Teddy's Strabismus

As I was taking our sheets and some dress shirts to the laundromat yesterday, I passed this teddy bear sitting out on an abandoned bicycle near the high street. He looks like he has been well-loved.

Maybe that's why he's now cross-eyed!

Yesterday was a get-this-house-in-order kind of day. First and foremost, I cleaned and arranged the patio. Now that the scaffold is gone, it needed a good sweeping and then I moved all the potted plants back into their usual positions. The scaffold guys managed to leave behind a heavy metal clamp as well as a big board, but I just threw them away. It's an unwritten rule that every time a scaffold gets disassembled, parts of it are forgotten. I'm sure they're used to it.

I also trimmed the monster, which had been partly blocked by the scaffold and thus left to run wild for the past month. It's been driving me crazy, so I was glad to give it a haircut. I collected two bags of trimmings afterwards.

And of course I vacuumed inside and took care of all the potted plants. One of our rescue orchids spontaneously died. I have no idea why, except that it was never very robust to begin with. It's OK -- we have plenty -- but I'm letting you know that I do have my failures.

I also took Olga to the cemetery. No turaco. I think Olga put on some weight while I was away, so we've got some more walking to do!

I came across an interesting article yesterday about the urban myth of the school that installed a litter box for a student who identified as a cat. Have you heard this nonsense? It's a story that's been making the rounds, usually perpetuated by people who are hostile to LGBT identities. Some mother made the allegation at a school board meeting months ago that schools were installing litter boxes for "furry" students, and it was never true, but the story took on a life of its own. It has been repeated as fact by politicians and political candidates and podcasters. When we were in Michigan over the summer, Dave's mom said she heard it from someone who had a friend who worked in this mythical school. That seems to be the pattern -- it's always a friend of a friend who has personal knowledge of this situation, and yet no specific school or litter-box-using student has ever been identified because they DON'T EXIST. It's just a way for right-wingers to take the idea of self-identification to an absurd next level. It's baloney.

People are so crazy. The things we come up with! It's enough to make me go cross-eyed.

Pigeons

When I walk down Finchley Road on my way to and from work, I pass some buildings where flocks of pigeons are often flying above the rooftops. They must live in the nooks and crannies of the structures, one of which is an old telephone exchange that looks like it may be largely unoccupied. I took this video last week, trying to capture their looping, circular flight patterns. Be warned: I got dizzy recording the video, and you might get dizzy watching it!

Yesterday morning Mrs. Russia e-mailed me to say the gigantic scaffold on our patio would be taken down that day. Dave and I both thought, "Yeah, right," but darned if it wasn't gone when we got home in the evening. That's a relief. Mrs. Russia initially told us this entire project -- replacing their window and repairing their roof -- would take three days. Instead it took a month!

(I wonder if they really told her three weeks and she misunderstood? I don't see how anyone could look at the scale of that job and think it was going to be done in three days.)

Dave had to go to the hospital last night for a spinal tap. Why he did this is a long story -- basically he's had a hand tremor and his doctors are trying to figure out what's causing it. I joined him there when I got off work. He did it privately, through our insurance company, so he had a private room in a swanky hospital in Marylebone. I waited while the procedure was completed, but when they wheeled him back into the room he said he had to lie on his back for four hours and I should just go home and take care of the dog. So I did. Dave showed up about 10 p.m. and he had a headache and some dizziness, but otherwise felt OK. He's still asleep as I type.

While Dave rested in his hospital bed, I came home and read an excellent graphic novel called "The Arab of the Future," by Riad Sattouf, about a boy growing up in Libya and Syria in the 1980s. We only have the first volume in our library but I'm tempted to order the sequels too.

Backing Up and Clearing Out

First, a brief tutorial. Just a few days ago, we had an incident in Blogland where Google deleted someone's account for a terms-of-service violation. This eliminated their entire blog, which they'd been keeping for close to 20 years. I can't imagine how heartbreaking it would be to lose all that work.

