Category Archives: Ideas (blog)

bug babble.

Come on, England!

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The World Cup is coming, and while the UK is generally the kind of place where they celebrate all of the UK or none of it, England pride is definitely in full force throughout the London area. This fazed us not at all, as I’m not sure anyone’s really expecting the US to survive their first match (which, coincidentally, is against England).

The English rallying cry is “Come on England”, which I’m pretty sure is supposed to be pronounced like a cheer, the same way we yell “Go Phillies!” (I’m amused by the fact that while Americans want their teams to “Go”, Brits want their team to “Come on”. Teams in that stadium won’t know if they’re coming or going.)

We saw so many Come on England signs that my sister transformed the phrase from a cheer to a jeer. It’s not pronounced like “Come on England, whoo!” it’s pronounced more like “Aww, come on, England, what’s wrong with you?” Before long, if we were caught in traffic, tired, the waiter was taking too long, the sun went behind a cloud… you know, pretty much anything, we’d all go “Come on, England!” giggle, and move on.

Throughout our insanely long trek through the Canadian airport, we debated the fate of “Come on, England!”. For a while, we converted it to “Come on, Canada!” but hit a glitch when we were annoyed at the US customs line… “Come on, America!” is too long, the suggested “Come on, Yanks!” felt like we were letting the other 3/4 of the country off the hook and I just haven’t warmed up to “Come on, States!” the way I thought I would.

So for now, everything’s England’s fault. Could be for a while.

No pudding! Ice cream, coffee!

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This post was actually written on June 5, but when they pertain to a specific date, I’m backdataing them.

Sunday the 30th we took a long walk around London, starting with a ride on the Northern Line of the Underground into Embankment. From there we crossed over the Thames by foot and walked up to the London Eye. I quickly learned a few things:

  • Copyright of Disney characters is pretty much ignored. We saw a number of Donald Ducks and at least one Mickey Mouse in costume in the path along the Thames entertaining. (We also later saw carousels and a number of other random objects with Disney characters airbrushed on them.) Let’s just say anyone who took their Donald Duck mask off in front of the public at Disney would be fired, but it wasn’t at all unusual on the streets of London.
  • Dressing up as a silver statue and standing on a box on the sidewalk is an acceptable way to make a living, apparently.
  • The London Eye is extremely busy on the first Sunday of half-term.

We walked up to the National Theatre in London, past the Blackfriars Bridge, and stopped at the Tate Modern art museum. I enjoyed the museum more than I expected to, not being a big fan of modern art. I still stand by my statement that the most beautiful thing I saw at the Tate was the view from the restaurant at the top, where the sun was shining on the Thames and making London look amazing.

From there we walked down to the Globe Theater and took a quick look inside, crossed the Thames back to the north side at Millennium Bridge (which is awesome by the way) and took a look at St. Paul’s Cathedral on our way up to Chinatown.

We got totally distracted by St. Brides Church, where the crypts were open for touring. There are few things I’ve experienced as awe-inspiring as standing in a crypt where I could reach out and touch (though I didn’t) the walls of a church that were dated to the 11th century.

From there we hiked it to Trafalgar Square, popped into the National Gallery for about 5 minutes, and finally made it into Chinatown.

We found a great little restaurant offering an 8-course meal for 9£ a piece, ate ourselves full of duck and chicken and shrimp, and laughed ourselves silly at some of the antics in the restaurant.

Behind us, a table kept asking about dessert. They kept asking for pudding. The waiter kept saying, “No pudding! Ice cream, coffee.” It took about a minute for everyone to agree on vanilla ice cream, but we’ve been chanting “No pudding! Ice cream, coffee!” ever since.

When we got our ice cream, by the way, it was as much chaos, because the waitress forgot about us, then seemed annoyed we’d asked for dessert, then didn’t know the term for vanilla ice cream, then finally delivered 3 bowls of ice cream, where each scoop was about the size of a ball of butter.

Thoroughly exhausted, we made our way back onto the tube, and home again.

Culture shock. Well, a little.

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I have a half-written post on the iPad I can’t fetch because of wireless restrictions, so you’ll have to take it from me that you’ll hear about our flight here later…. probably when I’m on the flight back.

The family I came here to visit had to put their cat down today, on a wet, miserable day, so the stay has started out a bit odd. We’re making the best of everything and everyone’s being very patient with everyone else, so I’m sure that while things won’t be quite what we all expected, they’ll turn out to be pretty nice for what they are.

