Pictures in our neighborhood--taken by Jim

These pictures are better if you click on them and enlarge them (especially the last three).

Cats napping. On top of freshly washed and folded laundry and on suitcases are their favorite places to relax. They also love to knead on and pull my new, cozy Welsh afghan (grrr).


Flask Walk at night with Christmas lights.


A fairly short line for crepes on a Sunday evening (thanks to the rain).


The crepe makers. These guys work non-stop. And the result is delicious and not nutritious crepes(obscene amounts of butter and cheese are involved, but it's so worth it).

Another Saturday, Another Walk in Hampsted Heath

There are so many great places in Hampstead Heath. Yesterday, unwashed and rumpled, we straggled out first thing in the morning to wander around for a couple of hours.

It's not just our back yard that's leafy these days.


This is the podega, a fancy public garden:

which backs up to this palatial home...where we are going to move once we have a few more kids.

Seriously, we think that people actually live in this place.
Jim descends the spiral staircase:

And then relived his senior year high school picture moments:

In Golders Hill Park, there is a deer enclosure. This young buck had a pretty bad limp so we're hoping that the park is going to take care of him.


Towards the end of our walk, it started to rain pretty hard and I realized that I hadn't been in one of the famous English phone booths. So I briefly took shelter from the rain. It didn't even smell like urine!

Leaf invasion

Jim and I haven't been the greatest about keeping the garden neat and tidy (we blame the rain every weekend, but mostly we've just had more interesting things to do)

But this morning, Jim got up and worked his butt off and now the garden is looking much less leafy! Yay Jim!

Finchley loves the leaves. He chases them. And a little robin came out and hopped around finding bugs and and other yummy delicacies to eat. At which point, Finchley was banished from the garden.

Beautiful jewelry

We went for a date on Friday night, so I got a little fancy (but not too fancy). Mom and Dad gave me some really pretty jewelry for my birthday, featured here! By an artist from Jackson. I love it!

9 more weeks to go:


We went out for a really yummy dinner in Angel at a place called Ottolenghi (referred to us by Meg and Dan). It was GOOD and fun and just what we needed after a week of hardly seeing each other. I even took a nap in preparation for the occasion!

I never thought I would see this happen....

A blog for Meg and Dan by: Jack

Dear Mom and Dad,
I just want you to know that even though you abandoned me, I'm doing OK. While you are flitting around the world, I am having to suffer through not being fed whenever I want to be fed, hardly ever getting table scraps and having to watch Finchley get to go outside while I have to stay in. That last part REALLY makes me mad, so I usually jump him as soon as he comes back in again.

Despite these hardships, there are some positives to being left behind. For instance, there is a new afghan, upon which I enjoy spending my days. With Finchley outside most of the day, I get all the attention from the people. I also have been spending a lot of time sitting on the heaters. Additionally, it turns out that I actually really LIKE those organic aloe vera teeth cleaning treats that you got me, so every day I have a couple of those. Plus, I have learned that if I don't want to starve, I have to stay focused on eating my food so even though I feel like it's very dog-like behavior, I have started wolfing down my breakfast and dinner. If I don't then my sumo-wrestler of a roommate eats it for me.

So, even though I would prefer to live with you, life is pretty good around here.

Love, Jack

PS Here are some pictures of me from last night. Claire would like you to know that her butt is not really as big as it appears in the second picture. I don't know the difference between a big butt and a small butt, but I know a warm butt when I see one!

Now this is how Halloween is SUPPOSED to look

Hopefully Kate doesn't mind that I have stolen a few pictures from her most recent Picasa album to share, because she and Andy had AWESOME Halloween costumes that NEED to be shown to as many people as possible. They were Gonzo (from The Muppets) and Camilla the Chicken (his chicken girlfriend). Kate made their costumes and we are seriously impressed! First the quilt and now this! I can't believe that someone with so much artistic talent is related to me. Here they are in all their Halloween glory:

Camilla the Chicken attacks the woman from "The Birds":

I'm going to fly Kate over to London for Halloween next year so that she can make us glorious costumes and sprinkle some Halloween spirit dust over the city.