Thoughts and Words Ill-Sorted

This fantastic caterpillar puts the women of Ascot to shame.

Erin and the children have been in Nova Scotia since last week, while I’m busy here in Oxford with several workshops and sundry matters that need attention before I leave in a few days. But last weekend I made a quick trip to Scotland to hike in the highlands, since I thought it would be well-nigh unforgivable if I hadn’t seen Scotland at all in three years of living on this island. This will be a rather large post, so click on the fold to see some pictures from the trip. Continue reading →

. . . but there’s plenty of activity in our house.  We have a stack of boxes near the door, this weekend I’ll be packing suitcases, the kids will have two more mornings of nursery early next week–and then we’re off!  Katherine, Nathaniel, and I will head out to Nova Scotia on Thursday of next week.  We’ve had another rounds of colds and I was at a conference for the past two days, so I haven’t taken the just-before-leaving pictures of the kids that I would have liked, but we’ve had plenty of opportunity to say goodbye to Oxford in the past month.  We’ve been enjoying our last bit of normal life, since we know there are many, many weeks of upheaval ahead of us, but even when life is “normal” it’s still full of surprises:

– Nathaniel went from pushing Katherine’s scooter around our garden to scootering to and from nursery on it (a trip of 3+ miles) within two weeks.  Katherine now has a new, two-wheeled scooter, and we will be leaving our stroller when we leave England.  It seems like a minor thing, but for us it feels like a pretty major shift in how our family operates.  I will be sad not to be able to just pack the kids in and go, and I will have to slip out alone if I’m going to take truly lengthy walks, but it’s been tricky pushing the kids anyway now that they’re heavy, and I’m very happy to get past the stage in which I’m pushing what feels like a giant shopping cart wherever I go.

– I’m trying to finish up revisions on a paper before we leave.  It’s still looking doable, and I’m feeling confident that it will go out sometime in June, even if I have to take it with me to Nova Scotia for a week or so.  Now I get to decide if I want to make a desperate push to get it out before we leave, or whether I’m getting a bit old for such desperate tactics.  We’ll see how things go!  Either way, I’m glad that I’m still reasonably on schedule for the summer, and that my two biggest projects will be out of the way early on, before I get too caught up in travel and family plans.  Nice thing about scheduling two big article rewrites for yourself: if you do manage to muster the resolve to do them, the remaining things (writing a conference paper, preparing for all of your fall teaching) will look a lot less threatening!

– Sydney will be staying here in Oxford for a couple more weeks, partly so that he can finish out the Oxford term, and partly because moving with small children seems to happen best if we stagger our arrivals and departures.  I’m doing my best not to leave too many things for him to take care of when we’re gone, though.  Yesterday Nathaniel scootered up to the hospital with me to donate some toys to the children’s waiting room there.  Nathaniel had plenty of opportunity to use their toys when he hurt his leg earlier this spring, and I was very grateful he had such great distraction.  He has since requested several times that we go back to the hospital, which amuses us to no end.  As I was backpacking him home, I was reminded of the difference between this trip (one with a sturdy toddler who has to be bribed to go in the backpack because he’s so keen on scootering down the steep hill . . .) and the one I made two years ago, when Sydney and I walked home from my hospital check-up the night Nathaniel as born.  It would be a serious understatement to say I’m quite happy about some of the changes that have taken place over those two years.

Erin

This morning I found myself, along with three other passersby, disentangling a hedgehog from a cricket net near my house.  The thought, “Only in England . . .” did occur to me.  With some scissors and a garden-gloved lady’s gentle scolds (“Now, little man, uncurl a bit.  That’s it.  Show us your little hand here . . .”), we got him sorted and carried to a hedge well away from the net.  I wish Katherine and Nathaniel had been there to see it!  I will never read Beatrix Potter’s “The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle” in quite the same light.

In other news, it appears that I got off easy with the two black eyes I received from our kids when they were small.  In this New York Times article, parents report fractures, concussions, and corneal abrasions from their beloved children.  I have to hope that it’s no accident that my injuries took place when the kids were very small and I was seriously sleep-deprived.  Maybe we’re done?

Erin

Despite threats of rain, we actually had beautiful weather for our hike in an area near Chur, on the east side of Switzerland.  When we first saw this lake, I couldn’t believe how blue and clear it was.  It only got more impressive as we got closer, since when I touched the water I realized it was warm and would make for great swimming even so early in the season.

