Capital City

This week it's the fifth annual SpringOne conference, but this year it's in New Orleans in October rather than Florida in December. I didn't go last year - a combination of no holiday entitlement left and no money, plus the fact that I'd been for the previous three years - but with the change of location this year, I decided to go. We knew there was no way we could get a direct flight there from the UK, so we took the opportunity to do something we've been talking about for years - at least, since we started watching the West Wing - and spent the weekend in Washington DC. Turns out there was a flaw in our plan though, as none of the direct flights from DC to New Orleans was with anyone who partnered with our trans-Atlantic BA flight, so we ended up connecting in Dallas, but it was pretty painless, as connections go.


It was pouring down when we got to DC on Friday afternoon. In fact, just walking 5 or 6 blocks from a restaurant back to our hotel was enough to soak Rob's shoes and socks right through, so he resolved to find a pair of slightly more waterproof shoes on Saturday morning. In true man-on-a-shopping-mission style, he walked into the men's shoes department of Macy's, picked up the first pair he saw, tried them on, liked them and bought them. And put them on straight away, leaving his rain-soaked shoes at the store. He remarked that these new shoes were great because they struck a balance between smart and casual - they didn't look out of place with jeans but they were equally good with smart trousers, so he would probably wear them next week at the conference, instead of wearing the shoes I had packed for him. That was when I remembered I had forgotten to pack his more formal shoes…


Weather-wise, Saturday was pretty much a repeat of Friday. After Macy's, we got the Metro over to Capitol South and had a look around the Library of Congress, then we walked across the road to the Capitol Building and did the free tour. We walked up the Mall towards the Washington Monument but it started raining really heavily so we ducked into the Air & Space Museum to escape the rain for a while. Turned out everyone else had the same idea - it was packed. So we got the Metro up to a micro-brewery Rob had found and had a late lunch. We were pretty wet and cold by then - we had brought waterproof jackets with hoods etc, but once my jeans were wet through and my legs got cold I started feeling a bit fed up. Plus we were both quite jet-lagged so we made our way back to the hotel via the White House, got in our pyjamas, watched a movie, ordered milk & cookies from room service and went to bed at 9pm. Bliss.


Sunday was colder than Saturday, but it was dry, which made for a much better sightseeing experience. We started out at the Jefferson Memorial and walked to the Lincoln Memorial via the Washington Monument and World War II Memorial, then we walked across the bridge and into Arlington Cemetery. We got to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier just in time to watch the changing of the guard ceremony, and we also saw the Kennedy graves. Then we walked up to the Iwo Jima Memorial, jumped on the Metro at Rosslyn (remarking that we hadn't realised that the place where President Bartlet got shot was quite so close to Washington) and rode back to our hotel.


I loved the Jefferson Memorial. It was far more beautiful - and less crowded - than the Lincoln Memorial. I really liked Washington generally: it was quite European in its feel; it reminded me of somewhere like the Ringstrasse in Vienna. Well worth a visit.

Next stop: NOLA.

The Pines

Our staff team (minus Smithy who was ill) just got back from 2 nights away to discuss the various aspects of the Church's work. We went to a house called The Pines in Coldwaltham, which is a place in the middle of nowhere the other side of Chichester. I went for a run each morning, and yesterday morning the sunrise was beautiful, so I resolved to take my camera with me this morning. Trouble was, the sunrise was rubbish this morning. Typical.

Still, I took some pictures while I was on my run. I really must read that Lightroom book I borrowed off Andy and learn how to use it - these pictures are just slightly retouched using iPhoto.

I think this one would look nice if I could black-and-white out the background. It's pretty much there already.

It took me forever to get this shot. I had my zoom lens on the camera, and it took me so long to find the dragonfly through the viewfinder that by the time I did, it had flown off again. I'm really pleased I got this one in the end.

I Heart the Big Smoke

Rob & I spent this past weekend in London. We got the train up on Friday afternoon, checked into our hotel and went straight out to meet Brent, Joe & Tara for a meal. It was amazing - it called itself 'Healthy Meal' but there was so much of it; I'm not sure it was all that healthy to eat such a large amount of food in one sitting :).

Saturday was our shopping day. I mentioned at work last week that I was looking to buy a ring in London and one of my colleagues told me to call her friend, who owns a jewellery wholesale business. I spoke to him on Friday, and he gave me the name and address of a jewellery shop in London that they supply. When we got there on Saturday, they had been told to expect us, and they gave me about 17% off the price of the ring I chose, plus a bottle of champagne to take away. Result! It's not what you know...

I also got a watch and a handbag, and two separate opportunities to speak some Italian. Rob got a key ring. But it's a nice key ring.

