…Or Not

Ready or not, Spring is coming.

Eventually. Or so they say.

We’ve wakened the last three mornings to brilliant sunshine, and cloud-free skies. Of course, this being Scotland, that lasted approximately one half hour before there were Titanic-sized clouds sailing. On Monday they lined up end to end and closed out the sun. It rained sometime during the night, but lightly. On Tuesday the clouds were towering and tall, but stayed white all day. Today they were dollops of whipped cream, which finally got together and pretended they were topping a pie. And then they turned several lovely shades of pewter. But through it all there has been sun, sun, sun.

(Sunshine is a joyous thing, except when you fling open the windows and are showered with the dust of a largely industrial city — and random ladybugs which seem bent on taking up permanent residence in your flat. Note to selves: Leave the windows closed.)

The lovely sunshine didn’t help D. any on Monday, after he showered and dressed, sat down to breakfast, ate a bite, tugged at his tie, ate another bite, removed his tie, ate another few bites, set aside his bowl, removed his clothes and went back to bed. We both of us succumbed to some creeping bronchial crud right after Van left, and are glad to be seeing the end of it now. And huzzah and yippee: It’s Spring Break! Though it took a little while, D. finally unwound like a spinning top… and fell over.

It’s nice to have sunny weather while you’re sick in bed, but there’s a certain… injustice to it in Scotland. We were exhausted and hacking and moaning that it wasn’t fair… but, the sun is allegedly coming back. Soon.

To that end, we’ve been thinking it’s time to get back on track with what we were intending to do here while on a vacation we were planning — cycling and camping. There is a lovely flat sixty mile track to Edinburgh, a perfectly flat canal trail. It’s only a half day cycle to Stirling, and there are pubs along the way to provide horribly fatty snacks and bathrooms. D. is a keen cyclist, while T. prefers bikes with fat tires and baskets and not having to wear a helmet, but she can be trained. Training is actually what D. and T. are up to now. D. has been such a faithful customer at a local cycling shop that they gave him a 70% discount on some trainers — one simply hooks the bike in and pedals away indoors. So, while it’s clouding up to rain again, in a few weeks when there are longer dry spells (Oh, who are we kidding. Let’s just say when the rain is …warmer), D. & T. will be ready. Or, ready-ish. (Or not.)

While we’ve been ill, we’ve been reading and watching TV. Not exceptionally unusual, except we haven’t watched much TV while we’ve been in Scotland — we couldn’t decide if we should afford satellite TV, and were wanting to just watch BBC for awhile and see what that was about… and now we’ve seen. For the most part, television here is just as useless as television in the U.S., but watching a couple of movies the other night brought some exclamations of surprise. The WWII film, Good Night Mr. Tom is a full hour longer in Scotland than when we saw it in the U.S. Also The Triplets of Belleville when shown here had many scenes which had been cut from the U.S. version. We rented the U.S. version, mind you, we never saw it in a theater… yet it still was somewhat different than what we saw. We wondered at that a great deal. (Yes, these are the gripping things you fill your mind whilst you are ill…)

In the case of the Mr. Tom film, it was probably no more than the station deciding what they had time to air — it’s almost two full hours sans commercials — but we find it interesting that there are different versions of films between the U.S. and the UK. The American versions generally are tidied up — certain things are blurred, certain things are cut — which we find strange. We’ve had off-and-on discussions with various of our Scottish friends, many of whom insist that Americans are so much more violent than Scots — we with our guns and all (and again we insist that we know very few people with guns, and none in Northern California, but this truth, held against media interpretation, holds very little water), but after watching Scottish television for awhile, we are reopening the discussion. (*Ahem!*) And pointing fingers. (*Ahem, AHEM!*) And saying, “Ooh, ooh, you too.”

Oh, all right. It’s childish to say who is worse. All of it is fairly useless, agreed? Even so, we look forward to getting satellite — we’ve missed watching our silly shows on the Discovery Channel. Life without Mythbusters has been rather dim.

It hardly seems possible, but we’ve seen the stores filled with Lindt rabbits and those hideous Cadbury eggs — it’s Easter this weekend. When we consider what we were doing last Easter — generally rehearsing nonstop and rapidly approaching nervous breakdowns — this weekend seems rather anticlimactic. Since the University is on break, things are quiet on campus, and it feels strange not to be part of a massive undertaking just now. Strange, but relaxing, and probably just what we need this time around.

This weekend J&G are coming over to play. We are flattered that they chose to spend their Easter-time with us instead of with their parents, and we’re looking forward to making real Mexican food — tortillas and all (again: THANK YOU, Van, for the pinto beans. All twenty-five pounds of them.), teaching them to play canasta, forcing them to ingest tofu (bwa-hahaha — oh, oops. Did we do the wild maniacal laugh out loud?), and dyeing eggs with things we find around the kitchen. We have collected onion skins, beets, turmeric, which is also apparently great for dyeing fabric, coffee grounds, and various teas. Tune in for the photograph evidence next week on Flickr.

It’s around the holidays that we miss our home, family and tradition the most. We don’t have much of an Easter tradition, but we send big hugs to our church family members and hope that you and they have a weekend filled with family and reflection and rest, renewal and joy.

Pax,

– D & T

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