First day of school

Happy day! The girls are both very excited about the start of school this year. They're in third and fifth grades. Sorry about the t-shirt - Juliette decided that this was the day to wear her school shirt. The name of the school has been covered for privacy reasons.

I'm always happy when school starts in the fall. The kids and I have fun together, but we definitely need a break by this time of year. They love their school so much, and I do too. I do a lot of volunteer work at the school, so I'm there frequently as well.

Out with the bad air, in with the good

There's always some sort of surprise after a vacation. In our case, it's the air conditioning. We had it repaired the minute we arrived home on Wednesday. But less than 24 hours later, it was out of commission again. We've been nursing the fourteen year old unit along since we bought this house seven years ago, and it was finally time to stop. So today, we're replacing the whole thing. The guys should be here any minute to yank out all of the crippled heating and air conditioning and put in shiny new high-efficiency goodies. While it's not the most fun thing to have to pay for right after a trip, we have known for some time that the day was coming, so it will be good to have it finished.

Nine weeks of junk mail

Guess what happens when you have the post office hold your mail for nine weeks? Yikes!


The sweet lady at the post office took my form and disappeared into the back room. When she returned with one of the post office tubs full clear to the top, I was amazed. But even crazier was the fact that there was another tub full as well. Guess what I did this afternoon?

Ahh. Much better.



The best part? Not a single jury summons in the pile! Going on vacation has always been the way we get summoned. I was a bit afraid that we'd come home to one or even two missed ones and have warrants out for our arrest! Whew!

We're home!

We made it home! It's been a really long day, with a ten-hour flight plus a broken air conditioner to greet us when we arrived. The house was 96 degrees inside. A quick call to our trusty heating and a/c company got us a $300 repair, and we should be back to normal by morning. Meanwhile, we've decided to have a backyard campout tonight, since it will be in the 70s overnight. I made a quick trip to the grocery store and discovered that I do remember how to drive, despite nine weeks as a pedestrian. So all is well, other than the jet lag, but a good night's sleep should fix most of that.

Edited to add: The air conditioning managed to get the indoor temperature low enough for sleeping before we went to bed, so we did get to sleep in our comfortable beds after all. What a treat after a long day on the plane!

Time is running out

Our summer in London is winding down. The girls and I fly back to the U.S. this Wednesday, August 13. Darrell will be staying here awhile longer for work. We've been making return trips to our very favorite restaurants. Yesterday we went back to the Dove Tail, the Belgian pub that I wrote about here. The beer and the food are both great here, and the atmosphere is friendly and relaxed. The standout among the things we ordered this time - a starter course of a leek, walnut, and goat cheese tart. It was so good that I'm going to have to try to make something similar once we get home. After lunch, the girls found a shelf of board games and decided to play for a little while. Check out the British Monopoly board!


This afternoon, the girls and I went into London to find the Banqueting House, one of the remaining sites on our Historic Royal Palaces membership. The building is all that's left of the Palace of Whitehall, which burned down. King Charles I was executed on a scaffold outside the building. The ceiling is completely covered in paintings by Peter Paul Rubens that have survived since 1635. I think I'm about "palaced" out, because it didn't really do too much for me.

Better than the Banqueting House is what's found right across the street - the Horse Guards for Buckingham Palace. It's kind of comical. The guard sits on the horse looking straight ahead while one person after another steps up for a photo. That horse was VERY interested in Katrina, don't you think?

Here are some London Underground pictures. Since we spent a large part of our summer on and around these trains, it's only fitting to show them. The two stations we saw the most were Uxbridge, where we live, and Baker Street, which is a good connecting point for several other train lines.




I've mentioned the canals in Uxbridge and how close they are to our apartment. Here's our building. This was taken from a little footbridge that crosses the canal. The entrance to the building is on the side away from the road. The canal runs in between the building and the road (actually the road in front of the building is a bridge over the canal as well).


This photo was taken from the same bridge, looking slightly to the right of the previous one. You can see the bridge on the right that is the road in front of the building.


This photo was taken from the road, looking straight at the building. I've outlined our apartment so that you can see how very close we are to the ducks and swans that live in the canal.



And finally, here is our swan family. We hadn't seen them for a couple of weeks and were hoping they'd make another appearance before we left. The babies are still gray, but they're almost as big as the parents now.

The wheels on the bus go round and round

Today was a high-powered sightseeing day. The girls and I signed up for a bus tour with destinations of Windsor Castle, Stonehenge, and Oxford, all in a single day. We got up very early and were on a train out of Uxbridge at 7:15 a.m. We had to meet our bus in central London by 8:45. We got there and settled in on the comfy bus with about 50 other folks from all over the world. Our nearest bus neighbors were from Dubai, and we met others from Spain, Australia, Canada, and all over the U.S.

Our first stop was Windsor Castle, which is Queen Elizabeth's favorite home. The castle is about an hour outside of London. Funny thing is, it's only about 15 minutes from Uxbridge. So we got up early, rode the train for an hour and the bus for another hour to get there! It's the journey, I tell you. We toured the State Apartments, which are amazing. The rooms are huge, opulent, and beautiful, which is quite a thing for me to say, as opulent rarely equals beautiful, in my opinion. No photos were allowed indoors, which seems to be the case with all of the castles here. But outside was another matter. This is the approach to the castle. Can you even imagine living someplace like this?


We caught a glimpse of the Moat Garden over a wall. Pretty! What we didn't know was that you can go into the garden. A little while later, we found the entrance, and the price of admission was a very small donation. So in we went.


I'm getting more and more pleased with the things that my camera will do. These roses were in the Moat Garden.


Here's a view of the castle grounds from higher up in the garden. I don't think I'd like having tourists traipsing all over my yard day after day!


We all piled back on the bus for the drive to Stonehenge, about an hour and a half away. The stones are in the middle of a field, in the middle of nowhere. But they're an amazing sight. They're well cordoned off so that you can't get too close, but the walkway is laid out in such a way that you can walk around all sides of it and see it very well. I'm sure that the crowds are much worse on the weekends, but I really didn't have much trouble getting photos without a ton of other people in them. This was one of the major sights that the girls had listed on their "must see" list earlier in the summer, and it was definitely worth a visit. It's way far out in the boondocks, though, so I do recommend taking a tour and letting someone else drive!




Next we were off to Oxford, another hour and a half away. We took a walking tour around the campus. The architecture was fabulous. Some of the buildings were almost 1000 years old. It was very hard to get photos without many other people and their cameras, but I did my best. The atmosphere of the town is very nice.




After leaving Oxford, we rode another hour and a half on the bus to get back to central London. We passed right by Uxbridge, which was unfortunately not a stop for the bus! We could even see our building from the bus. But we had to ride an hour further, then take a train back an hour the other way. By the time we got home, about 14 hours after we left, we were beat. But it was a great day.

Fun word pictures!

I ran across something really cool in my blog surfing today. While checking out This D*mn House, which is one of my daily reads, I was introduced to Wordle. Just give it the URL of your blog, or type in a list of words, and it will create a word picture for you. You can change the number of words, the orientation, the font, the colors, and lots of other details. Here's what I got using my blog, with all of the recent posts of our Paris trip. Isn't that fun? Click on the picture if you'd like to see it larger.

Try it out! If you load yours into the gallery, leave me a link in the comments. I'd love to see what you make.