Shakespeare in the Park

Every summer the various colleges at Cambridge play host to Shakespeare in the Park. Last year my friend Rebekah and I took my mom to see Taming of the Shrew. This year, Rebekah and I went to see The Comedy of Errors and have plans to see Much Ado About Nothing (one of my all time favourites!)

TCoE was absolutely brilliant! I've read it before, but had never seen it performed. Bless them, I'm sure they were freezing to death! We were all bundled up to our eyebrows: Jeans, jumpers, hoodies and coats, sitting on one wool blanket (over chairs) and huddled under another. Yeah, we just about survived it. But hey... this is the joy of the Great British Summer! It did not rain, ominous black clouds not withstanding. So all in all, we made out well.

Of course, we had to have the obligatory Scones, Clotted Cream and Jam! Yum!

Dressed for an English Summer

This spring, as the weather finally began to warm up, my sister was quite appalled at the shocking lack of warm-weather clothing in my closet. But then, I've been living in England the past 7 years. What need did I have of warm-weather clothing? I had a few short sleeve tops, and a couple skirts that were lighter weight. That's more than enough for the odd day that got above 24 C (that's roughly 75 F)! It just never hots up in the UK.

So, here I am back in the UK, and true to form, it's 14 C (52 F) out there, in July! Love it! Oh, and yes it is rainy today. Not chucking it down, but definitely wet. Seriously, I adore the cooler temperatures over here. It was quite a relief to escape the building heat of the US Western Desert. Have your 40+ C (100 F) temperatures! You can keep them. I'm happy over here in my jumper with my cuppa (herbal, of course).

I Love Denver In the Spring (or Ode to I-70)

Mile High Blues was this weekend!  Wooo hoo!  Loved seeing my dance friends again.  Hadn't seen many of them since I left Utah in 2009 to go back to England.  Was wonderful to reconnect.  And had a fantastic time dancing til the wee small hours of the morning.  The best blues is always around 3 am.  Ended up with some mild trauma driving home, though.  Oh, and by "home" I really mean campus, to teach!  I still haven't been to my place.  Won't get there til sometime after 7 this evening.  But, I-70 was a solid wall of snow from Denver to Grand Junction.  Took us 3 extra hours to drive it, since we could only go between 25 and 45 MPH the whole way.  Not fun.  And even at that, we ended up spinning out, doing a 180 in the road!  Fortunately we were going really slow, so we didn't have any problems.  Just a bit of excitement.  And it was the best possible location.  Flat area, no cliff, no traffic... as perfect a spinout as you could have.  We didn't even leave the road!  We just basically spun around to face the other way.  Seems like I always have this trouble driving home from Mile High Blues.  Must be trying to tell me something.... like I should stay in Denver with the awesome dancing.

That's Travel in Winter!

My parents are coming for Thanksgiving.  Well, that's the plan, anyway.  As things stand, they're going no where.  There's a blizzard (literally, according to the weather report, it's officially a blizzard) that's got I-15 closed basically all along Idaho.  And, a couple hours ago, the blizzard hit here.  I'm looking out my window, and all I can see is white.  Even though it's dark, still... all I can see is white!  Yep.  It's Winter in Utah!  We'll see if things ease up tomorrow.  If not, they probably won't make it for Thanksgiving at all.  Well, that's what traveling in winter is like. I always complained in England that we didn't get enough snow.  So, welcome home, I guess!

A Day for the History Books

It snowed today. Actually, we had quite a lot of snow. Enough that the ground looked solidly white, not just a little flurry that never did anything. It was even still reasonably snowy after church. That's how much snow we got! Meant driving to the chapel was more interesting than normal. One of the other families in the ward followed me for maybe the last mile to the chapel, and when we arrived, they asked, 'Where are you from?' I laughed and said, 'Michigan, more or less. Why?' 'Well, we followed you from the traffic lights, and we were very impressed with your snow driving. We thought you might be snow trained.' I laughed again and said, 'Oh, yes. Definitely!'

But that, as impressive as it is, isn't the reason it's a day for the History Books. The BBC actually got the weather prediction right! They predicted lots of snow for Sunday way back on Friday! I'm in shock. Generally speaking, if the weathermen say 'sun', I bring an umbrella.

Another kind of funny side note. In Sunday School we were talking about the signs of the times, including an increase in disasters, weather out of season and severe weather. Someone in the class said, 'Yeah, just look at today's snow.' Ummm..... It's November. Late November. Snow accumulation of 2 inches does not count as a disaster. It isn't even severe weather, and a bit of snow in November certainly isn't out of season.... England is clearly not at all used to snow. Which is silly, considering they're roughly on the same latitude (London: 51.32 N) as Germany (Berlin: 52.30 N) and Russia (Moscow: 55.45 N)!