In Woolton: It's rainy...No! Sunny!...No, rainy...No! Sunny!

Went for a run in the rain this morning. From the park, we can usually see Wales. Today, maybe whales. Har Har Har.

There were seaguls grounded by the weather, waiting it out in the fields. They don't fly in the rain?


Then! The rain stopped!..sort of...


and the sky cleared!...sort of..


How beautiful and hopeful and positive! Oh thank you beautiful sun!


At home in the conservatory typing, it really came out! Sparking on the rosemary and the laundry





and making it impossible to see the computer monitor. Damn you Sun! Oh. There it goes.





Come Back!

Oh! Quick! The Sun's Come Out! Write to Josephine!

It is cold and rainy this morning, but I'm typing in the conservatory with the radiator radiating and the wash steaming away. You hear about wives who, having traipsed across the planet after their husbands, and, with nothing to occupy them, take up illicit habits, like gin and baccarat and human rights activism. My illicit habit is turning on the heat and taking off my coat while I type. I've turned it off now, though, so it's OK.

Meanwhile, I've shut myself into the conservatory with the laundry and it's like the Amazon in here. Outside, the rain is clattering down out of the broken gutter, and, inside in the steam, the basil and the rosemary cuttings are sprouting and thriving and you can hear the spiders bursting out of their last, now-too-small exoskeletons.
Now the sun's come out, so I've rushed out to take a picture of the event.


Just as illicit as running the heater, I''m also drinking a D 'n' B soda. D 'n' B soda is a masterpiece of marketing. The bottle is black and glossy and bullet-shaped. The font and print are punches of gold. "D! B!" it snarls, with a bikini'd babe on each arm swaggering frosty out of the refrigerator.
However.
If you read the label, you notice that the "D" is written really big in swaggering solid gold block Sans Serif, but then you see, that beside the 'D' is 'Dandelion' written small and apologetically. And the "B", then they break it to you means "Burdock" for crying out-loud. Then they scrawl on the corner of the label in edgy, graffiti written by either a kidnapper or a three year old the D 'n' B slogan: taLL, daRk,&DriNkSoMe.
Actually, it's pretty good stuff. (I have to admit, I was a Dr. Pepper girl even after I discovered spicy elixir's main ingredient was, I'm pretty sure, something like pressed prune squeezing, and the tidy "10 2 and 4" logo and sophisticated art deco stream-lined clock on the glamorous, sleek glass bottle, took on an embarrassing new meaning. Even when everyone laughed and said, "Ew, that's prunes". I liked it and had an instant affinity of others who chose The Doctor. Although, I've got to say, I they were thin on the ground. I've recently discoved Brian liked Dr. Pepper. :) )

So D 'n' B is pretty good. If, when you hear "pretty good", you think of Vick's Formula 44, which is exactly what it tastes like. It cost 59p, so they're not giving it away. It's also, I read, the Official Soft Drink of the Great Britain Rugby League. An angry bunch. The label goes on to say that the black plastic bottle (very few soft drink bottles are actually black) contains "sparkling dandelion and burdock flavour" and the warning: "If spilt, this product may stain." Who can be surprised?
It's made in Glasgow.

What You Don't Know....

It's been raining for forty days. We arrived in the pretty mountain town of Llanberis, North Wales in a rain that came lashing in from every direction. Coming across the hotel parking lot was like being in a car wash. We couldn't see Snowdon, the mountain that we were going to climb, and it's pretty big. We could barely see the hotel.

The next day the sun came out.

At 3000 feet, Snowdon Mountain is the highest mountain in Wales, which you wouldn't think is saying much - that's less than a mile, the old, ground-down, gentle Blue Ridge are about 3000 feet tall. Plus, Snowdon's clambered over by 500,000 people every year: school groups, toddlers, people in flip-flops. But, as in most things, there are two ways to get to the top: the easy way: a lovely, lake-side stroll and then broad steps up the last 1000 feet.



And then there's the hard way, which means crawling along a ridge called Crib Goch, or Red Comb, made of thousands of rocks the size and shape of hooves and good for grabbing onto and hauling yourself through crevices and notches, but hard on the knees. Some people trot along the ridge in sneakers and stretch pants and make big sighing noises when they have to go around a pile of clinging mortals.





But we just went along until, as you do when you just go along, we got to the top. There's your boy waving from the top of Wales.

