Oh my good god, this is the fattest cat I have ever seen

Her name is Princess Chunk and she weighs 44 pounds:


For a video that might make you ill, see this.

Heat

It's not very hot in England ever - they had the hottest day of the year last week and it was only in the 80s. Still, Grace and I are struggling because we're living in a little sweatbox.

We're on the top (fifth) floor, so all the heat of the building floats up here. And you've got two human bodies, our laptops, and oven/stoves all pushing more heat into the room. Also, our windows don't open more than six inches, apparently because they are worried we'll all fall out. Finally, there's no AC. So, while it's only in the 80s outside, I think it must be hotter up here. I'm covered in sweat all day. Miserable. The whole thing makes you sleepy and groggy all the time. And our chocolates (left over from going to see Batman on Thursday) are melting. We've got two fans running, but it just isn't enough.

We move next week. We'll still be on the top floor, and most residences don't have AC, but hopefully the windows will open up and we can keep the kitchen heat safely in the kitchen.

Anyway, I'm sick of it now. I'm heading outside.

Update: When we were in India, chocolate was not a very big delicacy. I wonder if that has to do with the fact that it would probably melt most of the time.

Second Update: Another problem is that its always really hot up here so I under-dress for going outside. I always think a T-shirt and shorts will be plenty, but when I get outside I find it's actually jacket and jeans weather. Lame.

Sorry still nothing.

This is a non-post to inform you that nothing is going on with us

Sometimes we just have nothing to blog about!

We're Moving

So, it's not absolutely sure yet, but it looks like we've found a new flat. We're all set to move at the beginning of August, as long as my references don't sabotage me, and I think we'll be OK there.

We can't continue living in the studio paradise past September because neither one of us will be students by then, and this is student accommodation. And since we're coming back to Iowa from the end of August to the beginning of September, we're moving early.

Anyway, we've been on the prowl for a new place for a bit over a month now. At first we had very definite ideas about where we wanted to live - near a park. We didn't care if it was a studio again, as long as it was near a park. The idea was, we could run in the park for free, and not have to join gym memberships.

Well, it turns out that Grace really enjoys having access to the gym's equipment and doesn't actually like running that much. And I think I want to try swimming instead. So, then we decided that living near a park wasn't so important. By then we had gone out to look at a few places pretty far from central London and we sort of felt like we were isolated, so we decided we wanted to live in the city centre again, like we do now. This basically limited us to another studio, on our budget.

So we looked at a few places, but it wasn't that promising.

Suddenly, one day I woke up day and realised I did not want to live in a studio anymore. I confessed this to Grace and she said she had always felt that way.

There were a few things that made me sick of living in a studio.

1 - Grace always has to get up when I get up for work because there's just one room for me to eat breakfast and get ready for work. We have a sleep mask which she wears, but still, I'll be invariably making a lot of racket for an hour.

2 - Our building has some great facilities, including sound-proofed music rooms, where I have been playing the piano. I'm really enjoying picking up the piano after a decade of neglect, and would like to keep it up by buying a used electric one that I can plug a headphone into (note to Knifeblade and Erica or anyone else: Do you have any advice about this?). With a studio, that would take up a lot of room, and it would be a bit hard for Grace to concentrate. Furthermore, to learn songs, I watch people play them on YouTube and then basically copy them. And even with headphones for the piano, the laptop would still make a racket.

3 - Never any guests. We never have people over. And when we do, it gets pretty tight. Exhibit A, is this photo.



Furthermore, we've got Grace's sister coming to visit in September and we'll be having other guests come across the pond hopefully down the road as well. We really need to be able to offer them a place to stay. Paying for a hotel in London is just too expensive.

That's pretty much the main reasons. Obviously having more space is great in and of itself as well.

So, we expanded our search criteria and started looking for one-bedroom flats. We didn't have too much luck, but since we weren't in a big hurry (we don't need to find a place till the end of August) we could afford to wait for a good deal.

And I think we found one. It's an interesting situation. We'll be living in a converted attic of a family home, an old Victorian home. That means we have to go through their front lobby and up the stairs, past the kids bedrooms, before we get into our flat. Because of this, the place is cheaper than it would otherwise be. Today we met with the family for two hours, and we all get along great, so I think everything will be grand on that front.