Every six months or so I make a blog backup. You can download the entire contents of your blog into an XML file that you could then re-import into Blogger to re-create a lost blog. This works; I did it in 2008 when I quit blogging for a while and deleted my blog. I then restored it the following year when I started again. I don't quite understand how it works, because when you look at the backup it's just a lot of text gobbledygook and there are no visible pictures or anything, but somehow it all comes back. The only problem I experienced when I re-imported the blog was that my earlier comments all went to "anonymous" -- somehow it broke the link with the commenters' identities. Now, when you look back at my posts from 2008 and earlier, all the comments show as anonymous. Which is a shame.

Anyway, here's how to make a blog backup. Go to "settings" on the left-hand side of your Blogger dashboard. Scroll down to the "manage blog" section. Click "back up content." A pop-up window appears; click "download." Your blog content will be downloaded in a single file -- in my case, it's a 158 MB file, which isn't much considering how big my blog is.

Then, if (God forbid) you lose your blog, you can create a new one, go to the same "manage content" section and hit "import content," and restore it by uploading that XML file.

I have no idea whether this works for other platforms. In other words, I'm not sure you could download a Blogger backup and then upload it to Wordpress or Typepad. So, needless to say, if your blog has been deleted because of something you did on Blogger that offended Google, you'd have the same problem if you restored the blog. (Unless they tell you what you've done wrong and you're then able to correct it.)

Anyway, I thought this advice might be helpful to those readers who also keep their own blogs. Everyone else, sorry for the boring diversion!

You're getting a mishmash of pictures today. The top photo I took in our garden yesterday. Dave said it got down to 40º F (or 4.4º C) while I was in Florida, which is perhaps why the leaves of our geranium are getting those colorful edges. The picture above I snapped quickly out the car window in Jacksonville. Is it the "We're for Jesus" Love Center, or the "We're for Jesus' Love" Center? Some punctuation would be helpful here.

Surprisingly, work yesterday wasn't too difficult. I felt pretty awake. It was only when we sat down to watch "The Great British Bake Off" last night that I struggled, through no fault of the program. I had to get up and do laundry and dishes and some other stuff just to keep my eyes open until bedtime, and then I slept like the dead. It was fantastic and this morning I feel pretty much normal.

While I was at my brother's I spent some time going through old photos. My brother has boxes of stuff from my mom's house, and he's trying to organize and clear some of it out. I brought home a handful of pictures including the one above, which was probably taken in 1973 or so, and shows me swimming in the lake behind my childhood home near Tampa. I'll probably be slipping more old photos into my posts here and there -- it's a good way to store them. (As long as I back them up!)

Flying, in Two Parts

I'm now in the Miami airport on Wednesday afternoon, pre-writing some of this post so when I get to work tomorrow I won't be sitting at my desk blogging! (My boss might frown on that.) That above was the view out my window about two hours ago on the first leg of my flight, from Jacksonville to Miami. That's Sunny Isles Beach in the foreground.

We came inland just south of there and this was the view northward, over North Miami. A rainbow!

Then we flew directly over the Trump golf club in Doral. I wasn't fast enough with the camera, but of course it has egomaniac Trump's name in towering letters on the roof, so there was no mistaking it:

(That picture is from Google Maps.)

Now that I've shared those photos, let me back up a bit, before I even boarded my plane, to my mostly uneventful morning in Jacksonville. I packed my carry-on bag with my few odds and ends, and rode along as my brother took my niece to school. My brother and I stopped for coffee at a little place north of downtown, and then we proceeded to the airport. I felt like I had all the time in the world. I checked in, went to the security line, and as I was standing there preparing to pull my laptop from my bag I suddenly realized IT WAS GONE!

No, it wasn't stolen. It was under the front seat of my brother's car, where I'd hidden it so it wouldn't be stolen during our coffee stop.

I had to call him and have him drive back to the airport to hand me my computer before I could proceed to my gate -- a process that took about half an hour. And this, people, is why it always pays to get to the airport early.

