Hey Everybody,
I don’t like how wordpress does pics and vids so I convinced Hil that we needed to convert to the Blogger faith. You can visit our new blog at: http://lukenhilnfam.blogspot.com/
Let us know if you have any problems with going to our new blog….
Luke
So… although they speak English here in many ways it’s a foreign language to us Americans. I love all of the differences if they’re not sometimes a little embarrassing. A lady in our ward, Marian, was telling us about her son’s missionary adventures. He was out working with a companion and it was nearing time to return home, when he asked, “If we still have time I’d like us to go knock up that girl that we met yesterday.” Whoops, there’s a subtle linguistic difference that could easily be misinterpreted. His companion quickly informed him that knocking-up someone is definitely a less appropriate way to describe tracting.
I was telling Paul, Rebecca’s husband the title to this blog entry and he said, “No we have fries, that’s what they sell at McDonald’s, but proper English chips are much nicer.” He could have said lovelier, everyone including men use that word loads here. Maddy told me yesterday that the brownie I gave her was lovely. She also said after riding a coin ride at Tesco, “That was a lovely ride.” If a 3-year old has picked it up, it is obviously used a lot. Brilliant is another popular adjective. And “cheers” is a great catch all word, which in different contexts means “Thanks; okay; you’re welcome, etc.” Luke mentioned that Omar calls me, “Hilarie, my love.” Many people here use terms of endearment like that quite frequently. I love how sweetly people talk here.
So… a couple of days ago Luke asked that if he were offered a job here if I’d like to stay longer. Without hesitation I say, “Yes!” For all of you that really know me, this shouldn’t be a surprise. It doesn’t mean that I miss you any less; I just love our current adventure and this opportunity to learn about and adapt qualities from a new culture. It also helps that I’ve made a really good friend, Rebecca. We met the day after we moved into our first place when we went to church. She’s Megan’s mom, and I went up and introduced myself. Later that week she brought over a large box full of toys for Maddy to play with, and we immediately hit it off. She has done Weight Watchers for a while and has been great at motivating me. Thanks to her help I’ve done pretty well sticking to it, except for my recent indulgence in the evilly delicious chocolate Easter sweets (and I thought it was hard to avoid our American waxy chocolate). She’s also helped me with sooo much stuff here, and depending on the week we generally spend 2-3 days a week at her house. She is a great cook, mom, and housekeeper and loves each of those roles. I have learned a lot from her, probably most importantly to involve more social outings in my normal days. Anyway, you’ll probably hear her mentioned a lot and I wanted to tell a little bit more about her. We have lunch together often, and also family dinners. Luke gets along well with her husband Paul, too.
So Luke calls us “lazy bloggers”, but I’m the one that has actually taken on this new project and he has tried to fill in as it’s been over two months since I last blogged. Bless him, though. When I wanted to start a blog I thought, “Hey that’s a great way to keep a journal of our time in England that we can share with all our friends and family.” Well… I guess I have treated this blog more like a journal than I realized at that point that I would. I have this same pattern with journal keeping, when I am making new resolutions in January I always feel ambitious about keeping a journal and will do really well at first (even is it only lasts a week or two) and then a month or two passes (like it has with this blog) and when I finally write again I take too much time writing about what has happened since the last time I wrote that I’m too tired to write anything more than just the update. So… instead of telling in any depth what has happened lately I will recommit to do better for the future.
Maddy and Craigy are getting much bigger though and talk about their friends and family at home quite often (Maddy does anyway, and I’m sure Craig would if he could express his feelings with more than just canonical babbling). Maddy loves her pre-school; she’s starting to pick-up on many of the English ways. She now calls me “mummy” and uses the intonation that you hear all English kids use everywhere you go. She informs me as well that its not trash, but rubbish and we throw it in the bin not the can. We eat biscuits, not cookies and yesterday she said the brownies I made were “lovely”. And most importantly she has wee, not has to go potty. It’s really fun. She says she likes her new new England house better than her Logan house. I think it’s because there is a part of the upstairs sitting room that is basically a playroom (which she often calls her garden- another English term she picked up because they call the playground a garden at school). I’m glad she is having fun, though.