Things I have learned in England so far:

The electrical system is so controlled that when you blow a circuit breaker in your hotel room, nobody knows how to go flip the switch to turn it back on. We were moved to a new hotel room instead. So that was a bit interesting.

The elevators (lifts) count up from zero…. but the sign in the elevator says that everything (lobby, restaurant, etc.) is on floor G so if the 0 button on the lift wasn’t raised above the others, I don’t know that we’d’ve ever guessed.

There are very few true intersections on the roads…. most things are merge points or roundabouts. There are no stop signs. Dashed lines are painted on the road itself if you’re supposed to stop. Whereas in the States we’re expected to accelerate to merge into traffic, in the UK you’re expected to be prepared to stop.

And wow, it is difficult to adjust to people driving on the left side of the road because you constantly think that there are drunks barreling toward you. It’s most especially scary when you’re at the front of a double-decker bus. The bus drivers are very very good but it really does look like you’re going to hit everyone and everything. The roads are particularly insanely narrow.

We ate at a pub for lunch, and it was delicious. Sticky toffee pudding is wonderful, the curry is very good, and the smoked herring and cheese cakes are interesting. We won’t starve to death, that’s for sure.

The money’s more accessible, because all the bills are different sizes, but that does make finding a wallet a bit odd. I learned you don’t tip in a hotel until the end of the stay, you don’t tip at anything short of a full restaurant, and parking at the supermarket is on the supermarket’s roof.

I don’t know that I have the personality to wander into a foreign country on my own, with no local guide. (It took the trip to Boston for me to be comfortable traveling in my own country, for pete’s sake, although I think I did very well on my own going to Seattle.) It’s the little things that build up to the point that your brain goes, “Are all these people out of their minds?!?”.

Tonight was Eurovision… think American Idol where every country gets their own entry, and everyone calls in to vote for their favorite acts (the call cost 10p from a land line and “considerably more” on a mobile phone, the TV said) but you can’t vote for your own country. They then announce which acts each country voted as the top 10 for that country, individually by country, until all the votes have been tallied…. and then the top act is expected to sing their song again. The country where the top act came from is expected to host Eurovision the following year.

Apparently this has been going on since the 50s although I’m not sure it would ever take off in the United States because the music is all pretty much bubblegum pop and not enough anorexic singers. Plus, some of the costumes remind me more of the Mummers Parade than they did of an international talent show.

Topping all this is the fact that since it’s a live show, the show itself has an announcer, and then there’s a second country-specific commentator speaking over the main announcer throughout the whole thing. England has apparently taken on the tack of using their announcer as an homage to MST3K, or at least, that’s what it sounded like to me.

Laughed our asses off, learned a bit about the world and a lot more about politics than I expected, and actually heard one or two songs that didn’t make me physically nauseous.

Tomorrow we’re going to tromp all over London and do the tourist thing. We have to be up at 9 and it’s now almost 2 and I’m not tired at all. Not sure how I’m going to sleep, and my brain’s starting to speak with an accent when I think too much, so I might just go play The Sims or something until I crash.

Filling in the gaps: How do you say “I blew a fuse” in British?

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This post was actually written on June 5, but when they pertain to a specific date, I’m backdataing them. Also, in the tradition of protecting my family’s privacy, as usual, Internet aliases are used instead of names.

Just as I gave up on staying awake on the plane, they started raising the lights. We were less than 2 hours out of London and it was time to feed us breakfast. I don’t remember what breakfast was, just that I was thoroughly disinterested in it and wanted to be off the plane.

We landed in Heathrow without incident and walked through what I still swear were the employee entrances (lots of long skinny corridors of plan wallboard) until we were finally herded into passport control.

Passport control was a loooong line that terminated in someone asking us why we were here and when we were leaving. It wasn’t nearly as terrifying as I’d somehow worked myself up to it being, and by then I’m not sure if anything could have terrified me anyway. I was too tired. We collected our luggage and met up with Viv, who handed us a bag of soda and water and weird British candy and led us to the car.

Yorkie
An example of weird British candy

Because we couldn’t check into the hotel until 2, goatfiend took us back to the flat, where we enjoyed unlimited Internet, soda and snacks, a delicious breakfast bread, and wonderful wonderful naps. We were out so cold that Viv went out for a bit, returned, and had to get the neighbor with the spare key to let us in because despite the fact that the flat is 800 square feet and I was less than 5 feet from the door, neither of us heard her knocking to be let back in.

When plantnerd returned home we feasted on huge huge salads, chatted and caught up and drank tea, and then finally checked in at the hotel.

