Hobbits In Rivendell

It’s mailbag time, time to answer all those little stray questions from those who email us but have yet to bring themselves to venture a comment in the public eye, thinking that the public would not be interested in their queries (you never know, guys!).

The first note is from reader F., who asks, “Hey, guys, how’s life?”

Life, dear F., is just about the same here as it is anywhere else in November: cold, wet, and dark. The difference is that back home people are looking forward to Thanksgiving. Here, people are planning for Hogmanay. In the States, hard squashes are on display next to boxes of brown sugar, and the tops of all the pumpkin pies are leaf lattices. Here… well, yesterday we saw our first Christmas tree, and Friday we received our first Christmas… card.

(Previously the honor of The First Card, arriving directly after Thanksgiving Day, has been the provenance of L. and B. of Lafayette. They have been trumped this year by Mrs. E. M., from Pleasant Hill. We are baffled by how this could occur, as E. has just given birth (or is about to give birth?) to twins… thus bringing the number of children under age two in her home to — three — plus one very harried husband. We’re thinking E’s mom is staying with her right now. So, thanks for the card, E! [And thanks, E’s Mom!])

And now from reader B., who asks, “Are people still coming to choir rehearsal?”

Actually, B, they are! The numbers in our chorus swelled until we are nearly three hundred strong. This is not counting the orchestra, the other University group who will join us for the performance – there are about twenty of them – the soloists, the angels and all the people who require costume changes. This is a HUGE event, and two hours a week is apparently no sacrifice. Odd, isn’t it — especially since our choir only met for an hour a week for a month or so twice a year, and it was like pulling teeth just to get people to show up consistently or on time. The only conclusion we’ve come to is that music is different here — people socialize more by singing. People sing at football matches, in the pubs, randomly in public (okay, so, maybe that’s just our strange luck to encounter those people, but…) there’s tons of karaoke… so… I don’t know, maybe music is more important here in the land of bards. Or, it’s dark and cold and there’s nothing better to do… your call.

W. wants to know if we’re actually still attending church, or “enjoying a sabbatical.” We’re going, but none of the churches we’ve visited have …notes in their hymnals. This is probably intended to make the music more accessible to non note-readers, but sometimes for us it’s just plain bewildering. Never mind — the holiday season upcoming means that we’ll more than likely know at least half the songs at any given service for a full month at least. Meanwhile, we want you to know that we miss our church in P.H. — it will be interesting to come back after so many changes are being made. Hm!

Our next questioner is M., who asks if we’ve thought of anyplace special to go during Christmas break. Well, M., not yet. We’re considering Spain just because D. is fluent in the language and it would be somewhat warmer, but really, we may do a series of day trips during vacation and stick closer to home. Right now it’s hard to think any further than the day right in front of us. D. is working on Draft 2 of a major paper, and T. is disappearing under the stack of books she’s reviewing — both of us would love a vacation, but it’s one of those things that takes a bit of work to plan… and it’s all just too much to contemplate at the moment. Stay tuned, though; when the Light at the End of the Tunnel™ comes on, we’ll have all kinds of energy for making plans again.

From reader J: “Are you doing anything fun? And how’s T’s diet coming?”

Um.

Let’s draw a veil over the d-word, okay? Suffice it to say that T. is meeting her daily appointments with the high-pitched, shiny-happy-bouncy high-kicking cheerleader types on her DVD and she hates them. All. Deeply.

“How is D’s schooling coming, and how’s T’s writing going?” asks K. Things on the Legitimate Work front are going pretty well, considering. T is revising and waiting to hear from the editorial committee at Knopf about another project, but D. is steaming full steam ahead into the end of the semester. He’s doing a lot of scowling right now at his tutor’s comments in the margins of his essays, but he’s coming right along.

The Hobbits are fine — things are just a bit of a slog right now, but it’s that time of semester. As Thanksgiving approaches, we find ourselves feeling a little scattered — but thankful nonetheless for the opportunity which finds us here, for our friends who are sending books and cards and little notes, and for all the little things that keep us going.

– D & T

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

The U.S. Ambassador to Scotland visited the Uni today, and all students were asked to participate in a Q&A session. Of course, they were searched, not allowed bags, and there were plenty of innocuously bland looking people with those forgettable gray faces in the room, handily identifiably as Secret Service. D. was well groomed — he even wore a deceptively civil-looking tie! — and well-armed with his questions, one of which was:

What does it mean for international diplomacy that the US is perceived to be backing out of treaties (such as the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the Geneva Convention) at will?

