BBC 6

Radio! Radio was a great invention. I'm only just starting to appreciate how wonderful it really is - especially here. BBC does several radio stations with no commercials, which is akin to heaven in my opinion. We have the radio on basically all the time. We are awoken by it in the morning (very loudly, I might add - my first morning here it scared me senseless, I almost fell out of the bed), we leave it on whenever we happen to be around it (which is most of the time) and we make a special effort to be next to it when a particularly sounding special is going to be on.
We like channel 6, which "brings together the cutting edge music of today and the iconic and groundbreaking music of the past 40 years" according their website. I guess that's as good a description as any. One of the DJs says that he tries to play music people like, and if you don't like what's on just wait for the next song. The sheer variety they play is mind-boggling (although there are a handful they play ad nauseam, like any radio station worth it's salt), and the specials they do are entertaining and wacky. One Sunday they did a show about casette tapes, and on Christmas night they did a dinner-themed show, which was thorough to the point of being organized by courses. One song was all about onions. I have no idea where they get this stuff, but it's pretty amazing. 
Oh, and a little side note for everyone - when I say "we", I am referring to myself and my beau, who I am currently living with. I haven't done much with the codenames lately, but here's another one - he will be dubbed Bo.

English gardens

Have you ever seen the movie Greenfingers? It's a pretty good one, especially if you like Clive Owen and/or Helen Mirren. It's set in England and features a lot of gardening. I have rapidly come to the conclusion that this is representational of how the English feel about gardening. If you haven't seen the movie, I'll fill you in a little: they love it.

There are garden stores everywhere. Massive ones, tiny ones, even ones with attached stonecutters for fountains and pond installers with huge koi fish swimming around and big heavy machinery you can rent. Why do I know this? Well, when the weather is nice, a garden store is a great place to stroll around. Particularly if you're holding hands and being all lovey-dovey. Oh, and did I mention they all have cafes attached? All of them. Every single one. And some even have drip coffee! The last one, which had the drip coffee, also had massive portions of baked goods, including a particularly tempting bread pudding the size of a brick.

I have also observed an abundance of greenhouses in backyards. They're lovely little things, about the size of the self-assebled garden sheds you see sometimes in the parking lot of Home Depot. We have one here, although it's been abandoned for quite a few years now. I really like them, and there are so many that it seems they've just popped up out of the ground. I suppose they're particularly useful given the combination of local climate and inclination for growing things, but I think they're just beautiful as well, especially when glimpsed behind hedges and across fields while driving along the little windy roads.

The sky is falling! Oh wait, that was just a tree.

The other day it got really windy and nasty out. Kind of like a blizzard, but with rain instead of snow. It was one of those days that makes you glad to be warm and cozy inside and thankful to have a warm cozy inside to be in.

The next morning, we got a phone call. Turns out a tree in the back yard was damaged by the wind. A massive branch snapped mostly off a big cedar pine and hit the branch of another tree on the way down, breaking it too, and ending up in a big tangled heap over the fence and in a farmer's field. Thankfully it didn't hit a house or person or anything particularly damageable, but it seems like the neighbor (who may or may not actually have anything to do with this field besides also living beside it) took it personally and was very insistent it be taken care of immediately. So today I learned when not to ask about neighborly tiffs, and that sawing through a tree trunk is a lot more difficult to actually do than to watch being done while standing around trying to look helpful. Shocking, I know.

I also made friends with a dog who was just loving the abundance of branches being thrown around. He picked up the end of a particularly long and muddy one and tried to convince me to play with him by winding slowly around my legs like a cat. This had the side effect of smearing my jeans very thoroughly with mud. Had it been butter, I would be convinced the dog was preparing to eat me.

Once all the branches were sawed through and heaped into a massive pile (that would have made a highly dangerous but incredibly impressive bonfire), I observed the muddy, churned up section of the field. Impossibly, beautifully, it still had little spears of bright, beautiful green poking up from the mucky sludge. I find it extraordinary that such a delicate little bit of life is able to survive a storm that blows down half a tree taller than a house, a storm that would possibly have killed me if I had stood out in it all night and all day.

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Weather!

Well guys, I've been in England for a week and a half, and let me tell you - the weather is really something. I had been living in beautiful, basically unchanging sunny weather for over two years, pining for changing seasons and snow. I didn't realize those years were making me soft and vulnerable to the cold and accustomed to t-shirts and ballet flats. Now I'm finally in the kind of wet/cold/windy/frosty/snowy/drippy/slippy/breath-catching weather I missed and I'm glad I saved all those woolly socks from my skiing days.

The key to enjoying bad weather (as I am prone to do) is to be prepared for it and to dress appropriately. It's a lot easier to be happy if you're cozy in a fuzzy sweater under a down jacket with a soft scarf all tucked in and up around your chin and a thick hat protecting your ears and your feet encased in wool and waterproof (key) boots. Oh, and it also helps if your mittens are decorated like little bow-tied penguins. All these things combine to make a walk about the village a very pleasant experience, the cold making your nose run and the breath stream away from your mouth like hurried smoke.

The fact that I also have to wear the sweater, scarf, hat and gloves indoors is something I blame on LA and the Pacific Ocean.

I do find it endlessly funny that although constant cloud-cover and rain present zero transportational difficulties (except in the case of severe flooding, which, unfortunately is a big problem farther north right now), it only takes a tiny bit of snow to shut down airports for a morning.