Days and Nights in Camden Town

cluttercup and I went for a walk around Camden Square last night and we saw a fox cross the road. We walked around the square as it was nice and we hadn't been there before. We found a pub near by that looks like it might be nice and we think we'll try it in a few days. We could use a local.

As we were walking around the park we saw the fox bobbing in and out of the fence around it looking for food. He (or she) didn't seem to be bothered by us walking around at all. The fox didn't look at us, but wasn't exactly trying to hide from us eihter.

I don't think cluttercup or I thought that we'd be seeing wildlife in London. When we lived up in York, the most we ever saw were some rats from the Ouse. We saw loads of wildlife in Pennysylvania, but I think we thought that would be behind us once we moved to the big city.

This is caused entirely by having cluttercup's school books near the computer.

Grab the nearest book.
* Open the book to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions if you want to.
* Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

On the other hand, Marxism only partially dislocated the myth of Nature and the idealist anthropology it supports. - The Mirror of Production, Jean Baudrillard

memage via sabotabby

Well, I suppose it has been a while since I've been regularly posting here. I've been running around a lot between NYC and Horsham, PA and then over to Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota and now we're back and getting ready to move to London.

London stuff is getting sorted out. cluttercup is sorting out most of the stuff in the apartment with the move and I'm sorting out the stuff around work and banking. I think I might have set up international personal banking for my company. It really was the easiest way to set up an account in the UK before going.

I've also signed up for Twitter. Missing out on the stuff the Phoenix Lander has been doing was just too much.

I think I should get back onto the blogging though. I'd like to record how things are going with the move to London and what my impressions are once I get there. I hope that posting from there will be slightly easier than posting from the wifi-less Brooklyn apartment.

Powered By great vibes

OMG! We just survived round two of the thunderstorms of Wisconsin that are trying to kill cluttercup, my mother and me. Tomorrow it looks as if Minnesota is going to take its swing at us as we try to cross the state.

On a whim we went to Manhattan yesterday to see if we could get the books that cluttercup wants from the NY Public Library, which is open on Sunday, unlike the Brooklyn Public Library (the big on on Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn), which is not. We arrived to notice that the big building, which is where you would survive the Day After Tomorrow, was closed on Sundays, but the Mid-Manhattan library was open and it had the books she was after. However, the Brooklyn library card is only good for Brooklyn. The NY library card is for Manhattan, Bronx and Staten Island. I mean come on, if you're going to claim all of population as part of your claim of being the biggest city in the US, then you have to have one library card for the whole city.

I really just wanted to go and do something touristy and see Grand Central Station and the Library. After that we walked up 5th Ave from 42nd St to 59th St, past the Rockefeller Center in all its 30s fascist glory (really, the archtecture is scary) to the south eastern corner or Central Park and the big glass cube of the Apple Store. I thought we could get a UK keyboard for cluttercup's iBook G4 with the sticky space bar.

They didn't really want to sell me just the part in the store. They wanted me to carry the laptop from Brooklyn all the way up. And they also thought they would have to order the part, which I can do on the website. Why they wouldn't just sell me the part (the keyboards on the old iBook G4s are about the only easily replaceable parts) but wanted me to drag the laptop up here so they could order it is beyond me.

I was wearing my Kill Bill shirt though. Maybe they didn't trust me.

I'm really enjoying being in NYC. I like where we're staying in Brooklyn. I enjoy the commute on the subway and the path with the extra bits of walking that I can get in. I don't mind the crowds, or the tourists that don't know where they're going.

The one thing that annoys me is this. At work they have installed new IR sensor toilet and urinal flushers, soap dispensers and faucets. They have also put in IR sensor towels that dispense one towels worth at a time.

What burns me every time is when someone gets some paper out and then pulls more out of the machine. This jams the machine for later use and means that they are using 5 or 6 paper towels worth, when they could only be using 1 or 2.

If I weren't external I'd be telling them off. As it is, I just burn up inside.

I think it annoys me that they are misusing the tool and ruining the towel dispenser for whomever comes after. I wouldn't mind if they used 5-6 paper towels.

How come my right nipple is going Spung! even though I'm not a robot in a Charlie Stross Heinlein Homage (pastiche? mashup? remix?)

Two great tastes that taste great together! A community OS for a community organizer.

Wow, there was a big storm that blew through last night. It looked very impressive with lots of wind blowing things over and rustling the trees and lightning everywhere, which looks rather impressive from the 32nd floor.

However, the video I took of it is really, really dull. I wonder if lightning just looks cool because we can see the flash longer than it really lasts. It was pretty cool watching it hit the lightning rods on the buildings near by.

There also looked to be a big fire off in the distance in Brooklyn, but I didn't hear anything on the news this morning and the flames seemed to die down relatively quickly. It was far away though and it was through the rain and a rain streaked window. Maybe my eyes were just playing tricks on me.

w00t!

emacs from cvs works again. No more 7x13 font not found error! Huzzah!

My dad is leaving the hospital tonight after having only been in over one night without any incident. The CAT and MRI scans didn't show anything and from what I've been able to gather, the doctors think it is just a diabetes seizure.

My dad is OK. His legs are sore from seizing and he bit is tongue pretty badly, but overall he is OK.

My dad had a grand mal seizure today. This is his second one in the last eight years. He is diabetic, so they are thinking that is the cause. I'm thinking this is the current cause of my insomnia. I hope that I'll find out more later...uh today actually.

Wow, you'll never guess what music they were playing at the Wawa gas station.

w00t! A new star, 11 Leonis Minoris has entered my light cone today!

We're down from Brooklyn tonight and staying in our country estate. We were invited to a neighboring estate to partake in Lord John and Lady Andreina's Late Spring Ball. Last fortnight we were at Lord Michael and Lady Kathy's spring gala. Oh, the social whirl of it all!

cluttercup has joined one of the local Brooklyn Heights girl gangs. She's currently going through the initiation ritual which involves surviving the Girl Gang Grot. I hope she makes it and I hope I do too.

70 point win! Oh yes! My headache did not hold me back. The cathedral that cluttercup dropped on me relatively late in the game just gave me a 48 point city. All of my lake roads got finished (2 very near the end). I didn't drop any points due to cathedrals or lake roads. w00t!

Hmmm...when I had drivel running it kept on hitting a website that I didn't recognize and wasn't going through my ssh tunnels for my web proxy. wtf?

Now I know that there will be a number of people who will be happy that I'm not writing about cluttercup's 8pt squeaker in Carcassonne last night (see what I did there?), but it does look like not having a network connection to harangue people from is impacting my writing regularity.

I had been keeping up to date locally, but I found that the lack of exhibition was really discouraging me. So I'm going to try to write drafts in Drivel and then post them when I get network access in the morning. Who knows what affect this will have on my writing.