A difficult day
What you see here is a hole in the ceiling of our kitchen. That’s because we had a pipe that wasn’t soldered together and it broke loose, spilling water all over the kitchen – through the ceiling. As it turns out, there were three pipes that were not soldered together, and one of the was the gas. If that had come lose, we would have blown up the flat and probably the entire block according to the guys who fixed it.
So here’s the ingredients for a difficult day:
- Have a really bad head cold and lose your voice a bit.
- Have your big energetic dog in a cone with stitches in one leg. He has figured out how to use the cone to push people down the hallway.
- Have water raining through your kitchen ceiling
- Have your kitchen torn apart to fix it, thus leaving a mess of a kitchen with water damage everywhere.
- Learn that you could have blown up and that it was dumb luck that we didn’t. Although, never cooking turns out to be a smart thing in this case.
- After all this, we still don’t have hot water. "Thankfully", we are still paying rent through the end of the month at the place we were living in, and it does have hot water for taking a shower.
Hopefully next week will be better!
Milo is injured again!
We took this picture of Milo trying to find squirrels inside one of the fenced dog areas at Bishops park on Saturday evening. Moments after taking it, a dog walked past the other side of the fenced area, but on the outside of the fence. Milo was so hyper from the squirrel sighting, that he sprinted across the fenced-in area directly towards the dog to do his usual barking routine saying "come play with me". But since this dog was on the other side of the fence and Milo was beyond his normal hyper self, he bashed right into the metal fencing. He hit it so hard that his face was stuck in the fence for a moment. Yes, he’s a smart one. The result of all this fun:
- Five stitches in his front left leg.
- Some skin is scraped off of his face under his left eye.
- He gets to wear a cone again, probably for about 10 days.
- He can’t go out and play with other dogs every day to burn his energy off, so we will have a hyper dog with a big cone around his head bouncing around the flat.
And to top it off, I am fighting a really bad head cold right now. I’d rather sleep, but Lorie needs to work and Milo needs to be reminded to relax. At least we aren’t bored. 
Share your photos with me
Hi everyone, this is my plea to get you to start sharing your photos with me as I have been with you. It might even encourage you to go on some adventure just so you have something to share! Here’s how:
- Install the new Windows Live products from http://get.live.com/wl/all (click the "Get Windows Live" button)
- Run Windows Live Photo Gallery
- Import your photos from your digital camera if they aren’t already on your PC
- Select some fun photos and Publish them. If you don’t already have a Spaces site, it will take care of it for you. You can use your existing Hotmail e-mail address when it asks you to login, or you can get a new one if you don’t already have one.
Or to put this graphically:
Let me know when you do so I can see what you’ve been up to.
Multi-cultural
A night in Munich
Off to Munich
Not that it matters for this trip though, since I won’t be there long enough to even get into the city. I need to get back to attend the 2nd day of ReMix UK For yiou non-Microsoft people, it’ a geeky software designer & developer event.
Moved into our new flat
We are busy unpacking boxes and figuring out how to fit into our massive flat…. with no closets. It’s an English thing. We have quite a few hooks, towel bars, and paintings/pictures to hang.
Even though we are only about 3 streets away from where we have been renting, we now feel a bit permanent here. When you visit, here is what you will find in our neighborhood:
- The Fulham Palace
- The Fulham Palace Road Cemetery (always an interesting quite walk with lots of squirrels to get Milo excited)
- A place to buy plants
- Craven Cottage where the Fulham Football Club plays
- We live in the neighborhood (or neighbourhood) of Hammersmith & Fulham
- And of course Bishops Park where we take Milo to run all the time
Canal Boats in Yorkshire
Daisy, Milo, Alan, Megan, Anne, Lorie, and I spent 3 days and 2 nights on the Leicester, which is a 53 foot boat in the Rochdale Canal in West Yorkshire. We started off in the town of Sowerby Bridge, quite enjoyed the little town of Hebden Bridge, and came close to getting to Todmorden. We only got as far as a good biker bar just before Todmorden, which turned out to be fun since we were the token Americans and appeared to be quite the novelty. I’m not sure about other biker bars in England, but this one included someone who had never been outside of the Todmorden area (so she says) and a guy who was swapping names of favorite poets with Anne. He rode a Honda, but would like to have a Harley if he could afford it.
The canal is full of locks that we had to open and close on our own, and the boat is really a very slow moving barge with a big diesel engine. We only made it about 8 or 9 miles down the canal before we had to turn around and get back, so it is about half the speed of a casual walk. Along the canal are old mills, pubs, rolling hills of trees and farms divided by rock-walls, and other barges that people live on.
In Sowerby Bridge, we went through the deepest lock in England, which has a draft of 20 feet, and it was the only one that had someone stationed there to operate it. Otherwise, we were the ones opening and closing the gates and drains to raise and lower the water level in the locks. For the most part, Alan and I were usually driving the boat, Megan and Anne worked the locks, and Lorie was on dog duty to keep the dogs (mostly Daisy) from jumping off the boat or getting too nervous while going through the locks (mostly Milo). Here’s a diagram of the interior of our boat – long and skinny.
Update:
Our canal boat
Lunch with smart PhD types
I was able to meet up with Revi and her advisor John today, who are in London for a Royal Geographical Society conference, which is no longer about maps. Revi even has a session to discuss something or other.
We have been friends since we met at Microsoft years ago and she is now working on her PhD. Her main project is to put devices in the hands of women in rural villages in Kenya and India to allow them to send comments and questions to the local radio station to get them involved in discussions happening in the community, which is normally male dominated. There are a variety of interesting technical, social, and governmental barriers that they are overcoming to accomplish it.
It was great to catch up and learn about what she’s been working on. It certainly was not a typical lunch for me!
The Adventures of Lorie and Brian Groth 