Excitement at the Gym...

Well, there was a little bit of drama at the gym last night, which demonstrated exactly how oblivious people really are in that setting… I was just finishing my workout, and this (very young) guy was on a machine, directly across from me. Quite suddenly, he just sort of rolled off the machine, struck his head on one of the bars, fell on the floor and started convulsing. I ran across the room to see what happened. By this point he’d stopped having a seizure and was lying on his back on the floor. Almost straightaway the guy regained consciousness and I helped him reposition himself on the floor so he wouldn’t bang his head again (he was still pretty confused, and totally shocked at what had happened). I probably should have yelled for someone else to come over, but there was no one else at my end of the gym, so I told him I was going to run to the front desk and have them call an ambulance. I ran downstairs and told the girl at the front desk, then ran back upstairs. Amazingly, despite the commotion, and the fact that there were several other people in the gym, the guy was still lying on his back, on the floor, by himself. Don’t these people notice anything outside their little mp3 world? A trainer followed me upstairs and, trying to be helpful (but being, as he was, thick-as-shit), offered a glass of water. Um, hello, the man needs an ambulance, not a drink… So then the manager appears, asking what was happening. I ask if she’d called an ambulance. No, not yet – she has to ‘assess’ the situation first. Um, excuse me? Not much to assess – man falls, bangs head, has seizure, says this has never happened before – sounds like a pretty clear-cut case for emergency services to me! Fortunately, he has the presence of mind to request an ambulance directly (he’s pretty much OK at this point – just looking a bit green). I mean, I understand why large corporations have policies where they ‘assess’ the situation, even after someone says that an ambulance is needed, but in some cases, one should just trust what the person is saying, b/c to not do so is to, possibly, risk someone’s life. Anyway, I will be writing a letter to the parent company of the gym… (My God, how middle-aged am I getting? Writing concerned letters, complaining about the youth of today, getting a mortgage… Gack!)

A Lovely Day for a Bike Ride...

So, I'm sitting here trying to pay attention to the computer (difficult when David and Robin are watching 'Allo 'Allo repeats). Just making late dinner on a Sunday night. I was supposed cycle 100 miles today, but, as luck would have it, I got a flat tire, which wasted a good hour. Blah. I did manage 68 miles - decided to pick random roads, which is always an adventure in a city with as silly a road system as this.

David and I spent the day yesterday looking at kitchens and bathrooms - ooh how very domestic (and very expensive)!.

Anyway, not much exciting to say at the moment, but I do have some pics...

It's generally rude to make fun of other people's fashion choices, so I will just put this picture here and let you make fun of them...



Greetings from the planet purple!



My lunch spot on Box Hill, about 25 miles south of London - that's the lovely town of Dorking (giggle) below...)

I'm surrounded by nerds...

So, one of the fun things about living in a house with two big nerds, I mean, IT professionals, is that the appliances talk to each other (and not just if I've drunk too much). There are five working computers set up in the house - four of them in the living room (two of them on the dining room table), and many an evening passes with us all tippety typeting away in our own little universes. Sometimes David and Robin will speak nerd to each other, and I can only but hope to catch a word or two - 'delviating the ramafram, BRD'. Occasionally, I've even messaged Robin across the room, which tends to result in something being thrown back the other way (usually sarcasm). There is another computer in our bedroom, and, oh, I forgot to mention, a server sitting on the shelf behind the sofa. Both TVs are connected to the computers as well, and I'm waiting for the toaster to strike up conversations in the next little while. (That said, we seem to have an enormous collection of movies and TV shows, all of them perfectly 100% legal I am sure (of course!), and all the computers are named after Muppet characters, so it can't be all bad. Actually, at the moment we are all on different computers - David is ordering a new computer, Robin is transferring data from one computer to another (both of them 'borrowed' from work - must be nice to be an IT manager at a big company). Our happy little very strange household...

Oh, and David and I got the mortgage approved today - woohoo - we are going to be London houseowners! How very posh! David is already picking out new bathroom fixtures - how cute.

David related his very exciting story of cycling derringdoo when I got home today. Some motorist in a big shiny new Chrysler 300 cut off him and a number of other cyclists at a light, so David 'accidentally' left a huge scracth along the side of the car. Big scary car driver makes a big thing about threatening to run over David and says he'd better pull over, blah blah blah, so David pulls over, plays all sweet and dumb and innocent, and gets away with it! Ha ha! I admire the ability to do that - I wouldn't have managed to keep my cool. (Just yesterday I had an altercation with a motorist who honked at and nearly hit me - I caught up with him at a light - he's shouting and honking and making a huge scene (he was a bit of ghetto trash), so I shouted into his open window that 'I have the right to be anywhere on the road I goddamn well please, so f*ck off!', and then planted myself right in front of the car (making sure he doesn't actually get out of the car, doesn't have a gun, and that I know my escape route, of course). Ooh, the excitement of urban cycling! I think I need a Maalox.

