matching tracksuits

Saudi King Abdullah visited Buckingham Palace, and he received a villainous welcome.

Once again, we found ourselves at Graveyard Fields this weekend.

Last time we were there, L was much smaller:

I’ve a feeling that, as long as Dziadek is here, we’ll be doing a lot of repeat trips.

More at Flickr

Last weekend we had both grandfathers with the girl. One fed:

The other entertained:

What else were we going to do on a Sunday afternoon?

More pictures at Flickr.

The downside of having a big yard is having a ton — almost literally — of leaves to rake. And when the back yard has 25+ trees and hasn’t been raked in probably years, it makes a mess.

This represents probably 20% of the leaves in the back yard.

We all went down the other evening to shoot some pool.

Kinuk is out of Polska during this time of elections but plans on voting in the UK — like many other Poles.

I’ve been in the process of uploading old pictures to Flickr in an effort to make our collection there more indicative of our travels in Poland.

Ojcow lies just outside of Krakow. It’s a national park filled with rock formations and ancient castle ruins.

K and I visited Ojcow in late November 2002, for “Andrzejki” — the last night of partying before Advent sets in.

The first thing that strikes you about Ojcow when you arrive the bus station. There’s a tree growing through it.

We never learned why they built it around that tree. Maybe a rare tree? Maybe an ecological conscience? Maybe an architectural novelty?

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Ojcow is in an area formerly ruled by the Austro-Hungarian empire during the partition of Poland. The Austrians declared that the Poles shall not build a single church on this ground. Occupied Catholic Poles being what they are (like most occupied people, very stubborn), they figured out a way to get around that. Such rule bending drives me absolutely nuts when my students do it.

The other day, right as we were in the middle of our starter, the principal walked into the room, strode purposefully to the back of the room, and sat down. A bit of a hush fell over the class at a time when I do not require complete silence—they’re doing pair work, after all. Still, everyone was especially quiet.

A principal observing a classroom is the perfect illustration of the bane of modern science: the inability to observe something without changing it in the process of observation.