The Adventures of Lorie and Brian Groth

We finally made it to Bath today and lucked out with sunny, but cold weather. We didn’t get into a bath, but I stuck my finger into the one at the Roman Bath museum/tour – and yes, the water is nice and warm. The picture here is of the Royal Crescent, which is certainly an impressive looking building. Click here to see the photos.
The countryside is beautiful, but we really only saw it from town or from the train. We did see canal boats on the way there while on the train, so maybe we can take a long weekend canal boat trip and get back to Bath someday, but we all admit that it isn’t the most exciting town, despite the beauty. Interestingly, it is a World Heritage City.  

I had something new happen this evening (Friday) as I was waiting for the bus home. I was standing at the curb reading The London Paper, which is one of the free daily rags. Bus 24 pulled up and opened the door right next to me and the driver asked if he could have a paper; he was pointing to a pile of them next to me. I said he could have mine, so I handed it to him, he thanked me, closed the door and drove off. Nobody even got on the bus – he was only after a paper. :-)

I now work on a team in EMEA (Europe, Middle East, & Africa) focused on Windows Live, MSN, and Search. We just launched a new blog called "Live in Europe" to highlight some of the features and promotions specific to these products in Europe.

After a smooth ride home to London (sunny and cool) from Seattle (rain and cold) and after sitting in far too much traffic near Heathrow due to the rugby fans heading to the first Six Nations game in Twickenham, I arrived home exhausted. But after a quick nap (a kip in England) and a shower I was back to normal dog walking duties.

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?