Happy Thanksgiving!

Well, here's our answer to the question of whether parrots will eat mealworms -- yes! One of our local ring-necked parakeets happily settled in yesterday and fed on the coconut stuffed with mealworm suet that I bought earlier this week. You can see a starling on the suet balls just below the parakeet, too.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! Dave and I are off today and tomorrow -- one of the perks of working at an American school. (The British schools are all still in session, because Thanksgiving isn't a holiday here.) Today we're going out to dinner with a friend of Dave's from the states who's visiting London, and then Saturday we're having some of his music department colleagues over for a traditional meal. As we speak, Dave is salt-brining a big ol' turkey in the refrigerator.

Yesterday we only worked half a day, and there were no students -- we attended staff and faculty training sessions. I went to one on cyber security and one on British sign language, both of which were fun and interesting. Turns out British sign language is very different from American sign language. Who knew?

Our weather is pretty dismal at the moment -- there's an 80 percent chance of showers today -- but I'm hoping to get some gardening done this weekend. Those aren't potatoes in the bowl above -- they're dahlia tubers! I unearthed my first pot of dormant dahlias yesterday and found these massive round roots -- I had no idea they'd be so big and well developed, considering I grew them from seeds planted in March. I was shocked. Anyway, I lifted them and now I'm waiting for them to dry before nestling them in dry compost to overwinter in the shed. I'm going to do the same with the other dahlias and I also want to lift my amaryllis bulbs.

Feeling very organized, I bought travel insurance the other day for our Egypt trip -- I found a policy with all kinds of medical coverage and additional special coverage for our gadgets (camera, computer) and it all cost about £70, which seemed pretty reasonable. And then one of our coworkers reminded me that we already have travel insurance that we buy every year through the school. Argh! Of course I should have thought of that, because I've never bought travel policies for our other trips for specifically that reason -- but Egypt seems potentially dicey so I wanted to be extra cautious. I could cancel the policy, but as long as we have it I think I'll just keep it. Better too much coverage than too little, I suppose.