So, the flat. It's not one, not two, not three, but four rooms (and that's not even counting the bathroom). We're quadrupling the number of rooms we live in. A 400% increase in number of rooms. There's a bedroom the size of our current flat. There's a living room, also the size of our current flat, and it has a fireplace (not in use, but it's a 'period feature'). There's a kitchen, almost as big as our current flat. Get this. It has a REAL oven. Currently we use have a microwave/oven. You push one button and its a microwave, another and its an oven. It looks sort of like this:



It's good for cooking pizza and stuff, but not really for baking. And we only have two stove top burners. The new place has a proper oven and four gas burners. It's also got a fridge which would look tiny to Americans but looks enormous to us. We currently use a dorm room type refrigerator. The new one has TWO doors, one for the freezer and one for the refrigerator. Also, it has a toaster. A toaster is a pretty cheap thing, but we literally do not have enough countertop room for one. Finally, it's got a washing machine. Does it get any better?

Yes, because it has another room, which can be used as a study. Oh man.

And its in a nice area, albeit quite far from central London. My days of walking to work will be over, and I'll either get a bike or take the bus.

Anyway, we're quite excited. If everything goes according to plan, we'll be moving in on the first weekend in August.

Dr Who Breaks My Heart

Matt and I just started watching the new Dr Who series on the BBC. We've only watched 3 episodes, and the last one was the series 4 finale--I about got my heart broken over this one! It was just so sad. Long story short, the Doctor lost his latest companion, who I really, really liked and it was really sad.


Does anyone else watch Dr Who?

2008 Wimbledon Men's Final

Did anyone else see the Wimbledon men's final this year??? It was AMAZING!


What a heartbreaker for Federer!

At Last, A New Post!

We haven't written a long time, because we've been really busy. Let me start at the beginning.

June 25 - There's this mobile phone company in England called Orange Mobile, and if you have an Orange mobile phone, you get 2 for 1 movie tickets on Wednesdays. Grace and I bought a £10 pay as you go mobile phone last week just to take advantage of this deal. We saw Ironman on June 25, and it was great.

June 26 - We went to see 'King Lear' at Shakespeare's Globe theatre this night. The theatre is set up to look just like it did in Shakespeare's day, meaning they have a huge standing area that's really cheap and then more expensive seated areas. Naturally, we bought one of the 700 cheap standing only tickets.

So, on Thursday we met after work at the theatre. This was the third time we had tried to get tickets to the theatre. We had always assumed we could just walk up and get standing tickets - who in their right mind would want to stand for three hours and watch Shakespeare? Anyway, it turned out that tickets sold out quite early, even for standing only tickets. That meant we had to buy tickets in advance and put ourselves at the mercy of the notoriously volatile English weather. You see, like Shakespeare's day, the theatre is open air and the show goes on, rain or snow (in England if they stopped a show for something like rain, they would only put shows on one third of the time).

Anyway, the theatre. It's really nice with a thatched roof. The stage is raised up about five feet so even very short people can usually see the action if they're standing. Here's a picture of the place (I didn't take it though).



So the show started and for the entire first half (2.5 hours) I had only one thought. "What the heck is going on?" You see, I've never read King Lear. I know Shakespeare is tough stuff, but I figured I would be able to get the plot, even if I missed most of the clever wordplay. Nope. I missed some vital information in the first four or five minutes of the play and then had no idea what was going on for the rest of the play. Lots of Shakespearian raging and yelling and clever fools, but I was at a loss.

So I was easily distracted by other things. Like planes and helicopters. It was an open air theatre and they roar by overhead from time to time. There's not really anything you can do about that if you want to have a show like this anywhere in London. Secondly, the theatre was chockfull of teenagers, probably there on some mandatory English class field trip. They were not interested in the play at all and they just talked to each other and drank beers the whole time. One thing that the Globe is famous for is its really informal and you can come and go as you please, or bring in beer. And people do.

There was this part of the play where suddenly all these people in rags, covered in blood and mud, jump out into the audience and then act like nightmares or something, crawling around on all fours, growling, reaching out towards people and generally being like Gollum. I was like, 'what is this? A dream sequence?'

There was another part when one of the main characters had his eyes ripped out of his head by some other characters. That was pretty gross. They actually pulled some kind of bloody thing out on stage. Again, I had no idea why.

