Forcing my way out of the doldrums

We've endured entirely too much unseasonably cold, cloudy, and sometimes downright nasty weather this fall.  I actually feel like summer never came.  I kept waiting for it to get steamy and sweaty, like a Japanese summer, but it never happened.

And now I feel like winter is upon our doorstep.  I missed my best chance for fall photography last weekend when I was attending a conference.  A reminder of why I left graduate school after my M.A.  Who wants to be cooped in a dull classroom discussing the finer points of say, pornographic Japanese fiction, when you could be outside frolicking in piles of golden leaves?

So, I'm taking us on a virtual tour back to summer, and my warm and wonderful trip to England.

I already wrote about the world's greatest country boutique hotel ever.  

The New Forest

The hotel was in the New Forest, which is basically a big national park area, with towns and villages within it, that hosts thousands of wild ponies.  They are everywhere.  In parking lots, in the street, and in fields everywhere.  

Besides our stay in the Whitley Ridge, we also attended a family wedding in the New Forest.  Sadly, rain paid a visit, but Sweetie and I had fun with the children in the hotel garden.  We had run out to the car to get something, and the children were slinking around the garden and running from everyone they saw.  When they saw us, they'd run in the other direction.  This was amusing for about 5 minutes, and then the kids saw us, pointed, and shouted "Murderer!" and at that point, we decided we were very much done playing their game!

Motisfont Abbey

We visited the most glorious garden at Motisfont Abbey.  I could have stayed there for hours snapping photos of the bright flowers and bumble bees flitting from bloom to bloom.  The sun made an appearance and really warmed things up.  

Porchester Castle

Sweetie took me to the impressive Porchester Castle, in his home town (castles and gardens were tops on my list of things to do on our trip).  Located on the sea, it was an impressive fortress, still in very good condition.  We climbed up to the top, with its panoramic views of Portsmouth.  

Boo~~!

Have you been "Boo"-ed yet?  Or ever?  Do  you know what I'm talking about?

Last night, the doorbell rang wildly.  It was pitch black outside and we didn't have any outside lights on.  I was scared.  I didn't know who it was.  I gingerly approached the front door.  I then went around to the kitchen and peeked through the blinds.  I didn't see anyone.  

Across the road, I saw that our neighbor was outside his house, so I figured that if I opened the door and someone tried to attack me, he would notice.  So, I opened the door.

And there I saw a small, elegantly-wrapped bag with "Boo" written on a piece of white paper sticking out of the top.

After a moment of deliberation, I decided that a bomber would probably NOT wrap an incendiary device so elegantly.  So, I grabbed the bag and opened it up inside.

There was a poem with the "Boo" sign that explained that I was to do the same thing for two other neighbors within the next 24 hours.  The bag was full of all sorts of cool goodies like a really nice Halloween candle, some apples with caramel dip, Georgia pecans, assorted candy, and a Halloween towel.  It was really sweet!!

At that point, I figured that many neighbors had not yet been "boo"-ed and that I would have my pick the next night.  But alas, by the time I returned from a post-work shopping run, all of the friendly people we know on the street had already been "boo"-ed.  I found it interesting that the none of the folks we don't really care for had been boo-ed!  Apparently others share our taste in neighbors.

So, I ventured down to another cul-de-sac, where the two other people who work at the college live.  They didn't have Boo signs visible.  It wasn't quite dark yet, but I didn't really fancy walking around on a dark, cold, rainy, windy night, so I went out just before dark.  I think I might have been spotted after my first drop.  And by the time I made the second drop, I was very hesitant when I pressed the doorbell.  I'm not even sure it rang.  Oh well!  Hopefully they use their front door occasionally:-)

Try starting a Boo tradition in your neighborhood!  Now is about the time to get started -- two weeks before Halloween.

What ARE you doing?

This is what Sweetie said to me the other day.  I knew he was going to ask.  It's not everyday that you see someone boiling strawberries and rasberries and then setting them out to dry on the counter.   

I read about this method of keeping berries fresh and mold-free for longer in the New York Times.  I read that parboiling them could not only stunt or prevent mold growth, but actually REMOVE moldy bits.  And I needed a miracle, as roughly half the box of rasberries I had bought the day before was moldy.  

Definitely the boiling seemed to freshen up some of the berries.  But the clumped masses encrusted in mold, sadly remained....clumped masses encrusted in mold.  But, the boiling definitely seemed to improve the flavor, remarkably! 

Try it sometime!

Scrabble Injury

Sweetie and I have pretty serious Scrabble games. They tend to involve words such as "thrashed." And the other day, I think I broke a rib. Or bruised it. I might even have a collapsed lung. It was intense.

How it happened was....I was carrying Sweetie super gigantic Cambridge English Dictionary to check a word, and I wasn't watching where I was going. I managed to walk full-force into a wall. Which thrust the dictionary into my ribs. Yeah, super-coordinated. Way cool.

IT Hero

Sweetie and I finally caved and bought a wireless router for our house and a laptop for Sweetie (well, Sweetie bought the laptop for Sweetie but I picked it out). I was a little apprehensive about the whole router thing, particularly as the reviews for the router, while sterling, said to all sorts of mysterious things like: "I had a little trouble getting it to work.  It turned out that there was an IP conflict. To fix it I did the following: In ''DHCP Settings'', I changed the ''Start IP Address: 192.168.0.100'' to 192.168.0.1. I also cloned the mac address with the one I had on my last router. Finally, I changed the ''Default Gateway: 192.168.1.1'' to 192.168.0.1. After that, everything was working fine."

O-KAY.  

Yeah.  And, I did also recall that I paid approximately $100 extra to have my router in Israel installed by a professional and I do recall that it took Techo Geek roughly 3 hours to install it.  So, quite how I expected that I would be able to install this darn thing, I don't know.

