Summa, summa, summatime...

The weather in Glasgow this weekend has been -- as forecast -- amazing. Warm and sunny, with blue skies and no humidity. If I could design perfect weather, this would be it.

As a result, everyone has been outdoors for the past two days.

The parks are full of people laying out, all the beer gardens are full, the streets are packed, and restaurants and cafes have dragged tables outside. It seems like the entire city has left their houses to be in the sun. It's fantastic, and everyone seems to be in a much more pleasant, cheerful mood. Easily the best weekend of the year so far.

My Saturday was spent down in City Centre, shopping and having lunch outside at one of the Italian places off Buchanan Street, before going from outdoor table to outdoor table at two separate pubs for the late afternoon all the way through to last call. My Sunday was spent laying on a blanket in the sun at the Botanical Gardens, with a fantastic, summery playlist on my iPod and a 99 Flake.

Clearly, life is rough!

The numbers game.

The reading for the Glasgow Women's Library went really well! There were a lot (a lot!) of people in attendance, to the point where they ran out of seating and were scrambling around trying to get extra chairs for everyone who'd shown up. I was very lucky to be reading second, after the very talented Chiew-Siah Tei, which meant that I was able to relax and enjoy the rest of the writers (including Kokumo Rocks, a Scottish performance poet who was amazing). It was a really great evening, and nice to be part of such a warm'n'fuzzy writing community here in Glasgow.

No rotten fruit was thrown at me! I survived the performance!

Right now, the weather is spectacular, and I think I'm going to head up to the gym for a bit, before settling into writing for the day. My goal is 10,000 words by the time my plane pushes from the gate next Saturday morning to head down to Heathrow. It's a doable goal if I buckle down.

It's also a goal that might be more attainable if I disconnect the internet (damn you, Twitter, Facebook, ONTD, etc). But then I tell myself that no, I need to do "research." Somehow though, my research ends up straying from the intended Latin American revolutions to things like "Get Zoe Saldana's Red-Carpet Style In Three Easy Steps!" I don't think eyeliner and creme foundation is quite what the subcommandante had in mind...

Should we talk about the weather?

My first public reading (ever) is tonight, and it's safe to say that I'm absolutely terrified. While I don't mind speaking in public, I don't mind speaking in public with either someone else's words or something that's non-fiction. Presentation at a meeting? Not a problem. Reading something I've actually written? No thank you. Isn't the entire point of being a writer that we get to hide ourselves away from the world behind the safe and comforting glow of a computer screen? Didn't Proust spent the final years of his life in a cork-lined room, hardly ever setting foot outside? He didn't do public readings, and you know, things turned out pretty well for him. I'd say a burial at Pere Lachaise is as victorious as it gets.

My fear of rotten fruit being thrown on stage aside...

The weather here has been brutal over the past week. The rains have been heavy, the temperatures have been chilly, and the skies have been gray.

But starting today, things in Glasgow appear to be looking up. At least meteorologically!

Monkey business.

Rangers won the SPL today, which meant it was a bit of an interesting walk up and down Byres, what with all the crowds and the singing and cheering. I had to pop into a newsagent and when I was in there, a guy came in to buy cigarettes and told the shopkeeper they were celebratory ones. And then he turned to me and asked if I was excited.

So I told him I was American and that I didn't pick sides. And he says, "Brilliant! Mo Edu is American!" which I think was supposed to mean that I should get really excited about it, except I still have that whole fear of the imminent stabbing that will happen if I pick an Old Firm team, so I just kind of mumbled something about Edu being a Terp, and rushed out with my packet of Polos. Silly, as he was really nice and I don't think he was carrying a knife. Sometimes I think they overblow the whole YOU WILL GET STABBED thing here, just to scare internationals.

Also, with my collected cereal boxtops, I was able to adopt a monkey! Sadly, it's just a money donation thing Kellog is doing with an animal sanctuary, and not something where I'll now have a pet. But you get to pick your monkey, and I picked Pops. He's apparently a cheeky little bastard who doesn't like to get to close to people, but is really attached to his adopted monkey brother and sleeps every night with a teddy bear (monkeys have teddy bears?) under one arm, and cuddles up to Coco (the adopted monkey brother) with the other. And I liked that. So I adopted him, even though there were aesthetically cuter monkeys out of the bunch.

This serves as my official shoutout to the Lilongwe Wildlife Sanctuary in Malawi.

World, meet Pops.

Thick skin.

Another day, another magazine rejection.

Rejection sucks. I'm trying to man up and not be all George McFly about it, but realistically, you'd have to be a robot to not feel a bit demoralized from the "Thanks, but no thanks" that they send.

