Emily is a little upset right now.

I have been sick recently. Last weekend, I had some weird stomach bug, so I took Saturday off, hoping to knock this thing out before our trip home. But I guess my day of rest, juice, and Star Wars didn't do the trick because now I think I've picked up a cold. Maybe it's just one giant bout of the flu. I don't know; I've never had it. And now there's the added frustration in that I would feel incredibly guilty for taking another sick day so soon. All I know is that if I'm sick on my vacation home AGAIN, I think I might die of sorrow...or be just so darn mad. Either way, I will not be able to fully enjoy the presence of my favorite people, which needless to say, cuts me to the core. So if you could please pray for my speedy recovery, I would appreciate the sanity it would bring.

A first anniversary adventure

Hello everyone, long time no blog! My apologies for not keeping everyone updated... we'll try and work on that in the future.

This past weekend was our first anniversary, and to celebrate, Emily and I both took holidays from work for Saturday, Sunday and Monday, and traveled up to Lincoln. We took a train Saturday morning, since the previous night we went with a bunch of people that Emily works with to see the new movie Watchmen. (My opinion of the movie: fantastically well done, from a cinematic/artistic point of view. As a movie, eh, not so good.)

Anyways, we arrived in Lincoln just before lunchtime on Saturday. We walked from the station to our B&B and dropped off our bags, before hiking up the hill to the historical center of Lincoln. We happened to pick a good weekend to visit Lincoln, as there was a little fair/carnival going on, with lots of really good food and crafts for sale. Also, all of the tourist attractions were free! So rather than spend money on silly things like museums or castles, we got to buy cappuccino fudge =).

We toured the Lincoln castle first, which was really nice. There were all sorts of medieval demonstrations going on: archery, weaving, cooking, and others. We mostly walked through the various exhibits and took pictures.

Lincoln Cathedral, from Lincoln Castle

After that, we explored the city a little bit, and found some Roman ruins, including this well from the 300s or so:

Emily's comment: "It looks like Jabba's pit monster."

We then picked up some snacks and stuff for dinner, and headed back to the B&B to recuperate and catch up on our TV watching. We thus discovered that the British are just plain better then Americans at making commercials. They are creative and interesting to watch. But I digress.

The next day we enjoyed a full English breakfast, also known as a traditional fry-up. Probably the least-healthy thing I've ever eaten. Two fried eggs, two sausages, two slices of bacon, a fried tomato, fried mushrooms, and baked beans. I was thankful for the orange juice I had with it, as I think my major arteries were planning a secession.

Following breakfast, we headed back upstairs to exchange anniversary gifts. We decided some time ago that it would be fun to stick with the traditional anniversary gifts. Now, according to the internet (the authoritative source for sociological information) the traditional first-anniversary gift theme is paper, and the 'modern tradition' (really, not making that up) is clocks.

Clocks sounded a little boring; at least, there was a lot less flexibility than with paper, so we're sticking to the classics. Emily gave me a really nice personalized desktop stationery set, some origami paper, and a samurai sword letter opener. The letter opener, unfortunately, is in Irving, but it looks pretty awesome. For Emily, she had been repeating to me, on a nearly weekly basis, that she would love to take up painting, so I got her set up with watercolors, brushes, canvas, and two portable sketch/paint pads.

We then headed out to the Cathedral to do some more sightseeing. If we had planned a little better, we would have gone to a service, as it was Sunday morning. Instead, we had to wait behind a partition halfway down the cathedral until the service ended. Here are some pictures:

From the entrance

Looking toward the entrance

The cathedral was great, a really beautiful building. It wasn't too crowded either, which was nice. We had plenty of time to look around at just about everything. One of the coolest things we saw was an exhibition of sculptures for the fifteen stages of the cross called The Forest Stations. Here's #8:


And a closer view:
I have lots of other pictures from inside the cathedral that I thought about posting, but I think I'll stick to one more. This is the choir director's music stand, which of course immediately made me think of Dumbledore:

Which came first?

After leaving the cathedral, it was drizzling a bit, so we walked over to the Museum of Lincolnshire Life, which was mostly indoors. It's a very nice museum, with a lot of stuff in it that's been collected over the years, most of it in very good condition. We stayed there until the rain moved off, and then headed over to the ruins of the Bishop's palace. Unfortunately, there seems to be a limit to the amount of interest you can take in ruins over a 24-hour period, and so we were in and out of the palace pretty quickly. We did find a very nice vineyard terrace with a great view over the city, but I forgot to take a picture of it. Sorry.

Something to keep in mind if you visit Lincoln: everything closes at 4:00 on Sundays. We found ourselves shut out of most of the museum/historical sites, and so we headed down to the center of town to find some way to pass the time until we were hungry for dinner. We thought about going to a Waterstone's and reading for awhile, but they closed just as we got there. We then saw a Starbucks in the distance and trekked over there, but could only enjoy thirty minutes of comfy chairs and hazelnut hot chocolate before being kicked out yet again.

So we decided we might as well track down the restaurant we had planned to go to for dinner, in the hopes that by the time we got there, our appetites would have returned. Now, I had done some research before we left, and I found a pub called the Green Dragon (from the Shire? anyone?) that serves a four-course dinner for two for £20, which sounded perfect for our tastes and budget. We managed to find it after briefly taking shelter from a 5-minute hailstorm, only to discover that on Sundays they only serve yorkshire puddings. Dang it.

We thus found ourselves with no plans for dinner, no appetite, and nothing to do. Emily remembered seeing a fried-chicken place from our walk between the train station and the B&B, so we wandered over that way, and ended up near the marina area. The waterside area is really quite large, and we noticed that way over on the other side there was a huge flock of swans. I thought it might be fun to pull out some leftover crackers we had and try to entice them over, even though they had to have been at least a hundred yards away. Apparently we have good taste in crackers, because we got them all to come over.

This is about half of the swans we fed

After we depleted our cracker resources, we decided to get some more food for us, so we picked up a bucket of chicken and headed back to the room. It may not have been a romantic dinner out for our first anniversary, but after living in the UK for nearly six months, it was actually a lot of fun to just eat fried chicken and watch movies.

Here's our room!


And the other side!

And that's about it for our weekend. We had another great breakfast Monday morning, and then headed back to Cambridge. I do have more pictures from the weekend, so I may try and post more of them later.

P.S. - Thanks for all the great cards and notes we received! Emily and I were really surprised at how many we got; we almost don't have enough room for them all on the mantle =)