Category Archives: Life

1. The plane from Newark to Heathrow, for maybe two and a half hours. I tried to watch Divergent but gave up because the sound from my headphones wasn’t loud enough, and I’d already read the book. Since we’d already been traveling for 12 hours by the time our plane took off from Newark, it was time to sleep anyway.

2. The Peugeot my dad rented to drive from the airport to Somerset. We stopped at a random pub along the way for an excellent fish-and-chips lunch.

3. North Cadbury Court, our home for the weekend and the site of my sister-in-law’s 50th birthday bash.

Specifically, the Kinnordy bedroom

and the library.

I didn’t take many photos of the interior because they have a gallery on their website: http://www.northcadburycourt.com/house/rooms-house

The owner gave us a tour one evening and told us the history of the house. His brother showed us how they make cheese and gave us some samples. The Dean & DeLuca store in DC and Zingerman’s online sell their Montgomery cheddar.

We also watched a movie version of Persuasion, parts of which were filmed there.

I spent a few hours over three days drawing the front view. I got impatient with all the windows.

I didn’t do much sketching on the trip–it would have taken too long.

There were some great views from the roof. Cadbury Castle (the site of Camelot, possibly) was less than two miles away to the southwest. We walked up the hill and had a good view of the house.

Cow Arthur defended the walls of Camelot.

Glastonbury Tor was farther away to the northwest, barely identifiable by St Michael’s Tower on top.

4. The buses to and from various places (put me in a moving vehicle and I fall asleep):

A. Glastonbury, where we walked up the Tor.

On the way up, we missed that this was the correct footpath to take, despite the very clear signage.

We also visited Glastonbury Abbey, where there was an annual Catholic pilgrimage. It was neat to see the destroyed building in use, though it made for a crowded visit.

B. Cheddar Gorge, where we saw some cool caves and climbed 274 steps up to a walk around the top of the gorge with some great views.

I bought a variety pack of real cheddar cheese, including one that was actually aged in a cave.

C. Bath, where Jeremy and I managed to squeeze the Roman Baths, a walk by the Circus and the Royal Crescent, the Jane Austen Centre, Victoria Art Gallery, and a peek into Bath Abbey into just over four hours. The baths were a great feat of engineering.

D. Stonehenge, which we stopped by on the way to Heathrow.

5. Dulles airport and the plane to St. Louis. We had an afternoon flight out of Heathrow, and I had working headphones, so I stayed awake for that flight. I watched a couple documentaries and three movies I’d been wanting to see: The Great Gatsby, Her, and Frozen. Our flight out of Dulles was delayed by an hour, leaving shortly after 11pm, which felt much much later given our jet lag. (We had a hotel in St. Louis and drove home Saturday.)

When I wasn’t sleeping or running around with a camera, I was hanging out with a large number of people in my family.

Photos with people in them are on Facebook and photos without (easily recognizable) people are in my Somerset 2014 set on Flickr.

It was a fabulous week. I’m so glad Jeremy’s sister came up with such a wonderful idea to celebrate her birthday and that she was able to bring so many of the family together.

When I wrote up my blog schedule, I thought today I’d blog about my non-writing-related goals for the New Year. Except I don’t have any.

The thing about setting annual goals is that I change them frequently throughout the year. Either my schedule changes–the drawing class I’m signed up for this spring means I won’t be doing something else that day, but once it’s over I get that time back–or my interests change–more/less tennis, less sewing, more drawing, less/more piano, whatever. I don’t really want to force September Elizabeth to run three times a week if she’s decided she wants to swim, or to draw every day if she decided she doesn’t like it. I trust my future self to make her own decisions.

I do have a bunch of writing goals, which I’ll cover tomorrow, but even those are on a list that I plan to revise throughout the year.

So, while right now, I would like to learn to draw, play more tennis, and learn to play Air on the G String on the piano, by June I might have come up with some other plan.

I love this comic: Robert Frost: The road not taken

(And the poem, but the art is what I’m getting at here.)

Whenever I think that I wish I’d known earlier that I wanted to write novels, because then I could have taken different classes in college, and not started grad school for physics, and and and — I remind myself that I like my life, and I made good decisions for what I wanted to do at the time, and while my life would have turned out differently it probably wouldn’t have turned out any *better*.

Or, the second part of our trip to Europe.

