Today was absolutely wonderful. I went out to Kew Gardens to the Henry Moore installation of twenty-eight of his sculptures. It was perfect sweater weather, a few clouds, crisp fall chill to the air but warm in the sun. I walked for hours, except during the one-hour film, The Art of Henry Moore. This was a nice introduction to the artist, the narration was all in his words about his works. He said he prefers to see his sculptures out in the landscape rather than inside, so I think he would have been happy to see it here. Did you know that he thought the head (of his figures) was the most important part and that's precisely why he made them smaller--to accentuate the other parts? He also apparently spent lots of hours at the Wallace Collection looking at their armor (maybe I'll have to go back and look because I never fully appreciated that part of the museum--or maybe not), and at the Natural History Museum looking at bones, and at the Science Museum for his string pieces. I took about 100 photos (going through two sets of batteries). I've put them online at kodakgallery.com (which took forever to load for some reason and that's why my blog is late). If anyone wants to see them, let me know and I'll add your email address to my viewer list.

For the next six Wednesdays, we are having small groups of students over for dinner. Gord and I shopped in the morning at M&S, but it reminded me of Price Chopper because they didn't have a couple of basic items that were on my list. So when I got back from Kew Gardens Gord met me at Waitrose where we got a couple more things, but they didn't have yellow squash there either so we then had to go to Whole Foods. Whew. That was a lot of work for a simple meal.

Maybe I'm looking at things more critically here, but it seems that there is a lot more waste in regard to packaging in this city. So much of the food, both fresh produce and prepared, comes in plastic containers, or plastic trays with plastic wrap over them. I guess the focus is on easy, ready made meals. You can buy little sets of everything you need for a stew, ready to drop in the water, or for a stir fry, all packaged neatly together. There are also lots of dinners for one or for two with a lot more variety than we get, but with equal amounts of packaging. I just keep thinking of all the garbage this generates. And I used to feel guilty about buying the washed spring mix in its plastic container back home; well multiply that by five or more.

Oh, and those thin women I envied so much? I see many of them buying cigarettes. I guess I wouldn't trade places with them after all.