Near-Death Experience

I had to be at work early yesterday, because we did some schedule shuffling so the library could stay open an extra hour and a half. It's time for end-of-the-semester exams, so in theory students need extra library time to study. I haven't heard yet whether any students actually took advantage of those longer hours, but anyway, at least I didn't have to do the later shift. I was out at 4 p.m.

I took the tube down to Covent Garden to run a Christmas errand. That's the big tree outside the central market, above. I can't say what my errand was on the off-chance that the person it was for will read my blog (very, very unlikely). But all will be revealed soon enough.

I walked over from Piccadilly Circus and stayed at Covent Garden just long enough to run my errand and walk around a bit to take in the holiday vibe. Then I got back on the tube at Covent Garden station -- which is never that convenient to use as it involves elevators -- and came home.

Dave was away last night on an errand of his own -- a job interview for a moonlighting gig as the conductor of a community wind band in the City of London. I think I mentioned this before. He's excited about the possibility to work with some skilled adult musicians and program some more challenging music, but he's one of at least four candidates trying for the job, so who knows how it will shake out. Anyway, I was on my own for dinner so I had leftovers and watched "The Ice Storm," one of my favorite movies. I've seen it a couple dozen times and it still makes me cry.

One of our plants, a maidenhair fern that I transplanted from another pot where it grew of its own accord, had a near-death experience a couple of weeks ago. I have been experimenting with slightly altering my plant-watering schedule, from every week to every ten days or so. I always feel like I give the plants too much water in the winter, when they're not actively growing.

Well, all the plants were fine with the schedule change except the maidenhair fern, which loves water and is potted in that terrible compost I bought last spring. It's very porous and the water runs through quickly, and maidenhair ferns like to be damp. So basically the plant dried out and I didn't notice until it was positively crispy.

I watered it thoroughly and kept it watered over the next week or two. I thought I'd killed it until I saw those tiny fiddleheads appearing at the base (above). Looks like it's bouncing back.

There's a second, smaller fern in the same pot, also bouncing back.

Whew!

Olga's Star

This is the real estate office just up the hill from our flat. It's always the brightest-lit place in a little row of shops that includes a small grocery (once a newsagent) and a cleaning supply store (once a mysterious place of uncertain purpose called The White Room). When I look out the dining room window at night, the estate agent's office is there, about half a block away, shining like a blue beacon. It's comforting.

I got out and took a walk yesterday morning. My original purpose was to get bread, because Dave forgot it when he ordered groceries. But I'd spent the whole morning indoors, partly reading a new book called "All the Colours of the Dark" by Chris Whitaker, and I felt the need to get some fresh air. I extended my route to the store by roaming up to the cemetery and then northward through Child's Hill Park and back home -- a little more than an hour of walking.

I found this intriguingly decorated car along the way. I'd love to see it lit up. Is the asymmetrical application of the wrapping paper intentional?

And then there was this weirdness:

Like all my walking routes, this one made me miss Olga, who often accompanied me through the same streets in her younger years. I haven't talked much about Olga on the ol' blog recently, but I feel her absence every day. It's hard to believe it's been five months already, and I still question her last days and whether I could have done anything differently. I'm not sure those doubts will ever go away.

Dave and I are still talking about getting another dog, but now that we're planning our Italy trip for next summer, we may wait until after that. I'm still in a mourning stage, I think. I don't want another dog, I want my old one back! Maybe that's a sign that it's still too early.

I was walking Olga last January on the high street when I found that little light-up star, shown above in our dining room window, lying on the pavement. One of the charity shops had thrown it out, I think -- probably a bit of Christmas decor that never sold. It still worked, so I brought it home and put it on our mantel, and this season I've put it in the window and turned it on. It's quite a sophisticated little thing -- it even has a timer so that it shines only when it's dark out. It's probably supposed to make me think of Baby Jesus, but instead it makes me think of Olga.

A Skiing Flamingo

I restocked the bird feeders yesterday morning and the parakeets and starlings were on the suet balls within minutes. In fact, I don't think I made it back inside before they showed up. Maybe it's hard to find food at this time of year. Anyway, I saw six parakeets on the feeder at once, which might be an all time record.

