Miscellany

I discovered this month that it is hard to find Thanksgiving decorations – the sort one can put on a mantel.  We had no luck in Target, and even no luck in Wegman’s which I thought for sure would have some standing pilgrim or cornucopia or turkey.  I finally found a nice mantel and table centerpiece turkey at Paper on Pine in Philadelphia.  Isn’t he handsome?:

We have been watching many British detective shows via Netflix.  We first saw “Happy Valley,” which was excellent, and then watched “The Fall,” which was also good, albeit a little too serial killer-y for my tastes.  And now we are watching “Broadchurch,” which is a bit of a mess, but has a great soundtrack.  As I find is often the case when I watch British shows, it takes me awhile to get to the point where I can understand the majority of what they are saying.  Often I am a few sentences behind.  (My boss said she watches these shows with the captions on and just reads what they are saying – which is a good idea except that I am usually knitting while watching and it is hard to knit and read captions at the same time.)  There was a very apropos cartoon in last week’s New  Yorker, that had a man and a woman watching TV, and one of them says, “At some point, there’s only so high you can raise the volume before you admit you’re never gonna understand what British detectives are saying.”  Hee hee.  Anyway, I recommend all of them, especially “Happy Valley” (and Sean likes them too, except that he thinks we should not have watched all three of them in a row, and wants to watch a non-British, non-detective show next.  Fair enough!)

I don’t know why this is, but I have never NOT lived next to people who hate – and needlessly cut down – trees.  Our neighbors on both sides of us when I was growing up chopped down multiple very old and beautiful and huge trees from their backyards, leaving their yards ugly and sunny and naked, and of course negatively affecting the shade of our yard as well.  We had a huge tulip tree in our front yard that the city cut down for some nefarious reason.  And last month, neighbors across the street from us cut down a grove of six trees right across from our house.  The trees were on this ugly little scrap of land, too narrow to do anything with, and the land under the trees was neglected and filled with branches and scraps of wood, etc.  The trees weren’t particularly pretty, and I don’t think they had ever been planted by someone with aesthetics in mind.  But still – it was a nice wee bit of forest, the trees were very tall and leafy, and owls would spend time in them during the summer.  

Apparently, the city asked our neighbor to trim the branches that were hanging over the road, and instead of doing so, he decided he would chop them all down.  Instead of hiring professionals to do this, he hired a Mutt & Jeff, who hacked at the (very, very tall) trees with a rusty basement saw over the course of four or so weeks, and caused us and the other surrounding neighbors much consternation as huge branches fell towards our cars and houses.  (They broke a telephone pole).  All this is to say that our little piece of wild across the street is now an ugly view of a fence, and filled with stumps (which they of course did not take out) and sawdust and branches.  Gone are the trees, gone our shade, gone the owls.