Well, I followed the instructions and booted up Sweetie's new computer and NOTHING.  Then, I plugged it directly in my computer, ignoring the whole wireless aspect and... NOTHING.  Then, I plugged my computer directly back into our modem and....NOTHING.  Crap.  So, now, not only did the router not work, but NOTHING worked.  We had NO INTERNET WHATSOEVER.  Lovely.  

So, a small (okay, large) marital meltdown ensued as Sweetie was nastily (he will agree, it was nasty) accusing me of screwing everything up and declaring that he wanted me to repackage the whole lot of equipment and send it all back.  Meanwhile, I was crying and screaming in indignation: "I was just trying to improve our lives!!!!"  

Apparently, this is all very normal human behavior surrounding a non-professional attempt at self-installing a wireless router.

What I didn't know is that sometimes it takes up to 12 hours for the router to kick into gear.  

So, the next morning, Sweetie turned on his laptop and had an internet connection.

And all was well in the world again.

I told Sweetie he could call me "Hero" for one month.  He said he would go for "IT Hero," which I actually prefer.

The Last Straw

You may remember my tirade about our crazy neighbor "Rodeo."  Well, he just returned from one of his jaunts on his ear-blastingly loud motorcycle and is now "dusting" his motorcycle with a leafblower.  Not joking.  Wish I were.  I am about to lose my mind entirely.  The sound carries through the entire neighborhood when he has that thing blowing.  As if the nightly 11PM blasts from his motorcycle going past our house were not enough.

Is it, or is it not?

So....it started with a sore throat. And some nasal issues. So, I took some daytime cold medicine and went to work. Then, in the evening I took some night-formula cold medicine. I slept really well, only waking Sweetie up once in a coughing fit. But, then the alarm went off and I could barely lift my arm 2 inches to turn it off. I tried to sit up in bed and it was clear that I wasn't going to be making it to the living room anytime soon, let alone the office. I dashed off an email to my colleagues, stumbled back into bed, and slept for another full 4 hours and 45 minutes. Extraordinary.

I didn't have a fever, but then again, I was already taking antibiotics for an unrelated medical issue, and my body temperature is naturally a degree or two below normal, so what defines a fever for me is not entirely clear.

Yesterday I felt somewhat recovered -- at least enough to take a shower and comb my hair, so I went to the office and managed to eek out about 4 hours of work.

Sweetie has since displayed similar symptoms.

And then there was the email from the college where we work saying that a student has probable swine flu.

Hmmmm.....

So, at this point, we're thinking, maybe what we had/have WAS the swine flu?? Can I now run around campus touching door handles and drinking fountains with abandon, flaunting my new immunity?

Or, was it just a head cold?

Catching up

I'm a bad blogger. I just realized that I'm averaging one post a month. That's bad. Well, patient readers, this is what the RSS is for. Click the magic orange button on the side of your screen and you be alerted via email on those increasingly rare occasions that I post something:-)

Shock and School

As some of you know, I work at a college. And I just recently settled into a nice, quiet, work-on-projects-I-never-have-time-to-work-on summer mode, and all of a sudden, there are STUDENTS around. Making noise. Talking in the halls (horror of all horrors!). Using the bathrooms. Shouting. Interrupting my productivity-inducing tranquility. It's quite a shock to my system.

And presumably bringing swine flu back with them from all reaches of the country and world.  Should be a fun fall!

Taking a break
As some of you might also know, Sweetie and I have been house-hunting for some time now. It finally reached a point where we were so disgusted with the process that we needed to stop. So, we're taking a break for a month or two. We're not meeting our realtor, not making offers on any houses, and not visiting any open houses. Hooray for sanity.

England

I still haven't written about our trip to England. Well, it got off to a great start when I breezed through immigration and customs (my suitcase was one of the first off the carousel) so quickly that Sweetie had to do a double-take when he saw me emerge through the glass doors.  

This time, we had wisely reserved a room at an airport hotel (I arrived at night), so we took a shuttle there and were able to crash for the evening before heading out to the countryside the next day.

Brockenhurst and the Whitley Ridge Hotel

After a brief stop in the quaint, pony-populated village of Burley, we proceded toward Brockenhurst, a town which we drove around in circles approximately twice looking for our B&B for the night.  We finally asked a woman walking down the street (a non-English speaker it turned out -- isn't it always the case that the foreigner gets asked for directions?).  She was able to point us straight in the correct direction.

We entered a private, wooded driveway and at the end of it was the most elegant ivy-covered building.  An assortment of young French men greeted us and got us settled in our room.  We had some time to explore the grounds before our dinner reservation at the Michelin-starred LePoussin restaurant on the ground floor of the hotel.

They had an enchanting walled garden bursting with vegetables.  And beyond that a wild garden with a waterfall and a serene lilly pond.  

Dinner was so good, it was practically life-changing.  I shudder thinking about the pasta with canned beans and sauce that I made for dinner tonight.  You cannot call that food in comparison to what we ate at Le Poussin.  Sweetie actually declared upon eating a white truffle (of the dessert variety, not the mushroom -- those kinds of truffles were in my first course risotto) that he would never eat in a non-Michelin-starred restaurant again.  (Needless to say, that lasted all of 24 hours).  To put this comment into perspective, Sweetie is not the type to get excited about food.  He usually barely notices food.  In fact, once I came home from work looking forward to eating my leftover cheese-free vegetable pizza, only to find that Sweetie had consumed it without even noticing that it was my pizza and not his own meat and cheese encrusted pizza.

So, to make a long story slightly less long, if you go to England, you really must spend the night at the Whitley Ridge and reserve a dinner in advance at Le Poussin!  Well worth it!!!  (Easy for me to say, since it was Sweetie's treat.  Thanks Sweetie!  I love you!)