Department of Missed Opportunities

There will be No Picture at all in the blog today. This morning around 5:10 a.m. I looked at the dark sky outside and then I looked at my heavy old camera that only works half the time, and I thought "Who needs more pictures of the pitch black park?" and left it on the counter.

Just past the dog beach I saw a creature the size of a cat run across the path about 20 yards in front of us. The dogs raced towards it, but it climbed up the fence and shimmied up the lamp on the other side. There at the cross-bar of the lamp, with the light full on its face, was a baby raccoon! Henry and Simone were on their hind legs trying to climb the fence but luckily the raccoon was safe on its perch. It would have made a wonderful picture, but you will just have to imagine the tiny hands wrapped around the post, the luxurious dangling tail, and the little pointed face with its ringed eyes peering down at us in the lamplight.

I harbor no illusions about raccoons and know how fortunate we were to avoid a physical encounter. A Brooklyn husky I know ended up with a wound on its haunch the size of a saucer when it tried to attack a raccoon in its back yard. And I once observed a fight between a raccoon and a possum on the porch of a place I used to visit in the Berkshires. That wasn't pretty either. It's wild out here in Brooklyn! East Yorkshire has nothing like this.

Simone Best of Breed!

There are many people, who go out with their sighthounds most weekends to let them chase three plastic bags tied to a string that zigzags around a field on pulleys, who could paper their walls with these things. Among them is the owner of Simone's sire Calvin, a dog with more letters after his name than a Harvard Professor. To us though, yesterday's haul of ribbons is a big deal. After numerous false starts in coursing, Henry got the second leg of his Junior Courser title (although I do need to check that it wasn't the same judge as the first leg, in which case we'll have to go through this again), and Simone won first place and Best of Breed in the Open. She only beat out three other whippets, but we don't care, we think she's the greatest.
I have no pictures from the Big Apple Sighthound Association AKC lure coursing meet yesterday at Stillwell Woods near Syosset on Long Island, because the battery in my camera was dead, and anyway, a cold drizzle alternated with a thick mist all morning. It felt like a thoroughly English thing to do, to stand shivering in a muddy field in your wellies and Barbour jacket, defying the weather, with hounds baying and racing over the turf, then taking refuge from the elements in the car. The only thing missing was a flask of hot tea, or the little brass spirit stove my Grandad used to fire up on such occasions to make a fresh brew.

Seven feet off the ground, and Darth Vader

One of these days I will figure out how to take better pictures of running whippets. Watching the pair of them in a good chase is a fine way to start the day. They really do fly, and my ambition is to take a clear picture of them with not a single one of their eight feet on the ground. This one is seven out of eight. Next time.

Unlike those many residents of the outer boroughs who commute to the City every day, I manage to spend most of my life in Brooklyn, and I like it that way. My travel time to work is around 15 minutes, and in spite of too much high rise development along Fourth Avenue, you can still see big swaths of sky out here. In fact, I spend most of my life in the stretch between Green-wood Cemetery and Grand Army Plaza, and it's rare for me to get on the subway, which I dislike, to go to Manhattan. Yesterday I had to do it though, and as I approached the bridge over Fourth Avenue at Ninth Street I noticed some sad art deco details, grimed over and disintegrating. Aside from the Central Library building, one doesn't see much deco in this neighborhood, which is better known for its nineteenth century brownstones. A cursory glance at online sources proves that I am far from the first to see this. Of course Francis Morrone has checked it out: in an article in the NY Sun he writes, "The Art Deco station is handsome, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, but is desperately ill-maintained, and given the transit authority's budgetary woes, the station will get even worse before it gets better." Right. There were rumors of a coming facelift, but nothing seems to have happened yet. That Darth Vader lamp would look scary if it actually worked.

April 5 2009 deadline for buying back UK Social Security

My day was going quite well until I started reading my email. A kind relative reminded me that there is an April 5 deadline for buying back 1999-2000, 2000-2001 and 2001-2002 UK Social Security. You can also buy back 2006-7 without penalty until April 5th but you have until April 5 2013 to do it at a higher rate. Apparently for every year you buy back you get another L.157 added to your pension, so if you can survive around three years after retirement age you are winning. I'd say it's a risk worth taking, but in my case it requires finding something over L.1000 in short order. The good news, from my point of view, is that the pound is as low as it has been in years.

This being Wednesday morning, I double parked my car to allow for street cleaning, setting an alarm to remind me to move it back again at 10 a.m. The alarm went off at about 9:40, just a little too early to go down, so I sat down again and began figuring out how to save money in the long run by paying Her Majesty's Customs and Excise before April 5.

When I next looked up from my calculations, it was 10:05. Anyone lucky--or perhaps the proper word is stupid--enough to own a car in New York City will know that if 10:00 is your time, 10:05 is already too late, unless you are very very lucky. I went down, and found the expected orange envelope stuffed under the wiper.

The sky is blue

I would just like to point out that the sky over Brooklyn is perfectly, cloudlessly, impossibly, blue. The imperfections in the image come from my camera. Anyone who has spent half an hour in the north of England will understand the need to make this point.

English whippets from Virginia

Here are two English whippets from Virginia basking in a patch of spring sunlight near a window. The whippet was bred in England in the 19th century to race and hunt small animals over the moors and warm the feet of miners in their chilly beds. I have heard that a whippet and a ferret used to be required accoutrements of working men in the west of Yorkshire, but I am from the east so I only know by hearsay.

One of mine was sired by an English dog (Nevedith Justa Joker) but the other, Simone, is an all American girl.


On the right is what happens to a resting American English whippet when you take a packet of New York Cheddar cheese out of the refrigerator.

Cheddar, by the way, is the Somerset village where the cheese originated and home to the well-known Cheddar Man, whose death around 7000 BC according to Wikipedia, may have been connected to the cannibalism then practiced in the area. They don't still do that now down in Somerset, do they? It's been quite a while since I was last there.

To the left is Simone's dream.

Signs of spring

One of the strange things about spring in Brooklyn is the way it seems to come all at once, although this year is a little more nuanced than usual. At the end of March you might have a snowstorm and then three days later people are walking around in teeshirts. Signs of spring yesterday in Grand Army Plaza included the return of the ice cream stand, a baseball bat apparently carried without intent to do harm, and witch hazel (I think). Signs of spring you don't see here: snowdrops, carpets of crocuses, people dusting off archaic adages like "Ne'er cast a clout 'til May is out."