Telling the story of the ups and downs, the adventurous and mundane days of one British family's self-imposed exile in the Capital Region of New York State.
As I mentioned, the only ice left in the cove is on the shoreline. Still, a sunrise can add a little glamour to almost anything:
...or make it look completely other-wordly.
Speaking of which, in between running and working, I've spent the last week and a half reading Wool by Hugh Howey and playing Halo 4. My goodness they were both good (in very different ways). I know Halo 4 is old news but it is beautiful, engaging and challenging and Wool was the first book in a while that's kept me awake at night - first unable to stop reading and then unable to get it out of my mind.
I've run when it's 1°F, 0°F and even, perhaps, a few degrees colder, but this morning, even though I left it until 7am to get out of bed, when faced with this:
(that's -24°C) I decided that an indoor day might be in order.
So I spent the day watching TV, internet videos, reading (I'm about halfway through the excellent Wool by Hugh Howey) with a bit of cooking and clearing up. I've also been playing Halo 4 - yes I'm this guy:
but with nearly up-to-date hardware and a more manageable 1 year delay.
Exile #3 was not feeling well today - which means we didn't get out much, but also we didn't see much of her - especially at meal times. At dinner time however, we did have five at the table, thanks to a morning-creation of E5N1's and mine.
He started out with feet, and then gained wheels. As for what he likes to eat...
Sometimes, when I upload the pictures from a camera, I find some that I neither took nor knew about. This was the case on the night of Halloween, when - along with the kids and candy photos, I found these:
If you want an explanation, you'll need to ask Exile #4 (at least I know it was her!) - because I've got nothing!
Here's some of what he did and saw - I'm guessing it doesn't need much explanation - which is just as well because it's late and I'm completely tired out!
There's not all that much to report from today - a 12 mile run (me), two birthday parties (E5N1), a girl scout cake walk (Exile #3 with Exile #2).
The reason it was such a quiet day(!) was that I was home making pulled pork. This is an all day affair - it started at around 9 am with heating the charcoal and the meat was just ready in time for dinner a little after 6 pm.
It was a new recipe - from my Weber's Smoke book and worked rather well. I much prefer doing the post-smoking finish of the meat wrapped in foil in the grill than taking it out and bringing it in to finish in the oven as one of the other recipes I used suggests. I also like having grill temperature and meat temperature targets to work to - I'm a data-driven kind of guy I suppose.
On another topic, quite unrelated to today's activities - in fact related to yesterday's - can anyone guess what this is:
I have punctuation smiles to award to amusing answers and some more photos to reward a correct one!
It's been a bit of a rainy day, but we managed to all get out of the house twice. First time was to do some weeding. The kids were set to work removing the wild garlic from the bottom of the back yard - they (mostly the girls) filled a bin and a half to add to Exile #2's earlier haul.
Meanwhile, Exile #2 and I found ourselves attacking some Virginia creeper. I quite like this plant - it climbs and forms impressive Tarzan-friendly vines in the trees without apparently bothering them. It has fairly plain foliage but it turns bright red in the autumn - often at a different time than the trees it is climbing in. Today, however, we discovered a vast network of it creeping - rather than climbing - for the most part through or just under the grass in the lawn forming a circle at least 20 ft in diameter around its main vine. Pulling it up proved rather satisfying and a little addictive once we started - you can see our harvest in the black bin just behind the ones the kids filled above.
Our second trip was a walk to the library where I picked up the two sequels to The Hunger Games which I am currently thoroughly enjoying after a recommendation from Exile #2 and Exile #3 who have both read the whole series.
It's been an uneven start to the year running-wise for me.
January was fine in context, I ran 43 miles (averaging about 10 miles per week). Not what I was aiming for, but winter is difficult and I spent some time traveling.
During February, Exile #2 and I did a musical project that kept me up late at night and really affected my running - I only managed 24 miles including a two week gap.
March was another traveling month, but I started to get back on the right path, hitting 49 miles.
