Sage attended a birthday party on Sunday at the local rugby club. Some of the boys from her school play there weekly. Like football, it is only the boys that play rugby, apparently. Sage was the lone girl to come to the party, though everyone in her year was invited.
She was great and had a [...]
One thing I’ve noticed since being in the U.K. is the incredible number of traffic cones. There are many spots were a veritable wall of orange cones indicate road works or other traffic warnings. I’ve never seen anywhere near this density of cones anywhere else in the world.
I’ve been meaning to photograph this [...]
After visiting Sacketts Hill, we decided to go to the beach to enjoy what is likely to have been the last of the summer weather. We headed to the beach and found a tea house right near the car park. It was lovely: someone’s home surrounded by flower gardens.
Unfortunately, the service was very slow and [...]
We had an excellent dinner on Saturday night with the extended Sackett clan in Ramsgate. It reminded me of family gatherings in Corvallis. Everyone was very friendly and we enjoyed getting to know some of our distant relatives a little better.
The following day, Chris Sackett and Steve and Debbie Barbee offered to show us the [...]
We left early last Saturday to join a walking tour of Canterbury with some Sacketts convened for the annual reunion organized by the Sackett Family Association. Many of Molly’s distant cousins had been meeting all week, exploring the area around where the Sackett family originated in the Isle of Thanet, Kent.
It was interesting to learn [...]
I always enjoy learning new vocabulary. According to wikipedia, exeat means “a period of absence from a centre of learning… [used] in Britain to describe weekend leave from a boarding school”.
The kids both had special activities at school on Friday to kick off the long weekend. Sage and her classmates sold cakes for [...]
Sage has been interested in cooking recently. She’s particularly excited about cookies and pancakes and other things that need to be mixed and stirred and generally turn out to be fairly sweet. Her enthusiasm fit nicely with the request to bring cakes into school for a charity coffee morning. She picked the recipe out from [...]
Yesterday, we celebrated Molly’s birthday, attending a performance by the English National Ballet of “Angelina’s Star Performance“. Afterward, we had a brilliant time whirling around on a Ferris wheel in the city center.
The aerial view of Derby was beautiful, too.
We spent last weekend camping at a festival near Ashbourne, just into the southern end of the Peak District. Although it has dried up significantly from the previous weeks flooding, it had been raining fairly regularly last week and the festival was inundated with mud. Someone commented that you can tell how good a festival [...]
It’s been raining quite a bite here recently. As the kids are fond of saying, it’s been chucking it down! The River Trent has overflowed its banks and the fields, as well the road we normally take to get to the school, are covered in water.
This reminds me of another interesting linguistic tidbit. Sage brought [...]
