water water everywhere!

It just keeps on raining. How green must the legendary grass of England get before enough is enough!

Okay, our house hasn't flooded or floated away as so tragically happened to some residents of the West Country. Still, we go to the park knowing that if the seats of the swings or the slide are not yet wet, they soon will be; the roof over the food court at Manchester airport leaks, sprinkling teddy bears and fast food alike; and our plans this past weekend of walking around lakes and through hills and fells of the Lake District were quickly doused, sending us fleeing to the refuge of a Beatrix Potter exhibition. To live in this country one must become oblivious to the rain: play in the rain, eat in the rain, hike in the rain. However, when the sun comes out, the country is resplendent, with brilliance and beauty and, above all, high spirits.

on proper pronunciation

In my old travelling days I recall researching the proper pronunciation of towns and villages so as not to appear ignorant or, worse still, insulting. Since living in England I've given up and reconciled myself to forever mispronouncing place names. For instance, this past weekend we drove to Gles-go (that's Glasgow), toured Cul-layne (spelled an unbelievable Culzean) Castle, stayed overnight in a Cumbrian village called Kesick (Keswick) before touring another castle called Sizer (Sizergh). I'll have to ask a local why Nantwich isn't pronounced Nant'ich.

fed up with your web browser?

If you haven't already done so, download a new browser: for PC users, both Mozilla Firefox and Opera are highly recommended. I check my webpages in Internet Explorer mainly to see what workarounds are required for optimum viewing (there are that many bugs). For instance, visit this site with IE and then load the page in a recent version of Mozilla, Netscape Navigator or Opera. Scroll down the page and you'll see what I mean.

personal asides

School closed for the summer on July 23rd and Kassie is still going strong: playing with friends, swimming regularly, making day-trips to nearby attractions and cities and, recently, watching the Olympics on TV. She's back at school in just over a week and none too excited about the prospect, even though she'll be entering the Juniors and Year 3. The day she goes back, our first visitor of the season, Vera Adler from Hungary, arrives. Later in the month Kassie's grandparents from Montreal are scheduled to pay us a visit. Apart from showing our guests around, we intend to stay put until our trip to Dubai at the end of October.