In the evening we met up with Joe and Tara again and went to see The Shawshank Redemption at the Wyndhams Theatre. I don't know how faithfully the West End production sticks to the original play, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption (or even how the film fares against the original, for that matter), but as a stand-alone piece it was pretty good. By no means as good as the film, but there's only so much you can do with a play about a prison escape when you can't actually portray the guy crawling through miles of sewage pipe. There were some noticeable differences between the play and the film, but as I said, taken in isolation it was a great way to spend a couple of hours on a Saturday night.

On Sunday we got up early and walked down to HTB for the 09:30 service, then afterwards we made our way back towards the hotel, walking past Harrods just as it was opening :). We had a quick browse around before going back to the hotel to check out and get the train home.

The more I go, the more I love London. I couldn't live there, but it's great for a few days.

So That's What That Thing Does...

Rob bought me an SLR camera over 2 years ago, just before we moved down here, and I have never used it out of Automatic mode. Until today...

We both went to a 'Getting to Know Your Digital SLR' course at Portsmouth Dockyard today, and learned the basics like setting aperture, checking shutter speed, adjusting white balance and ISO settings, the rule of thirds and hotspots. I learned about depth of field and had fun taking pictures around the dockyard, experimenting with my camera's settings, getting blurry backgrounds, moving the focal point from one side of the picture to the other, etc. Here are a few un-retouched first attempts.

Do You Hear the People Sing?

6 of us went to see Les Miserables on Saturday in the West End. I love living just over an hour from London! Only one of us had never seen it before, and by the time we came out of the theatre, between us we had seen it 24 times...

It's over 4 years since I last saw it, so it was about time I saw it again. It really was just as good the sixth time as it was the first! The guy playing Valjean was the understudy (we saw the matinee performance) but he was absolutely awesome - when he sang his diction was really clear so you didn't miss what he was singing, which as you may know is one of the things I look for. Javert, on the other hand, was less articulate, and I was worried that Cathy, who was the Les Mis rookie, would miss what he was singing about, but she said she followed everything OK.

Having listened to the music countless times over the past 20 years, I have to say I'm a bit fed up of most of the better known songs in this show. What I love, though, are the not-so-famous songs and interludes, in particular One Day More, the Act I Finale, and the Epilogue from Act II. [NB: Don't click these links if you don't want to know what happens! But if you haven't seen it, rectify that as soon as you can!] One Day More is possibly my favourite ever song: it combines the 'theme tunes' of all the main characters into one song and took months to write, but it was well worth the effort.

It turns out most of the people I work with haven't seen Les Mis either. I feel another trip to the Queens Theatre coming on...

This is the Life

Yesterday we went up to Hook to meet up with Rob's best man and his girlfriend. We had a really lazy couple of days - it was bliss. Spa treatments on Saturday afternoon followed by a dip in the jacuzzi, afternoon tea (heavy on the cakes again, not so much with the sandwiches) then a walk round the grounds, a delicious evening meal and a celebratory bottle of champagne - which I felt compelled to drink most of, as the others weren't drinking, and I didn't want to see it go to waste…

Today we were back in the spa for an hour, then we had a lovely lunch before setting off back towards our respective homes. Good times.

Time Flies

It only seems like a few weeks ago that I was flying up to York for the weekend to celebrate Jen's 30th, and it's her birthday again already. I drove up this time, on Thursday, and for once I got a really good run; it took less than 4 hours to get there. Which may or may not have been due to the fact that I was flouting the speed limit :).

On Friday we went to Harrogate, which is only about 20 miles from where Jen lives and only 40 miles from where I was brought up, but I can't remember the last time I went there; it must be easily 20 years ago or more. We spent the morning in the Turkish Baths, which was basically a series of steam rooms, ranging from warm through hot to very hot, plus a freezing cold plunge pool. The 'warm' room was just the right temperature for the two of us to sit and chat, then we jumped into the pool (and jumped straight out again - brrr!) every half-hour or so to cool off. Lovely!

We went for lunch at Betty's, Harrogate's other famous landmark. We had afternoon tea, which in hindsight was possibly a bad idea: there was a lot in the way of desserts and not a whole lot of savouries, but it was still delicious. We were amazed at the number of all-male groups eating there - it's most definitely a girls' restaurant, and I would have imagined any men who went would have been taken by their wives/mothers etc, but there were plenty of male-only business lunches going on, and even a couple of builders at the table next to us. We did a bit of window-shopping after lunch, then drove back to York.

