Monday flashback: Frankfurt

A few last pictures -- really, these are the last ones -- from the Römer district in Frankfurt.

I have always been a little ditzy -- this would not surprise anyone who ever met my mother and believed in either nature or nurture -- but I think it's getting out of control during this lockdown. I keep losing things. I keep forgetting things. I have trouble focusing.

I misplaced an avocado a few weeks ago, much to the amusement of the friends who followed my three day search via text. (Yes, we are all that desperate to be amused.)

But an avocado is small -- and it turns out, practically invisible if for some reason you drop a t-shirt on top of it. Last week I lost a fitted sheet from my bed. I realized when I was doing laundry that I had a top sheet, and pillowcases, but the bottom sheet wasn't in the bag. Okay, obviously I'd left it upstairs in my apartment.

Except that it wasn't there. I looked in every likely -- the floor of the closet where I keep the laundry bag -- and unlikely -- had I somehow kicked it under the bed? -- place. It drove me crazy.

I did find it. Apparently I didn't actually take the old sheet off when I was changing the bed -- I just put the clean sheet on top of it. I don't know how I managed not to notice that there was already a sheet on the bed while I wrestled with getting all four corners of the mattress crammed into the clean sheet, but I didn't.

Covid brain.

More urban poetry

I did actually have one day of sun in Toronto, but this picture of the CN Tower is more typical of what I saw there.

Fun facts about Signal Hill

Here's Signal Hill, the mountain that overlooks the harbor of St. John's, seen from the city. The driver pointed it out as we drove in from the airport, so it one of the first things I saw in St. John's and I might as well start there.

So, fun facts: Signal Hill was the site of the last battle of the French and Indian War (or the Seven Years War, for non-Americans) in 1762.

Marconi received the first transatlantic wireless transmission here in 1901. (Because “transatlantic” is much shorter from Newfoundland than anywhere else in North America, the island was also the starting point for many of the early transatlantic flights, including Amelia Earhart's in 1932.)

Cabot Tower was built in 1897 to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Cabot's landing in Newfoundland as well as Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.  It looks rather jaunty sitting on top of its mountain with banners flying when seen from the streets of the city below like this, but up close it's just a surprisingly small stone building.

Newport Tower, close up

Enigmatic, maybe not. But it is an odd thing to see among all the colonial buildings.