April has been better again - 70 miles - even with another international business trip.
And now... I'm ramping-up the miles again ready to start the easiest of the very intense training programs in here:
Last week was a 25 mile week, the plan is to ramp up to 30 or 35 miles before the 18 week training program starts in June. All being well I will be in good shape to run the Mohawk Hudson Marathon again this year in October.
Exile #4 won a competition to design a bookmark on the theme of "Dive into Reading" for the local library. The reward is that her bookmark will be printed and given out at some events later in the year. I don't think she signed over exclusive rights, so I should be OK to reproduce it!
Meanwhile, I am airport-bound again. My Korean project is generating a third international business trip for me for this year. I'll see you on the other side!
Whether the school book fair and 'No TV week' coincided by accident or design I'm not sure, but we are enjoying enduring both at the moment.
The normal book fair rule is that we will buy one book of their choice (with our veto) and if they want anything else, they can use their pocket money. This year E5N1 stretched the definition of 'book' to the limit by picking out this:
Well, it is a book and some LEGO - and let's face it I wholeheartedly approve.
Until today, he has refused to attempt to build any of the "Crazy Action Contraptions" from the book, preferring, along with Exile #4 to make various weird and wonderful creations from their imaginations. I wholeheartedly approve of that too. However, I was happy this evening when, in our no-TV, no-Xbox evening, he finally agreed to make one of them.
I received this book in the mail yesterday. I haven't read it yet so this is not a review, but I wanted to mention that it's out and I have reason to believe that it is wonderful.
I first came across Mike Stavlund having met a friend of his and made contact with her on facebook. She alerted me to his poetry and I think poets are awesome so I was fascinated to see that he was giving a talk at the Wild Goose festival last summer and made sure I caught it. It was unexpected and wonderful. This is what I wrote here just afterwards in my daily recap:
My main session for the afternoon was Mike Stavlund talking about Integrating Our Losses. He is about to publish a book which he basically wrote five years ago - one chapter a week following the death of his baby son. Echoing words from one of my friends recently, he said that we have to stop trying to assign a hierarchy of loss - "Our heart doesn't know the difference it just experiences loss." He read sections of his book which were very moving, chaired the discussion of grief and loss in a really lovely way and made me cry reading the lyrics of a song by The Cobalt Season which was based on one of his blog posts during that time (lyrics, audio). It was a beautiful and profound time.
So the long-awaited book is here. I'll read it as soon as I can and maybe write about it again, but it's on my mind now, and so I get to write about it now if I want to!
Here's a piece of work that came home from school today.
E5N1 was asked, "If you could only take one thing with you [on your journey to America on the Mayflower], what would it be?"
His choice? "My joke book." Essentials only!
In the picture he is telling this joke: How to monsters like their eggs? The answer is in the comments. You can thank me there.
The other person in the picture is laughing heartily. Either that or he's just worked out how to throw the book or possibly the book's owner overboard to stop the seemingly-endless barrage of terrible jokes.
E5N1 chose to buy a book of "Goofy Jokes" from the school book fair yesterday.
Thanks to his recently-developed reading skills he can now regale us with these at all possible opportunities. Some are old classics, some are pretty terrible but there are some that genuinely made us laugh.
What's the difference between a teacher and a train? One says, "Spit out your gum!", the other says, "Choo choo!".
And then there are some that were made funny by his encountering of an unfamiliar word.
What is a blacksmith's favorite style of music? Heeeveee Meeetal!
A few months ago, information about a film adaptation of Cloud Atlas started showing up on my facebook feed. I guess I'd listed it as a book I liked and that at some point turned into a 'like' of a 'page' about the book...etc.