To which the good Ambassador replied, “…all countries have the right to reconsider treaties.”

Yes. All right then. That’s… helpful.

Others asked about the incoherence of American policies, to which the Ambassador replied that there was no incoherence, people had just changed policies and the world was slowly catching up; people asked about hidden weapons of mass destruction; his predictable response was a version of “well, we all believed they were there.” A disturbing man next to D. kept asking questions about white phosphorus, and unsettled him a good bit — because next to him on the other side was one of those Gray Men…

Before D. even met with the Ambassador, a gentleman asked if he’d be willing to stay after to talk about the Ambassador’s comments. (A fellow student told D. this was because he had a ponytail and was wearing a beret. He asked why that made a difference, but no one could tell him anything definite.) The upshot of all of this is that D. may be on BBC news tonight at 6:30. We have Choral Society, so we won’t be home to see the spectacle, but if you’re watching, hark at the bloke in the tie. Doesn’t he look mild-mannered? Beneath the t-shirt and the tie, there’s a giant ‘H’ on his chest…

– D & T

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Well, it was bound to happen sometime…

We have had the first little…mmm, bump in the road financially.

Well, maybe it’s the first big bump. Of course, it isn’t “nice” to talk about money, so we will say this in the most general of terms, but we have found that our student loans — from previous years of school — will not, in fact, be allowed to be deferred. (If any of you think for a bare minute that you might EVER go on to school after your Master’s program, do NOT, I warn you, consolidate your student loans. Ever. Unless all parties consolidated on the loans are in school full-time as well…) We have to fill out paperwork to explain that we have limited income, but we are now paying out a substantial amount from our American bank for that, plus taxes and HOA on our townhouse back home, plus still making up for the early and unforeseen inability to use our Scottish bank, plus…

The short story here is this: we can’t go back to the U.S. for awhile. The planned retreat at Christmas? Nope – airfare is four times higher in December than it is all year. The quick trip to USF for the amazing Multicultural Children’s Lit Conference in February? Probably not. Right now, what with having to juggle funds, even attending our niece’s high school graduation in June is in jeopardy, and that makes us kind of cranky, as that’s a BIG event to miss. T. is hoping to sell another book (the editorial committee is weighing in on it even now – crossed fingers that they finish up before Thanksgiving. They’re trying to convince her agent that since it is a WWII novel should be marketed as adult fiction – T. is frantically whispering, “NO! NO!” and making signs of “Avert!” against their bad ideas.) and set aside the advance for plane tickets and to bring over her siblings and niece to the UK in the summertime, but all of the plans are, at the moment, falling apart.

So the Hobbits are going to Rome.

Or somewhere.

The fact is, these things work out. Right now, with so much due, and deadlines hovering and darkness falling, things look bleak (T. is on another diet. This is, in fact, likely nine-tenths of the bleakness for her.), but that’s …today. Tomorrow is another day, undiscovered. So, why not see what’s in Spain? Or in Greece? It just seems time to change the landscape, do something fun and inexpensive and adventurous.

And it is inexpensive. Before we left the States, we were told to check out the wonder that is Ryanair. Much like the U.S. Southwest airlines, Ryanair is frighteningly cheap and zips back and forth around Europe. We could be in Rome for £20 ($40) each for Christmas. We could be in Greece for something close to that. A tour of Spain including a flamenco show is £16.58. We could just — go. See what else is out there. Continue the adventure we’re meant to be having.

The nurse at the clinic just got back from two weeks in Florida. Since both of us had grandmothers who lived there, it’s not exactly an adventure to us, but…why not? The media makes much of being home for the holidays, when ‘home’ is usually a place they’re trying to convince us we’re bored with, should remodel or leave for someplace else. Since we can’t be home annoying each other, we may as well find some strangers to bother.

Our Thanksgiving plans continue to shape up amusingly. D. has classes Thanksgiving Day, as we’d said previously, and we have a two and a half hour pre-dress rehearsal for The Creation, after which we plan to go home and have our ideal Thanksgiving dinner: toast, popcorn and jelly beans. Does anyone else remember A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving? (Even though the cartoon is far older than either of us, it’s one of those ridiculous things we just have to watch…) We have been having a Thanksgiving-style lunch every day this month, simply because we can, and to celebrate the many uses of parsnips and turnips as fill-ins for potatoes.

