109

Well, y'all, it has been hot here in Texas. (Not that this is a shocking statement, since anyone who reads this blog either lives here or generally watches the news.) We're in a severe drought, and the dryness and heat are perpetuating one another, which means it is just getting hotter and hotter.

My car thermometer on Sunday:

A ridiculous happenstance: the rubber on the handle that you grip when you open the back of our minivan has been getting softer and softer in the heat this summer. The other day, I walked out to the car and saw this:

It had dripped right off.

It's August--the hottest month, anyway--and it has come on full force. We set a record last Saturday: the high was 109F. The last time it was that hot was during the first week of classes at Rice in 2000. Nathan's roommate had skipped breakfast, given blood that morning, and walked clear across campus to our college for lunch, then fainted in the lunch line and knocked his head on a table on the way down. For as long as I've known him, he has always been in good shape, but even he couldn't hold up to being out in that heat after skipping breakfast and giving blood.

Every place in Texas is hot, but I think good old Wichita Falls (near the Oklahoma border) set a major record with the number of triple-digit days they had in a row--I don't know how many it's been now, but I do know that as of mid-August, it was at least 80. I watched a little clip of their local forecast, and the meteorologist said that when all is said and done, their average daily temperature for the entire summer will probably be around 105.5F. Excuse me?! That is nuts! That's the worst account of heat I've heard, but other Texas cities have had it bad, too: Dallas had at least 40 consecutive triple-digit days, and Houston has beaten its previous record with 24. Given that 30 of the 31 days this month alone were 100+, Houston has also easily set (and continues to add to) a record total number of triple-digit days. This is the worst one-year drought on record for Houston. My garden didn't really stand a chance.

You know what's funny, though? For a girl who does not like the heat, I've been doing okay. In fact, I was out running errands the other day when it was 109, and I didn't know it was that hot. Sure, walking out of Target feels like walking into an oven, but it is actually not as oppressive as most summers in Houston. I was about to start thinking that perhaps some elemental change had happened to me (I've always abhorred August in Houston) when I realized that the reason it feels a little more bearable is because it's not humid.

And there you have it. The Upside.

Jane Lately

Oh my. Dearest Jane. She is a handful these days. We are experiencing a burst of curiosity and exploration from this girl, and it is leading her into some interesting territory. And by "interesting," I really mean "dangerous," "annoying," and "messy."

For example, before 9am yesterday, the girl had found the drawer where I keep the crayons and colored on one of the dining room chairs, dragged an open bag of flour halfway across the house, and climbed one level up on the pantry shelves and was hanging precariously until I rescued her. And she was delighted with each transgression. This morning, she dumped out a bag of pasta onto the pantry floor (the pantry, by the way, is her favorite room), pulled out the stickers and made extensive use of them, pulled all the spoons out of the silverware drawer and dumped them all on the floor, and did some beautiful artwork on her legs with a marker that Nathan and I thought was out of reach--and almost all of that was accomplished while I was in the shower.

I would just like to take a moment to point out that my active little boy never did these things. Only my sweet little girl.

She is still a girly girl, though. She loves dresses, shoes, purses, and jewelry. She still loves to give kisses, and her teddy bear is always by her side in bed and just after she wakes up.

Here are two pictures of the Vaseline Incident, which occurred about a week ago. She rubbed half a jar of Vaseline into her hair.

As I discovered (and should have known beforehand), a bath does not get Vaseline out of hair, because Vaseline is not water soluble. It took a couple of days for it to work itself out.

Janey loves stickers.

A trip to the snow cone stand.

Jane's new camera smile.

Another exhibition of the camera smile.

Did you see my bow? I just now have enough hair for one!

We love that Jane Elisabeth, but she sure is a handful these days!

There's a Reason for It

Home buying process = fewer blog posts.

We'll be back soon!

Noah Lately

Some things Noah has said over the last couple of days:

• "Look! A water mountain!" (fountain)
• "Noah, did you get a haircut?" "No, not this year."
• To me: "You a Momster!"
• To no one in particular: "Hey! Get out of my mind!"

