London Day One

Virgin Atlantic Flight 12 left Boston Logan Airport at 7:45 p.m. on Friday, 25 September 2009 with Jim and me in seats 60J and 60K. We've taken our empty nest on the road. The flight was just under 7 hours, arriving around 8 a.m. London time. With our Oyster cards in hand(30 pds each for 7 days, unlimited Tube and bus rides), we took the Picadilly Line to the Circle Line and left our luggage at the hotel: Abbey Court near Paddington Station. We stayed here in July 2001 with our six children, then ages 10-20. The room is cozy, with a large sycamore tree outside our huge window.
I purposely didn't bring a camera. Mine's kinda clunky and doesn't take action shots. So, I'll just buy postcards along the way. For you blog followers, you'll have to use your imagination.
We toured King's Cross Station. A sign informed us that they'd moved Platform 9 3/4 due to renovation and directed us to its temporary location. When we visited in 2001, there was no brick wall between Platform 9 and Platform 10, so I wonder if this is a recent addition...It has the end of a luggage trolley bolted to the wall, so it looks like the trolley is entering Platform 9 3/4.
St. Pancras Station has a beautiful "glass-and-iron train shed, which for many years had the largest clear-span in the world." (TimeOut London, 2009 edition) Next to the station is the British Library, not to be confused with the British Museum, which housed the British Library until 1997.
A Parliamentary committee called the 1997 British Library "one of the ugliest buildings in the world" (ibid). Inside it the dimly lit John Ritblat Gallery houses an amazing collection of books and manuscripts, including Handel's hand-written Messiah score, a huge Gutenburg Bible, which was illumined by hand, a teenage journal of Jane Austen, a dictionary that Samuel Johnson created and two of the four existing copies of the Magna Carta. I was especially anxious to see those having heard that a copy of the Magna Carta has travelled to Fraunces Tavern in lower Manhattan. Samuel Johnson is one of Jim's favorites. He's been re-reading his biography by Boswell lately.
We bought some sandwiches and have settled in our rooms, trying desparately not to fall asleep, in order to acclimate quickly to the 5 hour time difference. Tonight it's Verdi's Requiem at the Barbican Centre. Hopefully that will be forte enough to keep us awake.

Challenge Course 4 at Heber Valley, Utah

I can't believe it! I'm in Salt Lake City watching my brother reading a truck book! Must be a slow day...No, really, I enjoyed seeing G, especially the outside shots of suburban New Jersey:
http://carlssummerblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/big-truck.html.

I'll be leaving Utah tomorrow. We had a great family reunion at a church campground in Heber Valley at about 10 thousand feet. It was wonderful seeing aunts and uncles and cousins. We had great food, a beautiful lake to canoe on and "challenge course four." This consisted of a 25 ft. telephone pole to be scaled, a 25 foot long high-wire to be traversed, with knotted ropes dangling above it at about 6 foot intervals for handholds, and another telephone pole at the far end of the high wire with a little perch to sit on, from which one is launched on a zip wire:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_wire
Family History note: our son had an unfortunate incident with a zip wire when he was in kindergarten, which involved a lot of blood and his two front teeth being pushed up.
I had heard about the zip wire and was looking forward to riding it. However, no one had told me how you got to the zip wire. When I first saw it, I was SURE I wouldn't be taking the challenge EVER. But they wouldn't let me do the zip wire without going up the pole, across the high-wire and onto the teeny little perch.
Obviously the end of this story is that I did the challenge and survived. I was nearly sick with anxiety at the thought of possibly even trying even just the telephone pole climb, possibly. Once I started,it was really scary, but very safe. I was harnessed to a belay rope (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belaying). Luckily, while I was debating about the attempt, I overheard someone say, "Don't look down," which was the best advice I could have had. I never came close to looking down. In fact, the view of the treetops in the distance is burned into my memory. I'm not sure I've ever concentrated so hard on anything as I did that view. It was intense. My mouth has never been so dry, not even after surgery when the nurse wouldn't let me even swish water in my mouth. About mid-high-wire, my dry mouth was almost as bad as the fear itself.
The zip wire was fun. Since it starts about 25 feet above the forest, it's really an amazing ride. Many people rode the zip wire "no hands," but after the high-wire ordeal I gave myself permission to hang on tight. I shook for quite awhile afterward.
This was at 11 a.m. Our group was also scheduled for 2 p.m. and since there were some extra tickets, I considered going again. It felt so unreal that I had actually done it that I wanted to do it a second time to convince myself I'd done it once. I spent a long, long time watching others accomplish the challenge, including my son for the second time and my daughter for the first, before I committed to going again. It was just a little teeny bit less scary. Before I started up I took a few sips of water and remembered to breathe through my nose, so my mouth wasn't quite so dry.

The second time, I waved my arms on the zip wire. Triumph!

BTW, my sneakers have done the challenge 4 times: once with me at 11 a.m., once on my son, who didn't bring sneakers and had broken the shoelaces of his father's sneakers in the morning, once on my daughter and then on me again. What brave little sneakers!

The great paint project

When I was a graduated senior from Westfield, NJ High School, I painted my parent's 3 story house. It had grey shingles. (I always spell grey with an e.) This summer Annie, entering sophomore at U of Wisconsin-Madison, has contracted to paint our 3 story. The 3rd floor dormers are vinyl-sided, so she won't need to rent a longer ladder like I did the day I painted the exterior 3rd floor.

Lawn mowing

So, just a few weeks ago, I realized that Sam wouldn't be around to mow the lawn. Since we have an acre of land, this is a big deal. Jim mowed a week or two ago and today was my turn. I clocked it as exactly 2 hours.

My hands are very sore from squeezing the safety handle for two hours. No blisters raised.
Note to self: wear garden gloves while mowing.

Sam's majority

It's the end of an era: twenty-eight years of mothering minor children. At the suggestion of a wise friend of mine, I've been preparing, trying to give myself permission to recognize this as a stressful transition: happy stress, but something with emotional weight. To pay attention to my emotional self and not try to tough it out by ignoring or denying the deep emotions that surface. I have kept myself from crying uncontrollably, but I have accepted tears welling up and acknowledged the feelings.

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Sam's graduation was June 7, 2009 at the Tsongas Arena in Lowell. Then on Thursday, June 18, he packed up and we drove him to Logan Airport. As I watched him clear security and saunter down the gate corridor to disappear from sight, I turned to Jim and cried on his shoulder. Such a mixture of pride, joy, sadness, and curiousity of what his future will hold. He texted me when he boarded the flight and now he's at BYU, getting oriented and starting classes on Monday.

USAir

I got an email this week from Travelocity: "The airline has recently made a change to your flight schedule/flight numbers...Please review this information carefully..."
I'm glad I did. Turns out USAirways re-scheduled Sam and me to fly out of Boston, arriving at Washington Reagan Airport at 9:36 a.m. and fly out of Reagan at 8:45 a.m. Yup, leave 51 minutes before we arrive. Hmmmm.
Happily, the Travelocity agent was able to talk USAirways into putting us on different flights to arrive in St. Croix at the same time. We just need to leave Boston 2 hours earlier, no big deal.

New wall double wall oven

About 10 years ago the clock/timer broke. About 6 years ago the thermostat broke, so that the 250 degree setting was about 450 degrees. And this week, our new double oven arrived!












Here's the last meal of the old oven - delicious ham and onion quiche.

And...drum roll please.....
Here's the new double wall oven!
10 days ago three of these traversed our backyard. Too scrawny to roast in our new oven...