Meanwhile, we are very much looking forward to our two-day trip to St. Andrews, the Tuesday and Wednesday before Thanksgiving. D. has received an invitation to come and participate in an epistemology seminar class and meet the team behind a philosophy research project that is apparently very big in philosophy circles. D. is applying to work on this project and potentially another project in Sweden, in lieu of teaching, and on top of his own research. It could be worth £22,000 to him, and a chance to work with some of the brightest minds in the field of philosophy. (As well as the chance to wear scholar’s robes at St. Andrews, and run around looking like an escapee from a Harry Potter film, but never mind that.) No matter what comes of it, we’ll very likely enjoy visiting a smaller, cleaner little town by the coast. Who knows, maybe we’ll run into Arnold Palmer and Tiger Woods. St. Andrews is golf country, after all.

And that’s the news from Lake… um… Never mind. That’s just our news for now.

Decidedly,

– D & T

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Another foray into the root vegetable center of the world…the UK Garden Box

This week’s veg box included these… strange knobbed things. Does anyone know what they are?! I mean, did you instantly identify them? If so, where are you from??? We peered at them in bewilderment, and had to actually slink to the computer – in shame – and email the CSA to find out: they’re Jerusalem Artichokes.

Well. Knew it was wistful thinking that they’d be something like, oh, truffles or something else brown and knobbed and unidentifiable. (Frankly, we’d be just as stumped if they were truffles… although we could sell them on the black market in France and buy a villa, at the rate one pays for them!) I guess artichokes would go well with …mushrooms? Rosemary? They look like potatoes… kind of. Maybe they’ll be good with soup, since I was just getting ready to throw together a potato-spinach thing. (Mom, have we ever eaten these? We’re not thinking we have…)

Any thoughts? Or, are we still on a Donal run and going to just say “roast ’em?”

This morning the meteorological office reported that it was 2 &deg C. by 7:30. Last night we walked home from Choral Society and it was 5 &deg C, and a lovely clear night with the moon an icy sliver above us and twenty mph. gusts, which carried a wind chill factor that brought the temp down to 3 &deg. We were both red nosed and frozen faced when we got home. The high today is forecast to be something like 5 &deg C., which is 41 &deg F. It got up to 3 &deg C – 34 &deg F – at nine this morning. In a suspiciously connected incident, I mentioned to my friend Barbara last week that I am a wimp about the cold, and she said she thought it might get colder at this latitude. We now officially blame the weather on her…

The clouds are rolling in however, and we’ll be back to a reasonable 8 – 9 &deg with sheeting rain and knee-deep puddles shortly…

– D & T

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Oh, my lands. The wind. The rain. The combination of said. It woke us up at and unholy hour this morning, the wind whistling through the vent at the top of the window, the spatter of rain against the window, as if some miscreant were throwing a handful of pebbles against the glass. Wow. Stormy weather. And that little chickie from the UK Consulate office in L.A. assured us, “Oh, it’s such a soft rain there. It’s kind of misty…” Um, yeah. Admittedly, it is now bright and icy cold sunshine outside, but the rain this morning was FIERCE. Is there anything misty about thirty mph. wind gusts?!

This day started off with more corroboration from the universe that we are, in fact, losing our minds. T. wakened in the wee small hours, suffocating and pouring sweat from the heat — to find that the comforter was folded in half on top of her, and D. was sleeping peacefully – sans blankets. (T. considered kicking him, but gave that up as a bad idea, as his legs are much longer. She was later informed that it was her fault anyway for leaving on the hallway radiator – more on that later.)

D. went whirling out the door with his bike and his gear, only to call T. ten minutes later and inform her that he was, in fact, sitting in an empty classroom — an hour early to his course. It’s the little things that have us stopped and laughing. Somehow, the more absurdly annoying things get, the funnier they seem.

Even as we whine, we can smile because we know we are whining. T. has a bit of a moan daily that she still can’t figure out how to make the dryer part of the washer/dryer combo work — and has to rely on drying racks and radiators (which explains the blistering conditions in the night), and that it takes forever to do anything — to walk to the University, to wash dishes by hand, to do laundry or clean the floors (the vacuum cleaner is abominable.), and that we’re practically pioneers, here — which is a vast and wild exaggeration, but this is whining, see. D. has a good moan about homework, the University professors who seem to prefer to hide in the pub or in their offices rather than be available, the rasp-tongued old baggage who screamed at him to “learn English” and “read the highway code,” when he rode by on his bike. (And you know, he DID go home and read the highway code. That’ll show her.) Imagining these complaints set to music doubles the amusement – yes, we have discovered the vast amusement afforded by complaint choirs.

