Episode Seventy – Gunpowder, Treason and Plot

My birthday falls on the 5th of November. Here in the United Kingdom, that’s a special occasion known as Guy Fawkes’ Night (or sometimes just Bonfire Night). If you’ve ever seen V for Vendetta, you’ll know more or less what I’m on about: basically in 1605 this Guy Fawkes character led an assault on the then-English Parliament, with the intention of blowing up the House of Lords and assassinating the King. The attempt failed, Fawkes and his fellow conspirators were hanged, drawn and quartered, and to this day we still celebrate that the treason never took place. Yes, even here in Scotland where we don’t feel particularly warmly or fuzzily about the Crown or the House of Lords or the London Parliament or any of that stuff. But hey, a party’s a party, and where I’m from, the 5th of November is definitely a party.

A beautiful introduction to the show: a great deal of fire performers and some slow-motion fireworks.

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Episode Sixty Nine – Why I Can’t Stop Blogging

This might seem like an ironic post title given what happened in the month of July (i.e. nothing – no new posts or updates, sorry again about that). However, I find that however long I go without posting on WordPress, I always get that itch to come back and continue sharing with all of you: and, more to the point, as soon as I do, I often can’t stem the flow of words and ideas that I suddenly just have to spout forth.

Knee-high by the 4th of July…

Episode Sixty Eight – S’more from Megan, Finally!

Hello again, faithful and long-suffering readers.

Goodness gracious, I’ve been busy since leaving Strasbourg behind! As I mentioned, I’ve been training for this new job at Sandemans New Europe tours. They offer free tours (as well as paid ones) in lots of cities all over the continent, and when I got in touch and said I wanted to be a tips-only tour guide, they responded by offering me a stable job with a good hourly wage instead :)

Episode Sixty Seven – Soundbytes from the Midwest

I don’t know how big a news item this is outside of the U.S., but for those of you who haven’t heard, things aren’t exactly super-awesome in Ohio right now. Nor in Indiana, Virginia or West Virginia, for that matter. On Friday evening, a huge storm rampaged across the four states, felling trees and dragging down power lines in its wake and leaving four million people without electricity. Then again two nights ago, a fresh derecho tore through the midwest once more – and while Zanesville narrowly escaped the new winds and in fact enjoyed a much-needed drop in temperature since many people’s air conditioning was out of service, the storm reached out as far as Washington, D.C., leaving more people without power and us further down the priority list.

Our back garden, where the root of our power problems seems quite clear.

Episode Sixty Six – First Days Stateside

It’s been a while since I’ve been in America, and even longer since I’ve been to Grant’s family home. Because of my world travels, he’s been visiting me in my various homes around the globe for the past year or so; first in Costa Rica last summer, then in Scotland at Christmas, and finally again in France in the spring. I spent about a week with him in Akron last October but never made it to his home town in that short time, so all told it’s been about fifteen months since I’ve been here.

This is what I’m looking at right now.

And things have changed since then! The family room has received a beautiful makeover and the gazebo’s been updated too; the first thing I noticed, though, was that Grant’s younger brother has moved into the other room in the basement where his sister used to live. Her absence was sorely missed that first evening when I went to take my shower and found that, in place of her usual array of products carrying such names as ‘Rose Garden’ and ‘Moonlight Whisper,’ I was offered only a single choice of shower gel: ‘Power Stick‘.

Episode Twenty Five – Goodbye, America

The other part of my spring trip I want to tell you about is our egg-dyeing session. Of course. As I’ve mentioned, Grant has an account of our D.C. trip in the pipeline, and while I’d love to tell you the whole story from my perspective too, I don’t really think anyone cares so much about those three days to require two separate accounts. Plus, I might have a shot at finally getting this blog up to date if I let him take this one.

Episode Twenty Three – Of Cats and Cavs

I just can’t keep to my word, can I? I tell you I’ll post soon and I don’t post for months; I tell you I probably won’t post for ages and I post again two days later. What can I say? I like to keep you on your toes. Anyhow, this post will be somewhat shorter than usual for a couple of reasons. The first is that while I was in Ohio for the spring, both Grant and I were working hard – he was still in classes and I had a linguistics paper to turn in when I returned to Edinburgh. The second is that Grant assures me he is working on a blog post for his own WordPress, although I don’t know how far along that is, and he’s working this summer as a legal intern at his dad’s office so he’s got quite a bit on his plate. The third is, quite simply, that I did not write down what I was up to while I was up to it, and I’ve been back for over a month and a half now so many of the details escape me. At any rate, I’m sure this news is not lamentable to you, so instead of making the post back up to regular Megan-length in my explanation of why it won’t be regular Megan-length, I’ll just get on with it, shall I?