The room was nice, if small. Two beds, a bathroom larger than plantnerd’s kitchen, and a window that actually opened. We promptly went about the usual tasks of choosing beds, setting up (and paying for) internet access, and trying to figure out how to charge 2 laptops, an iPad, and 2 phones on one UK power converter.

Here’s the wrong answer: power bar. I’d packed an old 6-plug power bar from the house, figuring that we could plug that into the wall and then plug all our stuff into it. When you plug the converter-laden-powerbar into the wall, hear “FFFT!” and smell something almost exactly like gunpowder, you rethink your ingenious plan.

The right answer turned out to be twofold: borrow a second converter from the cousin, and change hotel rooms. That’s right, I said change hotel rooms. You see, everything in the UK is triple checked to make sure that it’s electronically OK to plug in, so they almost never blow a fuse or circuit breaker. When they do (as we did – none of the plugs on the desk now worked, including the TV), the hotel staff don’t know how to fix it. There’s no breaker box in the hotel room. There’s nobody on staff certified to go find the problem on a Saturday morning. The only solution was to switch us to the next hotel room down the hall… which is exactly what we did the next morning.

Above the ocean

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10:24 pm (ET) – 3:24 am London time. Some notes:

First, How to Train Your Dragon is awesome.

Second, when you’re tired and hungry enough, even cold corn and cheese salad in some kind of Italian dressing stuff tastes good. Odd, I know.

Third, if you order a rum and coke with dinner, they give you the world’s smallest glass of coke, and a bottle of rum that is better sized for two glasses of coke. So I’m still waiting to get more soda before I finish that puppy off. It mitt just be enough to get me to sleep, though I’m thinking the way I feel right now that if I’m not sleeping yet it’s not going to come.

I have a smoldering headache that feels like dehydration, which is an odd idea for me because I’ve had more water in the last 24 hours than I’ve had for months and still it’s not enough. Guess I shouldn’t be too surprised, considering I’m currently canned… Meaning the plane…. Dehydration would be the next step in ensuring my preservation I guess.

According to the map built into my seat screen, we’re finally out over the open ocean. Still many hours to go, which feels amazing because I think I’ve been in this seat for a week already.

The seat thing also shows us further south than the original trajectory it drew back in Toronto. We’re about the same latitude as Halifax, or maybe just south, and just north of Boston.

My companion is fast asleep with her sweatshirt hood over her head and her mouth wide open. If I think I’m dehydrated, I’ve got nothing on what she’s going to be by whatever passes for morning around here.

It’s been just long enough since dinner that those who are still awake are starting to have significant interest in the bathrooms. Couple that with a slight shake to the plane and I’m wishing I’d gone right after dinner. 35,000 feet in the air is no place to try to hold it until you get home.

Right now I’m trying to decide whether to switch over to watching another movie (this time on my iPad) or whether to work on the novel.

12:48am ET, 5:48am London time.

OK, I am officially sick of being awake in a chair.

I already watched two movies (the aforementioned awesome How to Train Your Dragon, and the animated Last Unicorn that came out in 1982 thanks to my iPad) and I highly doubt I have the patience for a third. My body’s sending me every single sign it has that it wants me to lie down and take a nap: legs are cramping up, nose is running, head aches, butt aches, and I can’t type to save myself.

I am a grouch.

Canada: a review

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My sister and I are in Toronto right now, on a layover during a trip that will take us from Philly to London. I’m pretty surer we’re just in one of the two terminals, but it’s so small it feels like I’m in the world’s tiniest airport. I think we’ve walked this terminal twice.

Things I didn’t expect about Canada:

1. It’s hot here. Like, probably 85 degrees and muggy. I’m not sure that Canada was prepared for this, because it seems like they’re barely running the air conditioning. I’m used to places running the AC as if they’re refrigerating a building. If I had known that it was going to be sticky hot even in the airports I would have worn shorts.

As it is, it’s only supposed to be in the 60s in the London area, so I don’t necessarily want to change into shorts here, especially since I’m pretty sure the airplane has a better chance of being cold than hot.

2. My brain keeps desperately attempting to resurrect the French lessons I took in high school, so every time I listen to an announcement in English and French I forget half the English announcement as soon as the French one comes on because my brain gets distracted easily on four hours’ sleep.

3. Customs was really easy. Mostly because my sister and I were the only ones trying to get through at the time.

More later, as our vacation develops!

Lava oil maybe?

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If I tried to write down everything that was in the nightmares I just woke from we would be here all week. But here’s a quick summary.

