Spitafield etc

There is this wonderful thing called Santacon (www.santacon.com), which we found out about the day after it happened in London. What a bummer as basically it's a bunch of people running around the city (whatever city it happens to be in) in Santa costumes (or Christmas themed costumes). We would have loved to have taken part in that! But, alas...we were uninformed at that point.

So today we decided to get out of the house a little and seek out Christmas themed stuff to do in London. We ended up back in Spitafield's Market where there was an Eco-market going on. It wasn't particularly Christmasy, but we still had fun.

With wrestling masks (they were not, we later found out, part of the Eco-market):

Arty people outside of a coffee shop on Brick Lane:


People selling stuff (anything from very used looking shoes to really tacky vases that look like something Granny would have stored in her garage):


A wall off of Brick Lane:


For lunch we got really cheap and really yummy Ethiopian food. It was also super spicy.


There was also Mexican food, but we didn't have any:


One of the highlights of the day was when we ran across this interactive Christmas card thing. There was a camera that captured your face and superimposed it onto various Christmas characters. I, it turns out, was transformed into a rotund Christmas pudding, which made everyone around us laugh (you can see their reflections laughing in the bottom of the picture).


Jim and I almost always disagree about Normal Foster's architecture. The building that is sprouting out of his head in this picture is called the Gherkin and it is one of the top 100 buildings in the world (according to someone...not me!)

He also did Wembley Stadium (which is ok), the Pompidou in Paris (ugly, says me. Cool, says JIm.) the building formerly known as the Millennium Dome in London (which to me looks like a giant spaceship with cranes sticking out of the top of it. Jim is kind of neutral on that one.) and another industrial looking insurance building in London which we both agree is hideous. And there are more....

We had a great plan to walk home from Spitafield's, but I ran out of steam and we ended up taking the tube back. Before I pooped out, though, we experience the Barbican Centre, which is a gigantic feat in 1970's architecture (and also an arts center).


And this has nothing to do with today, but finally, after two years of sub-par brooms, we finally got one that really works. Hooray for traditional witch brooms!

Icy Heath

Warning...this blog is not exciting or very interesting at all. Soon there will be some interesting things to blog about, as Christmas gets closer and friends come in town! But for now, you'll have to settle for mundane blogs about our walks in the Heath and cats and other such exciting things.

Last weekend it was pretty icy when we went for our usual Hampstead Heath walk. Despite coffee and the frigid air , I wasn't really feeling super energetic (hence the haggard look I've been sporting lately):


It was beautiful, though, and Jim did a great job of capturing the ice and the sunlight (something that we haven't seen much of since then....).




We went a new way in the park and found a gnarled tree, in which Jim perched:


Shadowy...


This picture pretty much sums up how I was feeling that morning. Jim is a brave and patient man...and I clean up well.


We'll end on a pretty one. Logs in the woods!

Cat update

It's been a while since you've gotten a good update on what has been going on in Finchley's and Jack's lives. There has been a lot of eating and even more sleeping as well as the occasional fight with a neighbor cat through the window and frequent visits to the kitty litter. All is well in cat world.

The Ikea bag provided a little entertainment one afternoon.



The highlight was definitely when one cat was inside the bag and the other was outside.


Another great pastime is lounging in the windowsill, although some cats around here don't really fit in the windowsill that well:


I am up every morning from about 2:30 to 4:00 and Finchley sleeps on the chair in the living room, despite my turning the light on and making a ruckus. Jack, on the other hand is ready to rumble. This is hardly his best performance, but here is a taste of what he can do in the fetching department.