Valentine's Festivities

So I don't have anything deep or insightful to say this time around. Just a basic retelling of the events of the past week and a half or so.

Saturday, the church hosted a Valentine's Day party at the Mason's Arms, a pub about a mile down the road from us. It was originally supposed to be a Christmas party, but had to be rescheduled because of the insane snow storms. There was live music, with the grand finale consisting of an awesome band made up completely of our very own church members. The music and dancing was really fun. There was a raffle giving away prizes, and in the end we raised about 600 GBP for the Winter Night Shelter charity.

Sunday morning, I played ultimate frisbee with the church for the first time. It'd kind of becoming a tradition for the sports-y people in the church to play it every Sunday morning now, and they've been trying to get me to play for a while now. Frisbee has never been my thing though. Frisbees somehow always manage to magically morph into a boomerang every time they leave my hand. But I finally caved an joined in, and it actually turned out to be pretty fun. I still can't really throw one though...I inevitably turn into the "run down the field and try to catch a Hail Mary" guy. Maybe some day.

As fun as it was, I'm still a bit disappointed that frisbee has kind of replaced our Sunday football (soccer) sessions with the church. I kinda miss that, and hope we can bring it back soon. But I understand the reasoning anyway; frisbee is more inviting (to normal people, no me), and it's thus easier to include the girls that way. So next week, Chelsea's going to play with us too, hopefully (she was supposed to play Sunday, but was basically too worn out from all the dancing at the Valentine's Day party...what can I say? I've got moves).

Monday Chelsea didn't have class because it's reading week, so we got to spend Valentine's Day together all day. So that was really nice. We took a trip to Richmond Park, which was really nice. We walked through the little area of Richmond on the way there, which was really nice, with a nice garden.

The park itself was really cool too, and has some interesting history if you're interested (I won't type it all here...read the wikipedia if you care that much).

We did indeed see a pond, and I'm sure there were many we didn't see...

And...hey...what's that there in the distance?

What could it be?

Deer?

DEEEEERRRRR!!!!! THERE'S THOUSANDS OF THEM!

Okay, so there weren't really thousands of them. There's about 600 in the whole park. We saw about 30 or so. And we weren't really THAT surprised to see them...we knew they were there in the park, because we had dutifully read the aforementioned wikipedia page. Actually, the deer were the whole reason we chose that park. But the park is 2300 acres, so there was no guarantee that we would see them, so it was still pretty exciting that we found some, without too much trouble. The website said not to try to pet or feed the deer, but we still wanted to see how close we could get...at first I think that kinda made the deer mad...they had all been laying down, and when we approached they all stood up and stared at us. So we calmly shifted directions and tried to pretend like we were merely walking past the deer, not directly at them, when really, we were still coming ever closer. Finally, we decided it was close enough, and had ourselves a little picnic (is wine and cheese enough to be considered a picnic?)

So that was pretty much our Valentine's Day (not including massive amounts of sleeping in). We treated ourselves to a nice traditional southern dinner...breaded chicken legs with spinach and black eyed peas, and finished it all off with homemade apple crisp (basically British apple pie) with ice cream, while watching the mother of all Valentine's movies, Pride and Prejudice.

In other news, I've still been out on the job hunt. I am a bit encouraged though, as it seems a lot of places plan on hiring extra help for the summer months, starting at the end of March, so maybe there's a bit of daylight there. Also, the guy at the rock climbing wall called me this morning and invited me to come to a training session to become a climbing instructor. So that's pretty promising too...I really have no idea what that entails, but it's the closest I've gotten so far. I'm still waiting on an email with him for further details. He did say he wanted me to come in and brush up on my climbing skills before the training session, so if nothing else, I'll get to go climbing for free which is pretty cool (and he said Chelsea could come too!) It will be pretty ironic if I end up getting the very first job I applied for in London, especially after the now countless rest that I haven't heard back from, but if that ends up being the case, I'll gladly take it.