Clueless in the UK

[Updated with a few pictures 7/29/06]

I needed it a few days ago, the day we moved Jens and Neguine’s furniture into our house. You’d think it might be because of lifting the heavy TV or carrying the bed upstairs, and you’d think it was my back because … because it’s me and it’s always my back! But no, it was - I hesitate to admit it - hooking up the DVD player to the TV that did it. At the time I thought I was stretching a muscle in my left buttock but only later did I realize that I was trying to pull my thigh bone out of my hip, much like you would rip a leg off a chicken. And as I type I am reminded that my knee surgeon, back in 1992, told me that I have chicken legs. Bastard was right, but did he have to come right out and say it?

I’ve been having a hard time with this entry. I sort of started feeling like my blog was getting bogged down, if you know what I mean, and for all I know it still is. But tonight, yet another night in our new place without an internet connection, I feel motivated to say hello. Luckily I loaded this self-sufficient web page, chock full of Java-script, a few days ago in anticipation of British Telecom being more incompetent that I ever could have dreamed of just a few days ago. More on that later.

Here’s Hampstead High Street at night:

Did you know that every little area has a High Street? That’s where the shopping is. Sometimes you see in brochures, “Go to your nearest High Street” or something to that effect. This was 9:30 pm or thereabouts.

Last night I was watching TV. There was this amazing commercial with a little girl lying against or next to a tree, very still, looking a little odd, but then she starts moving slowly, and you start to notice that she is twisted a little bit, oh, even banged up a little, and a few seconds later you realize time is actually playing backwards. She starts untwisting and then slowly sliding across the ground into the middle of a road, where you quickly realize she has been hit by a car. And then you hear (I think), “80% of people survive being hit by a car going 30 mph” and then the on screen it says “It’s 30 mph for a reason. THINK!” Man - that’s a good one.

Tonight is night four in the Hampstead house. It’s been very hard. The first night it was stupidly hot and we stupidly had no fans. No sleep. The second night, the kept bachelor (kept by his rich parents apparently) 3 townhouses down, decided to throw a party, which basically started at 11 pm and ended at 5:30 am. To say that I was pissed is putting it mildy. Night two: zero sleep. Last night it cooled down, but cappuccinos are just too much for me - they are double shots of espresso and I am just too much of a wimp - so despite no sleep the two previous nights, I couldn’t sleep last night either. Tonight will probably be the same because I needed more espresso this morning, of course. But tomorrow - oh yes, tomorrow - everything changes.

Why? Because I bought myself an espresso machine. It will pay for itself in just 37 days, not including the cost of the coffee itself which I just realized - OH MY GOD - is about what I pay for it in the USA. (I was wondering if that would ever happen.) Anyway, I finally went to this cool kitchen store and there was a guy there who loved his machines and I asked him for the cheapest good one, and he demoed it for me. Man - the cheap but good machines have come a long way since my trusty, 10 year old Starbucks one. Actually, Starbucks still sells that model, but I digress. So, tomorrow, I will make myself and Sue exactly what we want, around breakfast time, just the right amount of espresso, so that tomorrow night I will be ready to get a good night’s sleep just in time for …

Our trip back the US for three weeks! Go figure. New Jersey and North Carolina, here we come!

The main reason I didn’t throw out my back doing the move is that we hired movers. Strapping young men, trying to make ends meet by doing the heavy lifting we old farts can no longer do. A Man and a Van they are called, and Sue hired one and asked him to bring a buddy so they could tackle the huge TV. Which they dropped … Why? Because what we got was most definitely not strapping and not young! Frankly I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. Oh, and it was about 100 degrees and humid that day. One of the guys, the leader, looked like Mr. Rogers, including the sweater. His buddy said “Hello” followed shortly thereafter with a “How did I let him talk me into helping him today!?” I wish I were kidding. Sue had said, “Please bring blankets so we can protect the TV and furniture” and the guy brought three.