These are the tiles at the entrance to the men's room at the Jacksonville airport. I love them. I feel like I know all those people.

Here in Miami I had a media noche and Cuban cafe con leche at Cafe Versailles, in terminal E, where I often stop for Cuban fare when I pass through the airport. It's not quite Calle Ocho but it's pretty good for airport food.

And now, on to the next leg of my journey...

------later------

Now it's Thursday morning and I'm in London, sitting at my desk. My overseas flight was pretty uneventful. I spent most of it reading a biography of Zelda Fitzgerald. I also slept a surprising amount of time, two or three hours, which is more than I usually sleep on planes.

While still in Miami, I was stupid enough to once again order a glass of wine in an airport. Apparently the $26 glass of wine from 2017 didn't teach me a lesson. This time it was a comparative bargain -- only $19! When will I learn?!

Holy Holy Holy

Well, I'm headed back to London today. It's been a productive visit and I'm glad I came. I got to spend time with Mom and help my brother with managing some of her stuff, and I'm taking home some old pictures and a handful of other family belongings. (I'll collect more at Christmas.)

Oh, and I got the quilts mailed! Woo hoo! We took them to the post office yesterday and sent them out for a relatively reasonable $100, which is only slightly more than it would have cost me to check them in an extra bag on my flight. (Plus, this way I don't have to juggle them through the airport and all the way back to my house.)

After that we went to lunch at a Mexican place where this car with a fun wheelcover was in the parking lot...

...and then went to visit Mom. We took her outside in her wheelchair and rolled around the grounds of her retirement center on the same path we used to regularly walk years ago. Hopefully it was familiar to her. She seemed to get a kick out of the ducks in the pond, and we sat and watched passing boats on Julington Creek, a branch of the St. Johns River. I just talked to her as if she knew exactly what I was saying, and she did seem to react at appropriate times, so maybe she understands more than we know.

The retirement center has a sort of carillon which chimes out familiar tunes and hymns every half hour or so, and at one point it began to play the hymn "Holy, Holy, Holy." I (miraculously) remembered enough of it from my Presbyterian childhood to begin singing along, and Mom mouthed the words of the first few lines with me. So she remembers it too.

Again, it's good to see that some wires are still connecting. I have to reassess what I wrote a few days ago -- that she's like a snowy TV screen. I think there's still a little bit of programming coming across those airwaves.

Last night my brother and older niece and I shared a bunch of retro music videos with each other -- they wanted to show me videos of '90s and early aughts bands like My Chemical Romance and Limp Bizkit, which we'd been talking about in the car. I remembered some of them from the gym, when music videos were often playing while I endlessly climbed the Stairmaster back then, and I responded by showing them Alien Ant Farm and Eminem, which also vividly impressed me at that time. My musical tastes are gentler than my brother's -- he likes more growly rock -- but we still had fun.

And now, off to the airport. I'll be landing at Heathrow around 7 a.m. and going straight to work. That should be fun.

Foggy Scrunchie Hair Day

Yesterday morning, when my brother and I took my niece to school, it was really foggy. These guys were sitting out on the St. John's River, fishing, and the view was just a milky whiteness. Normally you'd be able to see the opposite shore from here.

After dropping off Jane, we stopped in at a coffee place on the north side of the city. This was the doorstep of an adjacent building:

Do you suppose it once sold models, like the ones kids build? Or maybe model railroads? Maybe both? That seems like a pretty narrow focus of business, but perhaps back in the day there were enough model enthusiasts to make such an enterprise viable. I suppose like everything else it's now all online.

Later we went to run an errand. I am keeping two of our family quilts, which were made by my great-grandmother many years ago, and I thought rather than trying to bring them on the plane (I have no baggage allowance with this ultra-cheap ticket I bought) I would mail them. So we boxed them up and took them to the UPS store.

The box is not huge -- 16x16x12, and weighing about 9.5 pounds. Just guess how much the UPS store told me it would cost to ship that box to England.