Sorry everyone for the long silence. I (Luke) have been really busy finishing up the term and doing finals and Hilarie has not had reliable access to the internet. Poor excuses I know but I had to come up with something so you wouldn’t think we just don’t love you. We have been having a ton of fun here in England. It has been a chance for us to just get down to the basics and to think and dream about the future. We haven’t done a ton of traveling yet, unfortunately. We are hoping to do most of that in May when the weather is a bit cheerier.
Since the last post a lot has happened though. We moved into what Maddy calls our New New England house, as apposed to the Old New England house that you all got a video tour of. We haven’t done a tour of our new place yet probably cause we are much more comfortable here and don’t need the “looks like a fun place” reassurances you all lovingly offered about the other place. It was a little to small to say the least. We have a great deal of space in this place. It is a big two bedroom, probably bigger than our place in Logan. Maddy has her own room, she no longer resides in the closet nook. We even have a huge living room that has now become Craig’s room. We finally have been able to break him of waking up at night. Hilarie doesn’t know what to do with a full nights sleep, she is in the process of redefining who she is after having a few “normal” nights sleep. Craigie is so funny, he will wake up and cry and if we just go in and reassure him that we are still here he goes straight back to sleep. We feel a little silly that we didn’t figure this our earlier but on the other hand things just weren’t conducive to it before. Funny why it is such a big deal for a person to learn to sleep through the night, we sure get weird and find joy in the simplest things when we have kids huh?
Our landlord Mr. Omar Malek has been very accommodating to us. He either bought or lent us almost everything that we needed to be comfortable: microwave, iron, DVD player, toaster, pots and pans, bedding, towels, etc. We feel really blessed. He is such a classic English bloke. He blows kisses to Hilarie every time she sees her and calls her “my love”. I’m not too worried though, I feel confident that I could wipe the floor with him, well at least I could probably wrestle his ever-present scarf away from him to wipe the floor with. He even wears a scarf to the gym. He does claim the what he calls the “droit du seigneur” any time Hilary cooks, his interpretation is that he gets the first taste. The tradtional use for that French phrase is not so pleasant. I will leave you to look it up. He has a beautiful garden that he sometimes lets us venture into, its about 5 acres with a pond. He invited me over for dinner one night when Hilarie was out with her dad and the kids and I had to study. It was pretty funny seeing him and his “housekeeper” get drunk and loosen up. They served some very nice food. I am really getting a taste for parsnips. They also served some cheese on a dense wheat bread with relish on top for “desert” that was nice stuff. Nice is the word they use for tasty, we find ourselves using a few of these “posh” words when we are feeling “cheeky”. They call desert pudding and Mr. Malek makes a mean “pud”.
More on his “housekeeper”. Her name is Penelope (Penny). She grew up on a farm just west of where we live. She has a twin sister and they are both blonde. They used to do field work on the farm in their bikinis. Can you imaging two identical goodlooking blondes out in the fields in their bikinis? They must have been quite a sight, and it seems that they have some sort of reputation. She is a sweet lady, really mild mannered and soft spoken. I guess it is just a little funny for a housekeeper to show up Friday night at 10:00 pm in high heels and not leave until Monday morning. Hilarie got all the town gossip about it at the post office/store in town, pretty funny this English small town stuff. We have a pretty good relationship with old Omar and so one day Hilarie actually said something to him about it. She said, so Penny is your housekeeper? Omar kinds smiled and Hil said, maybe a friend too huh? He said, oh your such a nosy neighbor aren’t you? It was funny. He and Penny gave Hilarie cards and flowers for her birthday and they also came over for cake and icecream, Penny brought her glass of wine. We also came in the house from church on Sunday to Easter presents for the kids just inside the door. He has let me borrow tools to work on my Audi and also gives us access to his barbecue. He says he doesn’t use it cause burned meat is a carcinogen. I grit my teeth and I have to admit I imagined myself strangling him with his woosy scarf when I heard him say such blaspheme but I took it in good stride, I was proud of myself.