Eventually I had to put my foot down and tell the leader, the one with the sweater on inside the truck, which must have been 120 degrees, to take off his sweater. I don’t know, I have just gotten to the point in my life where I can start to treat kids like kids, even when they are grown up. He said, “I am really hot now but it will be so great later when I take it off” and I said, “If you live that long perhaps!” The real reason I brought it up, truth be told, is that whenever he moved his head a little too far in one direction or another, the pool of sweat that was somehow perfectly balanced on top of his head, rolled off onto our formerly pristine, second-hand furniture, and … it was kinda grossing me out.

He took off the sweater. Oh - and the TV is fine. Nothing like hearing a crash down stairs, followed a few seconds later by the witness (Sue this time) calling up the stairs, “Joooooooooonnnnnnnnnnn??????????” We all ran downstairs and there it was, the TV on the floor by the door, and two guys looking rather sheepish about the whole thing. But, yeah, it’s OK and it’s a great picture and we’ve enjoyed the free digital broadcasts that it receives with the Freeview box we also got from Jens and Neguine. Superb quality picture, almost the same old junk on TV though.

The apartment has been undergoing some repairs, which is why it took us so long to get into the place. They are finally done except a pesky little leak in one of the bathroom basins. I’ve learned that there’s only one sink in the house: the kitchen sink. All the other sinks are wash basins or something like that. All the plumbing in this house is in the attic, like our house in Atherton, which means we flew 8 time zones for the priviledge of having hot cold water in the middle of the summer.

The guy trying to fix the leak in the basin was especially annoying. When I arrived that morning he was already in there running the water at full blast, peering at the leak under the sink, frantically grabbing toilet paper to wipe the drips and then throwing the toilet paper into the toilet. He was behaving as though if he looked at it long enough the leak would just fix itself. So, eventually I got a little fed up and I got him a garbage and asked him to put the toilet paper in the garbage instead of the toilet, and he proceeded to teach me about the design of toilet paper and how it is designed to disintegrate shortly after hitting the water. A second later I noticed that it was hot water he was running that whole time, and I just shut it off.

He declared the leak fixed later, and an hour after that I discovered a puddle under the basin again.

Did I mention that the drought here is so serious that you’re not allowed to run any water through a hose pipe. It’s banned outright, don’t even hook it up and pretend to use it, don’t even water your flowers in the back yard, hanging up or sitting in flower puts, with a hose. You must use a watering can. It’s driving everyone nuts. And here was my “plumber” pouring gallons and gallons of my hot water down the drain, hoping the leak with suddenly fix itself.

Out and about in the neighborhood, the kids are just having the best time with their new friends:

The doorbell rings all the time, followed by “Can Madeline or Jason come out to play?” Half the time they just end up in our house, usually leaving dirty finger marks all over the freshly painted walls. Last night Sue and Madeline were playing London Underground, a game which teaches you all about the underground stops, how to get there, what famous thing is there, etc. Then Ryan and Emily came in to play as well:

Jason was outside doing Star Wars with Tommy:

He can be found inside practicing his form. Here he figured out how to adjust the mirrored doors so that it was him against 10 mirror images of himself:

Madeline had set up a bar in our kitchen window (this a complete picture of the outside of our townhouse):

and the kids just jump on up from the outside of the house and grab their cups through the kitchen window:

It’s really … nice. The kids are in heaven.

Madeline can be seen showing off her Heelie form. She is very good at it. Here in New Jersey they are about to ban all Heelies from use in malls.

On the cell phone front, I ended up buying a PEBL phone and going with O2 (Oh 2) as a service provider. The O2 guy let me borrow his SIM card so I could run back to my house to test it out. Did I mention that already? Anyway, as soon as I picked the PEBL the guy in the store said, “Girlie phone!” I said, “Typical. I always pick the girlie thing.” He didn’t know what to say after that, but I decided to get that phone anyway and give it to Sue, since we technically only need one phone since we already have a crappy GSM phone. But, once I got home I did a search for PEBL and girlie and there were zero hits. That’s not to say that there aren’t lots of girlie phones out that, it’s just that the PEBL is not known as one. So - I took it back for myself.

