Back in the USA

The last few weeks have been full of several adventures, hence the conspicuous lack of blog posts. My parents were here for much of July, and we had the great pleasure of traveling around with them through Scotland, Ireland, and France. After they left, Mike and I frantically packed up our whole lives in two short days, drove to the air force base (which is 40 minutes away) FOUR times, and posted almost 40 boxes of crap to Boston. Then, since we were homeless for a week after moving out of our beloved Oxford apartment, we traveled around Europe a bit more. Several driving nightmares, three horrible rainstorms, and a couple of ridiculous hostels later, we had journeyed through Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Spain. Returning to England at 1am this past Tuesday morning, we passed the time in my least favorite London airport (Stansted's motto: we're too cheap to buy seats so while you wait three hours for your bus, please stand or sit on our gross tile floors), caught the bus back to Oxford, rolled in around 7am, and promptly got ourselves soaked in yet another rainstorm. No time to dry off or sleep though: off to Ethox we drove, and there we spent 6 long hours putting the finishing touches on my thesis. Most of that time was spent fixing my references (damn you EndNote!), but at long last, the 262-page beast was completed. It took an hour to print off four copies, then off to the binders it was. Somehow we managed to keep all four copies dry in the torrential downpour, and a short 50 minutes later, the thesis was turned in! Praise heaven. Anyway, still no time to rest: next it was off to bid farewell to our favorite Oxford pub, the Gardener's Arms, and to one of our favorite people, fellow veggie-burger addict Alex. Three (or was it four?) pints later, we finally drove home (for all you safety sticklers out there, no, of COURSE I didn't have any pints since I was the DD; also 'cause I just hate beer). Next morning: we got up, drove to the bus station, frantically unloaded our suitcases while praying we wouldn't get ticketed (again - long story) for parking illegally, and finally dropped off our beloved car Carla at a friend's, and then we were off. As Oxford receded into the distance, we were simply too tired to care and were focused only on praying that the flat in Boston we were about to move into but had not yet seen wouldn't be a total dump. We arrived in Boston around 9pm, and thankfully our flat looks just fine! We've been here three days now, and it's still a work in progress, but hopefully we'll post before-and-after photos soon.

Thus concludes the summary of the past month... I'm sure I'll get around to sharing our traveling adventures one of these days, but right now, I'm flat too tired out to care. Ahhh well... only 48 hours til med school classes start (!).