Nothing To See Here

Not sure what to call this one.

As most of you know, our family has had quite a bit of drama through the years, most of it health-related.  Now we are going through something else, and it's time for me to share it here. 

After 16 years of marriage, Matt and I have decided to separate. Next week, I will be moving into a rental house exactly two blocks south from where we live, and the kids will go back and forth between the houses week by week.

This news will come as quite a shock to many of you, I know, but rest assured it was not made lightly.  It was also, ultimately, made mutually.  Both Matt and I agree that this is the best way forward for our family.

The reasons are, of course, intensely personal and complicated, and even I (with my normal lack of boundaries) don't feel the need to go into them here.  I will, however, repeat here a version of what we said to the kids: 

"I know you probably think that when you grow up and become an adult, you're done growing up, but that's not true.  Most people keep on 'growing up' their whole lives, and that means you keep changing.  Sometimes people who choose to be married at one point in their lives change so much, and in different ways, that after a lot of years they realize that they don't really 'match' as married people any more.  I know it probably seemed like your dad and I were very 'together,' but we had stopped feeling like we were 'together' in the way married people should be.  We care for each other very much and want each other to be happy, and we've decided that it will be the best thing for everybody in our family, ultimately, if we were friends instead of married people." 

I want to assure everybody that while this separation is sad and difficult and painful for all of us, we are all handling it as well as anyone can expect to.  Matt and I are actually very 'together' in this: we talk all the time, have had hours and hours of conversations about how we got to this place and where we go from here.  We are getting along very well, for the most part: Matt is actually helping me get my new house ready; he bought me dining chairs at a garage sale. For those who are wondering, we are basically thinking only one year ahead (the terms of my lease), but we are assuming that this year of separation will be transitional to divorce rather than to reconcilation.

Matt came up with an analogy for our situation...a neurosurgical analogy, surprise, surprise.  Dr. Curry always called surgery a "controlled injury."  Performing neurosurgery requires doing great harm; it requires deliberately causing damage and pain to the patient, but it is done under controlled circumstances and with as much as care as possible, in the hopes that the patient will be healthier (and happier) than without surgery.  Because it does involve danger and the outcome can never be predicted with certainty, however, it should only be done when the outcome of NOT doing surgery is almost certainly worse than the pain and damage done by the surgery.  Separating now, in this way, is our surgery.

So that's it.  We would like to say that we are doing OK with this, and that we hope that our friends and family will be OK with it as well.  While it is a difficult and painful and sad thing, it is not the worst thing that can happen.  It is far from the worst.

 

P.S.  Ian wants everyone to know that he got a phone for his birthday. And that he is doing OK. 

P.P.S. Paul seems OK, too.  He has been mainly concerned about where the furniture (read: TV, and the couch on which to sit while watching TV) will go in the other house.

Scotland 2010: Part 3

OK, I'm thinking I'd better wrap this little travelogue up before I forget everything about the trip. It's already starting to go a bit funny--what are those cute little skirts the men wear there called, anyway?

Well, we left Polmaily House in Drumnadrochit on Saturday, July 3rd and headed back down to Stirling, where I spent the first semester of my senior year in college.  That was the fall of 1990, and something happened that made me spend the next twenty years trying to think of reasons to go back.  (No, I don't know exactly what that something was, but that's not the point here.)  A day or two after I arrived back in 1990, my Uncle Roger met up with me and we spent a few days sightseeing.  I'm not sure exactly where we went then except for North Queensferry, a little town to the east of Stirling, on the north side of the Firth of Forth.  I'd thought we might take the kids there, since they have a good aquarium that I'd thought might make a change from castles and I remember liking the town, but as it turned out what the kids needed as a change from castles was actually no sightseeing at all.  This was perhaps their favorite activity in Stirling:

Yep, running around and climbing on the rock in front of the little lodge we rented.