I was thinking $75, or maybe $100. But no -- it would cost SEVEN HUNDRED AND SIX DOLLARS. Unless I took the slower option, with delivery in five days, which would cost a mere FIVE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-SIX DOLLARS. And that was the cheapest they could do.

Needless to say, we didn't ship the quilts.

I think we're going to try again today at the post office, which (online at least) is quoting me a much more affordable rate.

After that we went to see my mom, whose hair was up in a stylish scrunchie. My mom has had short hair all her life so I've never seen it look anything like this. She laughed when we touched it and she laughed when I showed her this picture -- but then again she laughs at pretty much everything.

We did have a little breakthrough moment, though. One of her pals, a fellow patient on the floor named Helga, rolled up to us and kept pointing at me and asking Mom, "Do you know this man?" Now, for years, my mom's vocabulary has been pretty much limited to the words "No" and "Oh, God." But when Helga asked her that, Mom said, "Yes!" My brother and I were impressed and I got choked up.

I think today I may try to take her for a little walk outside.

Snoop

This is Snoop, my brother's new(ish) dog. Snoop is about eight months old and is a very energetic puppy. He can't stand it when we're all sitting together and not paying attention to him. He'll come up to my chair with one of his toys in his mouth and beg for a game of tug-of-war, which he plays with wild abandon, growling loudly the whole time.

He's not even at an age where he can be petted very easily because he just doesn't want to sit still. He'd much rather be gnawing on my hand. (And I'm under strict instructions not to allow that. You may remember my brother's previous dog, Queens, did the same thing and my brother still accuses me of ruining the dog by tolerating it. At least Snoop hasn't broken my skin, whereas Queens used to leave me with scratches from her sharp puppy teeth.)

Queens had a good life but unfortunately she developed lymphoma and only lived about three years. It was a freak thing -- very unexpected and very sad.

Here's Snoop on our walk yesterday. He's actually more proportional than this photo suggests -- I think it's just the angle of the shot that makes his head look so big and his body so skinny. My brother is saying that he wants to fatten him up a bit, but Snoop is in the gangly pre-adolescent stage.

We visited my mom yesterday morning. She's now living in a nursing unit, following a springtime bout with flu that left her with diminished mobility. She was sitting in a wheelchair but she seemed happy, laughing and smiling. One of the other women on her floor said that Mom, who is 85, is always so friendly and has a contagious laugh, so that's good to know. She has no idea what day or time it is, or even where she is, and she can't really talk except to say "No!" now and then, to be honest I'm not entirely sure she knows who I am -- but she just rolls along with all of it. Some dementia patients get angry and some get frustrated but Mom has always just been giggly.

I suppose that's a blessing in a bizarre way. As I've told my brother, she's like a TV set to a non-broadcast channel. Her screen is on but there's only snow. Of course I miss being able to talk and communicate with her but overall, at the risk of sounding cruel, I feel pretty matter-of-fact about it. It is what it is. It's hard to imagine that just five years ago we were having conversations and going out to eat and even going to Savannah.

I also ran some errands with my brother and spent time with my nieces. My younger niece, Kate, is in fourth grade and obsessed with Warrior Cats, a popular book series about clans of feral house cats. There's a web page with some art tools, and together we designed our own Warrior Cat:

I know, it looks a little like Carmen Miranda. Carmen Meow-randa, maybe.

It was also my sister-in-law's birthday and we had some vague plans to go downtown and have a drink somewhere before JM (my brother) made steaks for dinner, but in the end the drink never happened. Well, not downtown, anyway.

We watched the early '90's movie "Point Break," with Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze, which I'd never seen and don't even really remember being released. It was OK.

And at night we watched "The Breakfast Club," which of course I love, being precisely that generation. I think I saw it about ten times in the theater when it came out during my freshman year in college.

I had such a crush on Emilio Estevez.

Oh, and of course we went to Publix, because I'm in Florida and that's what we do when we need groceries.

This was for sale at the checkout. Sometimes the world really confuses me.