Anyway. I liked the look of the ideas in the film and decided I needed to re-read the novel. I couldn't find it. The library was back-ordered to the nth degree, so I decided I had to buy another copy. This is it - it has a plug for the movie (but thankfully the original cover art). I thoroughly enjoyed it the second time around. It suffered from my "I want to know what happens" first-pass reading style - it's a book that needs to be loved page by page, not rushed through to get to the resolution. It's the first time I ever bought a novel twice (I often have to read them twice - thanks to that reading style I mentioned). I'm not sorry I did.
Today, Exile #2 and I went to see the film. I'd actually already seen it - on Monday when our plans to go together were disrupted by the school-closing, but I really wanted to share it with her and have someone to discuss it with.
I loved the film. It takes some liberties with the stories - above and beyond the necessary removal of subplots and secondary characters - but they don't change the feel of the six worlds (three historic, one contemporary and two futuristic) that Mitchell created in the book. It's a refreshingly un-Hollywood-ish adaptation despite the blockbuster cast. The conceit of using the same actors in multiple roles across the story nearly as often distracts from the action as it adds to it but, just like the hints at self-awareness in the book, this doesn't prevent the emotional impact being felt as each story comes to its climax.
And yes it's the first time I've seen a film in the cinema twice since - wow I have no idea - maybe ever!
This evening, with the weather being kind, we once again took to the streets armed with flashlights, cute costumes and bags to carry candy. Well in my case only one of the three - I was just an enabler.
The kids, dressed once again as Harry Potter, Hermione Granger and Ginny Weasley, braved some fairly scary sights:
It was the school Halloween party this evening. An event we've missed the last couple of years. Here are the three of them ready to go as their favourite Harry Potter characters.
The party comprises a bake-sale, a disco, some craft activities and the main-event an impressive haunted house (well, more haunted hallway - but it's unrecognisable even to those of us who have often walked along it.)
As a 5th Grader, Exile #3 did a shift inside the 'house' scaring the younger kids. These are Exile #4's photos inside:
Exile #2 did a long shift supervising a craft table and I trailed around after E5N1 most of the evening. Not our best ever night out perhaps, but the kids all seemed to have a lot of fun.
The other day, Exile #3 let us know that her (huge) math book needed to be covered. There are products specially designed for the purpose and traditional solutions such as brown paper shopping bags. We didn't have either but then I remembered what I used to cover my textbooks with and that we had a roll in the basement.
Wallpaper. And not just any wallpaper. This wallpaper:
It's what we recently removed from the kitchen walls. Although it looked less nice in its well worn state.
When I was a student in Oxford I became aware of a band from Bristol called The Blue Aeroplanes. Some of my friends saw them play live at a music venue I was later to play with my band a couple of times, but it was before I started going to such gigs with them. Later we would frequent another venue to see an unknown local band called Radiohead, but that is another story.
The Blue Aeroplanes, at the time were a large collective - sometimes as many as four guitarists, a keyboard player, drummer and a dancer (credited even on the recordings) collected around a beat-poet called Gerard Langley. When asked why he formed a band rather than recite his poetry he is reported to have said, "Have you ever been to a poetry recital?"
Anyway, it was around the time that I narrowly missed seeing them in Oxford that, at the height of their popularity, they released an album, "Swagger" and on it, one of my favourite tracks was "The Applicant":
It was some time later that I discovered, that these words were not Gerard's own work, but a poem by Sylvia Plath (here she is reciting it herself if you're interested). A few years on, while sharing this music, I found out more about Ms Plath thanks to an English Literature student I was dating (that's Exile #2 to you). I heard about her marriage to Ted Hughes, suicide and the fall-out where many blamed him for her death.
I had heard of him, but I had no idea that I had any real experience of Ted Hughes' work.
A couple of weeks ago, out of the blue, I remembered some stories I had liked as a child - I thought of them at the dinner table and wondered if it might be something our kids would like. Much to my surprise, it turns out that this book "How the Whale Became and Other Stories" is by no other than Ted Hughes.
Exile #2 found it at the library in this, relatively recently illustrated edition and tonight, while Exile #2 is out, I read the first few stories to the three who listened with rapt attention, always asking for another...
