My voice

I lost my voice today, in the literal sense (icky flu/cold) and found it, figuratively, online in debates about politics on facebook. In general, I don't really know what I think until I can articulate it well in a discussion. Which is why I so rarely offer my opinion in real life debates, because until I can express myself clearly and know both the facts and feelings, I tend to remain very much in the middle. I think and mull and ponder and inwardly question, try on different sides of an argument, and then if I do end up on one side, I'm very passionate about what I believe or think. Historically, there's always been a really small percentage of things that end up in that category, although I think as I get older I'm a little more willing to risk speaking out before I get to the 100% sure stage. And of course I'm talking about things that hit close to home. I love sparking up a discussion about whether coincidences are meaningful, or criticizing/praising the musical talent on the X Factor (which, by the way, I think is so much more interesting than American Idol!). But on things that do matter to me, it takes a while for me to get to the point where I will confront someone, or argue a point, and I got there this week (and especially today) with the election. I even surprised myself to find I was actually enjoying the confrontation.

I went to see Quantom Solace today - yay Bond! It was fun to go with my flatmate, and I absolutely love walking to the movies, there's a great theater just around the corner. Did not love paying £9.60 for a ticket...but this has been a weekend of excess. I went with my flatmates to a really nice pub for dinner last night, taking taxi there and back (it's really cold and I'm sick, alright?) and forgetting the reason I can afford to live in my amazing flat is precisely because I do not spend money like that. :)

The place was very much a meat market, or whatever the London equivalent is. I find the raw singles scene so fascinating, we were in a popular spot in Notting Hill, so the girls were polished and well dressed, and the men basically the same. The looks by the women sussing up the competition are followed by the men evaluating the options, it's all so sophisticated and creepy. The adult crowd is much more separate from the university crowd, which makes a huge difference from the icky feeling places I remember in Raleigh. We were only stuck passively ignoring the two oddly tall and skinny men chatting us up for the one drink, then we had our booking at 9:30 and retreated upstairs to enjoy the yummy food.

I found this site on techcrunch called "memiary.com" which lets you say 5 things you did that day and tracks it for you. Which is so cool, because that's a small part of why I journal, to take notice of what I'm doing every day...so this way I can just journal my thoughts, not mindlessly record events. Also, I can look back over events and start taking stock of just how pointless some things are, or repetitive, or destructive, or good...who knows!

Happy Birthday Dad!

If my father were alive today, he'd be 65. Crazy! I sometimes wonder what he would look like, now with graying (or totally gray) hair, more wrinkles, maybe thinning or maybe with a little more weight on him. I wonder if we'd see this election the same, or if he would still be pretty conservative. I wonder what it would be like to tell him about playing golf over here and going to the football game, or ask his advice for what I do next in my career. I wonder what it would be like to talk to him about how I'm now the age he was when he and mom got married, or get his opinion on guys that I date. I wonder if we would even talk about that kind of thing! I wonder if he would be spending all his time playing golf now that he's retired, or still drawing out the sketches for the 'dream home' on his engineering paper. After over 17 years, I don't think that saying I still miss him occasionally is the right expression - I've lived several more years without him in my life than I did with him, and it doesn't usually happen that you miss something so far removed from your present life - but I have a bittersweet connection to the idea of him, the memory of him, that comes up on days like today...and I'm letting myself indulge in it and savor the chance to fill my head and heart with imaginations of my daddy.

um, sleet? snow?

Well, this is what I get for saying to my mom and some friends how London is just chilly and dreary longer than NC, not necessarily REALLY cold, except for the heart of January/February. Wrong! It was snowing in north London in last night, and sleeting when I was walking home from the tube last night after work! It's October, what's going on? My roof terrace was iced over this morning, if that keeps up we'll be able to have slip n' slide across the roof parties in December.

And as a consequence of this frigid temperature drop, and probably also due to the long hours outside in the cold on Sunday, I feel like doodoo today. So I'm home sick from work, although still worked pretty much all morning, was a good time to clear through the backlog of my emails.

It's nice though, I'm getting to listing to last.fm instead of the crappy pop radio we have on at work, and find some new bands. I've started using all the social ways you can listen to friends' stations, partly because it's fun, and partly in my ever-increasing attempt to be a web 2.0 geek to be better at my job :)

I haven't posted much about politics on this blog, and I'll probably keep it that way after this until the election is over. But I will say that it is really freaking me out how crazy people are. When I see video clips of people who honestly believe that Obama is a Muslim, and thus a terrorist, it's scary to think that the battle has only just begun if he wins. People are so passionately divided, and I don't really see either side having any intention of fixing that. Obama's platform at least says he wants to, and I hope that if he wins that wasn't just lip service, but if the Republicans only want to have it their way and don't do anything to help bridge the divide, it won't matter.

Football, football, rah rah rah!

That's what my dad used to say all the time when it was Saturday and time for college ball games to start - after fixing the popcorn in our old-fashioned popcorn maker, where you melted the butter on the top while the kernels exploaded below, pelting them into the bowl and drizzling the butter all over it. Oh I love fall - football, pretty leaves, crisp weather...

Anyway, so I was complaining loudly Friday and Saturday about not finding anyone or way to go to the football game that was at Wembley stadium Sunday. Saints and Chargers, second year the NFL has been here. And then I thought, why am I choosing to complain instead of doing something about this? So I shut up, started searching for spare tickets and found a guy looking for a girl to go with him, since his mate couldn't go, and I said, what the hell, I'm doing it! It was slightly like responding to a personal ad, but when it comes to a chance to see a pro football game at a cool venue like Wembley in London, I have no shame. Plus, the guy was Irish, and it's built into my American girl genes to find Irish guys unreasonably attractive. :)

It was SOOO much fun! I had my Steelers jersey on, and probably 70% of the crowd had on some NFL team jersey, it was unlike any sporting event I've ever been to, b/c everyone was a fan of the game, not really the two teams that were playing. The weather even behaved, it had been raining, but stopped an hour or so before the game so it was chilly but clear. The game was great, and the "home" team was the Saints, so most people were routing for them, and it was almost like a home environment, which was fun.

