Dinner with the Fozards

Over the summer and much of the year we have enjoyed many dinners with our neighbors Miranda, Damian, Isaac, and Louie Fozard. In case you haven’t met the Fozard family, they live just a few houses down from us on Franklin Street. If you have met them you would remember them as they talk funny. Yes, that is right, they talk funny. But it isn’t their fault as they are from the Isle of Man.

If you are a birdwatcher you will know the Isle of Man as there is a bird named after it, the Manx Shearwater. If you are a cyclist, you will know the Isle of Man as it is the home of Mark Cavendish, a.k.a. the Manx Missile. If you are not a birder or a cycling fan, you really have no reason to know of the Isle of Man unless your boat went adrift in the Caribbean Sea. The Isle of Man is where you are likely to end up. It is a small island in the middle of the Irish Sea between England and Ireland.

Dinner conversations sometimes need a translator as I speak with a southern speech impairment, Mary employs the Philadelphia lexicon, Miranda and Damian speak Mannish, and the kids, as far as we can tell, speak some form of Pigeon English that no one else understands at all. For example, we call the evening meal dinner. The Fozards call it tea, whether or not tea is actually served. Tea it is. 

We did plan one thing right. We managed our turns at dinner so that the Thanksgiving Dinner fell on the Americans. If it went the other way, we could have ended up with a fish pie on turkey day! As it was, we had the Fozards, the elder Fozards, Brian and Kate who were visiting for the holidays, our friend Lucy, and Kevin and Rico for our big Thanksgiving feast! See photos of our soirée here. 

Aquatic Vegetation

Yesterday Mary, who was at the Jersey shore, called and said that our neighbor Miranda texted her and said that a wind storm blew a tree over in their back yard. I told Mary that I was not at home but on my bike. She asked if it was storm where I was but to be honest I couldn't hear her very well over the wind. Then I noticed that I was doing well over 20 mph going up a slight incline. If there was a storm, then the tailwind was doing me right! I was a bit worried over the darkening skies but there was nothing I could do but to keep pedaling. It began to rain quite heavily right as I got into West Chester. So my last 10 minutes on the bike were wet minutes.  

This morning we saw that it was a fairly large tree and it had fallen along side their pool! I told Damian that I thought reflecting ponds looked better if the vegetation were water lilies. See more photos here.