Phones around here are so messed up. You pay based on the kind of number you’re calling. Of course, that assumes you know what kind of phone you’re calling. Mobiles all start with 07 I think, and landlines start with 02. But the calling plans are along the lines of, “If you’re calling into the O2 (OH 2, not zero 2) network, you pay this rate, the Orange network you pay this rate.” How can you tell? You cannot. So, all incoming calls to mobiles, I think, are free. So it’s the caller who pays. The other day I called 0845xxxxxx to get help from BT and I was on hold for 45 minutes and blow through 20 pounds! Outrageous!

Speaking of outrageous, BT has so screwed things up that we are still without internet access and I am getting so pissed. Currently the broadband people are claiming my broadband is in fact hooked up, BUT, they cannot close the order and mark it as done because their computers have been down for a couple of days. Therefore, the broadband troubleshooting people are not willing to TALK to me about it because although the notes in my records say, “Yup, it’s hooked up” because the status is not closed, they won’t help me. So today I told them they have one more day to fix this problem or I am sending everything back to them and going with telewest. We’ll see if I follow through on that.

Jason has been running around with his light saber looking quite good, I must say. We finally let him watch Star Wars III, the one where Darth Vader is born, and we had been telling him for months and months that he was too young to watch it. Then the other day he accidentally saw some people being machine gunned on some random show on television, and he said, as he’s been saying for months and months, “See, that didn’t scare me at all!” So I finally decided to let him watch it and Sue agreed, and we did, and it was good.

Here’s the thing. I absolutely love Star Wars, I truly do. I laughed out loud at some of the horribly done scenes in Star Wars II, the desperately bad attempts at trying to show us how Anakin and Padme fell in love, blah blah blah, George Lucas is no director. But his story, it just does it for me. So there, now you know it about me, and you can judge me however you want. I love Star Wars, all 6 episodes, there you have it.

And finally, I have not been getting as much exercise lately because we’re here in Hampstead and … well actually I am not sure why. So today I took matters into my own hands and decided to walk all the way down the hill to Waitrose grocery store. It only took 15 minutes to get there, actually. I spent forever in the store trying to figure out what to get for the house, what to get the kids that they would actually eat, etc., and then I got out and walked all the way back up the hill. This is the same hill that had me huffing and puffing a week or two ago, but this time I had four bags of groceries on hand. I powered my way up it, huffing and puffing the first part, and then just hit my grove. It was great. I might make a habit of it as long as it’s not raining too hard or too cold or something. Then I got home and cooked dinner for everyone, three different dinners if you want to know the truth, and down two PIMMs and Lemonades while doing it.

And I think that whole experience is why I am feeling in the mood to write this all down.

All this time I have been struggling with weak lattes only to finally realize that it’s cappuccinos that I need. A single shot will do, straight up with the naturally-sweetened-because-it’s-been-steamed milk. Mmmm.

Unfortunately I discovered this today at 4pm, which is approximately six to eight hours past my normal cut-off time for caffeine. The problem was, I didn’t get around to getting the latte this morning because too much random stuff was going on, including trying hard not to kill the kids due to bad behavior caused by - it’s now clear - sleep deprivation. Anyway, the caffeine withdrawal headache had kicked in so I had no choice. This is what I looked like the other day when I forgot to have my caffeine:

(don’t be fooled - I am not actually awake while taking this self-portriat)

The above shot was taken at Hyde park, or is it Kensington Gardens? It was taken on Peter Pan day, which was kinda for kids a little younger than ours. We still had a good time however. There are pictures of pirates and Peter and wigwams and fairies and mermaids, but really, this is my favorite one from that day:

You can probably tell that Jason just passed is Gold Belt in Kung Fu literally just days before we got on the plane to London. He still practices it from time to time when he’s in a serious mood.