We did see a lot of castles.  Stirling is located in right about the center of Scotland, not too far south of the Highlands and with a lot of farmland and rolling hills.  Many of the most important battles in Scotland's history were fought in the area, and so it's not really surprising that you can't swing a cat around Stirling without hitting a few castles.  In the three and a half days we were there, we saw three castles: Stirling Castle, Linlithgow Palace, and Doune Castle.  As I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed about the prospect of providing useful and entertaining info about each right now, I'm going to let Paul summarize.  I just asked him which of the three castles he liked best.  First he said, "What about Edinburgh Castle?" so that says something right there. Then he went on:

"Edinburgh Castle has the minute gun, which is AWESOME.  Linlithgow Palace has the adventuring sort of thing, you can just go wherever you want and explore.  Doune Castle kinda also has that, where you just roam around, except you're also listening to a tour so that's really cool, PLUS it's the Monty Python castle." A pause.  "Which one was Stirling Castle again?" 

OK, so I think we're clear that his least favorite castle was Stirling, and I'd have to agree.  They are in the midst of a restoration that will restore the castle to how it would have been in the 16th century, which means there is scaffolding and such up.  The great hall is actually completed, so it's elaborately painted and hung with tapestries and looks a lot different from the cavernous grey rooms I usually associate with castles.  Stirling Castle is also on an impressive hill--actually a volcanic plug of the same type Edinburgh Castle is built on--but for some reason it really wasn't as memorable as the ones we saw before and after. 

Linlithgow Palace, on the other hand, was exactly what you hope a castle will be: a maze of cavernous rooms and spiral staircases and hidden nooks, AND we met my high-school friend Bill (who now lives in Glasgow) there.  Not that I mean to imply everyone hopes a castle contains my high-school friend Bill-Who-Now-Lives-In-Glasgow--though he is an extremely nice guy--but it is very much an "adventuring" castle, as Paul said, meant to be explored. 

     
Linlithgow Palace was built primarily in the 15th and 16th centuries as primarily a royal residence, so it's chock full of giant fireplaces and long corridors and seems to fit together in a Hogwarts way: rooms seemed to disappear and reappear randomly somewhere else.  In one of the kitchens, for instance, people were doing cooking demonstrations, but when I tried to show Matt and the boys later, first I couldn't find THEM, even after I'd waved to them in a window across the courtyard, and then I couldn't find the kitchen again. Then when I was trying to show them the "second" kitchen, a dungeon-like room I'd happened across with one of the actors who was participating in the day's festivities (jousting was meant to be the focus, but had to compete with on-and-off torrential rain), I kept finding myself in the first one instead.

I'm not going to say anything else about Stirling Castle, but here are a couple of pictures (proof, at least, that Paul was indeed actually there):

 
We went to Doune Castle on the last day (we flew from Edinburgh to Dublin the day before we flew from Dublin home).  Doune Castle's main claim to fame is that it is where much of the film "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" was filmed.  It is smaller and less elaborate than Linlithgow Palace, but has a free audiotour commentary by Terry Jones which gives not only pertinent historical information but also tidbits about filming the movie.  Ian in a huge Monty Python fan, and he was in heaven.  Actually, he said he fulfilled one of his lifetime dreams by standing on the ramparts of the castle and shouting down the insults shouted by the French guard in the movie.  I have a poor-quality video I'll try to post at some point, but for now just picture Ian standing on the top of the castle shouting at the top of his lungs, "Your mother was a hamster! and your father smelt of elderberries!  Leave, you filthy English pig-dogs! And GO AWAY, or I shall TAUNT you a SECOND time!" in a French accent.

And with that, I am going to wrap this up.  We did do some other things, but if I don't post this now it will probably languish until Scotland wins independence from England. 
  
  

 
 
 

Scotland 2010, part 2

We left Edinburgh on Thursday morning (July 1st).  The plan was for me to walk over to New Town to pick up the rental car while Matt packed us up, since I am not a very helpful person to have around in the chaos of packing, and then we'd be on our way up North before lunch time.  Once again, though, the gods of Leaving-One-Place-To-Get-Somewhere-Else seemed to be messing with us.  First of all, the apartment had a fantastic little washer/dryer machine, the likes of which I'd never seen because it actually washed AND dried the clothes in one step. You put dirty clothes in, they got washed, they got dried, and you took them out.  At least, that was how the machine was meant to work.  As it happened, the drying part was broken so it was just like having a front-loading washer that washed the clothes and then tumbled them around damply for hours just to make you feel like a very stupid American who did not know how to operate these tricky British machines.  So at this point the flat was draped with drying laundry, which was not dry enough to make packing a good idea.

