Watermelon Radishes

The weather was bright and blue and crisp yesterday, so Olga and I took an afternoon walk to the cemetery. Yes, I am still technically in Covid isolation, but since I'm pretty much over it and I was outdoors and away from people the whole time, I didn't see how a walk could hurt. I desperately needed a change of scenery and I think Olga did too!

Along the way I found this stamp lying on the sidewalk. It's an old French stamp, somewhat battered and torn. Who knows how it wound up lying on a London street. It makes me suspect someone's stamp collection got discarded and this one blew out of the trash can. But who knows.

Olga wasn't super-energetic, and in fact she turned for home after we'd made one loop around the rear part of the cemetery, rather than also doing a loop around the front too -- our usual path.

I finished Sean Wilsey's "Oh the Glory of It All," which I liked even though it ran long in a few places, particularly toward the end. For example, I could have done without the road trip to Marin County, complete with thumbnail-sized photos from a disposable camera, to find the exact spot where the author's father had died peacefully a few weeks before in a passenger seat while en route from Napa to San Francisco. But Wilsey's descriptions of interactions with his truly evil stepmother -- a cliché, but this woman was capital E-V-I-L -- and his entertaining accounts of his troubled teen years and education at various expensive and exotic reform schools made up for the occasionally excessive detail. Like I said, it was thumbs-up overall.

Here's something I've never seen before. It's called a "watermelon radish," and Dave bought a package of three at the grocery store as an experiment. His verdict?

"They taste like nothing," he said. "It’s the 'Seinfeld' of radishes."

(In case your '90s cultural references are rusty, "Seinfeld" was often described as "a show about nothing.")

Indeed, they are pretty and they're pleasantly crisp, and as you can see they're quite a bit larger than a traditional radish, but they don't have much of a taste. I think they're more about texture and appearance than anything else.

We also tried another new product, courtesy of my monthly (now quarterly; I reduced the frequency) box from the Craft Gin Club. It's called "Crodino," and it's a non-alcoholic Italian aperitif. It's very bitter and neither Dave nor I cared for it. He likened it to concentrated orange rind, and I think that's pretty accurate. But some people love it (at least according to the Amazon reviews) so maybe it's just not our thing.

Planned Obsolescence

A quick sojourn in the tropics today as we check in on our various orchids! Several have recently flowered. None of these are on their first go-around, but we do have one more -- which I adopted a couple of years ago after someone discarded it at school -- with buds, and I haven't yet seen it bloom. As soon as the flowers open I'll be sure to share them.

I took another Covid test yesterday in the hopes that I would be negative (and then negative again today) which would spring me from isolation tomorrow instead of Monday. But alas, I was still very, very faintly positive. So it looks like I'll be serving the full term of my sentence. Ugh.

(The test I showed in yesterday's photos was one from early in my infection, which is why it was so strongly positive.)

Dave is past his 10-day isolation period and is testing negative, so he got dressed and went to the grocery store yesterday. BIG EXCITEMENT! I walked the dog around the neighborhood, sticking to quiet streets and avoiding other people, so I guess that counts for something.

We contacted a lawn mower repair shop to see about getting our electric mower fixed. At the end of last summer it mysteriously stopped working, as if the wiring had come loose somewhere. Dave contacted a place in Wembley, but when we told them what kind of mower we had, they advised us to simply buy another one because it would cost as much to repair it as replace it.

This DRIVES ME CRAZY because I'm sure it's a fairly minor repair. I argued to Dave that we should have it fixed anyway, for ecological reasons. Why should we discard a mower that is otherwise perfectly functional? We can't treat the planet this way! But Dave feels it would be a waste of money, so we're at a bit of an impasse.

This would be the mower's ninth summer, so it's not like it's brand new. Besides, if we do get a new one, we could get a cordless which would be a lot more convenient. So maybe I'm talking myself into it.

Mrs. Kravitz is having her patio power-washed, which entails having a chugging engine parked right next to our garden fence and gritty spray being thrown all over our rubbish bins. I am forcing myself to ignore the situation. They're only bins.

Decor for a Disco Bathroom

Time for another look at all the photos that have been gathering in my iPhone. Despite the fact that I haven't left our house for the past nine days, I have a stash that accumulated before I came down with Covid. Frankly, if I don't blog them, I'm going to be writing about vacuuming again -- and nobody wants that.

