knit•er•a•cy |'nitərəsē, 'nitrə-|

G had a doctor appointment this morning, so I went into work late. It is spring, an early spring, and I'm sure we'll get wet and miserable again in March and even April, but what a glorious day today is. People looked happy to be alive. It's times like these that I thank serpenta for telling me that I might really enjoy the music of Richard Shindell.

( Photos below. )

(For those of you on my regular friends list, this is a public post, which is why some information you already know will be repeated or consolidated. I'm going to try to do something like this every week.)

Ninth October, 2005, London

From the window beside my desk, I can still see mostly leaves. The fact is autumn hasn't arrived yet, though we are expecting it any day now. We've had chilly weather, we've had a little bit of rain, but the cherry trees at the edge of the park haven't lost their leave yet. What that means is there's just this straight bank of trees outside my window, and the sturdy, bendy boughs reach up into clear, blue sky.

I continue to attest, despite the fact that we saw some really nice skies in New York City a couple of weeks ago, that England has the loveliest, most changeable and dramatic, most perfectly blue-when-they-are-blue skies I've ever seen anywhere. Atlanta and other places in the US were often hazy, although very little beats looking at stars in rural Georgia in the middle of the night. So close to the City, it never gets that dark here, even at night. As the leaves fall into the park, I will tell you about the little park our house borders. Just now, it's impossible to see through the leaves, all except the edge of the one path that leads in from our corner of it, the path we take to the train station. There are rooks in the morning and nightingales at night. And foxes, sometimes. The train station, since you're curious, is just on the other side of the park, perhaps five minutes' walk if you're not in a hurry and less than that if you're me on a Tuesday. From there, Central London is perhaps ten minutes away by train or Tube. And I get to live here. The amazing and fortunate turns my life has taken in the past three years fill me with wonder and happiness.

I recently changed my userinfo to reflect the changes in my life over the past 18 months or so, and since I promised some public entries that weren't just about what I'm knitting (though you can always count on some knit-geeking here), I figured it might be good to treat this as a beginning. So we begin.

( Relevant History )

Now, it's true that people in London speak English, so it doesn't feel quite as foreign as it might have felt to move to, say, Italy, but there are still significant difference between life in the US and life in the UK. Some of them are welcomed and delightful, and others have taken some getting used to, but having made the commitment to live here, I am interested in embracing as much as I can and not whimpering too much about the rest.

( So what-all's different, Harper? )

( Stuff you can't get in the UK-- )

Gosh, there are whole bunches of other things I wanted to write about, but I'm not going to have time to write about them tonight, because there are still a bazillion things to do before I go to bed. Luckly, my work week is Tuesday through Thursday, so I still have some time tomorrow to flesh things out a little bit.

Are there things you would like to know about life in the UK? Ask about them in comments, and I'll either reply in comments or make a whole post about them-- maybe even both.

( Footnotes )