With Mommy Day 3!

Thursday, July 5, 2012


Today is the third day Mom's been here in England and today we are going to Beverley!  She really wants to see the Beverley Minster, which is very beautiful.  After a restful (mostly) night's sleep, Mark & I got up obscenely early to see if he could work today.  He was so close to working this AM but he was sent home.  Sigh.  Well, at least he can spend the day with Mom & me, and I would have sorely missed him had he not been with us (I'm funny like that).
Once we returned home, we made breakfast and then we sat about for a while, eating, talking, digesting.  Finally Mom hopped into the shower, we all got dressed for the day and, after buying cat food (and taking mom on a not good roundabout), we headed to Beverley!  Mark took excellent video from Mom's phone of a couple of roundabouts as we made a stop at the pet store for more cat food.


Our first stop in Beverley was somewhere to park.  We originally parked at the Beverley Tesco but it only has a 3 hour parking limit and we didn't want to feel rushed so Mom & Mark went ahead and I returned for the car, found a pay & display parking lot and met up with them.  When I arrived they were sitting outside, obviously waiting for me.

Beverley Minster

You can, if you try, see them off to the left behind the rows of cars.  They didn't want to go in without me, isn't that nice?

Hi

See, I told you they were waiting for me.  Then we entered and it is just as beautiful and big today as it was when I visited it in October with the Gunton clan.  After paying the £3 fee to take pictures, Mom set about doing just that.  Yes, there is a fee of £3 to take pictures.  She got a badge and everything.

It didn't stick to her shirt too well but, she was officially permitted to take pictures... me, not so much.  She will be uploading the pictures we took at the Minster later today, once we have them off of all the camera devices.  And we have one more device to clear first.

And now, if you're anything like my sister, you wanna know why it's called a Minster.  This is a very good question.  A Minster was a building that was more than just a church but acted also as a town hall.  We're going to see the York Minster either this weekend or early next week.  We haven't decided yet.  We are all a bit tired so we're going to take a nap and then figure out what we plan on doing over the next few days.

Once we were finished at the Minster Mom bought a few postcards and those she wrote, had us sign, applied stamps and then posted.  All right there too!

With that done I was getting hungry so we had to figure out what we were going to do.  There's a place in town called Cactus Jack's and yes, it's a tex-mex place.  I was curious and interested so we walked over and it's only open for dinner on a thursday.  Are you kidding me?  How lame.  LAME!  Did I mention that that's lame?

We then decided that we'd save more money getting a roast chicken at Tesco.  And we did.  We had bread and cheese at home already so Mark ran in, bought a £4 roast chicken and we took it home, ate it with the bread & Leicester (pronounced less-ter) cheese and copious amounts of Diet Coke (and they're not even paying me for the ding!).

It's now 1500 and I am tired.  Mark & I were up at 4:30 this AM and I think it's time for a nap.  I love naps but I feel as if I should be doing something but I don't think that that's going to happen really.  It's been warm and annoyingly muggy all day as the sun's been out, there's been a lot of water in the atmosphere but none of it was falling.  I don't do well when I'm tired, hungry and irritated by the mugginess of the weather.

I had originally planned on making mead braised pork chops but I'm not so sure I'm going to be hungry enough later this evening to even want to think about it.

I suppose we shall see.

And keep your eyes peeled for the Day 3 pictures on Facebook 'ere long.

As for me, I'm snoozing!   

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Happy Independence Day!


The sun has sunk below the horizon and the day here in England is coming to a close.  I spent the first 4th of July outside of my home and it was different.  Mom is here so it was nice to spend the day with her and Mark.

We started the day with a nice breakfast, or rather, a nice brunch since it was past 10 when we finally ate.  And then we headed into town.  Mark had a meeting at 2 so Mom & I wondered about for a bit on our own. 

Hull Trinity Church

Pretty Windows!

We eventually made our way to the Trinity Church that was built about 700 years ago.  It's a bit old and really cool.  Of course I just happen to like really old churches.  This is where pretty much anyone who is anyone was baptized here.  Mark & I were originally thinking about attending this church and while it would be really cool, the Lord steered us in a different direction.

Baptismal

But my favorite part of these old churches is innards, such as the windows.  Trinity Church also has a beautiful baptismal made out of hull marble, which is crushed shell.  If you look closely (which this picture doesn't do) you can actually see tiny pieces of different shells.  Many, many famous people were baptized in this thing, including Wilberforce, who was the main man behind the abolition movement here in England.  GB did away with slavery long before we did.  There's even a movie about it called Amazing Grace.  I've not seen it because I've been told it's fairly sad but also uplifting.