I know that if getting fiction published were easy, everyone would do it. I know that it's not supposed to be easy. I know the hard is what makes it great.

Still...

...IT SUCKS!

I'm not really wallowing though. I've got too much to do in terms of my dissertation to wallow. Plus, possibly seeing Star Trek in IMAX to look forward to (shut up, why can't a person see a movie multiple times in the theater?), as well as multiple people's birthday parties in the next few days, and most importantly, a warm, sunny weekend in the forecast. And you can't be down when there's warmth and sun scheduled for Glasgow.

(Okay, maybe I'm wallowing a little. But it's nothing that a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch wouldn't fix. A box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch that someone would have to mail across the ocean to me, since it's unavailable in Scotland. HINT HINT.)

And I'm back in Glasgow once more. On a jetlag scale of 1 to 10 (1 being I'm fresh as a daisy and 10 being I can't even stand up properly) I'm on at about a 5 right now, which is actually pretty good. We got in early enough (7:30am) that I was able to get a nap in during the late morning and early afternoon that might take me through till tonight, when I can get to bed at a respectable hour.

The flight back from Newark was truly, truly unpleasant. Again, 757s are too small to sit in for six hours. Especially when it's six hours of screaming babies, turbulence, and loud people who have no concept of how to behave on a red-eye transatlantic flight. I will take the extra connection in Heathrow to be on a bigger, more comfortable plane next time. When it comes to flying across the ocean, size does matter.

My hope for humanity is to one day live in a world where the people sitting behind you don't pull on the back of your seat when you're sleeping, catapulting your forward. Because it really, really sucks.

Or, my hope for myself is that one day I fly first class where people know how to act.

On another note, I also learned a very important lesson today and why words are important. Ginger beer? NOT the same as ginger ale. Ginger ale is wonderful. Ginger beer burns.

List: USA-style

I love living in the UK, and I really love living in Glasgow. That being said, there's a laundry list of things I really appreciate about the States, and this trip, a couple of things (other than standard friends and family) have really stood out:

• Being in the same time zone as American Idol;
• Chipotle;
  
• The cereal aisle in the grocery store;
  
• Target;
  
• Muggy weather;
  
• Being back for not one, not two, but three Game Sevens in the NHL playoffs and getting to watch them at a decent hour, instead of 1am;
  
• CABLE. Real cable. 800 channels, OnDemand, DVR.
  
• Access to Hulu!
  

These are all superficial, silly things to love, but it's the silly, superficial things that count! Who needs socialized healthcare when you can watch back to back to back to back episodes of My Boys on a lazy Tuesday evening?

I'm leaving on a jet plane...

And I'm back in the States again. Pond-hopping is clearly one of my favorite activities, this time for a quick week of Mother's Day festivities and maternal bonding. And yes, I know i was just back here.

The trip this time was an eventful one.

Originally, I was going to book the cheaper, yet lengthier, itinerary on Delta/NW/KLM: Glasgow-Amsterdam, Amsterdam-Detroit, Detroit-BWI. All in the attempts to avoid Dad having to schlep down to Dulles during rushhour on a Thursday evening. Going with Delta would have been annoying with two connections, but on shiny planes that I loved (E190, A330, DC-9 -- though okay, not so much with the love there), with comfortable connection times. A pain in the butt itinerary, but one I was secretly looking forward to.

The other option was the much more sensible, logical, environmentally friendly one: Glasgow-Newark, Newark-BWI. Continental. It's the only year-round schedule Glasgow-USA flight, and typically, when you hop in a taxi at 6:30am, heading for the airport and you tell the driver you're headed for the States when he asks where you're traveling, he'll nod and say knowingly, "Ahhhh, Continental?" That's what happens when your airport only has ONE US-bound flight a day (though right now, Thomas Cook runs charters to Orlando and later in the spring, USAir will start up their Philly service).

So after some shaming from Gabriella about taking the most direct route, I decided no more game-playing, I was doing the quick and easy Continental hop, crossing the ocean in a 757-200 (a plane way too small for a seven hour flight, but that's another story), fitted with PHENOMENAL in-flight entertainement (50 movies, including all five Harry Potters, as well as Back to the Future), two decent meals, and a reasonably friendly crew. Pre-take off? Things seemed peachy.

Too good to be true? Probably is. Because when things seem easy and smooth to start, something's going to go wrong.

Like, a seatbelt sign that the captain leaves on all flight, even through hours of smooth sailing, leading everyone (including Flight Attendants) to ignore it, and it becoming the Seatbelt Sign That Cried Wolf, which then turned slightly problematic when actual turbulence started.