Wow, that last stretch made it sound like all we do is hang out at home and wait for our land lord to do something funny, we are a little more adventurous than that. I should talk about school. It has been fun going to the oldest Ag school in the English speaking world. this school was established in th 1840’s by rich land owners who wanted to have a place to send their kids to school. It has remained kind of a rich kids school with a lot of social deviance. The kids drink beer like water and are pretty unruly. I guess that 60 percent of the freshman drop out. We went to the Student Union meeting to complain a bit about the roudyness in the computer room but they didn’t seem to care about what we had to say. The school president was there and he just said it was part of the “right of passage”. Good job buddy, that’s the way to influence tender young minds. He said we were just experiencing some culture shock. Sounds like the whole town of Cirencester is in culture shock then. Most of the land lords won’t rent to students and they describe the school with 3 words “sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll”.
I have to include this part at the risk of offending some people just to give you a glimpse of the “culture shock” we are getting. Also proof that I am learning how to apply my Economics Knowledge. A little background. They are running the elections right now for the Student Union or what we would call the Student Body Officers. They have posted some pretty racy posters around including one that has a picture of two drunk girls and a caption “we are up for social sec’s (secretaries they mean)… if you are.” Then add to that the big fat neon green signs posted all around the computer lab saying “absolutely no food or drink allowed in the computer lab” and our meeting with the president(principle) and the student union about the fact that no one followed these signs to which they agreed that something should be done to protect the equipment from damage. With that as a background here is a chat conversation I had with a classmate here:
JC: the girls running for student union just brought in a bunch of beer to the computer room and handed it out to those who wanted. I asked them if that wasn’t against the rules. They said they had permission.I asked from who. Do you know what they said?
do you know who gave them permission?
me: the principle
JC: The principal.
me: he he
JC: some punchline, huh?
me: are they the ones that are up for social sex?
JC: yes,Some principal. Probably just couldn’t hack it in industry.
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me: We could develop a model for this: free beer = social sex = std’s and teenage pregnancy = lowered quality of life = increased incentive to cover up crappy feelings with more addictive substances and practices = more unhappyness = mass social unrest including school shootings and other terrorism = deterioration of social framework and consumer trust = prolonged economic downturn = mass depression = the need to look for someone to blame for our problems = WWIII = the need for Christ to come in and save us from utter destruction = happiness in the kingdom of God and a thousand years of peace for the loser American students that thought the principle was spineless and the students should be disciplined and burning of the RAC as chaff and the eternal torment and suffering in hell not only for the students but mostly the principle for not using his position of authority to enact change in a corrupt organization.
Lest you think that I am not impressed and don’t like it here I should now expound the good parts of the school experience. We are what they call post-graduate students and so we don’t have to deal too much with the kids. Our lectures are really good, for the most part. The RAC doesn’t really, in my mind, specialize in academics too much but what they are good at is knowledge application and industry experience. This goes along with the history of the college. A lot of the professors are actually not full-time faculty and are outsourced to come in and teach. This means that they are not the typical professor type that couldn’t really hack it in industry so they teach. They have extensive experience from the “real world” which gives great application to the material. Most of the class material is not new to us, we had most of it before in our undergrads but they give an industry perspective on things that I have found refreshing and fun, if not very useful and inspiring. My mind has been racing on things that I would like to do for my future career and for a future farm. I have been scheming and writing a lot of ideas down. I like the different teaching style a lot and am going to be very proud of my degree. I feel like after I am done I will be able to have a lot of confidence in a job interview, and really with all the contact that the professors have here I may be able to get a few of those, at least internationally.
I’m about done with the commentary for now. I will try to write some more later. I want to include some pictures and videos though.
Some fun pots in the back alleys of Malmesbury
Is this a car? I’m speachless, in total awe.
Fun english scenery
Cute Cragie
My easter family getting ready to feed ducks
Maddy’s easter cake. She saw this one on a magazine cover and had to have it. It was the highlight of her Easter. She was so excited to show Megan. I helped Hil make the cake, the ugly chicks are mine. They are made from marsipan.
Cute new easter clothes, the kids aren’t bad either.
Maddy easter dress photo shoot product.
This was our family’s first geocash. Maddy still talks about the treasure hunt all the time.