Well, when the intermission came I had Grace explain to me the plot. She had read (most of) King Lear and was vital in making the second half of the play explicable. She was even able to explain the crazy gollum people (they were insane asylum people) and the removal of the eyes (punishment for betrayal). The second half made a lot more sense. But, this being England, it started raining really hard. Lots of people left, but Grace and I managed to hunker down under an overhang of the roof. I was a bit protected, Grace not so much. She had to be in front of me or she couldn't see and that exposed her a bit to the elements. All in all, a great night at the Globe. Grace was wearing flats and walking home in the rain her shoes filled with water and she said it was like walking around in boats.

King Lear is good, but I think I would have liked it more if I understood it.

Also, the 26th was Mike's Birthday. Happy 22 Mike.

June 27 - We met up with one of Grace's classmates and his friends and went out to a club called Koko's. There was this guy who cornered us and talked with Grace and I. He was from the country and he was like a stereotype of the country boy in the big city. He kept saying this was his first time in London and boyee, it sure was different!

At the club a band was playing called Die! Die! Die!. They weren't that great.

June 28 - We spent from 1pm to 8pm at Regent's park having an extended picnic with a bunch of Grace's classmates. The weather was fantastic, sunny and cool. Grace and I have bought an essential piece of equipment, namely a picnic blanket (it's sort of like a normal blanket except its made of a canvas material so the wet grass doesn't bleed through and it folds up and has handles to carry). Anyway, the English kids brought Pimms, a classic British summer drink. It's this alcoholic thing you mix with sparkling water, mint, cucumber and orange rind. Grace really liked it, me not so much. We had beer too, of course.

But it wasn't really sitting around boozing. Grace and I brought our cricket set we bought in India and we all played a game. Grace and I's team got last. I am a really bad bowler. Still, the set was really nice and everyone was impressed by the equipment, if not the game. The German and American classmates all thought the game was a little weird, which I guess it is.

Anyway, it was a perfect day for me. I've wanted to relax in a park on a nice summer day for a long time this summer.

June 29 - I had to spend all day writing a freelance report for work. Lame. But that evening we went to a pub, again with some of Grace's friends, to watch the final game of the Eurocup 2008. Unsurprisingly, Eurocup is a European Soccer Championshihp. The two teams in the finals were Spain and Germany. Spain won. England did not qualify for the contest (only 16 teams do), so the entire championship has had a strange feeling to it. Nobody here feels like they have anything at stake, and they don't. Still, they love to watch football, so they do.

June 30 - We were scheduled to meet with this American guy whose been accepted into both Cambridge and the London School of Economics (LSE)'s economics diploma program. He's looking for advice about which one to choose. We decided to meet at a public lecture at the LSE, by Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International edition (or something), and author of a new book called "The Post American World." Basically he says we're entering a world where countries like India and China will be able to call more of the shots, alongside us. It's not the fall of America and the rise of China and India, we're all going to be up there, it's a world where no one country or two dominates things. He was a very good speaker and it was an interesting lecture.

He had this one really interesting fact. He was talking about how all the countries in the world now have their own media and 24 news networks, and can now form their own narratives, rather than relying on the one CNN and MSNBC gives them. Makes sense. Anyway, he was talking about how different countries see history differently. For example, in America, we look at WWII as a story where we heroically came in and, with help from our British allies, saved the free nations of Europe from fascism. But in Russia, they see things differently. Apparently 75% of Germany's forces were actually on the Eastern, not the Western front, and that is where Germany suffered 75% of its casualties. He talked about how, in the West, Stephen Ambrose wrote a book about the most decisive battle in 1943, which in his view was in Sicily and involved 65,000 troops. The same year though, in Kursk, there was a battle of over 1 million Russian and German troops. Long story short, to Russian eyes, the main story of WWII is the eastern front and the whole western front, including the Normandy invasions, is just a sideshow to the main event.

Another good thing about this lecture was the moderator. He was a Knight, a Lord. Anyway, when it was question time, he would cut people off and tell them to hurry up and ask their question if they started to, even a little, give speeches. Like this one guy started, "now, if I understand Chaos theory correctly..." and the moderator was like, "nope! That's too long! What's your question?!" Normally at these events you get people with crazy rambling questions, but not this time. Everyone was scared of the moderator.

