Some bets are worth losing.

Pete, on the trimming work outside our window: "Oy! Papa! The trees are bare! . . . It's so embarrassing for that tree, I bet."

Relativism

Yes, Carolyn got to talk to Michael Palin at Pete's school. But I got to talk to students about their course selections for next semester, and who's to say that isn't just as exciting?

Happy Halloween!

Pete's day: Venice. Train, bus, plane, shuttle bus, shuttle bus, plane, train, train. Hampstead--just in time for last ten minutes of trick-or-treating in Venetian mask.

Inheritance

Introduced Pete to British supermarket trifle. This must be how other fathers feel giving a son a first football, or chess set, or gun.

Is that London or New Hampshire?

You pop the boy in a British primary school for a couple of weeks, and you get this!

After attending the Poetry Show, we all went to the National Gallery, which stays open late on Fridays. Out front in Trafalgar Square, it was Malaysia Day! Music and food abounding! Inside, it was a mellow, uncrowded National Gallery, with Pete-entrancing audio tours galore. On the way out, a (non-Malaysian) fire-juggler. Not a bad London evening.

I think we've found our local.

Just returned from an evening dinner at one of the great traditional London pubs. This included a conversation with the owner that lasted approximately 90 minutes. The conversation constituted an 18th-century novel in his voice that included these chapters, not necessarily in chronological order:

III. Wherein I Welcome You, My New American Friends, To My Public House.

IX. Wherein I Play National-Level Competitive Rubgy for England

XII. Wherein I Send Your Child Upstairs to Play with My Child and Perhaps a Couple Others, Who Knows, While We Finish Our Drinks.

XIV. Wherein I Am Robbed by a Las Vegas Prostitute, Prevent Her from Leaving the Elevator, Receive a Major Head Wound from Her Stiletto, Am Unjustly Arrested and Eventually Acquitted, Have Visa Problems Because of the Arrest, but End Up Owning a Sweet Penthouse in the Bahamas.

XVII. Wherein I Survive Hurricane Irene in the Bahamas and Cook a Delicious Rack of Lamb with a Butane Stove.

XXI. Wherein I Reveal That I May Be Unusually Talkative Because I Have Been Drinking without Sleep for 24 Hours, Thanks to the Ongoing Rugby World Cup.

The pub turned out to have really good, moderately priced food as well.

Also, the school is different from Fairview Elementary in Grinnell.

Pete starts school Monday. The entrance form has a section for "language spoken at home" that lists 25 options.

Obviously, we're hoping he can transfer to Grinell.

Pete got into Carlton! Primary school.

London living

Pete now loves Stilton almost as much as Angry Birds.

He's going to love frequent flyer incentives.

Totally unanticipated difficulty of London: Pete has become a museum maniac and now has more stamina than we do for them. We went to the Keats House today, and I was giving him a little introduction to what we were about to do as we walked over. It started to sink in, and he turned to us and said, "IS THERE AN AUDIO TOUR?" Because we all now understand that if there's an audio tour, the boy is going to listen to all of it, precisely as instructed. He was captivated by the Brighton Royal Pavilion a couple of days ago, or the audio tour thereof. In a twist, however, it turned out that the Keats House no longer has an audio tour, but they do have a quiz book for kids, and if you complete it, you win A BADGE. The only problem is that Keats is not alive to articulate the resulting intensity of a boy's love for his badge.

Oddly, nobody else seems to be playing the same game.

Some parts of adjusting to London have been hard. I always have trouble with new places, even when they aren't that new to me. It's been up and down for all of us, including Pete, who has been delightfully excited about England but also sometimes cranky, understandably so given that the trip made him so tired he fell asleep at dinner yesterday while carrying pizza from his plate to his mouth. The best part for me has been taking walks to play baseball (specifically, "Giants vs. Dodgers" simulations with a tennis ball) on Hampstead Heath.

Just walking around will be tantamount to this.

Pete suggests a method for greeting the natives when we live in London this fall: waving US flags and saying, "Hi, we're American!"