We never saw a UK border official (and hence never had a chance to show anyone our hard-won visas), but it seems that we’ve arrived in Oxford. Or, rather, at our temporary residence just outside of Abingdon. It’s a gorgeous fall day. The sun is shining. It’s warm. The robins are singing. And there are beautiful crimson roses outside.
Sydney
We made it to Dublin and have had a good, long nap. The hotel—to our relief—allowed us to check in at 8:30 in the morning. This was much needed since Katherine did not care for the flight over from Chicago. It follows that her parents didn’t care for it either. And arrived very tired, even though the flight was quite a bit shorter than it might have been (a good tailwind cut almost an hour from the flying time).
Tomorrow we have a very early flight to London. Luckily, it’s a much shorter flight.
Sydney
Tomorrow we start the great migration to Oxford. We have packed four heavy suitcases, will ship three heavy boxes, and are carrying overstuffed bags onto the plane. Hey, you try fitting several days’ worth of diapers into a carry-on!
We’ll drive five hours to Chicago, take off at around 6pm, and arrive in Dublin before 8:00 the next morning. We will hope that Katherine ignores her surroundings and settles into my lap for some sleep on the plane, so that we can get some too.
So there will be more silence on our end as we move. And then we’re hoping to have lots of good things to report after all of this grumbling and packing!
Erin
I’m trying to race through a couple more scholarly books and articles, taking notes on my computer, just so I don’t have to take them along with me. Among other things, I’ve been reading through Faulkner’s speeches, letters, and his responses to questions when he spent time at the University of Virginia as Writer-in-Residence. After spending so many hours puzzling over his novels, wondering not just about matters of literary interpretation but even “What the heck is going on?” it’s both refreshing and exasperating to read Faulkner’s own take on things: a character in As I Lay Dying is deemed “completely off his rocker . . . Darl was mad from the first.” Despite the bluntness of his responses, it’s not entirely clear what one should make of such material; he has proven himself a forgetful and even downright wrong interpreter of his own work in other places, but then again, he wrote it in the first place!
Erin
Saturday morning Mom took Katherine and me to a local play center, filled with activities and exhibits for kids of all ages. We know Katherine’s a bit small to enjoy most of the fun things, but we thought it would be nice to check it out for later visits and let her run wild in a safe environment. She’s had a recent fondness for running toward the road when we take her out in the yard, so outside play has become a bit more dangerous.
At the play center, Mom and I had a ball trying out various exhibits, helping Katherine color, dig for treasure, scope out the swimming fish, and make a lot of noise. She was a bit scared by the cow that made mooing sounds (deep, ominous mooing sounds), but once she got over her shyness she had a great time. There was a huge staircase with rainbow-colored steps that arced around the corner of the play center and up to the second story of the large building. More fun yet were the rabbit holes on the stairwell that led to little passages under the steps–and, if you went from one rabbit hole to another, would get you from top to bottom without stepping foot on the stairs. Mom and I worried we were a bit big for the rabbit holes (that’s all I need: to get stuck in a rabbit hole while pregnant!), but we wormed our way through and helped Katherine (who was much more agile) find her way down. We definitely need to get one of those for our house!
I then dived into a new book when Katherine was napping, after which we walked down to the fire station for supper. It’s homecoming week here, when the fire station puts on a free chili supper and the town shows up for pre-game dinner before heading out to the high school football field. When we walked in I saw a sea of blue and white (school colors) and suddenly remembered that New York black wasn’t probably the best thing to be wearing. At any rate, we had a nice time, saw some people we know, and then walked back home for coffee with the neighbors.
A nice day all around.
Erin
Sydney leaves tomorrow morning for a conference in Toronto, where he’ll be giving a paper in front of a lot of other medievalists. I’ll be here in Iowa, sorting through our things and slowly getting them in suitcases. Sydney gets back on Sunday and we leave on Tuesday!
I am, as usual, dealing with major life changes by focusing on the little things. As we settled into some evening TV we cleaned our shoes and waterproofed them. You wouldn’t want to go to England, notorious for its rain, without treating your shoes! But I’m sure there will be plenty of last-minute cramming into suitcases to unravel such anal-retentive work. We already know, for example, that our books comprise nearly all of the weight that we can possibly haul in our suitcases–leaving little or no room for clothes and other belongings.
Erin
Sydney pulled into the driveway early yesterday afternoon with our carload of stuff. It is really wonderful to have him back again. On his way from Nova Scotia he stopped in Ithaca and attended a conference at Notre Dame, so he had lots of opportunities to run into people we know. I have, unfortunately, taken a dive into yet another nasty cold, so I tried to greet him from a few feet away (not that I could stand it for long). He’s set to give a paper in Toronto next week, so we don’t want to mess him up!
Very nice to have him home again.
Erin
Katherine and I are currently in Iowa, where we flew in to spend the next two weeks with my parents. Sydney is in the middle of his long, long drive from Nova Scotia, and should be here by the weekend, with stops in Ithaca and Notre Dame, where he’ll sit in on a conference. We are all, admittedly, very tired of packing up and moving, so we’re looking forward to the next hop, but currently K and I are very glad to be here; we’re both getting over nasty bugs, and the rest and attentions provided by the grandparents are much welcome!
Erin
“The Institute of Medicine, the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences, reported last year that more than a third of normal-weight women and more than half of overweight and obese women gain more weight than is recommended during pregnancy. Over all, ‘fewer than 40 percent of pregnant women gain only the recommended amount of weight during their pregnancy,’ Dr. Sylvia R. Karasu and Dr. T. Byram Karasu report in their new book ‘The Gravity of Weight.'”
This is what I found myself reading while eating dinner tonight. When I was halfway through a zucchini pizza, to be more precise. Ah, well.
Erin
I recently really messed up. I put down “September 30th” as the date of our arrival in England, so that’s the start date that the UK border agency gave us for our visas. The problem is, we had bought plane tickets that show us arriving in England on September 29th. What do you do if you want to enter the country a day before your visa begins? Well, says the border agency, you don’t. After they threatened all sorts of horrible things if we tried it, I gave up. But when I looked into changing our plane tickets, it quickly became clear that my little mistake might cost me $500 in change fees.
This is where I tried not to die.
After going to bed with that happy thought, I got up this morning, and, upon Sydney’s advice, called the airline to see if any other arrangements might be made. After much rearranging, we are flying from Chicago to Dublin, where we will spend a day, rather than connect directly to London as originally planned, and then take an early-morning flight to London on the 30th, when we are allowed to enter the UK. I booked a hotel at Dublin’s airport that cost me half as much as the one we had been intending to stay in when we reached the UK, so my net loss for this adventure is something like $50.
Now, lest you immediately think, “Ooh, a day in Dublin! What adventures they’ll have!” you’ll have to remember that a 5-months-pregnant Erin, an 18-month-old Katherine, and a luggage-hauling Sydney will most likely go straight to the hotel and nap after a night on the plane. For those who are more adventurous, more power to you 🙂
Erin
Alan Schmierer