Sarah and Lisa after taking in the view:

If you look closely in the lower left corner you can see a bit of the zig-zag road that cars and buses take up the mountain:

On our final morning in Switzerland we spent a bit of time wandering Zurich, and we joined what seemed like everyone else in town in taking a walk along the Limmat River, which runs through the city’s center.  It was a fitting way for us to end our trip, since it felt a bit like we’d been traveling back in time all week.  First Sarah came from Connecticut (her town recently celebrated its 300+ birthday), then I showed her around Oxford colleges (several of them 800+ years old), and finally we were faced with a city that had been permanently settled for more than 2000 years, and that had Roman ruins underneath its streets.  In a series of events that seems to call for a sense of humor, we began our week with an evening mass at Blackfriars in Oxford (Sarah let me tag along), and we ended with a visit to Zwingli’s church in Zurich, as I frantically tried to remember whether my kind of Protestants were led by him or felled by his sword.  The church, Grossmunster, is beautiful.  The original church building was, legend has it, commissioned by Charlemagne, and the present building dates back to 1100, with a Roman burial ground in the lower levels.

From one of the many bridges crossing the river we got a great view of the city’s three main churches: the Grossmunster, the Fraumunster (green spire), and St. Peterskirche (largest church clock face in Europe).

Erin

When I came home from Switzerland, Sydney asked me, “What do you know about a girl named Maya?”  Nathaniel had been asking Sydney about Maya, a girl from the kids’ nursery, all while I was away, and he had already been asking me about her occasionally for a few weeks before my trip.

When Sydney finally asked him, “Why do you like Maya so much?”  Nathaniel replied, “I just really like Maya” and then thought for a moment before repeating his answer.  So I was sent to pick up the kids with an extra mission: find out about this girl.  Apparently she’s a bit older than Nathaniel, quiet, and they often play together.  Sydney was not surprised to find out that her temperament is different from Katherine’s, and he seemed quite pleased with Nathaniel’s choice.  But this afternoon Nathaniel was in a great mood on the way home from nursery and walked and ran with me part of the way.  A cluster of young teenage girls, on their way to tennis practice, surrounded us for a few moments on the path and took a shine to Nathaniel, who was smiling for all he was worth.  So I’ll be on the lookout for girls in general, and not just the ones from nursery . . .

Erin

I just got back from five days in Switzerland, where I got a great tour of the country from my college roommate, Lisa, who now lives there.  Our other college roommate, Sarah, flew in from the US for the week, and the three of us had a great time catching up and making our way around a country that has four official languages, none of them English.  We spent some time in Lisa’s current home, Lausanne, walking along Lake Geneva and enjoying the flowers, a nearby castle, and a great stroll in the hills among the terraced vineyards.  Such a beautiful time to be out, with flowers at their peak and great glimpses of the mountains in France on the other side of the lake.

After a day in Lausanne, we took a train over to the east side of the country to visit St. Gallen, home of several beautiful churches, the most magnificent of which is the St. Gallen Cathedral.  The cathedral was quite something, but we were actually there to visit the abbey library, which looks like this:

If that’s the abbey library, it’s probably not surprising that the cathedral itself looks like this inside:

The rest of the town was quite festive, too, with murals on the sides of buildings, patterned roofs, and bright colors distinguishing each building from its neighbor.

Erin

From the Guardian‘s homepage:

No, the ’23C’ is not a typo. What, you didn’t know that a high of 23C (73F) makes a day a scorcher?

Sydney

Two weeks ago I flew to Berlin for a few days to visit a friend. It was a lovely trip, with agreeably plentiful perambulation and conversation.

The most surprising thing I learned while there: if the pedestrian light at a crosswalk is red, everybody waits even if there are absolutely no cars to be seen. So I gather that for a Berliner covering every surface with graffiti is a good thing but walking across a road without a green light is very bad.

I tend to think that the use of cameras interferes with the living of my life, but I did take a few photos while there. Here are a few of the Berliner Dom, which is certainly one of the most magnificent churches I’ve seen. As with nearly everything else in Berlin, a bomb came through the central dome of the church during the second World War, so what you see here has been rebuilt subsequently.

The requisite photo of the Brandenburg Gate:

Lots of palaces seem to have been the order of the day. Here’s Frederick Wilhelm the Second’s Lustschloss on Pfaueninsel, a small island in the River Havel a bit out of the main part of the city. I think I was more interested in the Middle Spotted Woodpecker that I finally found on the island, but, sorry, no pictures of it.

And here is the Charlottenburg Palace, a rather grander affair (and also reconstructed after the war):

Sydney

Katherine and I walked with Nathaniel to the grocery store the other day, leaving the stroller at home.  I was glad I took the backpack, since he needed to be carried part of the way, but for a long time he and Katherine walked hand-in-hand down the street.  I think he really enjoyed his experience, since he’s been playing “grocery store” ever since.

The kids have been spending a lot of time out in the garden since the weather warmed up, which has been a great help to us.  We have to break up a lot fewer fights if they can roam the yard while we cook.

Sydney showing Katherine an unusual butterfly:

Erin