The funniest part for me was the beginning, when the cheerleaders came out and the whole crowd went WILD - probably the biggest reception I've ever heard for the girls. Two reasons - A) being a minor sport over here, there were MAYBE 10,000 out of the 83,000 people there that were female. Actually that's generous, I was the only woman out of the 25 people I could see around me. B) none of the sports here have cheerleaders, it's a phenomenon for them.

Then there were the funny spellings - people with DEFENCE signs, instead of defense. And of course I loved being the local expert on the rules :) Even the game was good, lots of 'offence' and it had an exciting fourth quarter with the Chargers almost coming back from well behind. And my Irish date turned out to be pretty funny and we hit it off well, so it couldn't have been a better day, really.

Nesting

I have always balked at any suggestion of 'settling down' or even admitting I would rather stay in my current location than go somewhere exotic or just plain different - but I officially crossed over the line this week. I put up curtains in my flat, which coordinate with my duvet, and hung the mirror on the wall, bought flowers and placed them in two vases in the room, got the keyboard I ordered all set up, fixed the internet so I can sit here in my room and type before going to sleep...and I'm really freakin' happy with it all. :) Maybe there is something to that theory that people (esp. women) have that urge to 'nest' and create the sense of 'home'...I do pretty well at running from that notion, but it's kinda nice to let my guard down a little. I haven't felt this connected to the place where I'm living and the life I have there since 2001-3, the years after college in Columbia, SC, when I had my first apartment, my piano studio, and worked as the organist at a church. The part about this that scares me is that when I did leave, I knew it wasn't quite the right time, but did it anyway, and it resulted in 2 horrible years...financially, emotionally, and career-wise. So I'm really hoping I can avoid a repeat!

Last night I went out for drinks and then dinner at a Spanish restaurant with some friends - I was feeling so continental! Not just because we ate at 9:30pm, but it was an Italian girl, French girl, and Spanish guy, so I was surrounded. And that is yet another reason I love London. People here ask me all the time why I like living here and if it's for the city, wouldn't I prefer New York or something? My answer to that is that not only am I more likely to have last night's dinner scenario here than in NYC, but it's a heck of a lot easier for me to GO to Italy, France and Spain from London! Along that train of thought, I'm trying to plan a trip to Germany for December to visit a couple friends, and see the Christmas markets :)

Best weekend EVER!? part two

So after a lovely night's rest in Wales, we all got up for a fantastic breakfast, and hit the road to find some waterfalls! Awesome hike, with amazing views - here I am starting out.


This is the first waterfall - ah I love nature :)




And here's the big one we walked behind:


Cool tree.
Castles - stopped to see two of these on our drive through the countryside!

And this is me playing golf in Richmond, and there are the deer! Okay I wasn't hitting the ball next to them or anything, but it was still cool to see them as we exited.

Best weekend EVER!?

Wow, this last week has been a massive roller coaster. Things at my job went amazing and then to SNAFU, and then I went to Oxford to see a play, which was the first in a string of events that just fell into place, taking me to an outdoors 'ballet', the Cotswolds, Wales, and culminating in a game of golf today!

First, I had asked for Thursday and Friday off, but not planned what to do with them. Sunday, my friend asked me if I wanted to go to a play on Wednesday night, in Oxford, and I thought hey cool - I can do that, I don't have to work the next day! So I worked from home on Wednesday and took the 4:21 train to Oxford, ate dinner with my friend, and we went to see "The Secret Agent" an adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novel. I stayed there, and made plans to meet Monica on Thursday for lunch. We strolled through Oxford on a gorgeous day, found somewhere to have a glass of wine and £5 lunch special and sit in the sun, then some quick shopping, went to check out the rental car prices at Avis, which were a bit too much for me to justify at that stage, back to her flat, and then to see "Dancer and Mechanical digger" which was this choreographed routine with a ballet dancer and one of those huge tractor digging things. It was even cooler than in that photo because the moon was out and it was getting dark and just such a cool atmosphere.
From there we had burritos and Monica and Ian's, and then massive, yummy crepes at this cute cafe down the road, and started talking about maybe renting a car for a day and going to the Cotswolds together.

Friday morning, we met up after breakfast, and started looking online to make sure the prices were right, and found we could rent a car for 3 days for £42!!! So cheap! So then we started thinking, where else could we go? Looking at the map, Cotswolds are west, and if you keep going west....WALES! So we start planning a trip to Wales :) Decided on Brecon Beacon National Park because it's pretty easy to get to, has lots of waterfalls, and there's a great B&B lodge/spa with a night available right in the middle of it.

So off we go...Ian was awesome and drove the whole way - his first time on the left side of the road! We saw so many cute little villages - one with a mechanical music shop/museum, all with adorable stone houses and buildings and flowers and walls and sheep, it was great. And we had the best weather I've ever seen in England.





Bourton-upon-water was the favorite, had all these little bridges over the river running through it - we stopped there for cream tea.

I think we hit about 6-7 places all in all before hitting a nasty traffic jam (doesn't seem likely in the idyllic setting of the country shires of England, but it can happen) and starting our trek west. We ate our sandwiches at Ross-on-Wye, had a cup of coffee, and reached Nunt Ddu around 9.

I think Ihave to stop there because I'm exhausted and have a lonnnnng day at work ahead, I can just tell, more upheaval may await!