They're quite aggressive with each other and there's always a lot of snapping and jockeying for position. The one above kept nipping the tailfeathers of one of its pals, and held on even when the other bird took flight! Fortunately it promptly let go and the feather didn't come out.

In mid-morning I made a rare trip to the post office to mail a letter. I haven't used snail mail in an age and didn't have a stamp -- didn't even know how much one would cost, to be honest. Fortunately that problem was easily solved with some spare change retrieved from our dusty coin bowl.

There was some kind of holiday market on West End Green and I briefly wandered through, but I'm not really buying gifts this year so I didn't purchase anything. I did, however, stop in at the plant shop to buy...

...a wreath for our front door. Pretty nice, huh? I thought it was festive without all the red-ribbons-and-pine that we traditionally see at Christmas. Something different.

At a nearby bulk foods store I picked up a felted skiing flamingo. Because everybody needs one! Don't ask me why the bulk foods store was selling flamingoes because I haven't a clue. As far as I could see they had no other felted items on hand.

Oh, and I impulsively got both a flu shot and a Covid booster. I happened to walk past a pharmacy that was advertising them, and thought, "Why not?" After all we're going to be traveling soon and I'll be visiting some older and vulnerable people in Florida, so it would be good to take precautions. I probably should have done it weeks ago but I just didn't think that far ahead. Normally our school provides flu shots for staff and faculty but if we were offered one this year I missed it somehow, and the flu is going around.  My Covid arm is sore this morning -- the flu arm less so -- but otherwise I feel pretty normal.

I asked the pharmacist whether it was a good idea to get both shots at once. "It's recommended, actually," he said. OK then.

The rest of the day was filled with minor tasks. I trimmed some dead stuff out of the garden, raked some leaves and filled a yard waste bag. I watered all the houseplants. I cleaned and vacuumed.

And I edited this week's garden cam footage! The resulting video is very short. I had quite a few clips but most of them weren't very good. I'd returned the camera to the back of the garden, but I put it in a bad place -- too close to a pile of leaves, which reflected back so much light that everything beyond it was lost in darkness. Also, there's a very intrusive stick in the way -- in real life it looks like nothing, but on the camera it looks HUGE.

So, anyway, bad positioning aside, here's what we've got:

-- We start out with Pale Cat, who wanders around and then jumps the back wall. This is how all the animals get in and out of the garden, by jumping over the walls or fences.
-- At 00:23, we have a wary fox, followed by a couple more.
-- At 01:18, a squirrel is packing dry leaves into its mouth and running off with them. Building a nest, I guess?
-- At 01:48 we get a great view of a fox. I came out the back door and startled it lurking in some shrubbery. It ran to the back of the garden and stopped right in front of the camera, stared at me for a long while and then jumped over the fence.
-- At 02:08, another fox goes by, then wanders off behind the shed.

Yellow and Blue

See -- this really is the darkest time of the year. Almost all my pictures for the last couple of weeks, it seems, have been taken at night! (Or indoors.)

I took the one above at the beginning of December. I suspect that tree has a lot fewer leaves on it now.

And these people have a bright blue light on their porch. It reminds me of those '70s "black light" bulbs that would illuminate special psychedelic posters. Remember those? When I was a kid, my neighbors had a black light and I remember being told we couldn't look straight at it or it would blind us. Sounds like parental scaremongering but we believed it at the time.

Those neighbors, including my friend Theresa who died several weeks ago, always had the coolest stuff. Anything I learned about pop culture as a small child, I learned from them. They had transistor radios and we listened to "Seasons in the Sun" by Terry Jacks, and "Billy Don't Be a Hero" by Paper Lace, songs that were frightening because they were about dying which I could barely conceive of at the time. They had the Parker Brothers game "Masterpiece" which was about art, and which I then asked for (and got) for Christmas. My favorite character was "Bitsy" Rich Wong Dobrowski Keyes. They had stickers and toys and fun stuff and their house was utter chaos, while mine was cool and organized and somewhat dusty. I loved visiting them but I gotta admit I was always happy to get back to staid normalcy at the end of the day.

And here it is, a Saturday morning in 2025, fifty-one years later, and Theresa is dead and Becky is dead and I barely know where all that time went. How did it get to be the future?!

