France to go

Back in October, I was asked to participate in an online photography and storytelling project called Someone Once Told Me, started by Mario Cacciottolo. He showed up at the Coach and Horses for Tuttle Club on the one day of my trip to London I was able to make it, and he asked just about everyone in the room to write someone someone once told them on a piece of paper and then to hold that up for the camera.

Check out the photo on SOTM as well as my audio commentary

Some people put down serious words of wisdom. I, for some reason, immediately thought of one of the most bizarre things someone had told me: “I’m a nose man.” Now, I’ve always been self-conscious about my nose, as I’ve been teased about it and told it was big since I was a kid, so to have a strange older man approach me in a bar and tell me that he loved my nose and that he was a nose man threw me off quite a bit. I had no interest in this stranger, but the strangeness of his comment stuck with me.

I believe on his second shot at picking me up, he came on even stronger and that “That’s a nose I could settle down with”! Whoa, buddy, we were at a cheesy karaoke bar in Newport Beach. Not a time for grand nose-themed gestures.

I must say, though, I’m honored to be part of the project, and excited to finally see my photo up on the site. I think it turned out quite well.

Today we finally set up our Wii to connect to the internet — we weren’t able to in London for some reason — and of course we checked out France to Go to see how it would look on the new TV. Check it out:

We’re still working on getting settled into our new place, but thigs are coming along nicely. We have nearly everything we need, save for a couch/futon for Evan’s office and somewhere to put our DVDs, and we still need to hang our pictures on the walls. I think that’s what’ll really make it feel like home.

As the days leading up to our departure date tick by, I’m getting more and more excited to head off and start exploring. Today, I found a fun tool called Wordle that’ll create fun tag clouds from text, so I put in some info for our trip. I don’t like how it wouldn’t take groups of words, leading to some uncomfortable splits like “dead” and “sea” being two separate entries, but I had lots of fun playing with fonts, colors and layouts and seeing what it would generate.

Fighter jets flying over Buckingham Palace

It’s been a busy weekend in London. Yesterday was the Queen’s official birthday, and though I didn’t go to see the “Trooping of the Colour,” I did happen to see a lot of horses walking down Grosvenor St. and then was quite shocked to see an air-show worthy fly-by by lots of military jets — including fighter jets flying in formation, giant bombers lots of other gray air behemoths — passing right over Buckingham Palace.

A few hours later, I was walking home and as I passed by Hyde Park Corner, I had to stop to let a police escort whisk a royal motorcade into the park — there were crowns on all the black cars, though only one had the crown right on the top, where a taxi’s sign would be. It may have been the queen, though I didn’t really get a good look into any of the cars.

Apparently Pres Bush is also in town right now, staying by us at the Dorchester, and we saw what we believed was his motorcade, with even more police escorts than the royal one I saw yesterday, coming down Piccadilly tonight. We also saw a man in a dress. Well, more a skirt and top, actually, which, you know, wasn’t necessarily that notable. But about a minute later, we passed by a man with a thick Southern accent who said in a bewildered voice, “I don’t know what was more exciting tonight, seeing President Bush or seeing the dude in the dress”!

I also saw an old man wearing pink bunny ears and smoking a cigarette on Marylebone High Street this afternoon (LJ, where’s the photo?), so it’s been a bit of an odd weekend — though fun — to say the least.

Though Crips may just be a cutesy way to say “crisps,” and I find their bizarre package design with animal heads stuck on humans intriguing, the first thing the brand name conjures up in my mind is gang warfare. It’s also a derogatory term for disabled people. I did think the baked wheat-potato crisps were a nice, light alternative to potato chips, but I just can’t imagine any store in the U.S. carrying these snacks from Derbyshire.

Evan spied these candies at the Kew Gardens gift shop and ran over to us making a joke about dropping acid, of course. The Brits we were with started laughing and said, “Until right now, we’d never thought of it in that way”!

