Christmas at Underhill Cottage

We had my parents come to stay for their very first Christmas in England in 2009. I know it has been a very long time since then, but we have been busy, busy, busy with our crazy jobs mainly and with fixing up the house and getting involved with church stuff. I will tell more about church life later in another entry. For the moment, we should just say that We had a very nice time and my parents enjoyed staying in bunk beds in our spare room! We had a traditional Noche Buena (Cuban Christmas Eve) dinner followed by a traditional English Christmas day with church in the morning (I sang in the worship band) and then dinner complete with crackers, paper hats and family games! Tim's uncle, aunt and 2 cousins came for the dinner and stayed the night at the Webbs with Phil there too. We all had fun playing Buzz which was one of Tim's Christmas gifts. We also watched some traditional English football matches during which neither team actually scored, so we had to persuade my dad that the Brits are actually aware that they should try and score but that we just watched some pretty rubbish games in a row which was unfortunate. Elise, my only sister, sadly did not come for Christmas, and she was missed, but we did send some presents home and received some nice gifts handmade by Elise herself. We did also get some more visitors, my dad's sister and her husband who live in Chepstow (near Wales) came to stay one night and we had a nice pub dinner and taught them how to play Buzz too. My parents really enjoyed seeing us in our new home, our church and meeting our friends and family, and they enjoyed having a little mini Pajot family reunion too. Overall we had a nice Christmas, and now our house really feels like a home because my family have been here.

Autumn Watch

This is a program that is on in the fall which explores all around England in terms of the natural happenings of the season with discussions about animals etc. There are a lot of viewers who write in about different things they are seeing and with questions they would like answered. These guys try to advise people about what to plant and what to harvest etc. They also have a program like this in the spring called....Spring Watch of course! Today I went for a walk with the local history society doing a "field study" which felt a bit like an autumn watch in Stansted. We walked all around the village and looked at the sites of Stansted which have history attached to them as well as natural interests. We saw the sites of old bridges, where old town shops used to be and houses etc. before the railroad came to Stansted. We also saw a badgers latrine (very interesting) which taught us about the varied diet of the badgers as well as their cleanliness evidenced by the fact that their toilet was pretty far away from their home and they appear to always go in the same spot. We walked for a while, but pretty slowly considering I was the only participant under age 50! I also have a cold so I was sniffling all the way and was really running out of tissues by the time we finished. Anyway, I ended up at my mum-in-law's for a "lemsip" which is a drinkable medicine for colds orignially with lemon flavor, but mine was black currant. We had a very civilized tea and a chat and then I walked home feeling very villagey. Now I am back at home trying to get the jokes in an old program called Dad's Army which Tim likes but I don't really understand. I am coughing a lot so I will stop writing now and make another cuppa.

Cottage DIY

Our New House!

Yes, it has been a very long time since I last posted. Apologies for my lack of updates. For those of you who are dying to know what is going on in the world of webb, here it is...We bought a house! Here is is, our little character cottage we bought. It is in Stansted, where we are a five minute walk from the in-laws and a 2 minute walk from the train to London. For those of you who may be thinking of planning to visit us, we still have to fix up the spare room, but there are more pictures to follow of all of our hard work! We managed to get the house just before our trip back home in August, and we also managed to paint it and do the floors. That meant that we had to move all of our stuff in after we came back and before Tim went back to work at his new job. Yes, that's right he is a "proper" teacher now, but that is another story. Anyway more house DIY pictures to follow.

Springtime in England

Here is a picture of the lovely oilseed rape that grows all over the fields apparently normally in June but this year came early and has been growing all of May. I see all these fields on my drive to work every day. There is nice scenery the whole way to work which is good because there is a lot of traffic and sometimes it takes me an hour to get home. I have been getting used to a lot of changes recently, thus the recent silence on my blog. Sorry about that! I will try to continue to write more starting now. I have been adjusting to my new job which has made me utterly exhausted along with living in someone else's house which makes the entire week much more hectic in terms of schedules. The new job is different to say the least, but I am glad to be working again. I already have ideas of how to improve the whole job because I am disillusioned with the NHS system of providing speech therapy. I may end up working privately or in a special school in the long run just to be able to provide good services for kids. Other than that, the people I work with are nice, so that is good. i am doing lots of driving around though. That is nice but also means that it takes time out of my day and I can't do as much as I would like to considering the mountain of paperwork that goes along with seeing each kid. I can see the superiority of the US speech therapy services. Besides the job, Tim and I are also still working on moving out of the house as soon as we can. This is also another change we are trying to prepare for. In the meantime, I joined a new gym so that I can work out before or after work on the way to and from so that I can skip some of the traffic and get a work out too! Lots of changes are going on for us at the moment, so typical of spring on the whole. We are looking forward to moving out and visiting home soon!

House Hunting

Since I just started my new job yesterday, Tim and I are very excited to start looking for a place of our own. It will be great to get to set up house in our own space, and now that I am working it will be easier to get going with that plan. It just so happens that David Lee Estate Agency is in Stansted and Lee (of David Lee) lives 2 doors down so we have talked to him about finding us a place. Above are some pictures of houses in Stansted and Bishop's Stortford which is typical of the houses that are around here. The one with the cream and brick house is a few houses together which is typical as well and these houses are called character cottages. That means that they have quaint features and are much older. The new houses are like the one on the left which are much more modern but thoroughly boring looking inside and out. So I think we are going for a character cottage (which will be small but hopefully we can make it work). All the houses are smaller here anyway so it's a non issue and at lease we will get to be on our own!

Tim Got Dunked!

Just a quick note to say that Tim got baptized on Easter Sunday at our church. He has been a Christian since childhood but never took this brave step. He was a little nervous talking in front of the church but did a great job and even got dunked in twice because he didn't go all the way under the first time! It was a good day. His parents and his brother came and all of our friends were there supporting Tim. I am very proud of him!