Ah, the weather turned nice for us
The British have had a pretty dreadful summer, with cold temperatures, lots of rain, and flooding. The view above was all too typical of our experience in our first few weeks here. Rarely much rain, but precious little sunshine either. This photo was taken on a walk Sub-Evil Boy and I made last week from our new apartment into the town centre and on to the school that he’s likely to attend to see how long the walk would be. (30-45 minutes to the school.)
The last few days, however, have been gorgeous, so there’s hope for a nice autumn. This is a weird little roof ornament in our apartment complex with a gorgeous blue sky to set it off. Almost looks mediteranian.
Still no intarweb at home, so only intermittent access to e-mail, blog, Flickr, etc. I think we’ve now figured out how we’re going to get internet (through Zen Internet), but we’ve got to wait a few days before our phone line is activated before we can actually start the wheel’s turning on getting that actually turned on.
We did our first big all-family walk into the town centre today and spent a bunch of money we only barely have. We had to get a (cheap) phone so we could use our new phone line, and we had to get a digital video recorder (a Tivo-like device) or the other two thirds of the family would have almost certainly hurt someone that looked a lot like me. We also bought some used linenes from a charity shop, and some other bits and bobs. We were absolutely pooped when we got home - a bunch of out of shape gringos not used to being on their feet for a few hours. More days like that, and we’ll get better (or die trying).
We also spent some time at the house we’d been staying in (courtesty of Riccardo - thanks!) out in Wivenhoe (continuing map fun). We had to get our last little odds and ends out of their, and do a little cleaning. This included a fair bit of vacuuming using a fairly paleozoic upright Hoover that had at least four useful properties:
- It weighed slightly less than a newborn humpback whale.
- It was almost certainly less noisy than a Sopwith Camel in battle.
- It had an extraordinarily long cord. (This was usually a good thing, but it did make cord management a bit more complex.)
- It would occassionally lift small bits of detritus up from the floor surface in question. This depended, however, on a somewhat mysterious confluence of requirements relating to (among others) the surface being vacuumed, the offending bit of fluff, and the position of at least two of the other planets in our solar system.
And did I mention that it was really heavy and really noisy?
Probably.
Hard to tell, though, since my ears are still ringing from vacuuming, which messes with my concentration.
Tags: Video