Just had to give a quick link to the Londonist April Fool’s joke yesterday: “Piggy-Back Plan To Beat Heathrow Congestion.” A little excerpt:

 With the situation showing little sign of improvement at the brand new T5, London’s aviation bosses are keen to turn the public’s attention to plans for dealing with the real elephant in the Heathrow departure lounge - the traffic congestion caused by still only having two runways. Yesterday saw the first test of a solution that could be in commercial use as early as next year. The bold plan seeks to double potential runway capacity by using long-haul aircraft to carry smaller planes “piggy-back” style out of West London.

Also, seeing the image of an Air France flight strapped atop an Air India jet like a space shuttle was fantastic. It couldn’t have been a better prank on such a timely subject since Heathrow is just a mess right now.

Well, I was tagged by Sizemore to post eight random things about myself. And though I normally don’t follow through with these sorts of things, I was particularly bad at it when they were all the rage on email and then myspace, well, this is the first time anyone has actually tagged my silly little blog, so it only feels right to put together a little something. Maybe you’ll learn something new.

1. I went skydiving when I was 18. When I called my parents afterward to tell them, I said, “Guess what I did?” My mom guessed, “You ate meat?”

2. I’m a sorority drop-out.

3. I learned how to speak Hebrew and Yiddish in elementary school, but I’ve pretty much forgotten everything.

4. I have great-grandparents from Manchester (I only learned this a week ago).

5. For years, I was obsessed with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil.” I wrote many papers on it during high school and college.

6. I lived with a couple who, over the course of the two years I stayed with them, got engaged, got married and had their first child.

7. My boyfriend and I have the same birthday (July 8). He’s five hours older.

8. I was a vegan for 3 months. I gave it up when I went to Hawaii on vacation. I’m still a vegetarian, though.

And now to tag other people, which I’m not too keen to do. But here goes: Andrea (I love the new blog), Rey (how could I not include you?), Michelle (it’s high time you got back to writing, sister), Chris (of course I have to include a new London friend), Karla (even though I always feel like I learn new things about you when I read your blog), Allison (it’s been a long time since we’ve had an update from Oregon), Mike (I want to see more on your blog), and Hitched (even though it’s not a personal blog, I’d love to see 8 random things about hitched. Or its awesome founders).

Earlier in the week, we got a carton of smoothie juice — mango papaya flavored, I think — but we didn’t check out the label of all the ingredients first. I am not a fan of bananas in anything, really, so I was just going to leave this carton to Evan. But Evan decided to edit the ingredient list so I would drink it. No bananas here!

Of course, I didn’t actually drink it, though I still found it funny.

Happy face light!

Photographed today at Oktogon.

Evan did it. Thanks to a bunch of photos to look at and a bit of fiddling time, it’s solved. Much easier to figure out when we have reference of how it’s supposed to look.

At the Rathaus Christmas market in Vienna, Evan and I stopped by a puzzle booth. We played around with a few of the toys, and he asked the woman at the booth to give him something REALLY difficult. She sold him a three-piece wooden pyramid puzzle.

Well, I took it apart and put it back together twice by keeping the blocks all really close, and then when I took it apart and moved the blocks further away, trying to note where they all were, I couldn’t put them back together! So now we have a broken puzzle. I’m sure we’ll get it back together, but it’s quite frustrating to try to solve it–it only has three pieces. And I feel bad that I took it apart before Evan had a chance to play with it first.

If you’ve solved the three-piece Stewart Coffin pyramid, let us know.

Update: Problem solved. That was quick.

File this under sad face: Spike’s head is all moldy and I don’t know what to do. Suggestions are welcome. Is this the end of Spike?

If you’ve been following the blog from the beginning, you know that I started this trip on a British Airways flight sitting next to a Romanian film distributor and an Italian porn star (totally unrelated). Anyway, Cristina, the film distributor and I have emailed a few times, and today she finally read the post about my trip over here–and commented! Check it out.