I took a Saturday Class on “Hedge Laying”. Here instead of fences to keep in the livestock they traditionally used hedges. There is an elaborate art of making these hedges suitable for fences ie. strong and thick. There are over 40 registered hedge laying techniques, I only learned one. Here is what it is. They take the plants, usually hawthorn but any deciduous plant will work, and they cut them at the ground 3/4 of the way through and then lay them down. This way they can keep them closer and thicker at the ground and also it makes them look really neat and nice and promotes good new growth. You can see a little of the process we went through in the class in taking a wild hedge looking row of pretty much just little trees into a neat hedge that should hold in sheep. This was really fun for me. To do the work they use a tool called a Bill Hook. You can bet that I am going to give this a go when I get home.
Maddy burned her finger on the iron pretty bad. She found this cup that fit her hand perfectly and wouldn’t come off when she made a fist inside. It had cold water in it and she wouldn’t let us take it away, even when she went to sleep.
Malmesbury Abby, 1600 year old or so.
Maddy and Megan, her English twin. They are so alike it is scary. They were pulling the same faces at the same time when I was trying to get them to smile. They are nuts, really.
Our tour of the Museum of Natural History, neat place. Maddy’s favorite was guess… the sea turtles or mexican turtles for Grandma Nancy
Craig is such a cuddler these days. The kids are watching a movie together.
Maddy saw craig getting a bath in the sink at the London Temple Accommodations so she had to have one too.
The oldest church owned chapel in England. Maddy is impressed you can tell. This has a great story/history we will have to give you when you come, or when we get home.
Here are some videos on google video.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6691750323569512452&hl=en
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5885377748864066283&hl=en
I thought I would put this video on a new post cause a lot of people have already looked at the other one and might not go back to see the updated version. Here is the address to the tour of our house on Google Video.
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=2515696414913700707&hl=en-GB
Enjoy,
Cheers
Hi everyone,
It’s my (Luke) turn on this blog thing.
The B&B we stayed in for the first 4 nights was a pretty neat old farm house from the 16th century (pictured). Hilarie was sure it was the jet lag but the first night there I swore it was actually swaying in the wind, I actually started getting a little sea sick! The chandelier was totally swaying, Deanne was there to attest to it, of course she was jet lagged too. We spent most of our time at the B&B resting and trying to find a car. Hilarie’s dad Steve and his wife Deanne were such a great help to us, especially during our 1-4 am parties with the kids. We all really got to see sides of each other that we don’t normally get to.
The farm the B&B is on was beautiful. There were tons of big fat pheasants in the fields and they even had a John Deere tractor. We had traditional English breakfast each day consisting of bacon, fry-bread, sausage, mushrooms, eggs, and, of course, tea. Andrew, our host, even said that I could come back with my friends to “rough shoot” which is apparently a sophisticated way of saying what my friends and I called “if it flies it dies” or shoot anything that moves. Unfortunately, I have since learned that this is not possible as you have to have extensive licensing to even carry a shotgun. We do plan to go shoot clays with the blokes on the shooting club at the school though.
Our biggest necessity once we were finally able to stay awake was to get a car. Hilarie, our resident EBay expert, searched her little heart out and found us a great deal on an Audi (pictured). We drove right over and bought it and have loved it. It actually only cost 450 pounds!! Cars are relatively cheap to buy here but insanely expensive to drive. Gas is about $8 per gallon. We have liked our car and feel that how well it worked out for us is directly linked to the promises of the blessing Gaylen gave me before we left that things would “fall into place”. It truly has been a blessing cause 2 of the other 4 couples still don’t have cars and have had a real hard time adjusting and getting around. It would just not have done for us to be dependant on another couple to get around with 2 kids.
After getting our car we soon drove it stacked with luggage to our new home, the Tupenny Cottage. It is much smaller than we expected but very homey and comfortable (see video). We have settled in nicely and have realized that you don’t need much space when all your possessions fit into a few little suitcases. It is very quiet and nice on the Old Mill Farm and it is only 4.5 miles from the school. Maddy just loves her “England Home”. It has been really good for her to have a home base and when she gets overwhelmed by all the newness we are glad that she wants to go back to the England home.
The day after we moved in we were able to go to our new ward in Stroud. There are about 75 attending members. They were very welcoming and there is even a little girl Maddy’s age, Megan. Megan’s mom Rebecca has really helped us with Maddy. From brining a box full of toys to helping Hilarie organize a play group and getting Maddy into a preschool class with her daughter, she has been a wonderful friend already. Maddy went to her first day of preschool today and loved it. It’s cute too that Megan looks so much like Maddy. They have almost the exact same hair curl, color and all. There is even a guy in the ward that has spent a ton of time in Bluffdale at Camp Williams and knows a lot of the old farm families from Bluffdale.