If you’ve never encountered these, you’re in for a surreal experience. They’re the most niggling little collection of pointless bleatings ever, but that’s the point — our complaints are tiny pebbles in our shoes, just the steam blown off from our over-full lives. Nothing is really wrong with most of us — but the paper running out in the bathroom, the “some assembly required” nature of Ikea furniture, cellphone ringers, the nagging of spouses, the scarcity of good conversationalists, typos in the newspapers, the weather — these are the little things we collect to hand out to others as conversation, though complaints are not real communication. Who wants to talk endlessly about how awful they find the weather? Do you really listen when you ask someone how they are, and they wind up their list of prickles and pains? Not really, yet the amusement of hearing little petty pouting in four part harmony is somehow funnier than it should be. In any case, learning to laugh at these things helps us to let them go and to lighten up. That’s our goal right now, as it gets darker — to be sillier, to lighten up, to laugh. (This explains T’s DVD of belly dancing lessons — sometimes she just falls on the floor laughing, she’s so bad. And there we shall draw a veil…)

I never realized how Americans appear to people in the UK, but it seems we’re seen as …gun crazy. It’s still rankling, what a friend said last week, about “everybody” having guns. (Granted, it was in response to a comment about the legal drinking age here being sixteen, to which they retorted how it’s not like it’s as dangerous here, because “at least in the UK everybody doesn’t have guns.”)

See, here’s the thing: I don’t have a gun. My parents don’t have guns. My siblings don’t have guns. We don’t even know people who have guns (with the except of law enforcement personnel, and they don’t flaunt theirs). Granted, it’s because we lived in the depths of suburbia, where hunting just isn’t part of the routine, and most of the gumshoes and police we know are retired — but just the idea that we’re all some sort of cowboys, swaggering around in some ridiculous extended-adolescent gunslinger fantasy, well… Well, all right. There are definitely some people like that. But we are the LEAST gun-happy people I know. “Everybody,” in this case, doesn’t include most people…

The holidays are coming, and it seems odd that no one here seems to realize it. Well, no, take that back — they’re definitely revved up for Christmas, and something called Hogmanay (which has an unfortunate similarity with ‘Hootenanny,’ which just gives T, giggles) which we’ve found out is just New Years (apparently Boxing Day also comes in for its share of excitement). No Thanksgiving, though. Of course, it’s not as if we can expect the United Kingdoms of Britain to be celebrating the day some of its former colonists settled safely elsewhere, but the absence of people talking about what they’re cooking really stands out. D. will go to school that Thursday: it’s not a holiday in the UK. Instead, we have Firework Night and Diwali — two perfectly fun November holiday substitutes that involve more candles, less food and fewer relatives (well, I don’t know that for sure about Diwali, but certainly the fireworks don’t require relatives – and they seem to go on forever.).

It will be harder for us to miss Thanksgiving at home than Christmas. The quasi-traditional Thanksgiving routine has remained unchanged through the years — get together, annoy each other, be thankful for the opportunity, eat. This year we will simply be thankful to annoy each other long-distance, thankful to know that around some charmed candlelit circle, other people’s families are annoying each other, too.

– D & T

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

T’s mother thinks we don’t get out enough. To ally any concern, we thought it might be time for a little glimpse of “A Day in the Life.”

We’re not up here as early as we are on the West Coast. Six thirty is as early as we can manage, and in the blackness, we usually are out and really about by seven. D.’s classes don’t begin until eleven, so he’s less concerned, but he studies best in the morning, he’s found, so the earlier he can pull himself together, the better.

Despite the words from the worrying parent, sitting at the computer is part of what we do for a living. T. is still writing — daily. Has deadlines. Has the weekly writing group. Has a new manuscript under consideration with Knopf. (Just to clear up any confusion, since her father asked her last week what she does all day when D. isn’t home. *rolls eyes.*) D. is also still working, but only a tiny bit, as he’s having to write the specs for the database project he’s building — before he builds it. And he’s also writing essays. He’s on the second draft of the first one that’s due already. There’s not as much due as we expected… but he’s still a bit swamped, thus the computer time.