A picture he took of himself (there were many, including of the inside of his mouth):

He is still hilarious and highly energetic. He is entirely potty trained, but he still tries to get some of the old rewards out of it. At the moment, he is trying to get me to take him to go get a donut. He is the slowest eater in the family and is consistently left at the table with two thirds of his dinner left after the rest of us have gotten up. A lot of it has to do with the fact that he is easily distracted during meal times, but the truth is that he has always been a very slow eater. He loves Curious George and Phineas & Ferb. And he loves movies, which he has started narrating all the way through as he watches them--I think it's that toddler/preschooler fondness for reiterating familiar stories. Lately, he has discovered an intense fascination with Play Doh, which is wonderful. I like that we have finally found something that captures his attention for more than ten minutes at a time.

And he is ever a ham!
Here he is standing like a flamingo, making a . . . flamingo face?

Silliness!We sure do love that Noah Thomas!

A Word from the Anglophile

Well, vacations have monopolized the blog for long enough, and it's time to get back to real life. But before I do, I wanted to write a bit to wrap up our trip to Cambridge.

As I mentioned before we left, this particular trip was a long time in coming. In addition to our six-year vacation hiatus, we had not been to the UK in nine years and had always agreed that we love it there and would like to go back "soon." Well, "soon" took nearly a decade to take place, but it was worth it. We love so much about England, and Cambridge in particular, and we feel a bit connected to the UK, for some reason.

One interesting thing about us is that Nathan and I are different enough, by and large, to like and prefer and feel affection for different types of places. I loved the New England landscape, but Nathan didn't enjoy or appreciate it as much as I did. Alternatively, when we were in the Texas Hill Country, Nathan just soaked up the rugged beauty and loved every bit of scrubby brush and sand and rock, but I was not nearly as enthralled by it. However, we both feel invigorated by the English countryside. To both of us, it's beautiful and refreshing, and we love spending time in it. In fact, it'd probably be true to say that the only places we could live with mutual satisfaction are the mountains and England.

The highs in Cambridge were about 70F every day we were there. Now, I know that the people who live there year round are probably ready for it to feel more like summer, thank you very much. But as for me, it was sweet relief. In fact, when we returned to Houston, one of the first things I thought--with a great big dose of dismay--was, "I am just not built for this heat!" The hundred-degree temps really do drain me from time to time, so being in a place where I occasionally needed a jacket was wonderful. In fact, on our first day in England, as the train door slid open on our trip across London from the airport towards King's Cross Station, a breeze of cool, gray, rainy air blew inside the train, and I looked at Nathan and said, "Oh, it feels so good!"

We both realized right away that one of the things we liked a lot about Cambridge is that it's a walking city. I realized how much I missed that about Cambridge, Massachusetts. When you live in a city like Houston--which is so very spread out that a car is absolutely necessary, and which is so hot that it would be really, really unpleasant to have to walk everywhere year round, anyway--it feels wonderful to stretch your legs a bit and make walking a part of your day again. We probably walked upwards of four or five miles every day, and I loved it. It also made our daily snacks of scones, clotted cream, and loads of jam a little more justifiable!

At the end of our trip, along the train ride to the airport to come home, I watched the patches of purple flowers near the tracks blur into an impressionist painting and thought about the fact that I would have been happy to stay a while longer. Days after we got home, Nathan said he wished we were still in Cambridge. Now, granted, some of this has to do with the contrast between relaxed vacation mode and full throttle work and parenting mode. But I think we also have a connection to the UK somehow; that we feel a little like we belong there, as if we fit, just a little bit. As Nathan put it, it's just familiar enough to be comfortable and just foreign enough to be an adventure. Perhaps, if the opportunity ever arises, we'll move there for a couple of years; I know I haven't seen enough of the British Isles yet to be satisfied!