Can You Stand More Holiday Lights?

Yesterday after work I went back to check out the "selfie booth" on the St. John's Wood high street. I was right -- it does light up at night, and quite impressively too.

And as long as I was at it I checked out some other holiday lights in the neighborhood.

Here's the high street from the other end, showing the street lighting and the Christmas tree.

And here's nearby Eyre Court, a large apartment building that has a big ol' decorated tree in the front garden. The tree is a permanent feature. I wonder whose job it is to string up those lights every year? They must have a cherry-picker to get to the top!

I had another busy day yesterday, but I did at least have a chance to write back to the reader who sent me a letter. Hopefully I can get my response mailed to her today. I spent time with two classes in the Lower School, including one where a girl in first grade asked me to read a specific book to her, which was cute. (Usually I'm just the guy behind the desk and the teacher is the reader, but I was happy to comply!)

I also covered and/or put spine labels on about 40 new books, including this one:

I'm imagining the author on a camping trip with a young relative, and the kid making up those characters from what he sees in front of him. I didn't read it to get a sense of the action. Does someone build a new Cabin Head out of Tree Head? It looks like there's also a Bush Head, a Flower Head and a...Rock Head?

Dave and I started the show "Pluribus" last night on Apple. It seems very promising! It's by Vince Gilligan, the same guy behind "Breaking Bad," and it grabbed our attention right away. I'm also slowly watching "The House of Guinness" on Netflix. Dave isn't as impressed by that show so I have to watch it after he's fallen asleep. We finished "Down Cemetery Road," which I liked but I must confess I do not understand the title at all. It's supposedly taken from a Philip Larkin poem. Maybe I need to read the poem more closely.

Killing the Bishop

I got out yesterday for a bit of daylight by taking a walk at lunchtime. It left me with less time to respond to blog comments, but I felt better. I was feeling a bit airless after a whole morning of work, including an hour-long meeting designed to formulate our departmental statement of purpose, or something like that.

I am so ready for retirement.

I found the chessboard above behind the church in St. John's Wood, near the high street. A woman and her much older companion -- her mother, maybe? -- were walking in front of me, and the older woman impetuously stuck out her foot and kicked over the bishop. The other woman set it right again. I thought it was a funny thing to do, but maybe she was trying to see how heavy the pieces are. (Not very.)

Something tells me the time to see this glittery, spangly feature is at night. I imagine people stand in there and take selfies. It's probably elaborately lit. Maybe I'll go back and check it out later.

And LOOK! THE BROKEN-DOWN BENCH IS GONE! It's only been seven months, and after the addition and subtraction of various combinations of warning cones and hazard tape. I was going to post something about it on Nextdoor, hopefully goading the authorities into action, when I found that they'd finally taken care of the problem.

I just joined Nextdoor, which serves as a sort of message board for local news and announcements. I've been reading mostly about missing cats, stolen cars and porch pirates. Yesterday I saw a vigorous debate about foxes and whether they're charming wildlife or hazardous pests. I'm not weighing in on that argument, but you all know I love my foxes.

This Way to Disillusionment

I pass this tastefully decorated house in St. John's Wood on my walk home from work. I'm sure I've photographed it in previous years because I remember the deer, but I can't find that picture now. I don't remember the big bow, so maybe that's new. (Or maybe my memory is questionable -- much more likely.)

Another killer of a day at work. The less said the better.

Here's our library Christmas tree, decorated by yours truly. It's a real tree -- you can see the needles on the floor. Not exactly a wildly innovative decorating job, but I'd call it thorough. I wish the colored lights were working. We do have some lights decorating the shelves behind it to the left, as you can see. I suppose in a fit of creative frenzy (which I am unlikely to have) I could wrap those around the tree, but it's hard with the ornaments already on.

My co-worker Staci had to go to the American embassy yesterday to deal with some passport stuff. When she got off the tube at the station, she found arrows directing pedestrians to various locations:

But wait -- what's that sticker on the embassy arrow?

When Staci came back to the office she showed me her photo and we both had a good laugh, and she gave me permission to blog it. The Instagram account basically shows all the locations those stickers have been deployed. Many of Trump's erstwhile followers are beginning to feel this way, it seems. What happens when cults die?