It's July 4th - America's birthday, and Lois and I have fond memories of the three July 4ths we spent in the US from 1983 to 1985, when we lived in Columbia, Maryland. And each year we like to send July 4th greetings cards to our brother-in-law Steve in Norristown, and to my cousin Susan in Monument, Colorado.
However, we don't send one to my 72-year-old cousin Philip, professor and prolific author of academic text-books, who lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia, because Philip doesn't want to know us, we suspect - what madness!!!
His loss we think! Call us egotistical maniacs if you like haha!!!!
my cousin Philip in Atlanta - we don't think he wants to know us.
But is that his loss more than ours? I think we should be told
(by a neutral observer or "cousin counsellor" perhaps?)
Seeing the parade was a first for both of us.
Happy days !!!!!!
16:00 Meanwhile our current next door neighbour Nikki is having some work done on her house. Has the whole world gone mad???? [That's enough madness for one day! - Ed]
What a day filled with house matters - tidying, vacuuming, arrangements for surveys, inspections and roof-removals: not what we want from our day at all, to put it mildly.
Very funny, and self-explanatory this time, Lois and I feel. No need to google anything here, we think!
flashback to July 4th 1983: my sister Kathy...
...and me, watching the local parade at the entrance to Columbia mall
10:00 Lois and I are hoping to move house to Malvern in the next couple of months, and today our day is unfortunately taken up completely with tidying up the house and garden in preparation for a visit tomorrow by a mortgage inspector from Chippenham. And Lois does some more touching-up work with her paintbrush on the house's worn-looking paintwork.
flashback to Saturday - Lois begins "touching up"
the paintwork with her demon paintbrush
It's a natural feeling to want to make this 90-year-old house look its best, although the worst thing about doing all this work is that it's probably not going to make a ha'porth of difference to the inspector's report. But we'll see.
Later we get a phone call from the inspector's office saying that he'll be arriving between 1pm and 2pm tomorrow, so at least he's not going to get us out of bed, which is nice. In theory visits can be at any time after 8 am - what madness !!!!!
15:30 Later we get an interim surveyor's report on the house we're hoping to buy in Malvern, Worcestershire, which did come up with a couple of problems, although we'll have to wait for the written report which should come late this week or early next week.
The house has 15 solar panels, leased from the solar panel company, on the south-facing section of the roof. Lois and I didn't know that this could be a problem if you need to do any roof repairs, because you normally have to pay for the panels to be removed and then reinstalled, which could cost between three and four thousand pounds, from what I've been able to glean from some US websites.
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
nine of the 15 solar panels on the house we're hoping to buy
She got borough council approval last August for the removal of her existing extension and the construction of a big new extension to her house, to the rear of the property.
Today, however, she seems to have got a couple of guys from a small local firm to just remove the roof of the existing extension. Could it be that she's given up the original plan to have a brand-new extension, in favour of just repairing the roof of the old one?
We don't know, but we think we should be told, and quickly!
a local builder kneels on Nikki's patio amid
a pile of tiles and rafters that he's removed from the roof of her extension
later we see that the roof of Nikki's extension has been
completely removed. What madness !!!!
Fortunately, at lunchtime, we get some light relief from Steve, our American brother-in-law, who sends us one of the amusing Venn diagrams that he monitors each week.
20:00 Evening falls, and with it an atmosphere of vague gloom. Are we doing the right thing with our house move? A couple of negative phone-calls from friends don't help, so we settle down on the couch and immerse ourselves in the second programme in a new Channel 4 series, "The Lost Treasures of Rome".
One of the programme's archaeologists state the fascinating problem. Why did the little town of Rome eventually come to dominate the whole of the known world?
It must have been a "Conquer or be conquered" situation in the Italy of the time, but it's hard to uncover exactly why. And what did the Romans have that their neighbours didn't have, and which led them to become top dog and to win more and more territory?
computer reconstruction of the seven hills of Rome
and their individual villages, the running track (top left)
and the city's gigantic 10m high defensive wall.
Tonight's programme shows us excavations at Terracina, just south of Rome, which was one of Rome's first conquests. We also see the discovery of sunken remains of a Roman warship from an early sea-battle off Sicily, when Rome first challenged the Mediterranean's superpower of the time, Carthage. And finally we see a reconstruction of a Roman warship being built and launched by an archaeological team in Germany.
The answer to the question "Why Rome?", however, can't be dug up out of the ground, or raised from the sea-bed, really, can it! And all the better for that - it's the mystery that's the fascination, after all. That's what Lois and I think, anyway. Call us hopeless romantics if you like haha!
You can draw maps illustrating Rome's gradual conquest of the Italian peninsula:
Why the Roman Empire? It's a mystery that just can't be dug up, it seems!
Enough said!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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