Finchley and the Mattress

I know I said no more cat pictures for a while, but I couldn't resist posting this one. We are in the final stretch of packing and we move tomorrow. The cats are taking it in stride, really. I think it may have dawned on Finchley last night that something weird is going on around here. This morning I sent him out to play for the final day with his girlfriend and it made me sad. We've really enjoyed living in this neighborhood and all the nice people we've met along the way. At least we're not moving that far away!

Anyway, last night Jim dismantled our bed frame because it won't fit through the door in one piece. Almost as soon as he put the mattress up against the wardrobe, Finchley assumed King of the Mountain status. I am forever grateful to our cats (at home and in England) for providing constant entertainment.

People

Apologies for the lack of pictures lately. It's just really hard to motivate to take pictures when wandering around taking pictures is not your forte. I like taking pictures of people I know and love. Jim likes taking pictures of people he knows and loves and also inanimate objects (doors and signs in particular) and also complete strangers. This is where we differ. So, during this time of long weekdays unpunctuated by work or people I know, there are no pictures to share.

But I can share experiences! I enjoy a blog: www.emilymagazine.com. Emily has a very dry sense of humor and shares her daily thoughts and experiences in NYC in a way that I find very intellectual and also hilarious (mostly). A couple of weeks ago, she posted a really funny description of the people who were sharing her space in one of NYC's public libraries and I thought to myself that I needed to make a point of remembering people who strike me as being annoying/interesting/intriguing/worth blogging about. It sounds easy, but I'm finding that because my work involves (or involved, rather) daily interactions with people who would fall into the "intersting/annoying/odd/freakish" category, I'm a little desensitized to those kinds of things. Even at my new main hangout, the laundromat, the people are pretty normal and boring and rather refined.

Fortunately, today's jaunt to the pharmacy provided some much needed annoying and strange people. The first (strange) was the guy with very few teeth and Crystal Gail length dreadlocks. I was standing behind him and was so entranced by his mammoth dreadlocks that I almost asked him how long it took to get them to such great lengths. But then the pharmacist brought him a bottle of some medicine and the guy drank the whole thing right there at the counter before handing it back and I decided that some questions are better left unasked and concentrated on trying not to say something about personal space to the other person (annoying) who had caught my attention. She was an older woman who got into the line behind me and immediately started tisking and huffing about having to wait. Not only that, but every time she tisked and huffed, she also shuffled forward a little bit so that she was practically tisking and huffing in my ear. And I could smell her hair, which is one of my sensitivities when it comes to people. If I can smell your not very clean hair, you are way in my personal space (I also am quite used to people being in my personal space, as previously mentioned people from work frequently lack the ability to recognize that I don't need to be nose to nose with them to have a conversation). Finally some people left and I could scuttle away from the space invader, but unfortunately I could still hear her and then the pharmacy couldn't find her prescription and she really started to kick off.

What I have learned from today is that I'm going to try not to be come a crotchety, impatient person and I'm going to wash my hair a lot throughout life.

Ode to Bleach

Oh that I were a naturally neat and tidy clean freak...but I am only a pseudo-neat person and Jim, I'm afraid is very neat and tidy at work, but that tendency doesn't extend to home.

Now that I'm a pregnant housewife (mostly), I don't have many excuses for not cleaning (latest excuses: I'm pregnant and we're moving in a few days so what's the point? That last one has been extended over the past few weeks). So today I decided to tackle our bathrooms and all I can say is that I love bleach. Bleach can conquer even Jim's bathroom (although it did take about half a bottle). Until we can afford a live in cleaning person, bleach will be the answer to our dirty, messy abode. Hooray for bleach!

Fall is in the air (or never underestimate the healing powers of a good walk)

This morning, after a mostly sleepless night, I was feeling pretty down and out so I decided to take a walk. If you asked me my favorite thing about London, I would say, hands down, the parks. There are so many wonderful parks to walk in. We happen to live not far from Primrose Hill and Regents Park so we end up there a lot. Today was no exception.