And then we walked down the lovely, lake-side, path down broad steps.
and ate McVitie's Plain Chocolate Digestives biscuit cookies and raisins. Although our most gruesome injury was a blackened toe nail,

the whole thing was a little nerve-wracking especially to guard-dog B, who managed to persevere while simultaneously imagining all of us shooting off into the cloud and rocks far below.



But then, there's Scotland....

At Last The House!

Hello! and welcome to our house, Number 2 Doe Park Courtyard. Our house is on the right with the blue door and not nearly as floral as that of our neighbor, Next Door Dave, who plants loads of annuals every spring. This year, it's ivy geraniums and lobelia. This photo was taken in June. I think that's a white rose blooming. We have a yellow rose and perennial fuschias and lavender in pots and rosemary. The lemon thyme adores this cool, wet weather. The rosemary and basil, not so much.




It's raining this morning and every morning since the end of May. Here is the little foyer and hall. The house has got a breezy French Country "Rose-Covered Auberge in the Loire Valley" feel to it with lots of pine flooring, casement windows, and wooden chairs with blue and white striped cushions. I base the entire French Country House thing on those blue and white striped cushions.


Here is the living room, called 'The Lounge' here, which sounds misleadingly swank especially since you can plug in the fireplace. But every night we are very cosy and watch tv and eat dinner on the huge, blue couch. Chicken thighs in all constructions and guises have kept us from starvation since we have a frying pan, but I didn't know how to use the oven for months. It seems that Gas Mark 8 is about 500 degrees. Which is pretty hot. Then we each have three (approximately) McVities Digestive Biscuits, which are wholesome wheat cookies coated wholesomly on one side with dark chocolate.

The house is furnished, but we brought rugs and towels and bedding, family pictures, weights, camping equipment, and books. What else does anyone need?


French doors separate all the rooms downstairs. That's a good idea. I am typing to you from The Conservatory, which also sounds Posh and full of palm trees, and is actually full of light and where we keep the basil and cilantro which were blue and shivering when I put it outside, but is unusable if it rains anything like hard because the upstairs gutter is broken, and the water comes smashing down like machine gunned ball bearings on the corrugated plastic Conservatory roof and you can't hear yourself typing much less people talking to you. Soomeone ends up yelling, "Geez! This is horrible! Let's go in the living room!" And the other person points frantically to her ears and yells, "What?! I can't hear you! Let's go in the living room!" and the other person yells, "What?! I can't hear you! Let's go in the living room!" And it just goes on like that until finally someone just gets up and makes big arm gestures and Navy Seal stabbing and pointing hand signals and mouths "C'mon...Let's...Go...Into...The...Livingroom." It's exhausting. Different kinds of rain sound different on the roof. A light sprinkle sounds like bushels of plastic fingernails.

Oh and spiders! Have we got spiders! This is a picture of a spider, which I realize you can't actually see, but really, I assure you, was impressively massive enough to compare to my lens cover. They're the size of grapes. When Brian goes out the kitchen door in the morning, he has learned to pause in case one is dislodged from the door jamb and is dropping collar-ward from the ceiling. Sometimes, we just leap through covering our heads and screaming, which is pretty funny to watch from outside.

This is our room. Do you recognize the quilt? It keeps us cosy. Nightime temperatures are around 50 and it usually rains. A lot like the daytime, actually. It's nice to sleep with the windows open. Sometimes the neighbor's cat, Evie, leaps up on the garden wall, but then gets confused and comes in our bathroom window rather than her own, which is a surprise for everyone. Last night we heard the fox who lives nearby.

The other night, he and our neighbor's other cat, Silver, who is a big, beat-up tomcat with a limp, were on our front step yowling and barking at each other. We didn't know what it was. Foxes make such weird noises. Very wild animal-y. It's quite nice. If we hear them at night, we jump up and go look down at them running across the back garden in the dark.


Did you see a chair at the foot of the bed in the last picture? On the chair, there is a bowl covered with a yellow checked dish towel (A gift from my mother-in-law). I was making bread (Gas Mark 7) and needed a warm place for the dough to proof. The only other warm place in the house is the dining room where the refrigerator is, but I was drying laundry in front of that heater. In many ways, this house, with its coffin-sized shower and chilly rooms, its spiders and foxes, is like camping - which is quite nice, really.