point.

Meanwhile, it can enjoy some time in nature, among the birds and bugs and squirrels. We'll determine its fate later this year.

Remember the pathetic rescued ficus tree? This is what it looks like now. Still pathetic, but leafier.

Weather forecasts continue to taunt us with promises of rain that do not materialize. We had rain in the forecast yesterday morning, afternoon and overnight, and none of it actually happened. It's dry as a bone out there. I think today we may really get some, though -- the sky is cloudy and the rain chance is as high as 75 percent.

We've had temperatures above 93º F (34º C) for six days in a row. The BBC says that's the longest stretch of such hot weather since 1961. Today the heat is supposed to break, with a high of 88º F, and even cooler temperatures the rest of the week with more rainfall. Please God! Make the avocado happy!

The squabbly starlings are still visiting the bird bath daily. Yesterday I also saw a goldfinch, but didn't have the camera handy.

I called my Mom in Florida and gave her an update on life around here. (Not that there's much to tell -- mainly that I'm headed back to work in a week.) Meanwhile, Dave made a peach pie and a lasagna. I wish I felt more like eating. I'm just so hot.

(But as I prepare to hit publish on this post, I'm hearing raindrops outside!)

The Phantom Storm

 
We had a truly perplexing day yesterday, weather-wise. Initially we were told no rain was expected, but then in the morning a 50 percent chance of thunderstorms showed up in the forecast for later that afternoon. As the day went on, the 50 percent dwindled to 10 percent, and the sky remained basically sunny all afternoon and evening. We never saw a drop of rain. We may have heard distant thunder, but it could just as easily have been traffic or the railroad or something else.

That's Dave's tree fern, above, unfurling its new fronds. It seems unfazed by the heat. We've been watering everything like crazy.

This was my evening cocktail yesterday, a "highland sling," with ingredients provided by the gin club membership Dave bought me. It contained a special cocktail syrup and elderflower "posh pop," and it was OK -- a bit sweet for me. I'm happier with my normal G&T, but it's good to try new things, right?

It required a mint sprig for garnish, so I went outside and picked one, and while there I noticed:

That's a mint moth. Who knew such a thing existed? Apparently they're drawn to mint plants. I find it amazing that we can put something in the garden and the insect appropriate to live on it manages to find it. I don't think the moth is a huge problem, though.

Speaking of which, some of you may be wondering if we got any cinnabar moth caterpillars this year. The answer is no. Our ragwort has gone uneaten and the caterpillars are a no-show. I guess they move around but I've been watching the ragwort in the cemetery and haven't seen any there either. I hope they're not having a bad year for some reason.

I finished Byron Lane's fun book "A Star is Bored" yesterday. It's a novel about an assistant for a Hollywood actress who is suspiciously like Carrie Fisher -- which makes sense because Lane was Fisher's assistant. It's a hoot, as long as you don't mind bawdy humor. Fisher -- umm, I mean, the actress in the book -- has quite a tart tongue.

Oh, and I see that Kamala Harris is Biden's VP candidate of choice. I'm fine with that. Of course Fox News is already picking her apart, saying progressives are unhappy and offering advice from Sarah Palin (!). I'll be so glad when November is here.