Marie's Web Log

We almost moved to Edinburgh. I didn't want to mention it before, as I didn't want anyone to get excited (or freak out) unnecessarily. Ian had a job interview at one of the universities there last week, for a research post. He flew up and stayed over one night. Unfortunately he didn't get the job. It would have been a big change from the south west, but I wouldn't have minded going to a bigger city. I miss some aspects of city life. Exeter is only a small town masquerading as a city.

Ian also applied for a job with the Devon Wildlife Trust, but had a letter saying some of their funding had fallen through, so they weren't continuing with the process. Nothing is going our way on the financial side of things, and I don't know why.

We spent most of yesterday driving around the south west coast of Devon, an area we haven't spent much time in. A group of friends from Mississauga are coming over in June and we're all planning to spend a week together in a rented place. There are 15 of us including the children, so we need somewhere big. We went down to check out a couple of places we'd seen on the internet. It was a lovely sunny day, though cold in the wind. It's always interesting exploring the twisty, turny back roads of rural Devon. We spent ten mintues on one of those roads driving down to a beach, but when we got there it was spectacular - Bigbury-on-Sea. I took some photos, but they're still in the camera. Let me try to find one on the internet for you.

Well, they don't really do it justice, but here are a couple:

The island is only a temporary one - it's connected to the mainland at low tide. There's a pub on it that's been there since the 13th century, and an Art Deco hotel built by a crazy millionaire in the 1920s.

Amelia is fine. Her drawing skills have developed to the point where she is attempting to make representational drawings - mostly they look like circles. Though the other day she drew a series of circles joined together and said it was a train. She likes to play tea party with her stuffed animals, and last night she was feeding them butterfly stickers and chalk. Yum!

By the way, I am now set up on iChat, complete with video camera. If any of you are on iChat or AOL Instant Messaging, let me know. We could do one-way video chat even if you don't have a camera. I'm also using Skype for free voice chat. Both Skype and AIM are available from the internet as free downloads.