It was a kind of grey morning so when I got to Primrose Hill the city looked a little hazy. Already, by this point (about two miles into my walk) I was feeling about 50 times better than when I left the house.


In Regents Park, the leaves are falling and there was a definite smell of fall:


The tips of the trees are starting to change color already! Last year we dreaded fall, but this year I'm kind of ready for it. It doesn't seem like the summer went by quite as quickly this year.


I remembered to bring some bread for the ducks--another happy thing to do when I'm feeling tired and glum. No ducks are as cute as the ducks we fed in Germany, but these ducks were pretty entertaining. Unfortunately the seagulls were there in full force, too. They were loud and piggish...but not as piggy as many seagulls I've known!



After my walk, Joe and Maddy came over for some riveting games of Guitar Hero. I'm still not very good, but with their expertise we managed to unlock a couple of more songs. VERY exciting.

Work...work it boys...do your thing and make love to the camera...

As promised, here are some cat glamor shots. With help from his trusty assistant (I make high pitched noises and wave pieces of string around) Jim caught Finchley and Jack working it.

Sultry:


Innocent:


Trying to identify that smell....OH, it's Jim's stinky Converse!


Adoring:


Vicious:


Tiger-like:


Child's pose:


Ok, no more cat pictures for a while. Unless they do something funny with all the boxes that we have around here.

Camden rambling

Lately we've been going to Camden a lot and yesterday we wanted to get out of the house and enjoy the weather, so that's where we headed. But first...some cat pictures!

Here is Finchley outside in the morning, peering in through the kitchen door, eagerly anticipating his breakfast, which comes second to going outside in the morning.

And here is Jack, eagerly awaiting the moment that we finally let him outside (which is never). Poor Jack. Stay tuned for cat glamor shots at a later date.


And then we were off on our walk to Camden! (All pictures in this blog were taken by Jim, which is why there aren't any of him. I will make a point of including tons of pictures of Jim in future blogs because I feel like I'm showing up too much in the blog lately. But Jim takes better pictures than I do..with or without me in them.)

We made a pit stop about fifteen minutes after we started to get coffee and give me one of many bathroom breaks. We got iced coffee, which was delish and pictured below:


Note the sunshine in all these pictures. London has been really beautiful. You can smell fall in the air, but the rain hasn't started yet and it's really been nice to be able to spend so much time outside.

I'm pretty sure that we have this same picture with Jim in it somewhere on this blog....


Moroccan lamps and a juice stand in Camden Market.



The rave store is always very entertaining. Maddy has informed me that she knows the owner, so now Jim and I can get all the glow in the dark, blinking and space aged outfits that we desire...at a discount! Whohoo! Seriously, though. We spent a good 20 minutes in this place and remarking on how far rave fashion has come since our raving days (I think I went to all of two raves during my raving days, so I'm not exactly a rave connoisseur...but what I can remember is a lot of people dancing around with glow sticks and a girl dressed in a cheerleader outfit. Way low tech.)

Clearly I wasn't wearing my rave clothes in this picture, because you can't even see me.

This hat has great promise...with Billy Bob teeth:


Back outside in the non-black lit light of day, I made another pit stop and Jim took some really nice pictures of various Camden wares. Paper lamps:


Sexy dresses on mannequins:


Colorful zipper purses:


Purses and rugs and towels...oh my!


After eating some spicy West African food from a stall, we made our way along the canal towards Regents Park. I may be repeating myself, but the canals that run through London are some of our favorite places to walk. You can walk from Abbey Road along the canal that goes through Regents Park all the way to Camden and beyond. They run throughout the city and people live on them in houseboats. I think living in a houseboat would be fun for about a week and I'm impressed with the people who do it year round. It's a cheap way to have real estate in London and in the winter you can smell the wood stoves that people have stoked in their boats. It's nice.



In Regents Park, people were out enjoying the weather and there was much football happening! (as usual)


The Blue Herons of Regents Park were also out in full force. They hover around the ducks and geese and I'm pretty sure they eat the bread that people toss, which is pretty funny. They roost in the tops of the trees in raggedy looking nests. We love them because they remind us of home, where the herons stand on one leg in the bayou and make a croaky sound early in the morning.

