Snow and shadows

Snow seems to do extraordinary things to humans -- cause projectile fights, close airports, that sort of thing, but I rather like it. There are new friends to play with:

old friends just back from hotter climes:

a refreshing lack of Saturday afternoon riffraff:

and ample opportinuty for absurdist signage.

Just to remind myself that autumn actually happened...

It's true that I really picked the wrong moment to hibernate -- here I am, getting back into things in order to complain about the winter, while the human was off doing his best to enjoy the great outdoors before coming home to let me out of my sleeping bag and turn the heating on.
Things I missed include:

An apple and sweet onion festival -- which also seems to have included red wine and chestnuts -- in company with some of the old friends who first set me on the path of chronicling the eccentricities of humans;

and a trip (via Westward Ho!, no less) to a notorious pirate lair, convenient for the observation of Shetland ponies employed by the National Trust for mowing and fertilisation purposes, and the sort of meta-signage that offers visitors the best means of dpriving visitors of the opportinuty of actually falling off the ends of the Earth.

Score one for heliocentrism, methinks.

I'm still alive

Spring has sprung
and cherry blossoms keep falling on the bikepath!
More soon, I promise
Love to all,
Hugo

Snow falling on Vélibs

and on secret Parisian gardens...

and on other vegetation...

...but remember folks: keep off the grass!

Nuit blanche II: on the unexpectedly versatile nature of erstwhile garden installations

The improvised water tank formerly of West-Nor'-West Redfern was always an unpretentious affair, filling itself from a backed up drainpipe and washing machine hose arrangmeent when it rained, and keeping the garden alive for days at a time between summer showers.

Little did I imagine that its kind would go on to dominate both the entrance to the Buttes Chaumont and the Pont St-Louis! The future may well bring us luminous cities of plastic water cubes, but it's nice to know they haven't forgotten their roots -- allotments ahoy!

Putting things on a pedestal

or explaining the human's reluctance to invest in a basil plant to place on the kitchen window sill as autumn approaches:

Fame precedes me!

As do vertical gardens attached to the front façade of menswear chains...

Petit déjeuner sur l'herbe

Even the human has had his share of haloumi by this point in the week!

On somewhat inconvenient aesthetic developments relating to well-intentioned implement substitution

This is not the first time that the jiggler siphon has been mentioned in these chronicles, nor in all likelihood will it be the last. However I must report that the human seems to be both pleased and slightly vexed with his latest escapade, resulting from an attempt to transfer nutrient-rich yeast sediment from a patent glass fermentation vessel onto a garden bed that continues to produce both fruiting and tuberous solanaceae well out of season.
Despite its alleged status as a supercooled liquid, glass is generally known to be brittle. What is less well-known is that over-enthusiastic siphon-priming can cause an almost perfectly circular section of fermentation vessel to detach itself, resulting in somewhat faster than planned egress of said intended fertiliser.
Aside from the obvious application of such an unintended carburation port (obvious, that is, to a being larger than either myself or the human), can anybody suggest either a new use or a means of returning this vessel to its zymurgic destiny?

It's best to consider things from every angle

...not to mention share the love.

L'aubergine espagnole

pour vous rassurer que Hugo sait toujours faire des mauvais jeux de mots dans plus qu'une seule langue...

Greenwash

Time was when Nero fiddled while Rome burned -- a pursuit whose merits can be debated, perhaps, but rendered obsolete (in urban areas at least) by the advent of modern firefighting.
We do self-destruction differently here on the driest continent on earth. If you're going to go in for Oxbridge pastiches then you might as well do it properly -- no point watering the grass unless it's already raining!

Nuclear disarmament, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the eggplant

"Perhaps not in my lifetime," says the master of sartorial understatement, but it's comforting to think that this time the guy in charge might actually want there to be less nuclear weapons floating around the place. Nearly as comforting, in fact, as seeing eggplants start to ripen even past the date where it gets dark far, far too early in the afternoon.

The following exhibits support this hypothesis:

(a) with apologies to the person, place or thing it was ripped off:(b) with apologies for the amateur camerawork:

Q. E. D.

Not dead -- assisting the human with culinary and other enquiries

It's been a quietish summer on this front. Bar December's outbreak of fluvially-challenged equine spam (is this a particularly gelatinous form of foot and mouth disease?) and the human hogging the computer to wrestle with the problem of jokes that are no longer funny once you try to explain them, I've been doing not much other than observe the decline and fall of the cherry tomato empire, soon to be supplanted by the upstart snake beans.

I ventured into the kitchen this evening to find the human engaged in trying to fit the remains of a packed of pasta into a jar that had held what is euphemistically named "Cranberry drink," and couldn't help climbing up to investigate.

The human, meanwhile, wouldn't stop muttering that his experiment had finally proved wrong the angry socialist flatmate from a half-remembered John Birmingham novel, who claimed that the manufacture of pasta to be two centimetres too long to store in an empty juice jar went to show the lengths capitalism will go to to conspire against universal happiness. He may have been right about capitalism, it seems, but I can't find the reference -- googling "felafel socialist empty juice pasta jar" produces some strange results!

Zucchini flowers in west-nor'-west Redfern, la suite

Cucumber vines are being oppressed as I type, but will learn to strive valiantly upwards on the stakes I must get around to putting in!

Zucchini flowers in West-Nor'-West Redfern!

We're moving up in the world, we are!

Any recipe suggestions?