The Adventures of Lorie and Brian Groth

I am in Seattle this week working and not really doing much else – not even going to Microsoft’s main offices in Redmond. I am in a week of all-day meetings in downtown Seattle, so I am truly a visitor, which seems a bit weird. I am staying at the Marriott on the waterfront, so I get to see the WA State ferries float by, which is one of the nice and unique things about Seattle compared to other cities.

I did get out and play for an hour today and visited Easy Street Records and picked up a few new CDs. It’s a great store to discover new music and with the exchange rate in my favour (GBP vs USD), it means that CDs are cheaper in the US than in the UK.

Here is Milo’s card to his girlfriend Daisy. You can make your own here. You need to have photos on a Windows Live Spaces site or on Flickr, and hopefully everyone has started using Spaces to share their photos with friends and family like I have been doing and as I suggested in an earlier blog entry.

We spent the weekend enjoying Champagne with friends in Reims, France. We visited the old Roman chalk caves of the Ruinart champagne house and the tasting area of the Pommery champagne house. The Ruinart caves are impressive and are the only ones listed as a historical site, but we all preferred the champagne at Pommery even after trying a couple of the very high-end ones at Ruinart – I wouldn’t turn one down if offered to me though.

My last 2 entries were about cemeteries – sorry about sounding a bit down, but they are sort of fascinating. Anyway, here are a two new things in our lives:

1. We just discovered that the "now playing" mode in Zune displays a bunch of album covers that we own, which looks pretty cool.

2. I just finished reading Merle’s Door, which is a great book about a great dog, but also educational about how dogs learn and deal with life.

Merle’s Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog by Ted Kerasote Read more about this book…

Also, here is a great list of plugins for Windows Live Writer that I usually use when posting to my blog. With some of these cool plugins, I can now link to our entire photo album of our September trip to Champagne with Anne:

The bus I usually ride to work goes down Sydney Street (SW3) where there is "The Parish Church of St Luke Chelsea" with a small park right next door, but no cemetery like most other churches in the area. However, there is a fence around the church with headstones leaning against the fence; 2 and 3 deep. I suspect that the headstones were moved from the "park" next door to make room for the park. I wonder where the bodies are?

Seven of us joined about 350,000 of our closest friends in London down near the London Eye. A good time was had by all, until of course we tried to get home. The tube stations in the area were closed so we had to walk quite a ways before getting to a tube stop that was open. We didn’t get home until 3am.