there's a bright light up ahead

On Friday night, we watched a two-hour episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, which I enjoyed thoroughly. I do love mysteries, and that show is the perfect level of suspense/scariness.

On Saturday, Jack and I went grocery shopping. On the way to Asda, we stopped at the butcher shop, which was very nice and old-fashioned. And there are shelves of bread loaves and the loaves look so perfect that at first I thought they were fake! Jack bought a pork pie for tea, and when we got it in the car, duly stuffed it in the glove compartment, much to my amusement. (I also realized that I can really put gloves in my car’s glove compartment when I am home, because I bought summer driving gloves because my steering wheel gets really hot. /tangent)

After we came home, and I sort of helped put away groceries (I only knew where about a third of the things went…) I checked my e-mail and such and then read Great Expectations in the garden because it was sunny. And that was nice. And I had tea (the drink not the meal) out there, too, and that was also nice, and a great big fuzzy bumble bee bumbled all around the garden.

When I came inside, we watched the Oxford vs. Cambridge rowing race on the Thames. It’s been held every year for over a hundred and fifty years. Cambridge won, but it was a very close race.

Oh and sometime in there I watched Jack make a simnel cake (it is an English Easter tradition).

And then we had our pork pie for tea. And we had baked apples, stuffed with cinnamon and sultanas (which are just extra-nice raisins, in case you didn’t know that) and drowning in custard.

And watched Doctor Who. Which I liked very much.

Easter morning we went to church, of course, and I had the inspiration to wear my green long-sleeved shirt under my daffodil dress and it looked just stunning and I wore my gold necklace with the big butterflies and my gold leaf earrings and one man called me a daffodil and a lady called me a fairy princess and I was happy.

We didn’t sing any of the Easter hymns that we sing at Blythefield, but I did like the ones that we sang. And we sang In Christ Alone, and they had flags for waving at on a table at the back, and I went and got a yellow one and I waved it and I cried and I love Resurrection Sunday.

Here are pictures of the church, afterward, when everyone is walking around or standing and talking and chairs are being put away.

View from the back:

View from the front:

And then we went home and had simnel cake for “lunch” because Jan and Jack do Easter dinner like we do Thanksgiving dinner, at 2 or 3 in the afternoon.

This is simnel cake. Can you guess the significance of the number of marzipan balls on top?

Jan gave me this for Easter:

During the afternoon I took a few pictures of the house for you to see.

This is the view down the hallway, to the right when you come in the front door:

This is what you see, coming in the door to the living room:

That is the couch where I sit. Here is my little corner of the world:

(That sort of triangle box on the floor is the giant chocolate egg that Jack got me for Easter. He got Jan one too. And Jan got him a chocolate bird. And I got them caramel eggs. So we all got each other things. Oh, and next to it is Great Expectations.)

This is the couch where Jan and Jack sit:

And here is the other side of the living room:

After that I stopped taking pictures because it was time for dinner. (We always eat in the living room because the dining room table is covered with papers that are being sorted through, because of Jan and Jack moving to Greece.)

And we had lamb and roast potatoes and brussel sprouts (I think even you would like them the way we have them, Mommy, or at least not hate them) and carrots and mini Yorkshirepuddings.

And after dinner I finished reading Great Expectations, and I don't remember what else we did. Well, besides seeing a rat in the garden.

And then somehow we got off on a discussion of sacraments and ordinances, and then from there to the seven sacraments and had to look up what they were, and then the thirty-nine articles of the Church of England…

And we stayed up until a quarter to midnight reading and discussing all thirty-nine of them.

Yeah. It was pretty much awesome.

Then I wanted to read a couple chapters of something before going to sleep, so I perused the shelves above my bed and found The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, which I had heard was good but didn’t know anything about. And it turned out to be from the perspective of a fifteen-year-old boy with autism, and I read it straight through until 2:30am. (Which, combined with having finished Great Expectations that day, made me feel like a proper cutting-edge intellectual student. Now all I need is an in-progress masters degree, ramen noodles, a glancing interest in Buddhism, and an independent coffeehouse to frequent regularly for free-range coffee. (Although I think that last bit might be contradictory with the ramen noodles...))