Mark describing how he'd get to the pillars from the floor

After Mark's meeting he met up with us at the church and instantly started thinking about how he could move about the building a la Assasins Creed.  I'm telling him, no darling.  I think he's played that game too much.  :)  Much like all churches of this era, there was the nave (where we are in this picture) and several more different areas.  Take, for example, the picture directly above us.  One thing interesting about the church is that the nave had no pews originally and so the unwashed masses had to stand for the entire service.  However, during the 19th century they put in pews.

Pew Lxxvii

Each one had it's own unique number and each was decorated with hand carved hand rests.

Pew hand rest

Pew hand rest

a married couple

Another thing I love about these old churches is that they have tombs inside of them!  How cool is that?  Yes, we're just going to have a random tomb here, inside the church.  The Beverley Minster is filled with tombs like this.  It also happens to be the object of our journey on Thursday!  There are also gravestones on the floor and when I mean on the floor I actually mean, the gravestones are the floor, least the names of the dead are inscribed on the floor.  Some of them are so old that they are worn down by the passage of millions of feet.

tombstone inside the church.  

tombstone outside

And once we were done at the church (and no, this isn't the sum total of pictures, just a few) we meandered about a bit more and found the Hull Grammar School.  If all the who's who of Hull went to Trinity Church then they went to Hull Grammar School.  It's now the hands on history museum.

Why did Victorian children work?

What was it like to live on a Victoria street?

so yeah, it's really, really old.  See, there's Wilberforce again.  There was a huge section of what life was like for children during the Victorian era (not so great compared to modern times).  This section really makes a person glad to have things like running water.  One thing you don't get a sense of, unless you live in one of these buildings (which I currently am, unfortunately) is how poorly built these things are.  These buildings are hovels and each room has to have a fireplace (now boarded up).  Behind each house is an alley that leads to the outhouse.  These alleys allowed people to come in each morning and dispose of the waste. Urine would be used for tanning and poo was probably turned into fertalizer.  There's a tannery not far from here and when they're open for business you can smell it!


Once we were done with the museum we headed back into town center to find someone who could answer the question: why won't the O2 sim card work on mom's verizon iPhone4s.  Apparently it's not been properly unlocked so Mom needs to email verizon and have someone unlock it for her... or have Apple do it.  Either way it's frustrating.


And then it we went to the tourist information centre (or TIC as Mark kept calling it.  He kept saying tick and I had no idea what he was saying.  Then he told me he was saying TIC not tick.  I accused him of speaking British at me.)  where mom bought some postcards.  So check your mailboxes in a week or so and if you sent mom your addy then you should have a postcard coming your way.


After that it was time to go home and start some supper for the 4th.  We had some british beef (meh, it ain't exactly USDA choice), mashed potatoes and corn on the cob.  And for dessert I whipped up some whipped cream (they have it here but it tastes funny-no sugar nor vanilla added) and we had ice cream inferior cheesecake (I'm not sure what kind of cream cheese they used and if there was any sour cream added).


All in all, it was a good day.  We ended it trying to watch 1776 but it wouldn't let us so we watched Up instead.  After that it was bed time.


And thursday shall be an entirely new day and full of new adventures!

Mommy's Here!

For the last few months my mom has been been planning on visiting Mark & me here in England.  She arrived this morning and we picked her up from the airport in Manchester.  Her plane arrived 20 minutes early and we got stuck in traffic so we were late picking her up.  But we have her!

As soon as I saw her I shouted MOMMY!  Some people looked at me oddly but then I haven't seen my mother in 10 months so they can shove off.  I put a brand new, 02 sim card into her phone but her phone rejected it, wanting only her verizon sim card.  It was frustrating to say the least!

Eventually we gave it up and went home.  We had a 2 hour car drive home over the M62 (the highest motorway in England at 1221'!)  Our satnav doesn't always make it clear that stay to the left doesn't mean get into the left hand land and so we ended up leaving the motorway and we got lost a little until the sat nav could redirect us.

Eventually though we arrived in Hull.  We stopped at home, unloaded Mom's baggage and took a look at what she brought.  It was at this time she went to wash out her contacts and she cut her hand on her razor.  Mark put a bandaid on it, but she bled through that in record time then he patched her up.

One we were ready to head out,  we headed to St. Stephen's Shopping Centre (a mall) and we had a late lunch of hamburgers at the Handmade Burger co. and then we did some grocery shopping.  And because her phone was still rejecting the new sim we went to O2 to see what was up.  The woman said that the phone was unlocked but we needed to connect it to iTunes.

So we finally went back home, I plugged her phone into Bob (my powerbook), connected Blue (her iPhone) into iTunes and, severa hours later, it's still rejecting the new sim... sigh.

But now it's a quarter past 7 and we are eagerly awaiting bedtime.  Mom's been up since 4 PDT (noon GMT) yesterday and she's not slept since.

I think we're all going to sleep well tonight.