There’s also some daily reading time in the house. As previously mentioned, in the mornings, D. reads school stuff, T. reads other people’s manuscripts and reviews books — and every day publishers send packages with more, because now she’s reviewing books for children’s and young adult book award. Usually it’s first thing in the morning on Mondays when we read — each of us on our own couch, wrapped in blankets, hard at work. Or, dozing off again…

Mondays we trek to the library for our reading, and breakfast there. Sounds weird, but our branch has a café, and we have never yet seen a good book that didn’t look better with a mug of tea and a roasted vegetable panino. Thursdays we attend choir rehearsal — (and we’re whipping The Creation oratorio into shape. Just four more weeks until the performance!) and afterwards take advantage of the city-wide Thursday late opening hours to pick up a few items from the organic market. Thursdays are really entertaining nights, because it seems like the whole city is outside, on foot, wandering into traffic en masse. (City people in traffic are amusing – never mind that the little walking man light is red — walk anyway. What, there’s a car coming? No worries, they’ll stop. Don’t count on that from the buses, though…)

The usual bits of daily living get done around D’s school schedule. Mondays he only has one class, Tuesdays he’s out of the house by eleven-thirty and doesn’t
return until after 7 p.m., Wednesdays and Thursdays he’s out until six — and mind you, it gets dark by four. Most days we are together for a quick candlelit …lunch. (It’s SO dark that T. has had a really good excuse to unpack the four hundred or so tea lights left over from her sister’s wedding, that yes! She packed and shipped over [in a rare stroke of genius] to up the coziness factor).

There’s something weird going on with our eating habits. Eating lunch, the light tells us that we’re eating an early dinner. It’s dark by four — just dark. Like it is at eight. So, by the time we should be eating dinner, something in our brains tells us we already did. We are actually less hungry. Mind you, this fluke isn’t working to our advantage entirely. We tend to do meal combining – breakfast is a huge brunch affair, so it’s not as if we’re missing anything in the calorie department by missing a meal. (Drat. T. is crankily beginning another diet. Tomorrow…) On the weekends, D. is still cooking and baking and experimenting; during the week, T. has her turn. With the contents of the CSA box as her guide, she’s branching out — tonight will be roasted parsnips… (pray for us, now and at the hour when we eat.)

We do socialize — but right now, socializing is somewhat like interviewing. Lots of the meet-and-greet things D. has to do are part of academia, where it’s all about who you know that weighs in on determining where you go… It seems like a massive and quite pointless game at times. D. spends his time smiling at philosophy professors and it’s a relief when we can hang out with people who are actually not Associates and Acquaintances, but people who are slowly moving toward the category of friend. Our weekends also have to have room
for Conferences, for more reading, for discover-the-city explorations, for our church-hopping adventures, for our scheduled Skype visits home, and for the Life and Death Struggle previously known as Scrabble. (May we take a moment to rail against those who play only for the cheap glory of the triple word score spots, [LAURA??? and D.???] instead of the elegance of a well-played word? May we??? Thank-you.)

Right now, life feels bizarrely… consequence free… It’s as if nothing we’re doing right now matters in the larger scope. The rent is paid. There’s enough money for food. Sometimes we just sit and say, “Huh. We’re in the UK.

In a way, we left our community for this reason, so we could work without distractions and take a breather, but it still sometimes feels like that “breather” is just a big inhalation that goes on and on. In the silence between breaths is a little pause during which no one cares what we do, or expects us anywhere, or feels like we should or ought to be doing anything. Freeing. Disturbing. This little pause seems like something we should have figured out how to manage without moving so far away…

– D & T

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

When we saw this little cartoon, we just burst out laughing.

This is SO the way we obsess over our walking. D. spends time glaring at the city map because he’s pretty sure that cutting through Kelvingrove Park is supposed to be quicker, but there’s that hill, and the fact that it doesn’t work out after dark (NOBODY should go there after dark, we’re told, because it’s all Bad Guys after dark… despite the fact that this is something ‘everybody’ knows, we see people swanning off through the trees at dusk every night…) is also another negative —

Problem is, the path through the park is really shorter, in terms of distance, but not in terms of elevation. So, going through the park actually involves expending more energy. Going down Argyle street involves more stoplights, and can be faster … and usually is, but it involves more stop & starts. So, while it takes a shorter time, it’s the in-between path in terms of calories. Now, going down Elderslie to Sauchiehall Street means that D doesn’t hit very many lights at all – about 1 real light – but it’s 1/2 a mile more in terms of distance. So, it’s consistent, but it’s a consistent 15 minutes, instead of the 10 minutes D spends going on Argyle.

Of course, that’s cycling – walking, it’s always faster to walk down Argyle. Taking what we call The Stairs of Doom is a shortcut to campus, but one arrives sweating like a pig, flushed, disheveled and generally cranky, which is why we only do it on Thursdays…

Life without cars: more mathematical than you ever thought possible.

– D & T

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.