After the lecture we took the American guy out for pizza and had a good time talking with him about England, America and everything. So good that, after that, we went to my favorite Belgian beer place, Bierodrome, and stayed the rest of the night (not that long when things close at 11) drinking Belgian beers.

July 1 - This was Grace and I's two year anniversary. We went out for dinner at L'escargot, a restaurant owned by the British chef Marco Pierre White, the chef who trained Gordon Ramsey. For the restaurant of a famous chef, it was really cheap (although expensive for a normal restaurant).

Grace had escargot, snails. She was pretty proud of herself for figuring out how to eat them without needing to call over a waiter, like the people at the table next to us did. Anyway, the restaurant was really nice and we had a good time. Apparently, if you go to the upstairs (we were seated downstairs) there is a genuine Picasso on the wall. And a Matisse.

July 2 - One of Grace's classmates was going back home to Germany this night, so we all went out again and had a bunch of drinks. By now I had been drinking a lot, for five out of the last six nights. I was starting to dread the Beer Festival which I had agreed to go to with a work colleague the next day.

July 3 - I secretly hoped my work buddy would be too busy to make it to the beer festival, because I felt like I needed a night in. Au contrair (spelling?). He had stayed till 7:30 pm at work last night and come in at 5:30 am to get everything done in time to go to the beer festival. So it was definitely on.

Grace stayed out of this one. We took the tube down to Ealing after work. Ealing is at the very end of the line, so it took 45 minutes to get there. Then we got lost and were given a million incorrect set of directions to the festival. Finally, at 7pm, we found the park. The festival was basically a cordoned off section of the park with two enormous tents, each one with hundreds of barrels of different kinds of (English) beer. Mostly Ale. Ale is a uniquely british drink. It's like beer, but its served uncarbonated at room temperature. Sounds awful, but I think it's quite good. One advantage is it doesn't get worse as you drink it. Beer is served cold, but by the time you get to the last drink, its not so cold and not so carbonated. With Ale, it starts out warm and flat, so no worries, it'll still be warm and flat at the end.

The beer's we tried had names like Blonde Witch, Snowdonia Ale, Wren's Nest etc.

I'm a bit amazed at how these beer festivals manage to work. I think if you had them in the US, people would get absolutely destroyed. But here, everyone is actually there to try the different kinds of beers, and, while they get drunk, nobody loses control, throws up, stumbles or generally causes any trouble. Anyway, I think my tolerance for beer is getting better all the time, because the next day I woke up without a hangover and went to work early.

July 4 - Happy Independence Day! is what lots of people at work said to me. They wanted to know how Americans celebrated the day and they all thought it sounded very nice. These holidays are one of those times you really miss home. Grace and I have missed the fourth of July in Iowa for three years now. We were in Chicago for our honeymoon in 2006, we were in India in 2007 and we're in England in 2008. Anyway, I very much miss it.

To celebrate we went to the absolutely strangest 4th of July festival I've ever seen.

After so much drinking, I desperately wanted something relatively peaceful. We live near the British Museum and they were having an Independence day, American themed celebration, so that seemed the obvious choice.

It was so weird. Now I know what people from other countries must feel like when they go to celebrations of their country in America. This America celebration crammed together the most bizarre set of American culture I have ever seen. Apparently the British museum's idea of an American themed party includes (I am not joking):

-Tap Dancing
-Lindy Hop
-Native American Craft Making
-Demonstrations of Basketball and American Football
-Jazz
-Quilt Making
-Swing Bands
-Print Making

To top it all off, we had "American Style" food. To the Brits that apparently means:

-Footlong hotdogs
-Cotton Candy
-Popcorn
-Cheesecake
-Beer

Originally they had Budweiser beer, but they ran out and started serving Becks (which is German I think), instead.

That's all. We will try to post again soon!

Iowa City Flooding

Hey all, Matt and I have been following the news of the flooding closely and just want to say we're thinking about all of you and hope everything will turn out okay. It looks like the whole community is really stepping up to help with filling and laying sandbags and helping people evacuate their homes. Good luck to everyone!

Pig in Boots

Hey, I just wanted to post this, it is the cutest thing I have ever seen, and maybe will cheer up you Midwesterners who are experiencing the Deluge right now:



Apparently, this little piggy from a farm in England didn't like rolling around in the mud with its siblings because it was afraid of the mud, so the farmers put on these teeny tiny wellington boots and now she is happily trotting about. Cutest thing ever.

