DPP 20: Time-Travelling Warriors

On our third day in London, our familial trio visited one of my very favourite places in the world: the Tower of London. We were treated to a tour by a beefeater, and enjoyed many displays: a mixture of old things left looking as ancient as possible, new things built and constructed to resemble the originals, and some interactive displays. This archer crouches in the middle of an interactive display rigged to recreate one of the great battles once fought around the Tower. Below his arrow are the homes of some beefeaters who work in the Tower and live, with their families, in homes built into these eight-metre-thick walls thousands of years ago. Above his arrow, the bustle of modern-day London can be seen.

DPP 19: New Breath in Fresh Air

On our second London morning, our amiable trio set out to visit the Tate Modern art gallery and Globe Theatre, but were distracted en route by a wonderful market near Waterloo station. This garlic display caught my eye particularly.

DPP 18: A Historical Time

Isaac and I are freshly back from London, where we met his mother (visiting for Christmas) and spent a few days playing tourists. On our first full day in London, we visited the British Museum, where I was particularly impressed by the clock exhibit. This one was apparently used to announce feasts in days of yore.

DPP 17: Ironing for Jesus

I've been attending Anglican churches on and off since I was quite small, and it's only in the past week that I've become aware of the vast number of elaborately-named details that that are washed, ironed, and laid out before the services behind the scenes. This pile of linens, front to back, contains purificators, lavabo towels, linen veils, and amices, all freshly laundered and carefully ironed. They are not as well starched as they are supposed to be, but I've never learned to starch clothes.

DPP 16: Class Dismissed

Today I taught my last writing lab of the semester.

Actually, that's not entirely correct. Today I sat in an empty classroom out of a sense of duty and not wishing to have a student show up forty minutes into the today's session (an open period for questions) to find me absent.

Nobody came, alas, so the dude on the back wall helped me write the first page of a conference paper I'll be giving in just under three weeks. Yeah, procrastination! Woo!

DPP 15: The Soot Burglar

This morning the Chimney Sweeps visited our humble flat. From within our chimney, they removed more then ten gallons of soot (mostly sandstone that had crumbled off the inside lining of the chimney) and a mummified pigeon.

Here's one of the sweeps gathering up the last load of soot:

DPP 14: Repetitive and Evergreen

When I was a little girl, my grandfather and I took a trip every November to a Christmas Tree Farm a little ways from home. Together we roamed through a beautiful forest of woody-smelling evergreens, examining the dimensions, fullness, irregularities, and overall elegance of each before tagging a large tree for his house and a slightly smaller one for mine. We would return to the farm in late December to cut our trees and take them home, and somewhere amid the blur of working in my parents' bookstore, preparing Christmas gifts for my family and friends, and attending the Christmas Eve services that marked the end of the crazy retail shopping days, our tree would get both lights and ornaments.

Life is less idyllic now, and we bought our modest little tree pre-cut and at a discount on account of its many irregularities and "holes." It has exactly twelve ornaments (five from last year and seven from this) two garlands, and one string of lights, which is exactly right because there's not much room for more--and taking the tree down after Christmas will be simpler. Some of these ornaments will go back to the charity shops from whence they came when we move back to the States, and a few will indubitably make the journey overseas with us, to remind us in years to come of our happy days overseas: exhausted and busy, but without the demands of children and long-term employment.

Ah, these will be the days . . .