A suitcase full of damp clothes was the least of our anxieties, at it turned out, because when I got to the Hertz place there was a line nearly to the door.  OK, I thought, no big deal, I'll just take a little walk and maybe the line will go down.  There's plenty of time: I am not such a help with the packing that I want to get back before it's actually done, anyway.  So I had a nice walk down toward Leith and back, and when I returned twenty minutes or so later the line was exactly the same.  So I got in it, and was very patient, and eventually it was my turn.

And that's when it really started to go wrong.  "Oh, your reservation here says 9 am," the guy said.  "It's ten-thirty."  "Oh, does it?" I said.  "I thought I'd made it for ten.  Does that matter?"  Of course it doesn't matter, I was thinking--when has it ever mattered whether you pick up the car an hour or so after the reservation says?  I would just assume you couldn't show up before the time, but that if you'd reserved and PAID IN ADVANCE FOR the car it would be waiting for you whenever you showed up.

Well, the time when it matters is in Edinburgh, where the Hertz place is tiny and holds about fifteen cars.  They'd given away the last manual mid-sized car, and all they had left was one very small Vauxhall something, a hatchback.  Will it hold two large suitcases, four backpacks, and four people, I asked.  Probably not, I was told, but we went and looked.  No, it really didn't look like it would.  All the rest of the cars were automatics, the guy told me, and he couldn't give me someone's automatic.  "Isn't anyone else at all late?" I asked.  No, that was just me apparently.  It was this car or no car, he assured me.  And what about the money I'd prepaid?  Nothing he could do about it.  All gone.  So I took the car.  I can't talk about the rest of the rental-counter experience because that's when the cost of the car--which might not carry all our luggage--quadrupled because apparently when you book on the American Hertz site it doesn't include even the basic insurance with the 600-pound that is automatic when you book on the UK or Europe sites and he scared me with tales of the cost of the whole car being put on my credit card if I had a bad crash.  PLEASE no one tell me how my State Farm car insurance would have covered it (yes I know it would have in the US and we never buy the supplemental insurance, but I wasn't sure enough of it on the spot, and at that point I was figuring that anything that could go wrong with getting from Point A to Point B would.   So anyway, I gritted my teeth, signed the papers, and took my car.

All the luggage fit, with an extra two cubic centimeters to spare, and the car was fine. We were on our way north to Loch Ness.

After three hours in the car, during which Matt and I would award "points" to whomever saw something scenic first (stone ruins--2 points, sheep--1 point, castle--2 points, Highland cattle--5 points, cool stone bridges--7 points.  The point system got a bit random, especially when I started assigning large point values to things only I saw) in an attempt to distract the children from their Nintendo DS's, we were driving along Loch Ness (Loch Ness Monster--one million points) and soon found our hotel, the Polmaily House Hotel.

The Polmaily House Hotel was the highlight of the boys' trip, I think.  It's a little, family-owned hotel with 14 rooms in a 300-year-old country house.  Our room had an alcove with three bunks for the boys, which they thought was the
coolest place to sleep ever.  Even better, though, was the trampoline outside, and the tree swing.  It was the tallest tree swing I've ever seen, and it was on a hill so you felt like you were swinging out even higher.  I wish I'd taken a picture of it--and yes, I did spend some quality time on the swing myself.

The hotel was basically run by one guy named Gary, who greeted us, showed us to our room, served us evening drinks, cooked our breakfast, cooked our dinner (the second night).  He grew up in South Africa, was brought to Scotland when he was 14, and learned to cook in the army.  He's a brilliant chef; our dinner there was one of the best meals we had.  Gary also chased the rabbits when they escaped their hutch (this is in fact what he was doing when we arrived), fixed anything that needed fixing, recommended restaurants and activities, and refinished the wood floor of the bar. There were a few other people who worked there, but we hardly ever saw them.  It was always Gary, in a white shirt and jeans during the day, and then wearing tails at night. 

And, it turns out, Gary doesn't get paid.  After having worked for the hotel's owner (a guy called Ian) one summer, the next year he got tired of living in the city and called Ian to ask for a job.  Ian said he was broke and couldn't possibly hire him.  So the next day Gary shows up anyway, saying he'll cook for the hotel for nothing but a place to sleep and food.  That was a year or so ago, and this fall Gary will actually be made director of the hotel, which will involve actual money, but for now he just works from 5 am until at least 11 pm every day for, well, the future.