Pygmalian

So here's a rule of thumb of mine - wherever you are, make an effort to do the things you can only do in that place (if they appeal to you at least a bit). So, in Iowa City, go to Pagliai's pizza, and the Hamburg Inn. In Ames, go to Thai kitchen and Battles' Barbeque (if you eat meat). In London, go see the art and the theatre (but don't worry too much about the restaurants).

So, in that spirit, Grace and I intend to see some theatre and visit the museums this summer. Last week we went to the National portrait gallery and the Tate Britain museum. And last night, we went to see 'Pygmalian' last night at The Old Vic, a historic theatre (Kevin Spacey happens to be the artistic director). They have a special deal for people under 25 - 100 12 pound tickets each performance for the young crowd.

Grace and I studied this play in high school, but it was impossible to understand a lot of the jokes when it was being read, because so much of it depends on accents. For example, there's a scene where the entire joke depends on the juxtaposition of the character's upper class accent and her lower class topics of conversation. This joke is entirely lost on a high school class from Iowa with no idea that there are different english accents. We all thought an english accent basically meant you dropped your "h's" and said "guv'nor" at the end of every sentence. It turns out there are dozens of accents, in London alone. And it was great to see the actor's make use of all these different accents.

So it was a good play. And I hope to see more. My theory is that I'll know what's good and bad and I'll begin to enjoy things even more when I've seen a slew of plays. It has worked with art, which I am now capable of really enjoying (for about 40 minutes - then I tend to lose my attention). After the play we went to the bar below the theatre (called the pit bar) and enjoyed a pint. The cast was down there, which was cool (it's not like we talked to them though). However, there was someone else there. This guy.

He's better known as this guy.

Henry Wickham from the BBC Pride and Prejudice miniseries. Grace freaked out for about 180 seconds.

Red Bull Flug Tug

Update: Since posting this blog entry I have been informed that the event is actually called Flug Tag, not Flug Tug. Anyway, I found some much better videos on youtube of the action. I'll put them up at the end of the post. I might just recommend starting with them.

On Saturday Grace and I, plus one of our friends, went to see the "Red Bull Flug Tug" in Hyde Park. The "Flug Tug" is basically this silly competition where teams of people - usually men - build enormous gliders and then run them off a ramp into the Serpentine (the man-made lake in the middle of Hyde Park). It's a competition and people are judged on three criteria: creativity, performance and distance.

You can get a maximum of 20 points for creativity. The gliders are not usually built by people who know anything about aeronautics. They're usually more like parade floats that are pushed off a 20 foot ramp, where they fall straight down into the water and break spectacularly apart. The performance is also out of 20 points, and is based on a 30 second performance which the team does before they push their craft into the water. You get 2 points for every meter you glide through the air, for a maximum of 30 points.

Unfortunately, we showed up a bit late (it was free) and there were no more primo seats on the water. Like the majority of the 80,000 people who attended we had to watch the event on giant TV screens. Still, it was a good crowd, and a good excuse to drink some beer, sit in the sun and eat freshly fried donuts (I love freshly fried donuts).

Anyway, I took some videos, because you really have to see it to believe it. Unfortunately, these videos are pretty terrible. When you take a video of a TV screen, it shows up very badly, as you will see. Beware of flashing lights.

ANYWAY, without further ado, here is a typical entry. This one is Star Wars themed.



And here, if you can stand more flashing TV screens, is a wildly successful glider built by real engineers.



Other highlights:

-A very good looking plane built by engineers that snapped apart in mid-air from the weight of the pilot.
-A disco themed team whose glider was literally a giant discoball with some angel wings attached to either side. That went absolutely straight down.
-There was also a team whose 'glider' was literally just a fully loaded fruit stand.

Some Better Videos:

A Nun-themed team (The Bad Habits)


A Better Video of the Star-Wars Team (The Wrong Brothers)


Don't worry, this guy from the Evel Knieval themed team was alright.


And, one more time, the successful glider.

Scotland

We got back to London yesterday afternoon after a week in Scotland. Here's a brief photo tour of the trip.



