I’m writing this on Sunday, 2/16. There is 1 pic, from our Circle dinner last weekend.

Going clockwise from lower left: Bill Bauman, Mike Bertch, Danita, me, Rose Bertch, Tina Bauman, Teggan Bauman, Donna and Tony  Sochurek

We’re going to England! I’m not sure whether we will be visiting the United Kingdom, or England and Scotland. (Scotland is voting on an independence proposal.) But we’re going. We’ve been talking about visiting London for years. We finally realized there’s no reason not to go now. When we decided to go to Alaska, it took us months to figure out what we wanted to do. This trip happened quite easily. Danita and I both looked at some possibilities. Danita outlined the trip; I made the reservations. Here’s our itinerary. (“BA” is British Air.)

It’s too early to buy train tickets. (Schedules for June aren’t posted yet.) But it’s not too early to reserve rooms. I selected 3 possible rooms for each city. Then Danita reviewed them and gave her input. When I went back to make the actual reservations, some of our choices were no longer available. For one of the rooms, the web site warned there were only two rooms left. While I was entering our reservation, the screen flashed and said there was only one room left. I was amazed. But we have great rooms, all “near the action”. Other than London, we are staying in Guest Houses (that’s English for Bed & Breakfasts). I would say they are all reasonably priced, but we’re still suffering from the sticker shock of how expensive things are in the UK. A fancy tea in London can cost £40. Each. We won’t be going to that tea.

We are very excited about this trip. Our list of things to do and see is longer than we can possibly accomplish in the time we allotted. We plan to have a blast.

The next thing I will work on is communications. I want to see if I can get a British phone plan for June. This will let us make local calls at reasonable prices. We also have to get Onion cards (for mass transit in London), and tickets to performances, and in general spend a bunch more money. But we’ll wait until we pay for the plane tickets and hotel rooms before adding more to the charge card.

It was much more fun writing about England than it would have been writing about doing taxes. (The only thing left is to receive the refund deposit.) We’ve also had some wintery weather. We had 18″ of snow Wednesday night. We had another 2″ of ice Thursday night. We were supposed to get several more inches again Friday night, but that got delayed, then petered out into not much of anything. UMBC was closed Thursday and Friday. It wasn’t hard to spend a few days at home together. None of our utilities were interrupted. We had continuous access to hours of movies, music, TV, and books. I found a reference to a book I decided I wanted to read, and had a copy of it on my Kindle in less than 2 minutes. Most of that time was spent walking upstairs to my computer. I spent much of my time reading an old-fashioned paper book, “The name of war : King Philip’s War and the origins of American identity” by Jill Lapore. (Our library’s E-book collection is still limited. Many interesting books are available only in paper.) The reading is dry, but the author gets a lot out of very little documentation. She’s careful to lay out the boundaries of her knowledge. She’s very good at explaining our attitudes towards the Indians, how those attitudes shifted over two centuries, and how those attitudes interacted with how Indians were treated during our history up to the 1800s.

Our SOCA party Friday evening was cancelled. Snow continues to flit and drift through the forecast. We have a BSO concert this afternoon. Danita found a great deal at Bare Bones, so a dinner of ribs could be in our immediate future.

We’re approaching the time of year when I start counting down the days until spring. Baseball is starting up. Temperatures are starting to climb. It’s easy to get ahead of Mother Nature. But we often get one last snow as late as mid-March, which is why I say “Beware the Ides of March”.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.