The Day We Saw the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge

One of the iconic Cambridge activities is punting: boating in a flat-bottomed boat called a punt. Punts are propelled by taking a long pole and pushing along the bottom of the shallow river.

In Cambridge, you can either punt one way along the river and go down towards Grantchester, or you can punt the other direction, along The Backs, where you pass many of the colleges that back up to the river. Since we had walked to Grantchester several times already, we decided to punt along The Backs. It was very lovely and relaxing, and we enjoyed ourselves a lot, although Nathan wished he would have had time to punt down to Grantchester, too (given the chance, he'll always choose the option with the most nature). Next time, we'd like to do what we saw some other people doing--punt down to Grantchester with some strawberries and champagne, bread and cheese, or even a whole picnic.

Now, all throughout the city center are punt touts, young people who stand on every street corner and ask every tourist who passes if they'd like to go punting. (They drive Emily crazy on her walk to work the summer!) The term "punt tout" comes from the activity of touting how great they are at being a punt chauffeur. When I was in Cambridge before, I went on a chauffeured punt tour with a group, and it was actually great. I loved how they gave you lots of interesting info about all the colleges we were passing. But half the fun of punting is trying it out yourself (or watching your husband try it), and since our group knew most of the nifty fun facts already, we opted to punt ourselves down the river and back.

Me, waiting for the rest of the family to catch up.

Nathan found a nice perch near the river.

And off we go!
Papa B. started off punting our boat, and Nathan switched off with him later. Matthew punted the other boat, with Emily, Aunt Traci, and Barrett.

That's the Mathematical Bridge of Queens' College in the background. There is a story that Sir Isaac Newton designed the bridge, which was originally built with no nails. Then, a bunch of students took it apart one night to try to figure out how he did it, and they couldn't reconstruct it, so ever since then, it's had nails. But that story is completely invented. Ha! It'd be a great yarn, if it were true!

Well, hello there, Emily.

The guys generally looked quite serious when they were punting. Evidently, as simple as it looks, it takes some concentration to ensure that you don't dump your easygoing cargo into the river or, more likely, crash into another punt.

Check out that serious face!

Actually, we did see several crashes. Of course, you're moving so slowly that nothing bad really happens except that you might have to do some deft maneuvering to get around the punt you just bumped into. Thankfully, we didn't crash into anyone, but we did have a couple of close calls. There was a major traffic jam when we were trying to go under a bridge to the main part of the river from the area where you get into your punt. Thankfully, we weren't in it, but we did witness it and had to get around it. Nathan's mom said it was like watching a car accident in really, really slow motion.

Nathan turned out to be a pretty excellent punter, considering it was his first try.

Me and Deborah.

King's College from The Backs.

There were nice views everywhere you looked--beautiful old buildings, bridges, trees, water, and my husband isn't bad, either. ;)

The bridge at Clare College; the one with the spheres.

There's the one with the missing wedge!

Matthew and company.

Deb cultivated a friendship with some ducks and geese--she had an easy hand with the bread.

The Wren Library at Trinity College.
The last time I was there, I saw a Shakespeare folio, the only known sample of John Milton's handwriting, and a lock of Sir Isaac Newton's hair.

Navigating the bend in the river, around to St. John's College.

The Bridge of Sighs at St. John's.



"The Wedding Cake" at St. John's. It's rumored that Hitler wanted Cambridge and would have considered it a prize to set up a Nazi stronghold in that building, which has an eagle on top.

Wonder where that door goes.

Cool pic.

Very cool vine.

Beautiful in the summer; can you imagine how pretty it'd be in the autumn?

The original site of the bridge on the River Cam ("Cam-bridge").

We saw the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge while we were punting. ;)

Deb and Nathan.

A view of the Bridge of Sighs again on the return trip.

I like this picture of Matthew punting past King's.



Just at the very, very end, we had a little accident.

Nathan's pole stuck in the mud and he lost it!

Here we are, paddling back towards the other punt, which picked up our pole for us.

Emily to the rescue!

Punting our way back to the dock.

We had a great time!