Hi all!

First of all, welcome to the new site. Hope it works out for everyone.

We hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. And for all you Detroit Lions fans out there, there's always next year.

Our Thanksgiving was a wonderful day. We were joined by Sarah and her daughter Tabitha, and Irene and her sons Lawrence and Stefan. We're thankful to have both families as neighbors and friends. Ironically, Sarah is having her boiler replaced, and Irene's boiler is rebelling, so neither family had heat in their houses. Meanwhile our heating system has been diagnosed with faulty mechanical switches, and the electrician managed to force one into functioning but warned us not to let the boiler stop heating for any reason, lest it freeze shut and not come on again, so we are in a mini tropical zone until next week when the plumber can replace the switches and restore a more normal heating cycle. We had a fully traditional Thanksgiving meal, including turkey, stuffing, green bean casserole (the crispy onion thingies are onion salad crispies here) , and sweet potatoes. I even managed to find the last two pumpkins huddled together on an empty table in the Swansea Market, I slaughtered one and made three pumpkin pies. Yeah!

It was a little surreal, however, to get a mailbox full of e-mails from my local retailers in NY trying to entice me to shop early Friday morning for doorbuster deals. I sure do miss JoAnn's craft and sewing shop (and don't get me started about Kohl's!). There is a yarn shop/cafe in Mumbles (hee!), one of Swansea's neighborhoods, called Mrs. Mac's. She's got just about every kind of wool imaginable, her name is invoked with reverence at our meetings of the Swansea Stitch-n-Bitch. I went there a few weeks ago and spent a full half-hour just staring at it all before buying some beautiful blue stuff.

Friday was a teacher planning day at Hannah's school, so she had the day off. And Mother Nature chipped in to make it a snow day as well. We got about 2 inches of the gorgeous fluffy stuff, which, this being coastal Wales, began melting promptly at 9:30. But it was beautiful, and Hannah and the other kids had a great time doing first-snowfall things like building snowmen.

We're also thankful for our friends and family back home, and you're in our thoughts this season.

However. I am beginning to believe that you can’t outrun your luck. The first sign that things weren’t all going to go our way began a week ago, when we woke up in the morning to find we’d lost the heat and hot water. Tried all the usual fixes, including shutting and restarting all of the components, checking for pilot light, etc. Just as in the States, plumbers are difficult to get hold of, particularly when the weather is changing and everyone’s heating system is deciding whether or not to act up after having the summer off. We finally managed to get one in, and he reported that we need a new control box, now we are awaiting its arrival, hopefully by the end of this week. Nearly the same time, I discovered that water was somehow making its way into Hannah’s room (or failing to escape it), and the wallpaper on one wall was moist and beginning to mold. Our landlord is trying to line up someone to fix up Hannah’s room; we have moved her temporarily into the office until it is cleared up. Then, on our aforementioned trip to Cardiff, we managed to lose our debit card, the one piece of plastic we’ve managed to acquire in the UK. (It’s amazingly difficult to do much banking in the UK unless you’re a permanent resident. The only reason we even have a bank account at all is that Cliff still has the one he set up when he was a Fulbright student in London; otherwise we literally just could not have opened a new account.) Cliff has been battling an ear infection, and Hannah is trying to kick a nasty cough. And on a general things-can’t possibly-be-this complicated note, we had been having trouble playing rental dvds on the dvd player here, so we’d ordered an inexpensive one from Amazon, which had gotten great reviews in the “plays anything” category. Tried setting it up by unplugging the leads from the old dvd player and hooking them up to the new dvd player—and it doesn’t work properly.

So it is in this spirit of “my goodness, things have been cropping up lately,” Cliff and I put Hannah to bed and (having re-set up the old player) sat down to watch a movie-- “Shaun of the Dead,” a rather black comedy about a handful of British slackers who end up in a mess when London turns into a city of zombies. When the film was done, Cliff went into the kitchen and noticed the back door was open. This was a little annoying, as we have little heat as it is. But then he saw that the sliding glass doors were open as well… and we never ever use them, we were told that they’re broken and difficult to close. We have a walled patio in back, and the door to that, which was unlocked because we hadn’t been able to get what we thought was the key for it to work, had also been opened. We immediately grabbed household implements of self-defense, turned on every light in the house and checked every closet. Then we spent a fun-filled half-hour trying to get the glass doors shut, and called the police. Who came, and were very nice. The Crime Scene Unit was equally friendly, and it was actually kind of interesting to watch that whole procedure. Don’t think anything was taken—a wallet full of CDs was carried outside, but it looks like they just dropped it when they saw the CDs were childrens’ software. The lights in most of the house were out to save energy, and we think the burglar(s) broke in thinking no one was home, but then immediately left as soon as they heard the TV. Our digital camera and Shel’s computer were right there on the kitchen counters, but not taken, which was lucky. But the police told us that crooks often return later once they’ve checked a place out, so now we are, to say the least, a little unsettled. Well, no, I am a lot unsettled. Bah.

So, even more than usual, we would welcome e-mails, hellos and general words of encouragement.

On a happier note, Thanksgiving is nigh and we would like to wish everyone a safe, healthy holiday with their loved ones, as we hope to do here. (I think I may have even managed to find a substitute for those french-fried onion thingies that go in green bean casserole—yeah! What exactly are they used for the other 364 days a year?).

We last saw our heroes scrambling, figuratively speaking, up onto the beckoning shores of the Old World, having braved the hurdles thrown before them by an uncaring bureaucracy, the mysterious workings of international express delivery, and Mother Nature herself. Now, two months later, let’s see what’s going on…

Mostly, things are going pretty well. Cliff is quite settled in at the University, teaching and enjoying a life of relative leisure, as he doesn’t find himself grading an endless series of exams and papers. He is making progress on his research and editing projects, co-teaching a course on Revolutions in Military Affairs, and giving lectures for a variety of seminars and courses, in Swansea and elsewhere. He is also beginning to work on several proposals to revise and strengthen the curricula for Swansea’s interdisciplinary BA and proposed MA in War and Society. He loves being a 10-minute walk from work (through one park, through another park, past an abbey, et voilà!), and also having the opportunity to do lots of reading. Whole books, even, not just chapters or articles relevant to the next day’s teaching. Hannah is absolutely at home in Mrs. Roach’s class at Brynmill Primary School, and every dry afternoon is spent in Brynmill Park, just down the street. She is also enjoying Sunday School and “Springers” [sort of a play group] at the local Baptist church, and will probably start Rainbows [British version of Daisies or some such] this week. I am even experiencing a modest social life; Wednesday evenings I go to the Borders book store in Fforestfach for meetings of the Swansea Stitch-n- Bitch, where we knit, gab and eat cake. Our family has little entertainments and adventures; just last weekend we took the train to Cardiff and saw Circus Oz at the Millennium Centre theater; playdates and coffee shop visits and library visits round out our time. We even had a mini-reason to rejoice when the last two boxes of winter clothes we had shipped from home—in August—finally arrived on our doorstep in November. What’s a twelve-week wait, in the grand scheme of things.