The Adventures of Lorie and Brian Groth

Lorie’s sister Beth showed us this over Thanksgiving and I was rolling laughing at it.

Unrelated, today was cold and sunny, which is great for a walking around London:

While checking out the Christmas lights in London tonight, we saw a Money Box in one of the department stores. In the US we would call this a Piggy Bank. I think Money Box makes a bit more sense, after all, how many Piggy Banks in the US look like a pig? What’s pictured here is a penguin or something, but there were other animals too, but no pigs.

I have uploaded a few photos of the lights, plus created a map of where these lights are located.

The voice of the London Underground (aka, the Tube), Emma Clarke, has been fired.

Click here to hear her saying some of the Tube phrases and some spoofs. My favourite is the American Tourist one. It’s a spoof, but an accurate one.

Unrelated to Emma is a site with animal drawings made from the tube map.

Now that we have the shed in the garden and some new closets in the flat, we spent the day organizing stuff inside and out. Not too much though, since we still have a bit of jet lag and the dogs often want to play… or relax with Lorie on the couch.

We are back home in London after being in the US for 17 days, which was too long of a trip. We mised Milo and now we have to re-adjust to GMT. London most certainly feels like home now. :-) At least we are back in time to see the stores getting ready for Christmas. The Peter Jones store at Sloan Square is all lit up with strips of small white lights and the square has big blue lights in the trees. It seems to be the only area set up that’s on my bus route home, but I’m sure that will change next week.

While we are generally having far too much food and there is a bit of crazyness with so many people to visit, we are at least enjoying the sunshine in California. I had so many back-to-back meetings in Redmond last week and will again next week, that this is the only chance I get for fresh air. Notice the haze in the view across the bay. :-) 

This evening, we went 10-pin bowling (not lawn bowling) with a bunch of friends here in London. I actually don’t remember the last time I went bowling, but it has certainly been quite a few years. I still got at least one strike though… a few gutter balls too though.

Since Lorie and I are basically having our birthdays in two countries (US & UK), it looks like we will be having a few parties. This is the first.. the rest will happen in the US. I get an extra long birthday day this year, since we are flying to Seattle from London on my birthday. I hope British Airways gives me free first class upgrades or something.

I went to a car show today to see what they are like compared to the US, even though it has probably been 20 years since I went to a car show in the US. Most of what I saw were very expensive cars that a normal person can’t afford and many of these were built by small car companies in the UK and Europe. I have a photo album with more of the cars I saw with descriptions below some of the photos. The one pictured is from a French company called PGO. The only cars from the US I saw were two new Ford Mustangs and one new Corvette, but they just don’t compare to the German, UK, Italian, and French cars.

If you didn’t know, you can watch a ton of videos on MSN Video.

It’s worth checking out. I automatically get redirected to http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-gb since I am in London, but when I need my US fix, I simply change the URL to http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-us or if I feel like seeing Italian videos, http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=it-it