now it is this time next month...

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It is that time next month, time to get ready to head back to Texas. It's going to be extremely difficult. I'm far from being disappointed that I came to Scotland- I'm anything but. At the same time though, I've found a spot for myself again, and now I have to leave it. It's so much like being at school and having to go back to Texas, and then being at home and having to leave for school. These last three years have really been a continuing cycle of wanting to be in a different place no matter where I am at the moment, and now there's another place to add to the mix.

The man that I've met here, David, is going to be especially hard to leave. He's become a big part of my Scottish experience. What are the chances that I would find the Stirling native that has never been out of the United Kingdom?? Go figure 😊 So there's little chance of us seeing one another again, even though he's talked about coming to the US to visit. Who knows what could happen. Kathy mentioned to me the other day that there are a bunch of Clarkies that studied abroad in Stirling and ended up coming back years later to marry people they had met here. I couldn't help it- I laughed. She obviously knows how to lighten the mood, but I never figured I'd even consider living in the UK.

I really like it here though. Nick Laskey, one of my friends from school, asked me about my trip to Italy and what I would remember the most about it and what it was that I paid attention to the most when I got there. And I told him it was the people, learning about the culture, seeing that we're not all that different from one another but at the same time, we are. I'll always remember Marco, the charcoal artist I met right by the Great Canal on our first day in Venice. Similarly, I'll never forget Sam the dog who always comes into The Wallace really late at night, or Chris, David's friend, who's always in the pub and has really big teeth, or the two 20 something neds who come into The Wallace and try to beat David and I at pool- especially the one David calls Dumbo (for good reason, unfortunately). At the same time though, I know that people here will change just like I will when I go back to the US, and sometimes that's what bothers me the most is that I won't be able to ever return to what I enjoyed the most.

Anyways, the real purpose of this post was to let everyone know that I was attacked by a squirrel yesterday. I walked into our kitchen to make dinner last night, and I heard this noise from in the kitchen, and suddenly, there's a squirrel running across the kitchen floor towards the common room connected to it. I'm of course in the prime location of the door way right between the two rooms and am obviously blocking the route to the window. The thing runs towards me, jumps up on my leg right by my knee, scratches me, dives between my legs and into the common room. I turn around and the thing is facing me- I scream, it figures out where it is, turns around to the window and makes the at least three foot jump to the window from the floor and out the window. It totally freaked me out. David and Kathy offered to kill it if I could identify which exact squirrel it was. Unfortunately, they all look the same to me, but it did chew a hole into Sarah's bread, so if you see any squirrels with little bread crumbs on their lips that have Scottish accents- let me know.

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Comments

[Lauren]

Egads!
A squirrel? Did it have an egg to throw at you, too? A bittersweet post with a funny ending (in retrospect, I'm sure).