First we - Mike, Rob and Me - took a train up to Edinburgh. You may have read about it earlier, on this very blog. We stayed in a hostel, 12 bunk beds. I thought it was an all male room, so when I changed that night, I treated it like a locker room. The next morning I saw lots of the people sleeping in the bunks were women.

We stayed at a hostel right under Edinburgh castle.



We stayed out each night, enjoying the live music scene. It's pretty amazing, a set of free live bands for the choosing.

The next day we hiked around town, seeing the castle, going to the top of Arthur's seat, an extinct volcano.





The hike up the mountain was about 45 minutes and pretty exhausting. Really windy.

The next day we headed off to Stirling on the train, to see another castle and the William Wallace Memorial.





Please enjoy the above, blurry photo of me by William Wallace (Mel Gibson)'s sword.

The next day we rented a car and drove off, into the highlands, to the town of Oban.

It was good times. Great to get behind the (passenger side) wheel of a car and drive on the (left hand side of the) open road. Once we got about 30 miles outside of Edinburgh it was just a two lane road, speed limit 60 miles per hour. We had lochs and little wooded mountains all around and the road was really, really windy. We got into Oban, went to take a whiskey distillery tour, and were shocked to discover it was totally booked up. We took a ferry ride out to the island of Mull.



The entire island has a population of about 2500. We only had two hours on the island before the last ferry of the night left, so we stayed in a pub for the whole time. We did not want to miss that ferry.


Like an idiot I thought it was warm enough for a T-shirt. The ferry ride was not so pleasant.

That night my glasses broke, and the only cool pub in town was having a concert which was sold out. We gave up and went to get some food from the local Tescos. It was closed. Oban sucks! That's not entirely true. It had a good sunset. In Scotland, we were so far North we had light until 11:15. This photo was taken around 11 at night maybe.



We left early the next morning (we had to get out of stupid Oban!). We had our first taste of one lane roads - first over a bridge.



Then we got up to Loch Ness, home of the monster.


Nothing to report on that front. We also did some hiking that day. We felt the rain added to the atmosphere.



We got into Inverness that night, the capital of the highlands. However, despite the existence of a three story pub called 'Hootenany' we decided to stay in that night and watch the football - America versus England! America lost 0-2 and the commentators made fun of our team a lot.

That afternoon Grace had finished her last exam and she took an 8 hour train ride up to meet us in Inverness. She got in at 11:05 and the next day we left bright and early for the far North, to the town of Ullapool (pop. 1300).

The landscape changed quite dramatically up North. It became really remote, barren and desolate, but I actually liked it even more.



We got into Ullapool, a really nice fishing village that mostly a jumping off point for hiking and then spent the afternoon hiking to the top of a 500m mountain called Stac Pollaid (Stack Polly). Mike thought, just for kicks, he would go for a little run on the mountain trail.







That night we had some drinks on the harbor.



The next day, Mike drove us part of the way out to another hike, this one to a waterfall. He was really excited to be on the wrong side of the road.



The cool thing about this hike was it started at a bookshop/cafe which was in the middle of the highlands, only accessible by a single lane road (you have to pull or back into a passing spot when another car is coming).

So we hiked out to see a waterfall. It was really bright and none of us had thought to bring sunscreen. I mean, c'mon, it was Scotland. Anyway, Robt was in danger of being sunburned, so he had to put on a 'cape.'






After the hike, we drove back, and got stuck behind sheep wandering around in the road. It happens on the backroads. Anyway, that night we all went out for a last round of pints. Some of us stayed longer and some of us stayed shorter. Me? I found I had a tick in my shoulder, his head all the way in. Grace and I had a good time getting it out that night.

The next day we drove due south, all the way back to Edinburgh. We did stop for lunch.




That night we had pizza hut and went to Indiana Jones (we were tired of learning about foreign cultures I guess). And the next morning, before we knew it, we were on the train and off to London.

Finished!!!

I just finished my last exam and now I'm about to leave to catch a train to Scotland! It feels strange to not have anything that I have to do right now. What does one do with so much free time? I have 8 hours to sit on a train and think about it. So excited!

living in the future

I'm writing this while on the train to Scotland, via my iPod touch. The train has free wireless Internet access. I'm just now looking out the window at fields of yellow flowers. We're living in the future.