Why I am furious

After my wonderful dream of babies and winning the lottery things went downhill. I puttered around the house with a feeling of....not dread, but melancholy, which I chalked up to too many hours by myself on a daily basis, the knowledge that Jim isn't going to be home until late tonight because of a work party that spouses aren't invited to (I could write a whole other blog rant about THAT custom) and the fact that, for the second time in a week, I had to take a large suitcase full of laundry down to the laundromat because our washing machine is still broken. I should have done what I felt in my gut, which was to stay at home in my pajamas, enjoying the company of my cats and considering whether or not I was going to clean the house.

But, alas, I made the wrong choice and loaded up my giant suitcase with laundry, put on my favorite North Face fleece jacket and schlepped down to the laundromat.

Yesterday, I filled the same suitcase with items for the charity store and dragged it down to the charity shop, which is approximately half a mile from our house. On the way, plenty of people saw me, an obviously pregnant woman, struggling along with this suitcase, but no one offered to help. Today, the second day in a row of life with the giant suitcase, I got about three blocks before I was too warm for my fleece jacket, so I hung it over the suitcase and continued on my way. As I made my way up West End towards the laundromat, people observed me having trouble maneuvering the cumbersome suitcase, but, again, no one offered to help. Then, people had the nerve to act ANNOYED that they actually had to share the sidewalk with me and my giant suitcase. I mean, heaven forbid that you have to MOVE to one side for a pregnant woman with her giant suitcase or wait five seconds while she figures out how to get it on the curb.

About an hour later, I realized that my fleece had not made it to the laundromat with me. Having completely lost faith in London humanity by that point, I really doubted I would ever see it again, but sometimes in our neighborhood people pick up lost articles of clothing and drape them on walls or over bushes so that if the owner comes back he or she can reclaim the item. I have to say that I've seen this done with baby clothes, tights (I think you would have to be pretty drunk or passionate to lose your tights on an evening out), shoes, pants, shirts...but, alas, not with my nice, favorite, Northface fleece jacket, currently the only warm thing that was either not too big or too small for me.

So here I am, home again, cold and feeling like people in London can be total assholes sometimes.

More vivid pregnancy dreams

Last night I dreamed that we had twin boys (which would be a total surprise--I'm pretty sure there's only one in there) and that Jim won 15 million pounds with a lottery ticket! That's the fourth dream I've had about having a boy baby (so far the only girl baby dream has been the disturbing floating head one). It will be interesting to see how things turn out in reality. I'm definitely not counting on Jim winning 15 million pounds...

A Day in Windsor and Eton

Yesterday was an incredible and sunny day, so we decided to get out of London and go for a short walk in Windsor. I had only ever been to Windsor in the winter time (with Rashmi and Sidd!)so it was nice to be there when it wasn't raining and cold. We took the train from Paddington to the lovely city of Slough (featured in the English Office) and then from Slough to Windsor (six minutes).


Because we had both been to Windsor Castle, we skipped that part. Of course some of us didn't get to see the Queen when we went to Windsor Castle...but whatever. I stood next to a big tower before we headed towards the river.


We crossed over this bridge into Eton. It has some historical significance...I think it was the first bridge built from Windsor over the river toward London or something.


Then we followed the Thames path along the river. It really is unbelievable how different the Thames is in places that are not London. It's clean and people ride up and down on their boats, looking happy and not scared or suspicious and feeding the ducks and masses of swans.


This is not a very good picture that I took of Jim, with "unobstructed views of Windsor Castle" behind him (and some football players). He obstructed the views of Windsor with his head, but even if he hadn't, I don't think it would have turned out looking that good. I'll take Jim's head over Windsor any day.


Of course we hit a big, huge patch of nettles, but by employing the arms above the head technique, we were able to make it through without any stings. We also looked very cool.(actually, I'm not sure if Jim tried this technique. It may have just been me).