Not much else - I'm still sleep deprived, tired and crabby - I should probably go to bed early tonight - that's what I skipped the gym for today, after all. Hmm.

Of Rain and the Coming Republic of Bikelandia...

Yay – it rained finally! We’ve been having a pretty serious drought this summer. Granted, it doesn’t rain much in London – only about 22 inches, but the rain is usually spread out fairly evenly. With climate change, however, this evenness seems to be being compressed into much shorter, heavier rainstorms. The summers are tending to be either storm-filled or entirely dry. This has been a dry one, though, fortunately, not so hot as the rest of northern Europe. London in a dry summer is not very pretty. The parks all turn to straw, the trees look unhappy, and the general level of crud and birdpoop on everything increases exponentially. But, this afternoon, the heavens opened, and there was at least one anaemic burst of thunder (it doesn’t thunder much here).

I’ve been tired and headachy today – I always seem to be tired and headachy. Wonder what it is like to be awake and alive and alert? Our new intern seems quite bright though, which is good, as he’s been made my responsibility. It does mean though that I can’t just hunker down behind my desk and ignore everyone. Ugh – the burden of responsibility! ;-)

Oh, and in bike news, I saw someone cycling up Mare Street on a double-height bike (a bike attached to the top of the bike), sans helmet. Not sure if that was brave or stupid, being up there six feet above the ground like that, weaving through the busses? Oh, and I learned that the UN is trying to take over the world through bicycles. I am very proud to be part of the revolution, and I’m not even wearing my tinfoil hat! Anyway, seeing as how I am at work and probably should be working (hah), that’s it for now. Trying to be more regular about this though… Oh oh – and finally – more evidence that this is a strange little country (in case that wasn’t inherently obvious already).

Oy vey and a half (Indeed!).

Well, I've not been at this in a while. You'd think that as life got more stressful, I'd want to write more, but the actuality is that I get home from work and the gym, feel like a big braindead blob, and park my butt in front of the TV. We're still mid-throes of buying a house. What a big pain in the butt. And not in a good way either.

Robin just got home - he's complaining that they sent him the wrong colour blades for his hair clipper (he got replacement blades). Oh major tragedy ensues...

Anyway, back to things I care about... The house buying process in England is a little bit more fraught with uncertainty than in the US. For starters, the prices in London have not gone down at all, and make New York City look almost affordable. It was my job to find the place, as, after 7 years, David still can't find his way out of a paper bag in this city. So, while unobserved, I looked at several hundred places online, and we actually went out to visit about 12. Each place is listed by any number of 'estate agencies', and the estate agent works for the seller only. This means that it is very very much a 'caveat emptor' type situation - you can't trust the estate agent much farther than you can throw them. Much research is needed to make sure the house isn't actually a big piece of crap and is being sold for a (semi) reasonable amount. Once we decided that the place is, indeed, a good house, we put in our first offer. Rejected. Wait a few days - put in a 2nd offer. Wait. The offer is accepted. However, nothing is legally binding. Now comes time to apply for a mortgage (they now require 25% down payment for a decent rate), and hire a solicitor, who is responsible for talking to the seller's solicitor, as well as checking the local planning permission, the title, etc. The house has to be valued by the bank as well. As it dates from 1893, we're going to get a full 'building survey', to make sure it's not going to fall down. Once this is all completed, we exchange contracts with the sellers, after which it becomes legally binding. Finally, on an agreed date, we meet with the sellers and the estate agent and receive the keys. The offer was accepted about a month ago - we don't really expect to be moving until about October. I don't want to be doing this again any time soon!

So, lots of stress, not much sleep - general blahness.

On a completely unrelated note, London just started its bike-hire scheme last week. 6000 or so big, clunky blue bikes that you can check out and drop off, all over central London - 24/7. A brave new world of numbnuts, toodling about on 45lb behemoths. The very first one I saw being used was, appropriately enough, being run through a red light. Ah well - some things never change.

TfL Bike Hire

I'm sure there have been lots of other things to have happened, but I'm too tired at the moment to think about it - plus I have to fix a few things on my bike.

How butch.

I suppose I will try to be a bit better about this (hmm) - so many times I think 'Oh, I should write this down', and then I don't, and I forget...

Sigh.

No, not the comfy chair!

Oy vey. So, we've been looking at places to live. Just had our second weekend of looking at houses. Avoid anything that is "cute", "quirky", "good condition", "cozy", "can be expanded", etc... Utter and total crap. Very expensive utter and total crap. The funny thing is, the places we have been looking at are all quite small - around 1100 ft2, and obviously designed as the "affordable housing" of 100 years ago. Not affordable anymore! I suppose there is a small part of me that is vaguely curious to go into other people's houses and see how they live, but mostly, I find the whole process depressing - it's amazing how a tiny little shithole nothing of a place can be made to look magnificent through the power of a fisheye lens. But, we knew this was going to happen - London is just about the most expensive city in the world. Blah.