Good Days Ahead

Not a lot has been happening for a few months now, but hopefully that will change starting this week. For two months or so, I've been working overtime and freelance to save up money for a trip to Scotland with my brother, his friend Rob, and Grace. For even longer, Grace has been studying at every free moment for her exams. But...

Mike and Rob come into town today - in fact, I have to leave in an hour to go pick them up from the airport. We leave for Scotland on Saturday, for about nine days. And after that I shouldn't have to work quite so much, so I'll have more free time.

Grace's second exam (out of four) is also today. She finishes a week from today, when she'll be taking the long train up to meet Mike, Rob and I in the highlands. After that, she'll 'just' have to work on her dissertation, which will, in theory, be no more than a 9-5 M-F kind of job. We're planning to do actual fun things on the weekends.

Keep an eye out for pictures of Scotland!

Brief Update

That guy below (who looks like a human version of Big Bird to me) is now Mayor of London, and has already started moving and shaking things up! He's banned alcohol consumption on the Tube! How will Londoners COPE???

We have had a solid week now of sunny beautiful weather. London in spring is a revelation compared to London in the long, dark, wet, cold winter. We are taking advantage by spending a few hours reading in grassy Russell Square, which is right near where we live, and by taking our lunches out there. It's a bit like when we were in DC and we were appalled to find that people thought the height of summer fun was to lay out in Dupont Circle. That was lame, but this is amazing, because Russell Square is much nicer, more like a lush, leafy park. Dupont Circle by contrast has been scraped down to the dusty earth and is already covered with homeless people. So people are bringing blankets and picnics and drinks and enjoying the sun. We have also taken books and lunch over a few times but are also stuck indoors studying and working. It's all over for me in three weeks though!

Bits and Pieces

A couple of updates.

This guy is now the mayor of London:



He has had a haircut recently though.

We've had a really good weekend in London. It's finally warm outside, and daylight stretches past 8:30. Plus, it was a public holiday on Monday, so it was a three-day weekend. We felt like big city folk for the first time ever I think today, when we went to eat lunch on a park bench by a fountain.

Also, we bought airline tickets for our trip home this summer, and we got a steal - $550 each! Anyway, we'll be flying into Chicago on August 26 and leaving from there on September 4. Looks like there will be some kind of Labour Day party at the parent's house, so put it in your calendar.

Zimbabwe Again

So. The central bank of Zimbabwe - a country currently in economic meltdown, with a shrinking economy and inflation somewhere north of 150,000% per year - has issued a monetary policy statement. That's when the central bank, or the Fed for the USA, changes the interest rates and all the business pages make a big deal about it. Here is a small excerpt from the latest monetary policy statement from the US Fed.

"The Federal Open Market Committee decided today to lower its target for the federal funds rate 25 basis points to 2 percent.

Recent information indicates that economic activity remains weak. Household and business spending has been subdued and labor markets have softened further. Financial markets remain under considerable stress, and tight credit conditions and the deepening housing contraction are likely to weigh on economic growth over the next few quarters."

So, the US fed lowered the interest rates from 2.25% to 2.00% and issued a 6 paragraph statement to justify their actions.

Compare this to Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe has just raised interest rates from 1,500% to 4,500% and issued a 103 page statement. The ending of this statement is pretty priceless.

"11.15 In conclusion, Ladies and Gentlemen, let our economic history of tomorrow, just like our Liberation War History of yesterday, record that, at her greatest hour of need, when she was at her most vulnerable moment and at the stage when it was easier to give in and give up than to toil and sweat, Zimbabwe found herself lucky to have men and women who could stand up to defend her, who could sacrifice all they have for her till she was able to stand on her own...

11.16 Let our future history record that such men and women were You and Me, and not the other way round.

11.17 In God's hands I submit this Monetary Policy Statement."

Wow.

Update: If you want more Zimbabwe, I like this audio clip from a South African morning radio talk show host. Two DJ's "call" the Zimbabwe embassy to get information on the election results. I fear this may appeal to a limited audience.

First Exam Done!

I just finished my first exam! I can't remember the last time I was this elated. That was my hardest class and now I have three weeks until the next exam. And as Matt said, a few days of having no obligations while I'm in Scotland! Tonight, we are celebrating with a drink 'down the local' i.e. at the nearest pub, which we have decided to consider our 'local'. Geez, after the last FOUR WEEKS of studying for this exam I NEED A DRINK!