Like, massive thunderstorms in Newark midway through the afternoon as I waited for my 5pm hop to BWI.

Like, the cancelling of said 5pm flight, and bumpage to the 9:45pm flight instead.

Like, every flight out of Terminal A being delayed or cancelled, madness in the terminal, pilots camped out on the ground because there's nowhere for them to sit and no one will give them a seat (I'd personally like my pilots comfortable and rested), and a man having an actual heart attack right next to Starbucks.

Like, my now 9:45pm flight being delayed until 11:50pm.

Like, Continental then being kind and sticking me on an on-time 7:15pm flight to DCA, departing from Terminal C.

Like, me sprinting to Terminal C to try to make the flight, only to find out that while the plane is there, the crew is not, because they're inbound on a flight that's late.

Like, me being sent to customer service by the gate agent because I'm having a very hard time dealing with the fact that by the end of it all, I will have been at Newark for anywhere from nine to twelve hours, when BWI is a mere four hours from it in actuality.

Like, after an hour in the customer service line, the agent taking pity on me, giving me a hotel and food vouchers for the night, and a seat on the first flight out in the morning instead.

It was just a maddening travel day. And while I know none of these things were actually Continental's fault (on the contrary, they were GREAT to me. When's the last time I could say that about a legacy carrier?), it was just so draining. What's worse? The cheaper Delta flight into BWI? Landed on time.

The next morning, after passing out in a king-sized bed at the Holiday Inn - Edison, I was headed back to EWR and Terminal A where my BWI-bound flight was set to depart, only to find that (of course) it had been moved to Terminal C. Back onto AirTrain and a-sprinting went I. 20 minutes later, I was sitting at the gate, free (thanks, Continental!) Starbucks in hand, waiting to board a teeny ERJ-145. From there, it was a smooth 36 minute flight down to BWI, way ahead of schedule.

All of that, nine hours at Newark on Thursday, an overnight, and another hour on Friday, for 36 minutes flying time.

And while, yes, it was all worth it to see the look of surprise on my grandmother, mother, and aunt's faces, next time I'm going with my airplane geeky gut and booking the flight that I want to take, on the planes I want to fly in, rather than go with the on-paper easier option. I'd gladly connect in both Schiphol and Detroit in lieu of setting foot in Newark.

At least my return is a straight shot: Newark-Glasgow. Hopefully, as Mary J. Blige says, with no more drama. And fingers are crossed that all five Harry Potters are still an option!

Crawling on a bank holiday Monday.

In most normal cities, you have a pubcrawl.

In Glasgow, you have a subcrawl.

Here in Glasgow, the subway isn't really an expansive network. It's just one circle. There aren't multiple lines, there's nothing to figure out. It's just a circle, with trains moving in an inner loop and an outer loop. It is literally impossible to get lost on the Glasgow subway, sometimes (but not often by actual Glaswegians) called the Clockwork Orange.

So a subcrawl? You and your group go stop to stop, getting off at every station and having a drink at whatever pub's right there off the subway line. 15 stops in all! Needless to say, it makes for a long, but fun, day of drinking and also gives non-Glaswegians like me a chance to see parts of the city that they would never ever in a million years otherwise see. Places like Ibrox, Kinning Park, and Govan? Without the subcrawl I can promise that I'd have never set foot in them.

The Glasgow south of the river is like a different world. Where the sectarianism is very real and apparent, not just something joked about for football reasons. While some of it is probably part urban legend, the fact that there's likely some ounce of truth to stories about people being thrown out of bars around Ibrox for ordering Guiness is half scary and half amazingly interesting.

But south of the river ended up being really cool. Save for one (Hawaiian themed?) pub in Govan, all the others were fantastic and people treated us well. My favorite may have been the District Bar in Kinning Park, where every decoration on the wall was Rangers something, the people were fantastically nice, and I had a feeling I'd be stabbed if I used the "c" word (not the four-letter one, but the one rhyming with "schmatholic." The Laurieston, at Bridge Street, was great too. Super dodgy looking from the outside, with warm and friendly bartenders wearing bowties on the inside. And by early evening, we were comfortably back across the River Clyde and into familiar territory, before ending things on Byres Road, closing down Curler's. All in all, a good day and good furthering of my Glaswieducation.

Subcrawl: definitely a Glasgow must if you're with a group, want to get a big-picture look at the city, and if you're in here with an entire day to spare (and a next morning devoted to sleeping in and consuming lots of coffee and greasy food to help get you right again). But bring along a Scot or two or three, don't wear green, get through the Govan-to-Bridge Street stops while it's still very light, and most importantly, EAT SOMETHING along the way.