From as far as we can tell Craig is loving it here too. Aside from having a nasty smokers cough and the few days of fever, the cold wind taking his breath away every time we step outside, and his sister loving him too much, he is just happy. He is starting to eat “real” food and wants to be a part of everything we do (see video and pics). He is still not sleeping very well though but we are optimistic that someday he will.
I am really enjoying attending the Royal Agricultural College or RAC (pictured). It is so neat to attend a school that is dedicated exclusively to agriculture. The whole library is nothing but books on agriculture, heaven!!! Although there are a few very nutty English professors one of which spent a whole class period talking about Jaffa Cakes (you’ll have to look those up online when you get extremely bored, they are tea cakes by the way), there are quite a few professors that are very involved in international agriculture and are globally well known as some of the very best in their field. I am loving the new perspective they bring of agriculture in this part of the world. Something I didn’t foresee was how much they talk about African agriculture. I somehow failed to remember how involved England is in Africa from the colonization times. We have a lot of African classmates that are really neat people. There is even a crazy Russian, Oleg, who is teaching us English swear words I have never even heard before. He is pretty foul mouthed but a very nice kid and actually seems to know a lot about agriculture worldwide. Our other classmates are from Ecuador and China.
Here is your English language lesson for the week: Lories = semi-trucks, cheers = thank you, your welcome, hey, see ya, etc., module = class, boot = trunk, bonnet = hood (of car), bits and bobs = odds and ends, doctors office = surgery, and lastly, apparently the “F” word is an intelligent term that very educated college students must use extensively to prepare them for their future distinguished careers J. Maddy is settling in very well to this distinguished society. Our evidence of this is her new extensive use of the word Mother. Gone are the days of Mommy and Momma. Hilarie is now her “Mother”, but I’m still Daddy.
Here are some pictures for you to enjoy. Also some videos. The only way I know so far to do this is to paste the addresses into your address bar. It then sends you to google video where I have them uploaded. Let me know if this works out for you.
Videos:
Double Decker Schoobus
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-4978411068171403059&hl=en-GB
Craig’s first meal
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=69132095985505416&hl=en-GB
Tiddly Winkey Woo
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=7473180640964165232&hl=en-GB
Maddy Dancing
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=6741453190879052306&hl=en-GB
The Streets of Small-town England
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-8803891678748161823&hl=en-GB
Tupenny Cottage
Please see the post entitled “Tour of our England Home” for this video.
Well, that’s all for now. I am hoping that Hilarie will also write some of her reflections when she gets over her sleepless nights and we get an internet connection at home, we hope. Hope all is well at home, cheers.
The Petersens in England
The past week or so Craig has been giving what I loosely call kisses. Luke was doubtful, but I am sure that’s what he is trying to do. I ask for a kiss and he gives his slobbery face attack, but it’s still a kiss nonetheless.
We took the car back to the airport today and then rode the “tunnel” or subway into London for a bit to see the Piccadilly Square and let Maddy ride “England’s swings”. She has been singing the Roger Miller song with the first line starting “England swings like a pendulum do… “, which isn’t really taking about real swings, but in her experience the only thing that swings is an actual swing, so she’s been excited to ride the England swings. There was a little amusement park there and she actually chose to ride the merry-go-round instead of the swings (she was too short). We had fun but it’s pretty cold and windy so we didn’t spend too much time outside. But we made the boss (Maddy) happy with the “swings” and seeing the “red school buses” (translation: those double-decker tour buses).
When we got here Steve and Deanne helped us with the luggage and we got two cars, one that Steve had reserved and another that I rented to transport our luggage. We couldn’t fit our 12 bags in even a big car, go figure!! We rented a little “van” that had the seats taken out. I just followed Steve, who had a GPS to guide him, and we did pretty well even driving on the wrong side of the road, well other than hitting a few curbs and driving onto an off ramp on the freeway against traffic. We did so well driving that a surprisingly low amount of people felt the need to give us the one finger salute.
Petersens in England Weblog 