4th of July!

Hello and hope you all had a nice Independence Day. I celebrated the 4th of July with Bill and friends here in Norwich, but he had trouble understanding why we were celebrating the independence of my country from his. :-) We prepared a traditional 4th of July meal with corn dogs (since you can't buy corn dogs over here, Bill found a recipe which tastes identical to the ones we buy at home!), burgers, baked beans, corn on the cob, and coleslaw, Coors Light, and ice cream and Oreos for pudding. I was a very happy girl. In the morning, all of my English friends in attendance were privileged to my renditions (a cappella of course) of "The Star Spangled Banner," "Yankee Doodle," "My Country 'tis of Thee," "America the Beautiful," and "Dixieland." I can assure you it was a treat for all. When I told mom later, she was surprised they didn't contact the staff of Britain's Got Talent, having just found the next big name in show business. :-)

Right. Moving on...

Everything else is going really well here. I haven't gotten to do as much of my research lately as I would like because I've been trying to tie up loose ends with several smaller projects I have been working on. But thankfully those are coming to an end and I can get back to my readings. I've also started applying for part-time jobs, both at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts and in the city of Norwich, so I'm hoping that I get good news there. Even with funding I've realized that it would be nice to have a little extra money for month-to-month expenses and perhaps a rainy day.

I love my new house and my housemates are fantastic. Two are moving out later in the summer but one, a lovely girl from Mexico named Clara, is staying through next year to finish her PhD. We have another girl from Cambridge moving in during September, so I'm looking forward to getting to know her. Here is a photo of my house (it's the white one, no. 117 on the far right).

I've started working on the back garden a bit, since it was in sad shape, and it's beginning to look really nice. See the big green bush on the left side (behind the palm)? Well if you can imagine, it was completely overtaking the picnic table...you couldn't walk past it! So I thought I did a pretty good job giving it a haircut. It looks so much better!Bill's mother gave me five beautiful potted plants as a "moving in" gift to get me started, and I've had fun clearing out the existing dead shrubs and planting the new flowers. I now have French lavender, a Sun Rose, some blue blossoms, and two bushes with gorgeous green and yellow foliage. Here is a picture, although the scraggly thing in the back left still needs to go. Haven't gotten around to that yet.
What else? Well, Bill's sister Felicity is getting married at the end of this month, so we've all been helping with preparations for that since the reception will be at her parents' house in Essex. I'm sure I'll have a separate post about this event later. Something else (not nearly as exciting) is that I have applied for my provisional UK driving license! Since my country is not part of the commonwealth, I have to go through the whole process, start to finish, including the theory test, eye test, and driving test. Bleurgh. And I think I will probably have a couple of driving lessons as well, just since I'm not used to driving on the other side of the road while sitting on the other side of the car. So hopefully I'll have completed everything by the end of the summer.

Well, more soon. Hope you are well!