As you can probably tell, we got fairly chatty with Gary by the end of our time there, but we did do other things as well.  We visited both of the competing Loch Ness Monster museums, and we visited Castle Urquhart, a gorgeous ruin of a castle on the shores of Loch Ness where Matt fell on some stairs and broke the screen of his iPhone.  It was fairly traumatic at the time, but not as bad as Matt feared because first, the touch screen still worked fine even though spiderwebbed, and second, it turned out a new screen would have cost as much as an iPhone 4. So he gets a new phone.  As the picture below shows, it was very windy at Castle Urquhart. I do not really have a bouffant hairdo. 

I also spent an afternoon hiking in Glen Affric, an absolutely beautiful area a little ways north, while Matt read back at the hotel and Ian and Paul jumped and swung--which was really all they wanted to do.  Boat ride on Loch Ness?  Castle? No, just "hanging out."  So here are some of my Glen Affric pictures:

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

 

 

OK, that's it for today. We're heading down to a family reunion (Matt's side) in Urbana in a couple of hours, so part 3 won't show up before Sunday.

Scotland 2010 (part 1)

The first thing I would like to say about our trip to Scotland, which turned out to be a great trip, was that it did not start out very well.  The second (and related) thing I would say is that there was no aspect of the actual plane travel that went as it was supposed to. Ever. Both on the way there and on the way back we found out at the very last moment that the airlines had changed something months ago and failed to tell us about it, resulting in something like a connecting flight that arrived an hour AFTER the flight it was connecting to left (on the way there) or a flight that was cancelled and rescheduled for a day EARLIER (on the way back).  I'll go into no more detail than that because it makes me anxious and afraid to ever book a flight again, but it is worth saying. Also, I will say that flights on Ryan Air (which we flew from Dublin to Edinburgh) cost less than a t-shirt for a reason.

So I'll jump through the jet-lagged day in Dublin (which was the type of day that makes you wonder what the hell you are doing taking these grumpy and unappreciative people to this cool place) to our first day in Edinburgh, otherwise known as "My Favorite City in the World."  

We stayed in a little two-bedroom apartment in Edinburgh, where we had two small bedrooms, a living room, a tiny kitchen, and a bathroom right off the Royal Mile for MUCH less per day than a hotel would have been.   I don't know why anyone would stay anywhere else!  It was fantastic, in a little residential square around a courtyard in between the High Street and the Cowgate, for those of you who know Edinburgh at all. To get to it you walked down a close, which is a narrow alley between buildings, sometimes narrower than an arm-span, off of the High Street, about a five-minute's walk from the castle.  (The two pictures are the two closes we could use to get to our square. One had stairs, many stairs; the other had no stairs. We arrived at the flat about five p.m., and Cate, the owner of the flat, was there to meet us and suggest good places for dinner, so after settling in we headed down to the Grassmarket, an area just a few minute's walk away where centuries ago there used to be...wait for it...a market!  Though since the area is downhill from the High Street and markets would be places with lots of people and animals, I rather imagine streets of mud and filth rather than a pleasant green lawn.  The Grassmarket's real claim to fame, though, is that it was there that all the public executions were held.  (The pub nearest the actual spot is called, of course, The Last Drop.)  Anyway, we managed a nice dinner of--since it was our first night in Scotland, what else would we eat?--Italian food. 

On Tuesday morning the castle seemed to be the obvious first destination.  From the outside, Edinburgh Castle looks exactly like a castle should, and Paul was really excited.  He was even more excited when he realized that J.K. Rowling wrote the Harry Potter books in Edinburgh and could, in fact, see the castle from one of the cafes she sat in while writing the first book, so any resemblance between Edinburgh Castle and Hogwarts is not entirely coincidental.  (Here we are having lunch the next day in said cafe, The Elephant House, by the way.  The boys were very excited about being there, both because of the Harry Potter connection and the fact that you could get hot chocolate with both marshmallows AND whipped cream.  They did seem quite impressed after I used the bathroom and told them that I had just peed in the very spot where J.K. Rowling must have peed many times...there were only two toilets, after all, and she was presumably going through a fair amount of coffee since she had to justify holding a table for hours.  I thought it was interesting that there was a lot of new-ish graffiti on the bathroom wall to Rowling, saying everything from "Thank you for inspiring so many children to READ!!" and "Ron ROCKS!" to "I heart Hermione".)

