Refreshed after a weekend in Cumbria

I have just come back from a weekend with Emily's parents at there home in Gamblesby. Gamblesby is a small village in the Eden Valley right at the beginning of The Lake District. We had a wonderful and relaxing weekend. I came up on Friday afternoon on the train and am writing this on the train back to London, Sunday evening. I, of course, ate like a champ and rested wonderfully. I went for a three mile run on Saturday and then later that day we headed over to North Allerton in Yorkshire to see Anna (Emily's sister) and her family. It was great we spent the afternoon with the kids and had a meal (Indian) then drove back to Gamblesby. Other than that just sleeping late, walking the dog and hours going through old pictures from Emily as an infant up to their first visit to see Emily and me in New York. It was a truly wonderful weekend. I really did win the lottery of in-laws.

I have been enjoying London. It's been strange to be a teacher where I was a student and to now see things from that side. I am teaching improvisation on a new two year course that Chris Pickles has created at the school. Until this year there have only been one year students, so it's interesting to see the adjustments that the faculty have to make. The students are great. There are twenty-four of them and I teach all of them twice a week in two classes of twelve on a Monday and Wednesday. We are still in some real basic exercises, but they all seem willing and clever. I am directing half of them in what's called scene study 3. Meaning, this is their third attempt at rehearsing and performing. We are tackling scenes from August: Osage County and we have only had two sessions of that. We read through the entire play then I did a cutting and we read through the cutting doing some basic text analysis. Finally, with about an hour and a half left of our last rehearsal they got on their feet and we started blocking the scenes. It is, of course, early. So, I think that it has the potential to be great. We'll see.

I'm supposed to have a meeting with Chris about Shakespeare's Keeper details this week. Hopefully, I will have something to post about that next week. I hope all is well with everyone back home.