First, I found this interesting whiteboard in the North Greenwich tube station the last time I was down that way. At first I thought it was Ed Sheeran song lyrics, but looking more closely I see it's actually a poem making references to Sheeran's songs: "Nancy Mulligan" and "Galway Girl" are both song titles, for example. Apparently @allontheboard are a couple of guys who work for Transport for London (TFL) and decorate whiteboards throughout the tube system.

A little sticker (or something?) I spotted in the mud on a footpath. A smiley insect of some kind, apparently?

One glove, one shoe -- both lost. Did their owner hop away waving one bare hand?

These are in the window of a high-end Italian furniture shop on Finchley Road -- a shop that is closing, coincidentally. If anybody wants a fancy glass globule I can probably get it for you cheap!

These discarded wooden frames were in boxes marked "STD canvas" with the name of an art supplier in Blackpool. I'm guessing they're frames that an artist would stretch canvas over to paint? There were quite a few of them, and I hated seeing them all in the trash. Too bad someone didn't Freecycle them.

In case you're not sure what a positive Covid test looks like -- this is it. (A negative one wouldn't show that line next to the T.)

When I was walking in the cemetery not too long ago I came across this discarded (and muddy) grocery bag -- which wouldn't be unusual except it's a very old design. As long as we've been in London, Waitrose has used bags with a green pattern and lettering. This red-and-black look must be a decade old, anyway. Further evidence that plastic bags hang around a long time!

(And look, you can buy a fresh one on eBay for £1.99!)

Finally, another found item in someone's trash -- a glittery purple toilet seat! It would take a very special bathroom to pull off that look.

More Bulbs

I told you the daffodils were days away from blooming -- and sure enough, they have arrived!

In fact, suddenly we have more bulb flowers popping open every day. There are crocuses:

And there's also this:

This tiny jonquil comes from a bulb that I found lying on the ground in the cemetery last spring. It appeared to have been uprooted by some animal, and I pocketed it, brought it home and stuck it in a pot. I didn't know what it was and in fact forgot all about it, but obviously it survived.

The only other excitement we had yesterday...

...was the appearance of a woodpecker on our suet balls. Remember the ones I bought at Homebase that the birds didn't like? We theorized they were too old and/or too dry. Well, we bought a fresh container from Ocado and the birds seem to like those better.

And that's about it, aside from vacuuming, reading, television and cleaning and plant care. Plus ça change.

Dave and I are feeling more and more normal each day. I haven't tested myself today and I may not bother, because there's no point in trying to get myself to work today and tomorrow. They're teacher conference days and the kids aren't even around, so I wouldn't have much to do. I may as well wait until my appointed return date, Monday.

My Failures

I'm a bit late posting today. I didn't get up until 7 a.m., so I had a bit of a lie-in, though I was also awake for two hours in the middle of the night so that's probably why. Our mysterious sleep cycles!

I'm now at the point where I could test out of my Covid isolation -- I need two consecutive daily negative tests and then I could rejoin the world. Unfortunately, yesterday's test was still positive and although I haven't tested today I doubt it would be any different. So it looks like I may have to serve my full ten days, through Sunday. I'd also need to be symptom free to "get out of jail," and although I mostly am, I still have a bit of congestion and tiredness.

I spent more time in the garden yesterday, neatening some things up, and taking stock of some of our plants. I'm debating throwing out a few that seem to have lived their best lives.

I seldom talk about my plant failures, but here are three:

You may remember a few years ago I rescued a mostly dead ficus tree discarded in freezing January weather. I cut it back and this is what it looks like now. Not a failure, exactly, but I expected it to grow more upward than outward. It's not a very pretty plant.

Remember the "rescued" prayer plant? Well, I'm putting "rescued" in quotes, because that isn't what's happened at all. The plant looks worse and worse. It put out a new leaf but that quickly died, and the others are slowly turning brown. I think it's toast. I intended to give it until spring, when we have more light and warmth, in the hopes that would coax it to do something else -- but it may go in the trash any day.

Finally -- and I'm really bummed about this one -- there's that crassula that I dug out of the garden, where it was getting mangled by the dog and shaded out by other plants. I put it in this pot on an indoor windowsill and it seemed to do well for a while, with lots of new growth. But then that growth began to shrivel, and I don't know why. I put it back outside, thinking that restoring it to a familiar environment might help, but the jury is out. I put it in well-drained gritty soil with cactus compost, because supposedly it wants dry conditions, but I wonder if it's been too dry. Or too wet. Who knows?