Actually, that photo was from 5 days earlier, when it was cloudy and about to rain all day. It finally did I think, but not a lot. And it was welcome.

Here’s a photo from Peter Pan day:

The weather here has been a lot like California: warm and dry, no clouds. Today it was hot and tonight it’s kinda warm. But that wouldn’t matter to me because my cappuccino is just 9 hours old - it still has another 3 or 4 hours left in it before I will find sleep. Every night we swear we will get the kids to bed at 9pm and every night both are still up at 10:30 to 11. I think it’s the brightness, although the days are obviously getting shorter. Or it might be that they are in the same room. Either way it’s beyond frustrating because they are sleep-deprived and they are not on their best behavior under those circumstances.

But only when they are together. Today Sue and I split up and Madeline was a delight and I heard later so was Jason. Kids … yeah … just kids.

We’ve been talking around the neighborhood with some more of the parents. Hugo’s a popular guy, everyone loves him. It would have been nice to know that while I was freaking out over this whole process. It has been a little frustrating though, with the painting still going on, and two serious plumbing problems that are being addressed, we hope, tomorrow. Still we had neighbors come in and check out the place and they were very envious of how nice it looks inside, people with the same but not as updated apartments as ours. Apparently some are paying much more than we are which makes me feel so clever.

Hugo asked me how old I am and I told him 41 and he said, “I told Mr. D’Arcy that I thought you might be out of your twenties.” I told him I owe him a beer for that. But I think sunblock and muggy weather makes me look younger, as well as being a greasehead my whole life. Oh, and there’s also the maturity factor to consider …

Today Madeline and I went to our local NHS to register. The nice lady there was very apologetic when she explained that prescriptions will cost Sue and me (but not the kids) £7 each. For the privilege of free health care (except for the prescriptions I suppose) all I needed to show them was proof of my address. Nothing else. So I said, “You can tell I am American, so, why is it free for me?” She smiled and said, “That’s the NHS!” She was a little sheepish I thought, implying that they don’t can’t be bothered to check your official status, or perhaps she was proud that if you’re living there that’s all it takes to be covered. She went on to say, “If you get sick after hours go to the hospital about 100 yards down the street. Of course there’s no charge to visit the hospital.” I asked her if I am covered if I faint and hit my head on the way down over the shock of getting no bill, and she just smiled. Then on the way out I said, “I promise to be a good citizen and give back to the society that is providing me free health care.”

I also payed my television taxes today. If you have a TV in your house (we don’t yet) then you have to pay £130/year. I paid it at the post-office. This is to cover the BBC. A color TV license costs a lot more than black and white … wow.

I also have to pay Council taxes, which may be a couple thousand pounds for all I know. So, see, I am paying for my health benefits sort of. Once I’ve paid those taxes I will get a little bit of a break at pool/club I want to join on a pay as you go sort of arrangement. Pay as you go with clubs is a good idea, pay as you go with cell phones sucks. Speaking of which, the Motorola L6 w/i-mode does not sync with your mac, like the Motorola L6 w/o i-mode supposedly does. So I have to return that phone as soon as I drain the SIM card I so foolishly topped up with £20 instead of £2, and I only have 13.5 days to do it. Wait - I have to do it before we had back to the States in 10 days! Don’t let me forget!

But back to the pool. If I don’t get swimming soon I might not be able to recover from the pain in my right shoulder that’s slowly creeping back into my life. I think my shoulder does not like even a small amount of weight on it, say a bag or a back pack. I had two shots before I moved here and things were great but now … not so sure. We’ll see.

OK - here’s a shot of the water play area fountain thingywhatsit which is part of the complex where the pool I so desperately need is:

Perfect for a hot day. And I think we have a week of hot days in our immediate future. The water just sprays out three sprayers at the top and runs down. The kids can run around in the water and get as wet as they like.

I am going to start today’s entry with something that is hard for me to watch, and hard for me to believe, and therefore I want you all to suffer as well.