But to get back to the castle.  I am a big fan of guided tours, since I like information about the place I am, and docents tend to have a lot of information.  Furthermore, at a huge attraction like this one, the guides are often funny and great performers as well.  Paul thought a guide sounded boring, though, especially since he couldn't understand his accent at first, but as soon as he realized that the guide was talking about weaponry Paul changed his mind.  For the rest of the tour, Paul was standing right in the front, staring at the guide intently to pick up everything he said.  The highlight of the castle visit came after the tour, though, when we were just in time for the cannon firing. That's "cannon" as in "big gun" and not "canon" as in "Anglican church official" (in case you were worried about unemployment among the clergy), and it is fired every day at one o'clock, for no reason other than it makes a very loud sound.

After a lunch involving actual Scottish food like cullen skink, a delicious soup made of smoked haddock and cream, and fish and chips (which Paul decided at this point was the safest thing on most Scottish children's menus, though he eventually branched out to "toasties" once he realized they were grilled cheese), we headed up to the Camera Obscura.  This was a weird attraction I had never thought much about the summer I lived in Edinburgh, 1997, probably because it is geared to children and I was about exactly a year away from having one at the time.  It's a tower, and at the top is a camera obscura, a Victorian invention that basically projects the goings-on on the streets below onto a surface in a very dark room--very good for spying on one's neighbors apparently.   The guide showed us the building next door, which had oddly tiny windows--windows which had been normal-sized until the owner figured out the spying thing.  The picture here is from the rooftop of the Camera Obscura, where you hang out before they call your group in to see the actual camera obscura, which in a tiny room.  The picture is not of the tiny-windowed house, but it is a pretty good picture of a seventeenth-century tenement house, and I could actually see someone moving around in one of those white windows at the top with a regular old telescope. Turns out I quite like spying, even when the spied-upon are doing nothing more than sitting at a desk doing something with paper.  The floors leading up to the top were almost more interesting than the camera or view itself, though, as they were filled with exhibits of various types of optical illusions and such.

That evening we thought we'd head over to the New Town, which sprung up in an orderly, well-planned way in the 18th century, for dinner.  Bad idea, that was.  It turned out to be one of those unfortunate evenings when you walk miles and pass countless delightful-looking restaurants but find that for one reason or another, you can eat at none of them.  We started off on Rose Street, because you can't swing a cat without hitting a casual-type restaurant, but it turned out that most of them were pubs, and since they changed licensing laws recently, lots of pubs in Edinburgh don't allow children at all. We finally found one that would but were told there'd been a great rush all of a sudden and it would be at least an hour for food.  So we found another, same message.  Tried another, too fancy. Tried another that said "Families welcome!" only to go in to see the sign "No children served after seven o'clock," which was rather less welcoming than we had hoped.  So we decided to walk back to the Grassmarket and go to a pub/restaurant we KNEW served kids [walk walk walk, walk walk walk] only to arrive and be told, kids only until eight.  It was 8:05.  Rather than sit down and cry, which was my first instinct since I myself had been hungry for about four hours at that point and I REALLY wanted a pint, finally we admitted defeat and ate (to Paul's delight) at the exact same Italian restaurant we had the night before.  Where there was plenty of pasta, but no pints at all.

The next day all of us but Paul visited the "real" Mary King's Close.  The "real" is because there still is a close called "Mary King's Close", but this is a section of the city that was closed off and covered over when the Parliament buildings were built, creating sort of a 17th-century time capsule of apartments, one of which was the actual home of the actual Mary King.  I have no photos, though, because it turns out to be very dark underground.  Ian and Matt went first while Paul and I visited the Museum of Childhood, which is basically a collection of told toys that impressed Paul less than it did me. Paul seemed to find the old toys boring while being slightly offended that newer toys were included. "A bike? That's just, like, a regular bike!"

OK, that's it for today.  We did do some other things in Edinburgh--I climbed Arthur's Seat, for example, and the boys went to a new museum called Our Dynamic Earth, but I'm out of time just now and had better get this up while I can.  I didn't mean to go into quite this much detail, and I'll try to be a little more succinct in the next installment, which will come no earlier than Thursday.