Hi friends,

IF you’re reading this, you will have probably noticed mounting evidence that I’m not in DC this summer. Why not? Well, it gets quite hot in DC in the summer time, and I’m fancy & I don’t like the heat, etc. so I came to the UK. So the summer plan, in bullets:

• Hang out in Chicago & do a year’s worth of weeding in my backyard.
• Hang out in Boston and teach Z. Pants how to do stuff
• Fly to Dublin, take a train to a port outside of Dublin, take a boat to Holyhead, Wales, take a bus to Bangor, Wales, rest.
• Take a Welsh class, because why not?  Meanwhile, tackle the summer reading list & see some old castles and churches and stuff.
• Hang out in London and Edinburgh with my dad, because tradition.
• Walk to ~Glasgow with my dad, uncle, cousin, and assortment of native/naturalized Texans.
• Make way back to Dublin to see friends & meet friends’ kids (!)
• Return to ‘Murica, plan class, write dissertation, etc.

So far, I’ve done the first three of those bullet points, and I’m a third of the way through the fourth.  This post is photographic evidence of.. um, I guess like.. point three?  No, this post is a post, but it contains photographic evidence.

Actually, not even very much. I wrote that paragraph before I looked at the photos I had taken, and there’s not a lot. Plus, while I was in Chicago with the weeding and in Boston with Z Pants, I was taking the photos on my phone, and I ain’t about to deal with that.  So..  um, ignore whatever expectations I created and enjoy these five or six pretty dumb photos.  As I knock out more items on the list (like reading articles from the summer reading list, going to London, seeing naturalized Texans, etc.) I’ll post MORE evidence, so you can keep me honest.  Deal?  Deal.

UPDATE: Actually, there are eight pretty dumb photos here, but PLENTY more to come.  Also: dumb captions.

*In Ireland, I saw my first V40 with the steering wheel on the right side, and it totally freaked me out. I was staring at it, trying to imagine what it would be like to fiddle with my cd player with my left hand instead of my right, trying to imagine what angle would best capture both the beauty of the car and the absurdity of the wheel placement, in a kind of weird reverie, when the owner of the car approached. He didn’t seem to be super stoked at my weirdness.

Which reminds me, driving on the left? Still hard to get used to. BUT I decided that, as long as we have to arbitrarily pick side to drive on, it might as well be the side that allows us to go around traffic circles clockwise. Also, where’s the clutch? Is everything a mirror image here? Crazy!