Dad vs. Cell Phone

We've been busy this spring, in part because my dad suffered a fall at our rental house and broke his heel. He was in the hospital for nearly two weeks (with one surgery) and then spent six weeks at a rehab facility here in town. All told, he was away from home for eight weeks, and he was so happy to be home.

But I wasn't letting him get away without a cell phone anymore. We bought a fairly simple flip phone and added him to our plan. Here's how it went:

Week 0: I plug in the phone to charge it, program my number and those of several relatives and friends into it, and try it to make sure it works. I explain how to call and tell him that because we're all AT&T subscribers, he can call my cell phone at any time for free. He can also make use of some of our shared minutes if he wants, and we have lots of spare night and weekend minutes he can use. Under no circumstances, however, is he to call his friend in England and talk for an hour. I leave with instructions for him to unplug the phone when the light turns green. (The red light/green light thing is brilliant. Works just like his cordless drill charger. Glad we went with this phone.)

Week 1: Dad learns how to call me.

Week 2: He calls me again. Makes sure to ask if it's still free for both of us. Yep, still free.

Week 4: "I was driving to Valpo and there was a train, so I thought I'd call."

Week 5: Phone runs out of battery and turns itself off. Fortunately, I am there to tell him to charge it.

Week 6: A text message arrives. Panic ensues.

Week 7: He can't figure out how to answer when I call, so he waits for it to stop ringing and calls me back. "The green button says CALL...." I can't really help him without seeing the phone (just like I couldn't help with the text), so I suggest that maybe he can answer the phone by opening it? We haven't determined yet whether this works.

Gotta love engineers. He could probably take apart and reassemble the thing perfectly, but using it is another story. It is awfully cute to see him wandering around with it, though.

England

Steph and I just got back from an 11-day trip to England. We went with her mom to visit Steph's sister Stacy, her husband Roger, and their daughters Annabelle (almost 2 1/2) and Penelope (7 months). They live in the small town of Upwell, which is about 25 miles outside of Cambridge. We spent eight days there and a day and a half in London. We stayed in the most wonderful little B&B in the small town of Little Downham called Bury House; it was in a house that dates from the 1700s, and it was beautiful. The bed was very comfortable, the breakfasts were incredible, and everything smelled good. Also, they had five chickens in the yard who supplied eggs for breakfast.

Among the things we saw were the town of Ely, the city of Cambridge (complete with punting down the river), the Queen's country estate at Sandringham, Bircham Windmill, the Norfolk lavender farm, the beach town of Hunstanton (on the North Sea), the Church Farm Stow Bardolph rare animals farm, and Castle Rising. In London, we saw the British Museum, took a double-decker bus tour, and stopped by the Charles Dickens museum (in a house where he once lived) briefly as they were closing.

My favorite thing that we saw (other than Stacy, Roger, Annabelle, Penny, and their adorable off-white miniature poodle who is sometimes known as Goya and sometimes known as Puppy) was Castle Rising. The stonework was fascinating, and it was interesting to me that on a warm afternoon, some rooms were quite warm and some were very cool. We could learn a lot about passive solar heating from this structure. I also liked the spiral staircase and the layout of the rooms. We did not get to see Westminster Abbey because they weren't open when we were in London.

I enjoyed all the little differences between England and the US. (Roger asked us what things annoyed us about England, and we couldn't come up with any.) Some things I noticed:

* About 95% of the cars are stick shift. Almost no one parks their car in gear. (Why is this?)

* Diet Coke tastes different. Not enough for me to think it's a different soda, but slightly different.

* "Are you all right?" there means the same as "How are you?" here. I only figured this out after I saw a cashier ask it of the guy in front of me in line; I was relieved because I thought we somehow looked awful every day at breakfast -- our B&B proprietor asked us that every morning.

* When people asked, we would tell them we were from Indiana. Everyone knew that that was in the Midwest. I was surprised; I didn't know that much about the geography of England.

* Tea is everywhere. So is ice cream.

* England smells good. That may be partly because we were there when the lilacs were blooming -- I felt very lucky to experience an extra lilac season this year -- but in general, there are lots of pleasant smells.

* There is nothing cuter than a toddler with a British accent.

* The city of Ely has no actual movie theater but manages to support three small yarn shops. We visited them all.

We're still recovering from jet lag (though it wasn't as bad for me this time). All the flights were good except that I had terrible ear pain on the last leg of the flight home. We were fortunate to have a good friend petsitting for us, and all the creatures and the house were very well taken care of while we were gone. Lucy has been a little extra affectionate this week, which is nice because I missed her.

Quote of the day

Scene: Pizza Ranch, Washington, Iowa. We are there with Steph's family for dinner.

Riley: ...and my science teacher, he's...

Todd: Does he teach biology?

Riley: No, he's bipolar.

Todd: Oh, so he teaches geography.

Sour beef

When I was growing up, my parents would sometimes make traditional Czech foods. One of them that I enjoyed was sour beef and dumplings. We only ate it a couple of times per year because it's pretty time-intensive to make.

My dad came to visit last weekend and brought me a couple of servings that he'd frozen. (He makes it a lot more often now that he's retired again.) I was more than a little concerned that it might be the kind of food that you had to eat while growing up in order to stomach, let alone love, but Steph liked it a lot. I didn't take a picture because, well, it's not the most attractive-looking dinner.

I don't have my dad's recipe yet, but I Googled the phrase last night and found a few, none of which look like they're the one our family uses. I also found information about some restaurants in Baltimore that serve it. The Czech word for dumplings is spelled knedlicky; it's pronounced KLED-neek in my family. Most people seem to make small individual dumplings, whereas we make large ones and then slice them.

My Czech vocabulary is very small, and I have difficulty locating the correct spellings of the few words I do know because they aren't phonetic. A number of years ago my cousins and I compared the Czech words we knew from our dads, and we discovered we knew different ones. They know the word for mashed potatoes, for example, while I know the words for facial hair, pacifier, and tail (as in "dog following you around," not "appendage on the back of animals."