Not a lot else really - I didn't manage a bike ride this weekend, as there was no time, and my bike had yet another problem. Once I get that fixed, the front derailleur, the handlebars, and the pedal cranks will be the only original parts left on the bike. Frankenbike. I did go for a very nice bike ride last weekend though (pics below). And we went to Avi's garden party today - 50 or so people - about 1/2 gay. Funny thing is, quite a number of them are in a gay motorcycle club, so, of course, they were all there in their leathers. What a bunch of queens! David and I chatted with this one guy (who seemed to have a bit of a thing for me (blush!)). Anyway, he was trying very hard to give off as butch of an image as possible, but they he started talking about his bike, and how his gear has to match his bike - even his earplugs match the colour of his bike. Oh dear.

Back to work tomorrow - yuck. Still no hint of another job - stupid crappy economy! And Tuesday is the new national budget, so if things are looking bad now, I don't think they are going to look any better after that. Sigh.

A valley in Kent, just on the southeastern outskirts of London...



Now here's something you don't see very often... The funny thing here about flags is they only tend to appear around sporting events (such as the World Cup) - for the most part, people don't give a ratcrap about the flag, or American-style patriotism, but get a sports event involved, and the flags appear everywhere and people suddenly get very nationalistic. Not sure if that's better or worse - but, they do say that sports are ritualised warfare, so maybe it's one and the same... Hmm. So, with this jerry-rigged flagpole, one might assume that it related to their choice of teams, but as the American flag was flying on top - you just never know.



The view from the North Downs - I would have gotten a slightly bigger view, but there was a couple dry-humping on the other side of the trees, so I thought that might have spoiled my view a bit... Blech.



Hydroponic strawberries. Never seen hydroponic strawberries before...



Wheat fields of Kent... They do grow a lot of wheat these parts...



You just can't make up some of these names...



Bike plus phone box... Is it art, or kitsch? Not sure.




You just can't complain about roads like this - perfect cycling road...



The slightly depressing thing about this ride was that I took the entire afternoon to cycle the 70 miles out to Ashford, and then the shiny new, 140mph train gets be back to town in 38 minutes. Maybe I should cycle faster? Hmm.

Flibble...

Well, I had a lovely walk today, pushing along my bike, which I just spent £500 fixing up. The cable to the rear derailleur slipped a little bit, then went 'dink!' in, of course, one of the less salubrious parts of East London. For want of a screw... Anyway, the bike is locked up inside London Bridge Stations (next to the bike store, which had better fix the problem for free) and I took the train the rest of the way home.

And breathe...

Mildly stressful thing - our landlady just announced she is going to sell, which means we have to find a new place to live, after three years here. Well that's a fun thing to do this summer! David has decided that it is the time to buy, which means, since I'm the one that knows London, that I'm going to find us a place to live. No stress...

(Where did I put the bubble wrap? MUST SQUISH BUBBLE WRAP!)

I had my job appraisal today. You've not lived until you've had a local government job appraisal. First you get to fill out a 10 page form, where you discuss all your targets, learning goals, etc (many short essays), and then you have a 2.5 hour meeting with your manager to discuss the same. Wee fun! Still though, for whatever reason my manager seems to like me. Suppose it's b/c 'im just such a cutie wootie! ;-)

Some random pics:

A rather precarious chair on a debris pile in Hackney:



This is the kind of fun and excitement we have on a Friday night 'round here. This is David and Robin on the way home from the supermarket. (We're not Dutch enough to actually cycle home with the heavy bags hanging from the handlebars - we just push the bikes).



And isn't this just always the way? ;-) Saw this sign on my bike ride last weekend. It did occur to me as I cycled around on the little dinky 1-lane backroads of rural Essex that, in fact, the fact that the English took down all the direction signs at these intersections to fool the Germans (who would never know the way to such places as Upper Dicker or Cockfosters) must have been terribly confusing for the locals as well!



Here is the trusty steed (before the gear cable incident!)



Here's a thunderstorm picking up steam. A hedge and a wall proved decent shelter from the rain!




One shudders to think...



A wheat field in Essex. Essex has a bad name, given that the towns are full of chavs but the countryside is actually quite pretty - almost Midwestern feeling.



This is the huge metropolis of Coggeshall.



Ooh, is it Kansas, or is it England? (Hint, the wheat grows on the left... ;-)



You can just about see the Olympic stadium in the distance. This is taken from the 23rd floor of the Olympic Delivery Authority, where I went to a very boring meeting in a room with very big windows. Not suprisingly, I spent a lot of time looking out the window.




And finally, what does this package say about the general intelligence level of people who eat Tesco Organic Porridge? Hmmm...