Upon making it through the nettles, I tried to squeeze through a gap in the fence that normally I would have fit through. I'm learning that nothing is normal these days, as my ever expanding stomach foiled efforts to skip the kissing gate. I am like a cat, except that instead of using my whiskers to determine what spaces I fit through, I use my gut.


There was a riveting game of cricket happening as we made our way back towards Eton. I have to admit that I don't understand cricket and I think it's boring. But it's not really a fair assessment because I haven't TRIED to understand it, so maybe it's really interesting. But it strikes me as something similar to baseball (boring) so I probably will never try to learn how it works.


And then we entered the grounds of Eton College--a fancy schmancy boys' school. We heard said boys in their dorm rooms playing what sounded like Guitar Hero. It sounded a lot like our living room yesterday afternoon when Joe and Maddy unlocked a couple of new songs. It was loud.


Jim made me strike a pose within the confines of Eton College.


And then we got some lunch and Jim told me lots of important things, which I have now forgotten.


Clearly I was paying attention.


This thing was funny.


Here's to sunny days in England! Summer is ending and we definitely noticed at 2:00 that it looked more like 4:00. Soon we'll be wandering around in the dark for most of the day, so we're happy to enjoy the nice weather while we can!

This is purely a pregnancy blog

My Shug requested more pregnant Claire pictures, so here you go! Under the direction of Jim, photographer extraordinaire, we produced these pictures of my rather large baby belly.

Gazing pensively out the window:


We use my bellybutton to catch rainwater for bathing:


You can't really see that I'm pregnant in this picture, but we like it anyway:


Hot mama avec stroller:


And not to be outdone, Jim also took some pregnancy pictures:


I'm still winning the belly wars. But his is hairier.

Weird dreams in times of change

I wish I could put a picture of the dream I had last night on our blog because it was bizarre. I've been sleeping pretty poorly lately, waking up at 3 or 4 in the morning and tossing and turning until five or later. Then sleeping again.

This morning, between waking and sleeping, Jim and I both dreamed that our baby is a girl. In Jim's dream, the baby was a normal, happy, baby girl. In my dream, I gave birth to a balloon-like floating head with a full head of hair, cartoon face and perma-grin. She was a happy floating head and I lead her around on a string.

Not surprisingly, I woke up sweating profusely.

Bechtesgarten, Germany

On our final day in Salzburg, we decided to ditch the city for the mountains and crossed the border into Germany. We drove to Bechtesgarten and hopped on a boat to an island I can't remember the name of now. Jim was thrilled to be photographed on the boat:


The scenery was spectacular: blue, blue water, mountains all around. Unfortunately, we were the only non-German speaking tourists on the boat, so we didn't catch any of what the tour guide was telling us. We did, though, pay our tip after he played trumpet to demonstrate the echo effect at a certain point in the boat ride.




The boat was moving pretty slowly, so we had plenty of time to read our English brochure, which informed us that all of the boats were battery operated to help reduce noise and help the environment. We also read that this chapel was built in 1100 or something like that (I lost my notes, so I'm not positive):


When we finally got off the boat, we headed out on an 'easy' walk. But first, pictures next to the quaint German buildings!


The walk WAS easy at first.


We had lunch near a small waterfall.


What did we have? Ham and cheese sandwich, of course! Pork has got to be a huge money making product in that part of the world because it is available in abundance and in every form imaginable (although I didn't see any pickled pigs feet like we have at home).


After the picnic, the trail went up and up and up very steeply. I felt like I was going to die, so we quit and went back down. Jim was envious of everyone's walking sticks, so he found one of his own.


Had we made it through the walk, we would have ended up at a beautiful lake. Unfortunately, I just couldn't do it. Fortunately, there was another lake to visit (the one we boated across) and the highlight of the whole day was sticking our feet in this ice cold lake and feeding some incredibly cute adolescent ducklings.

I almost had them doing tricks by the end of it:


More scenic views.


I was worn out.It was time to go back home.