Let’s start with a brief frustrating aside. Jessica and I have COVID. We’re currently isolating in a hotel in Swansea in Wales, an area we had been thoroughly enjoying (more on that when I finish with London) until we got sick. It seems like we got it at a dinner for the Fulbright that we both attended (and at least […]
London 7: The British Museum…and other life news
London 6: Historyland
London’s got a lot of history. As discussed in previous posts, it goes back to pre-Roman settlements, through construction of a Roman city, the Norman invasion, and onwards to the present. Kinda a lot of things happened here. And that’s obvious at pretty much every turn in the city. Just to give a few examples… “The Box Office” sits on […]
London 5: More Building Babble
Jessica and I have now officially left London, but I have a bunch more thoughts, photos, stories, etc. that I’ll finish writing up over the next week or two, so expect a small barrage of posts–a couple shortish and a couple might be kinda epic. Today I want to write about how we encountered London–mostly through observing its buildings. With […]
London 4: Into the City and out of the city
Jess and I have started watching the clock a bit. We only have a couple more weeks in London and we’re realizing how many places we’d love to check out that we’re not going to get to. Oh well. It turns out it’s a big enough city that you can’t see everything. Shocking info, I know. In the meantime, we […]
From Henge to Ham: a week of new adventures (aka London, Part 3)
It’s been busy times lately. Jessica and I have continued trekking all over London, eating well, and visiting a bunch of museums. But, to focus in a bit, the last week of February was a particularly fun and interesting chunk of time. That Monday, we got up early and zipped down to Waterloo Station to catch a train to Salisbury. […]
London 2: Finding Hidden Joys
We’ve been in London for about a month now and we’re feeling pretty settled in. The flat we’re renting is definitely “home” and we know how to get around a bit. Of course, COVID fears have held us back from doing too much still–we’ve only eaten indoors at a restaurant once so far, and we’ve been avoiding doing a number […]
Starting Slow in London
Last week I was having trouble sleeping through the night. I was waking up for three or four hours each night. The last several days, I’ve been catching up, often sleeping well past 9:00 am, and generally having a sluggish start to my day. But, that’s just the microcosm. On a larger level, the start to our three months in […]
New Year’s…Resolved
I don’t do New Year’s resolutions. Never have. I get it, but I don’t really find this a particularly meaningful time of year to commit to changes. Maybe that’s because I’ve always lived on an academic calendar–even the years I wasn’t a student or a teacher, Jessica was, so I never really got off that rhythm completely. But, this year, […]
NYC6: The Beautiful City
Welcome back for the last (I think) post on my brief sojourn in New York. I wanted to end with my favorite part of being there…which was mostly simply the fact of being there. We walked along the rivers, through the parks, up one side of Manhattan and down the other and all over in between, not to mention some […]
An Interruption: the worst day of the year.
A year ago, we were at what we thought was the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Jessica and I spent a relatively quiet night at home, playing games and watching movies before taking a lovely hike along the coast near Santa Cruz to usher in 2021. That night, that day…they were pleasant, but a bit sad. You see, for the […]