The Adventures of Lorie and Brian Groth

We went to the Borough Market today, a favourite of Megan and Alan. This is a farmers market only open on Friday and Saturday located in the heart of the city. It gets quite crowded by noon, so get there around 10am to avoid the crowds. In addition to the variety of cheese we always seem to purchase, this time we picked up some ginger wine and pot pies. Specifically a Heidi pie (vegetable) and Moo pie (beef). The ginger wine is a sweet white wine with ginger, so the colour is sort of brownish-red and it has a ginger bite to it. I like it (not love it), but Lorie thinks it tastes like cough syrup.

And yes, they have fresh seafood too, as indicated by the octopus dangling over a stick in front of the normal ice-bed of fish. Sorry, but I didn’t take a picture of the cider, mulled wine, sausages, cheeses, and wide selection of vegetables.

When Milo is on his best behaviour, this is what anyone visiting our flat will see…. right before he runs down the stairs and bounces all over the place, which is how he greets friends. I imagine an intruder would get the same greeting, but with more teeth. 

An hour north of Berkeley are the little beach towns of Stinson and Boninas. We spent the weekend there with our friends Fred and Nina, their two kids, and most importantly, Clifford their pudgy, fuzzy, and lovable dog. I just copied other photos online too.

We fly back to London on Monday, landing on Tuesday and can’t wait to get back home and to see Milo’s always smiling face.

We had 2 great days of skiing in Utah, complete with about 18 inches of fresh, light and fluffy powder snow on Sunday and a bright sunny day on Monday. It was certainly much better than the Alps last week.

I skied on Sunday with the family at Alta; snowboarded on Monday with dad at Solitude; then later in the day we picked up Michael and went to Snowbird, which is terrible for snowboards so I switched back to skis. Click the picture of me snowboarding for photos.

One weird thing I experienced at Snowbird was the tunnel at the top of the resort that lets you get from one side of the mountain to the other. The tunnel has a conveyer belt that you stand on. 

With still no new snow at Les Arcs, we avoided the icy morning conditions (with fog today) and took the Funiculaire down the hill into Bourg Saint-Maurice. It’s not a very big town, but good enough to wander around for a few hours and have lunch. Click for new photos.

We take off in the morning and in a few days we will be skiing in Utah, where there is fresh snow.

Today started out cold and icy, but the sun came out and warmed up everything so by about noon the snow had softened and I was happy I had suntan lotion on my nose.

We can ski down to our cabin, but it’s about a 5 minute drive up to to Arc 1600 (the base of one of the ski areas), which is about a 20 minute drive up from the town of Bourg Saint-Maurice.

Today, Megan, Alan, Daisy, Milo and I went on a 10 mile walk through Bishops Park, Wandsworth, Balham, and areas in between. Lorie stayed home sick. The dogs of course enjoyed Wandsworth Common and Clapham Common the most. You can see a map of our walk here.

One of the more interesting things we saw was a car being taken away. The guy operating the crane was standing on the sidewalk operating it all via remote control. At one point, it looked like it was tipping back a bit too far, but he recovered and got it loaded without dropping the car, which would have been much more interesting. 

I was out for a walk at lunchtime heading towards Embankment when I was stopped by two policemen for suspicious activity. I was attempting to cross the street from one park to the other since they’re nicer than walking along a busy road. Cars kept coming across the street, so I walked up to the corner to go across the cross walk. Apparently, the police saw me and when they would walk one way, I would walk the other. Since nobody was with me, I was wearing pretty much all black (shoes, trousers, trench coat, and stocking hat), and I was obviously trying avoid them, then decided to stop and question me when I crossed the street.

I of course had fun with it.

I explained that I was born in "the other Washington" (the state, not DC), that Fulham is a good neighbourhood to live in, and of course asked if they use Messenger since they now knew that I worked at Microsoft. One of them said "of course"! I forgot to get a photo, but they were dressed like the two guys pictured here. Below is an aerial photo of where I was crossing, which is right next to the Ministry of Defence so that might have had something to do with it. 

UPDATE: I forgot to add that they patted me down to check for weapons too. All they found was my Zune, which I had to explain is an MP3 player. Also, my only ID was my Microsoft badge, which thankfully does have my picture on it. 

I headed to Heathrow at 6am this morning only to learn that my flight to Munich, Germany was canceled. So on the drive in, I tried to find another flight, but nothing would get me there with enough time to get much done before catching the flightg home this evening. So I am now on the Heathrow Express train heading back into London to try and do our meetings via conference calls, which is tough for an all day meeting.

In the end, I went from home to the office as usual, but took a long detour via the airport!

I had to do "hard reset" on my phone, which is the very cool HTC TYTN II. I must have installed something that was making it lock up quite often. However, now that it is set back to factory settings, the built-in GPS works, which had never worked before now. So I have installed the Live Search client (see http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/livesearch/default.mspx) which includes maps, easy ways to find places, traffic info, and driving directions. The cool thing is that it can center on my location via the GPS. This means I can be lost in London and use it to pinpoint my location on the map and then find a good pub neaby and directions home. Right now I am sitting on the bus heading into work and I have Live Search following my route and sometimes asking if I am lost. Aparently, the driving directions and the bus route don’t quite match.