Saturday was a fairly slow morning, but we did manage to make it to Cafe Concerto, one of my favourite places to eat, in time for lunch. Then we made our way over to the pottery painting place (I've really got a thing for it at the moment!) and met my lovely friend Sarah who'd driven down from Stockton to meet us. We spent the afternoon painting pottery (surprising, I know) - Sarah and Jen did mugs; I did a square plate. Again, I didn't spend any time beforehand thinking about what design I might paint, but I did find a Mackintosh-style rose to copy. I spent far too long on it and Sarah & Jen were finished well before me, as is apparently becoming the pattern on these occasions. In fact, I still had a big chunk of the plate in the top-right corner that was untouched, but we had run out of time and I noticed a sign on the wall saying 'we can add a clock to any piece for £5', so I asked them to do that ;). And seeing as it isn't 17 August and I do actually have the glazed, finished article, here's a picture.


I was a bit disappointed in the paint coverage of the lines - it was really difficult when the paint was wet to tell which parts had been covered once, which twice and which more than that. Plus the tick-tock of that thing is LOUD! Still, it goes perfectly with the decor in the spare bedroom, so it will live in there.

Saturday evening Jen had the girls round for drinks and nibbles, so we spent the rest of the afternoon preparing for that, then on Sunday, Jen's birthday, Mum & Dad came down and we all went out to lunch at a great little pub. We had a very lazy afternoon back at Jen's before I left at around 18:00 to drive back home.

Waiting...

Ben, Jill, Rob and I went into London yesterday to see Waiting for Godot. Actually, we didn't go to see that play - we went to see Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart star together in a play, and it just so happened that the play was Waiting for Godot.

Having got home and read the wikipedia entry on the play, it appears that there are numerous ways you can interpret it. The most obvious interpretation to me was that the play is a metaphor for life (although not my view of life) - nothing of consequence happens in the play, and the point of it is that there is no point - we're born, we go through life one day after another and we die. As I said, not my opinion at all, and it made me feel quite sad in parts.

McKellen played Estragon (with a fantastic Lancashire accent - just how he would have sounded if he'd never left Burnley) and Stewart played Vladimir, while Simon Callow played Pozzo and Ronald Pickup played Lucky. I would have paid to watch such great actors just stand on a stage and do nothing, so it was nice that they put on a play while I was there, but I can't say I would be desperate to see this play again. Apparently it's one of the most influential plays of the 20th Century - which only solidifies my view that the enjoyment factor of a play/film/TV show etc is inversely proportional to the amount of critical acclaim it receives. Remember The English Patient? And Gone with the Wind? And Casablanca? And Cabaret? And Children of a Lesser God? And... you get the idea.

As we were standing in the lobby before the play started I felt something sharp on my thumb and wondered how on earth I could have been burned by a cigarette while indoors. I raised my hand to see what it was and there was a wasp attached to my thumb. I shook my hand up and down to the point of hilarity and when I looked again only the wasp's stinger and half its body were still there. We were half an hour early for the play, so I had time to remove the stinger and hot-foot it to the nearest Tesco for some TCP and cotton pads. So if you were sitting in the balcony of the Theatre Royal Haymarket yesterday afternoon and wondered what the awful hospital smell was, that would be me.

More Wedding Photos

Fed up of hearing about the wedding? Well, keep it to yourself if you are, but don't worry, this is positively the last post I'll put up about it (I think).

The hotel provided two disposable cameras per table, which we thought was nice. But a combination of the cameras not being particularly high quality - they said on them 'not recommended for indoor use' - and the fact that most of the photos were taken by people under 10 years old meant that I paid £88 to have them all put onto CD and find out that it probably wasn't worth paying to have them put onto CD...

Still, there are some nice pictures, and a couple of very nice ones, although as I say, the picture quality isn't great. Anyway, if you'd like to have a look, I've put the better ones here, and my favourites are below.

Check These Out

Instead of a guest book, we asked everyone at the wedding to sign a picture mount, then got the photographer to print us a black & white copy of one of the photos he took to put inside the frame. Thanks for the suggestion, Jill - I'm really pleased with how it turned out: -


We also got this beautiful applique tapestry from Nikki, Will & Evie. We opened it on the morning after the wedding and I cried :)


Finally, for the last 20 years my Mum has made some fantastic embroidery samplers as wedding gifts for most of the weddings she's been invited to (and even some she hasn't). After all these years of admiring the ones she'd done so far, I was quite surprised to find out that she wasn't making one for us, but Mum said she thought I wouldn't want one (I guess the hint-dropping chain broke down somewhere, eh Jen?). So, with three weeks to go before the wedding, she put this together and Dad presented it to us during his speech on the day.


Finding a spot to hang the photograph was easy - our hallway lends itself very well to black & white pictures, so I just had to re-position two B&W shots of the New York skyline to give the new picture pride of place. Picking a spot for the other two is proving more difficult. All the pictures we have on the walls downstairs are meaningful to us - embroideries of the houses I've lived in, photos, paintings, prints and maps of places we've been etc - except for two large pictures of flowers in the lounge. I have a feeling they won't be in the lounge much longer...