On the Saturday after we arrived, we drove to Perry Green to see the Henry Moore sculpture garden, which had a special exhibit by Auguste Rodin. (Here’s a virtual tour of both men’s sculptures.) The Moore sculptures are outside, and widely spaced, and for the special exhibit the Rodin sculptures were dotted around the landscape as well. It was a really nice setting to see the art, especially the larger pieces.

I didn’t expect to walk through a sheep pasture to see things. The closer one here is called “Sheep Piece”. The sheep seemed to appreciate its shade. The sculpture in the distance is called “Large Reclining Figure”. I was not impressed with Henry Moore’s titles.

Afterwards, since we weren’t that far from Cambridge, we drove up there and walked around, looking at the ornate buildings.

I like the light and shadows in that one.

We peeked through the gates into a lot of courtyards.

I bet the students just love all the tourists.

Then we stopped for dessert. I had Eton Mess, which is broken up chunks of meringue mixed with cream and topped with cherries and walnuts. It’s like a big pile of the topping for a real dessert. Tasty, but different.

Sunday, we went on a walk along some canals.

The Basingstoke canal didn’t have much of a current and was covered in bright green algae, at times a solid mat. There were a lot of locks, which I imagine makes traveling very slow.

Cygnets! We saw some that were almost adult-sized, and some very small ones still on a nest with one parent while the other supervised from a few feet away.

We stopped for lunch at a pub where I got very tasty (and hot, and greasy) fish and chips. It seemed like the appropriate choice.

We took a different route back, not along the canals, and passed a field of corn. I would have thought I was back in Illinois, but then we walked out of a forest and and found this:

On the drive home, I was too slow to get out my camera for the ruins of a stone church standing in a field–no roof, just sharply peaked stone walls with long holes for the windows.

We flew to London from O’Hare on a Wednesday. The terminal had angled skylights, which made it hot as a greenhouse even for our 9pm flight. We ate dinner at the terminal because we were there at dinner time, and then they fed us breaded sweet and sour chicken on the plane at 10pm–I ate my salad and my dessert. You’d think a snack and breakfast would have been a better plan than dinner and a snack, but I suppose it’s better for them to serve the hot meal first.

While we were in line for the flight, a guy behind us was complaining that people in London wouldn’t take his US money (he claimed that in New York, the street vendors will take foreign currency), and the woman with long gray dreadlocks in front of us seemed absolutely shocked. J explained to her how she could go about changing her money once we arrived.

Walking around J’s sister’s neighborhood, I noticed the front yards. Many are paved as courtyards or parking spots. Most were walled in. It struck me as odd that people would have these lovely gardens in front of their houses and then park cars in them. I suppose you have to park somewhere. A fair number of people were out walking, especially on the footpath along the Thames (this was Thursday afternoon). Couples, mothers with baby carriages. No joggers.

Friday we went to Hampton Court Palace, which was near the top of my to-do list, and the Royal Horticultural Society Flower Show, which J’s sister wanted to see and which was conveniently on the grounds.

These guys lined the path to the palace entrance:

Henry VIII’s chambers had a comfy-looking red velvet-covered toilet seat, which was apparently actually from the 1700s.

The Tudor part of the building had elaborately styled chimneys:

In the kitchens, the boiling vats were in their own little nooks, up a few short steps and around the corner from other parts of the kitchen–no huge cauldrons hanging over fires.

Ages of soot above the roasting fire:

There’s a sharp contrast between the meandering navigation of the older part of the palace and the more modern feel of the 1700s building.

The yew hedges of the maze (my first hedge maze) are contained in iron fences so you can’t cheat and cut through the hedges.

Mushroom trees (trimmed yews) on the grounds between the palace and the flower show:

The king’s privy garden–this is a restoration of William III’s garden from 1702:

Part of the exotic plant collection:

Part of the flower show was a “concept garden” about recovery or renewal. Maybe 6-10 themed gardens. One had everything planted in freezers. Two were about recovery from forest fire, one with a smoke machine, one with saplings that got taller and taller as they curved in a line from then”burned” area planted with black plants.

I fell in love with some of Susan Entwistle‘s paintings.

The flower show had a florist exhibit with all sorts of scenes made out of flowers:

Also, chicken coops:

I’m back from two lovely weeks visiting family in Europe – England (London area) and Sweden (south of Stockholm), specifically.

I took a bunch of photos. I even posted them to Flickr. But I haven’t written up any explanations of what’s in them because I had a cold this weekend and spent lots of time napping.

So a description of my trip will have to wait. Sorry to keep you in suspense. I’m a big fan of sleep right now.