A friend from work had a new car (SUV actually) that had voice activated controls. She told me I could try them by telling the car to become a camper, and she handed me a fancy phone/microphone/doohicky. When I told the car to become a camper it became a playground instead – the swingset I’d had as a kid, to be exact, but with one lone tire swing and a largish (30×30) square of AstroTurf that the swingset sat upon.

That drew a crowd, and suddenly I wasn’t going out to lunch with a friend, the car was part of a number of booths at a home show / car show / convention type thing. We did have a camper then, but it was a separate vehicle, which I had to chase a different co-worker through to get the car remote back from. He was planning something nefarious, or maybe he just wanted to run off with the senator (who looked like a different woman I know from work) because they were a couple.

Anyway, I went back outside and asked the car to transform into a camper so we could leave and the car agreed so long as I made sure the senator (the car recognised her) got off the swingset first and wasn’t in danger. Once I did that the car transformed into an armored vehicle, and the senator and I drove away.

Now the dream was no longer first person adults. (Although I have to admit in most of my dreams, including this one, by “adult” I mean I’m about 22 years old.) Instead, the camera is on some toys on a bedroom floor that are being controlled by a child (9 or 10 years old) who is never quite on-camera. Bare arms capped with the dark green sleeves of a teeshirt, brown courderoy pants covering knees, and the occasional white sneaker were glimpsed, but the camera was at head height of our protagonist (and yet it wasn’t the child’s view of the toys) so that’s all we saw.

The child was narrating a converation between some terrorists in their fort (a closet door) who had taken the child’s mother (a Barbie doll in her underwear) hostage, and given the child specific instructions on what he could do to get Mom back, which strangely included trying to blow up the terrorist fort so the terrorists would know he arrived. (Blind & deaf terrorists perhaps?)

Instead, the child used a battering ram (soda straw) that he kept cutting shorter and shorter, to slowly bang the closet door open so that, while he was still negotiating with the terrorists, mom could run out and jump into the armored jeep and then they drove away.

The rest of the dream was a long and complex chase scene, back to normal first person, sometimes taking place in a Hummer, sometimes in my Saturn, sometimes in our Camry, sometimes in my brother’s new Subaru, and sometimes in my parents’ Oldsmobile. I was the driver most of the time, and I was back to being me. Mom was safe at work. I don’t know where my sister was but she was safe as well. Nighthawk, as far as the dream was concerned, didn’t exist.

My father was being hunted by the aforementioned terrorist gang, but since they were a secret society we couldn’t tell who they really were. Everywhere we went at least six cars were following us. We tried lots of ways to shake them, most of which were temporarily successful, but none of which were foolproof – after the next turn or the next car switch they’d be back on our tail in different cars.

Eventually we figured out how to ditch them all and we went home (my parents’ house). Dad and my brother worked on making a giant inflatable toboggan/slide out of a twin air mattress that was at least 30 feet long, and I was in the house thinking about dinner. Dad came in and said that he wanted to go out for a drink and I agreed. I said I’d drive because he was in no shape for it.

We stepped out the front door discussing where to go, and just as we yelled our choice out to my brother, we realized there were at least 10 cars in the yard & on the street, filled with “friends” we recognized, who said they’d all meet us there. They all left.

Mom arrived home from work to find us discussing whether the air mattress would work yet (no) and suggested we go somewhere else for drinks. I got Chance and Kaylee into the house and we all got into my car, but then I got nervous that someone would attack the house while we were gone. I went back to the house with Dad to collect the dogs and that’s when we realized the house two doors up was on fire – at least, the yard was. By the time we saw it, the yard next door was glowing too, and it was starting to seep into our yard.

I thought it was lava, so I ran inside and got the dogs. My brother, and I debated who was going to call 9-1-1, while Dad whipped out this big phone and called. He apparently recognized the man on the other side of the line and explained that it looked like “the rig was leaking again”. When I looked down I realized it looked like a mixture of vegetable and motor oil was running through the yard.

Then a second person cut Dad off on the phone and demanded that if he was going to call 9-1-1 he needed to join the calling club to get the best discounts. We could all hear the argument over the phone between the legitimate dispatchers and this loud screaming man, who was trying to get Dad to admit that his last name was Hochstetter (it’s not) and then hung up yelling he’d be right there.

I suddenly realized that Dad wasn’t on his own cell phone. He was using some other phone he’d picked up somewhere. It was the same phone controller thing from the transforming SUV, which we didn’t even have anymore, and the whole chase was because the terrorists were after the fancy car.

That must have been too logical for my right brain to handle. I woke up.