I'm reading "Oh the Glory of It All" by Sean Wilsey, a memoir of growing up in his well-to-do and well-connected but eccentric San Francisco family. I remember when it came out in 2005 and I was struck by the fact that someone several years younger than me was already writing a memoir. I've always meant to read it -- along with "The Tender Bar" by J. R. Moehringer, another memoir that came out around the same time, and that I still haven't read, and that is now a movie on Amazon Prime that I still haven't seen. The Wilsey book is good so far -- I'm about 100 pages in -- but I gotta wonder how his family felt about it. He's not pulling any punches.

(Side note: Every time I see author Sean Wilentz's name in print I get him confused with Sean Wilsey, even though Wilsey is 20 years younger. Neither here nor there.)

(Top photo: A ring-necked parakeet resting in the winter trees above our back garden.)

Signs of Spring

This was the view from the back door yesterday, with the sun shining brightly and temperatures warm enough for me to be outside in shorts and a sweatshirt. I spent some time working in the garden, stripping ivy from one of our fences and cutting back dead stuff and pulling weeds.

I know winter isn't over. We could and probably will have more frosts, and potentially even a whopper of a snowstorm. But it's hard not to think ahead when the weather is as nice as it was yesterday. Besides, spring things are happening!

The hellebore, which is a winter flower anyway, is blooming...

...but so is a crocus, definitely an early sign of spring.

And the snowdrops have opened.

The problematic ivy was growing on the fence between us and Mrs. Kravitz. She asked me to remove it some time ago (you know how she's obsessed with the fence) and it was threatening to overshadow our honeysuckle, so I finally got around to it. I also pulled some ivy out of the flower beds. I am forever pulling ivy.

Here's our tree fern, looking very feathery and lush in its protected corner of the patio. We haven't done anything special to overwinter it this year. The gardening shows all advise wrapping the trunk and stuffing the top with hay or burlap, but I've come to the conclusion that in London, tree ferns generally manage on their own. Mrs. Kravitz doesn't do anything to hers and it looks good year after year. Out in the chillier countryside or up north I'm sure they need special care, and if we had snow I'd cover it.

Olga joined me outside to enjoy the sunshine. You can see that our daffodils are budding too (on the left). We'll have daffodil blossoms any day now.

I still need to weed the patio and we need to have someone come and service the lawn mower. It mysteriously stopped working right at the end of the season last year and I gotta get it in shape before we have to start mowing again.

You may be wondering how (or why!) I'm doing all this gardening if I'm sick. Well, honestly, I don't feel too bad. Just a little tired and stuffy. And it feels good to get outside, even if just into the back garden!

Flowers and Football

A rather boring and frustrating day yesterday. I'm between books and I didn't feel like immediately diving into a new one, and I didn't want to watch a movie, and of course I can't leave the house. "Trapped like a rat! A rat in a cage!"

(I wrote that thinking it was a famous quote, but when I Googled it to see where it came from I only get advice on how to kill a trapped rat. Or references to a Smashing Pumpkins song that contains the line "despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage," which isn't quite the same. So maybe it's not a famous quote. I think it's just something my friend Sue used to say.)

Anyway...I did a little more work on my dad's photo book and uploaded it to Blurb, and ordered a copy to see how the finished product looks. I also sent the PDF proofs to my stepsister so she could check them out, as she helped me research the names of Dad's traveling companions on that trip, and I'll send them to my stepmother too.

When Dave first tested Covid-positive a week ago I bought him flowers on the way home from work -- you're seeing that bouquet in these photos. It's past its prime now, but still pretty. When I bought it the poppies were more or less the same height as the roses, but they magically kept growing so now they're several inches higher.

Dave was hoping he'd be able to return to work early with a negative test after five days -- but his test last night was still positive and he's still coughing, so he's not too happy about that. As for me, my symptoms are still mostly in my nose. My sinuses were incredibly stuffy yesterday and I used some of Dave's nasal spray -- MAN, that stuff WORKS! Apparently it's addictive so you can't use it much but I was mighty impressed at how freely I could breathe afterwards.

Apropos of nothing, here's a video of Olga with a football we found at the cemetery on a recent walk:

It amazed me how excited she got! She was like a puppy again. A football really motivates her. I brought the ball home but I haven't given it to her in the garden for fear she'll demolish the plants.

Remember when she lost her dog tag several weeks ago, and I worked so hard to successfully find it? Well, it's gone again. This time I have no idea where it fell off. Fortunately Olga has a microchip so if she ever gets lost she can still be identified and returned to us -- and she has a spare tag too.