Where Are They Now?

Catching up, yet once again...

Since our return from Italy, life has been fairly quiet. Most of the first week or two was partly consumed by my trying to get my various credit cards, debit cards, and other sundry cards cancelled and reissued. We did pop off to Guildford on the 3rd, and I'll put up some pictures of that shortly. Some of you may recall that Mich had already been to Guildford, however, this was where our camera decided to cease working, so there weren't any pictures the first time around.

Guildford was quite enjoyable. It's a fairly small little town, and really the most interesting thing there is Guildford Castle, which was probably built shortly after the Battle of Hastings (1066). It's been greatly modified since, and the only thing left is the walls, but it also has some magnificent gardens, where we took a good number of pictures. We wandered around the town a bit, stopped off at a TGI Friday's (!) for lunch, and had cotton candy (here it's called candy floss) from a vendor on the high street.

It's probably a good thing that we went that weekend, as we finally got our tax bill this past week. It's safe to say that the tax bill and our trip to Italy has left us grounded for a bit. I won't go into the gory details on taxes, but basically we pay taxes to the US, Alabama, and the UK, which makes for an unusually high tax rate. Nonetheless, life goes on.

The weather here has taken a turn for the better and the past week and a half or so have been unusually sunny and warm, running about 70 - 75 or so for the highs, which is really quite warm for this part of the world. According to the Wikipedia article, the UK gets an average of 1,339.7 hours of sunshine per year, and I figure that with the recent good weather, things are about to get ugly. Still, it has been thoroughly enjoyable. The weather is reminiscent of when I first arrived: for nearly two weeks it rained only a little, and I wondered why everyone fussed so much about the rain and bad weather. I've wised up since then. We even bought a disposable grill yesterday and grilled some burgers for the first time in over a year. It was awesome. For those of who pondering the disposable grill, it's basically a small aluminum pan with charcoal in it and a small grilling surface, useable once.

So, all quiet on the front. After I post the Guildford pictures, I'm going to try something new. A friend of ours has a blog where she posted 30 things for 30 days. I'm not sure if I have the stamina, but I figure I'll give it the old college try.