Lately

I can't believe that summer is already over here. Mornings and evenings are chilly and it's been raining almost every day. Here are a few pictures from the last few weekends. We caught the tail end of a pick your own produce farm and scored some berries and made cobbler. We've been riding our bikes out to some fun gastropubs. The picture of Neil sitting under a willow tree is at The Perch, a classic English pub with huge grounds on the Thames.

On another note, the spiders here are no joke! We were shocked to find this guy in our sink. I'm not sure if the picture does him justice, but he was very large. Every morning I have to fight my way through our front walk because of all the webs from the night before. They are persistent and like clockwork, are always there in the morning. I quickly learned to swat my way through after the first few days of blindly walking through and getting massive webs to the face. They, on the other hand, do not learn and keep on spinning across the walk. I was talking to my colleagues about all the spiders and they say England wouldn't be England without all of the spiders.

Ireland

Hello all. We're back from Dublin. The trip started off on a stressful note because we hit two extra hours of traffic on the way to London and were very close to missing our flight and potentially the whole trip. But it must have been the luck of the Irish because we made it and so did our bag. We spent most of our time in Dublin, but also spent a day on the west coast to see the beautiful Cliffs of Moher, and also a half day in a small seaside town called Dalkey Village. The weather changed about every ten minutes but for the most part it was clear and nice. We had such a great trip. Now we're off to do laundry and unpack and Neil starts work tomorrow!