Law, Partially

Sometimes, changes in a growing child happen in such small increments you hardly notice them. Sometimes, a change is as stark as black and white. And sometimes, along the evolving pathway, you note a benchmark against which a change becomes noticeable, whether gradual or not. The Christmas holiday marked a number of milestones, some we hope we can move past and some that we will cherish. It jolted our London routine, and now, back in London, we're still living in the aftermath. Thank you, Santa, for this bounce house (and for a fun cousin). Flopping face first into the new year like... It's natural and common that we prefer the happy memories. So when someone shows a camera to snap a photo, we all smile and pretend like we're really happy, regardless of how happy we really are at that moment. Social media is now infamous as a tool for us all to present only the happiest aspects of our lives, not to mention spin them so it all seems better than average. As I w...

Ireland exudes a certain romantic lure. Christine, Bobby, and I had never been but were drawn. We wanted to jam one last European trip in this year before heading to the U.S. for Christmas. How could we have known the weather would be so cold and rainy in December? We were anxious to spend some time in Ireland because so many people talk so fondly of the place, and it has experienced a remarkable economic transformation (we, of course, being contributors to the blog Law Partially are always interested in the legal-socio-economic structures underlying our tourism destinations). I love the  Irish language  and Irish names. I love that the language is so old and a bit strange and actually hardly used anymore. We almost named our first born Seamus, and I still plan to name our first daughter Siobhan, even if Mum so far hasn't been convinced. Besides, visiting the Long Room of the Old Library at Trinity College was a bucket list item for Christine and me. In the Long ...

These days, it's all about vehicles, especially planes and trains. Whereas our adventures in Islington and further afield used to be focused on finding parkland, increasingly we are looking for trains. Much of Bobby's summer outdoors was spent down the road from our apartment (i.e., flat) at a gate to some light industrial sites through which one can see trains passing on their way to King's Cross. Much of his summer indoors was spent playing with his toy trains on the carpet or looking through the window to spot planes in the sky. Growing up is a process of observing more and more phenomenon and then recognizing similar phenomena that fit with patterns seen before. Bobby is fascinated by his urban environment, especially vehicles. He loves observing and exclaiming his observations -- for vehicles including, bicycles, motorcycles, garbage trucks, rescue vehicles, trucks, cars, taxis, boats, buses, airplanes, helicopters, and trains. His ability to recognize different type...

While our little boy had taken ill on his long weekend in the Cotswolds, a healthy bouncing baby boy across the Atlantic was clamoring to meet him. Three best buddies hanging out at Rachel House. The London Linges have spent a good amount of time in DC over the years, making it our most visited city outside of the ancestral homeland in Cedar Rapids. Our last days in the US before moving to London were spent as guests of Gugu in DC. See last year's blog entry  and  the other . The year before, DC was the last trip of Mum and Baba before Bob was born. August is vacation time in Europe, more so on the Continent than in the UK, but August in a UK office is slow, and many London restaurants close for the month. So fourteen months after our most recent, very enjoyable stay in DC, we were packing up in London for a two week trip to DC. There we expected to find the 2018 Catalina Wine Mixer, with Linges from far and wide coming to adore the new babe, Lincoln Kevin. But ...

You may expect these London residents to take vacations in Europe. Some of us have not explored much of Colorado before, and we were going there anyway for Molly's Keystone wedding extravaganza. Molly had three days of festivities planned, and the FD Linges turned the trip into an eight day road trip from the southwest of Colorado to the center. There will be plenty of time for -- and there will be many -- European vacations. But, first, Colorado. We flew from London to Dallas to Durango (Bobby's tenth and eleventh flights). Going through immigration in Dallas was a surprisingly painless experience. In Chicago we wait in much longer lines and always get harassed because Christine's immigration documents are out of date because the US government can't be bothered to update them (so we have government agents mad at us for suffering from government inefficiency -- pretty much sums up federal government logic). Durango is an old mining town on a plateau in southwestern ...