The Daily Show and the Pig:

Even I wouldn’t be this bad of a president.

So, when I moved to Seattle I wrote email back to all our friends and family and said things like:

• Boy it sure is beautiful here, more beautiful than the Bay Area
• Boy the traffic here isn’t as bad as the Bay Area
• Boy the houses are nice and affordable here.

When I got back one of my friends pointed out that I had sent all those obnoxious emails, and I was embarrassed. Especially since, once I got back I had already written more emails along the lines of:

• Boy it sure rains a lot in Seattle
• Boy the summers are only 3 months long in Seattle
• Boy in Seattle they brake for sunlight
• Boy the roads really suck in Seattle

Of course, now the roads really suck in California, but really, I am trying to break a cycle here. After this blog entry, that is.

I really REALLY like our Hampstead house and neighborhood. Today, for example, we had about 8 of the neighborhood kids in our house, running around, etc. Later, one of the other moms came by and introduced herself as one of the kids’ parents and then she took off with her kids and our kids to a local ice cream store.

Yeah - I know this kind of stuff happens in other parts of the world, too, but just not with us, at least not since we were kids.

Anyway, the kids were running around like yesterday, in and out of the various houses, playing soccer - oops, I mean football - and heelying around, and we grownups were off doing our own thing. The kids are in heaven, we’re in heaven, what more could you ask for? Apparently there are two more families with young kids that are out of town, right next door to us and the one over from that, AND, one of them has a 13 year old who just loves to baby sit. Things are LOOKING UP BABY!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hampstead is turning out quite well, I must say. Today we spent almost all day hanging out in the apartment waiting for some more furniture to arrive, and arrive it did! We got the pots, we got the pans, only have to return two of them because of dents that prevent the lids from closing properly. Two beds came yesterday.

OK, I am going to get really distracted today and just write whatever comes to my mind. See, the shopping thing is kinda cool. You take the tube, you find something you like, you have it delivered, because you can’t carry all your crap back on the tube, who wants to do that? Then you wander around in the store for another half hour and find something else that catches your fancy. This time you just show them the previous order and they add to that delivery. Sweet!

Only two things didn’t show up today … and only two others were damaged! Hmm … It’s not perfect but we like it.

Anyway, here’s what sucks about our new apartment: it’s not ready. Yeah - we’ve been paying rent for two weeks but it’s not ready so I fired off mail to Mr D’Arcy and suggested we redo the contract to start in mid-July instead of July 1. Still haven’t heard back from him - he’s probably golfing. Or not. The other thing that sucks is this: the water pump. Apparently the water pressure is not strong enough to actually allow water to fall from the faucets, so there’s an electric pump in the attic which kicks in immediately. And it’s loud. So, you wash your hands down stairs in the kitchen and two floors up the kids waking up thinking a plane is landing on the roof. Sue’s comment? “I always run the water when I check out a new place.”

So I think I will poke around up in the attic and see if I can unplug that thing. Can anyone tell me if 240 volts is really all that more dangerouns than 120 volts? I think not - both will kill me.

Here’s what’s great about our new apartment. Wait - I need to call it a town house because that’s what it is. Anyway, the place is full of kids, and Sue and I just let ours run around outside with the other kids in the neighborhood while we were in the house putting together the dining room table and preparing a gourmet meal consisting of Tesco pre-made dinners, our first meal in our new place.

The kids were running around for hours, literally, before and after dinner. When we called Jason in to eat his dinner, one of the kids came in to watch. It just feels right:

Here’s what our kitchen looks like with a bunch of junk, and Madeline reading in her new bean bag chair. You might recognize this shot from before, without all the garbage

I tried out the washing machine and drier today. The washing machine took 2 hours to wash almost nothing. All the numbers on the “program selection” dial are erased so I am trying to reverse engineer it while reading a manual written by a French person who didn’t use a spell checker when translating to English. I wanted to kill myself. The drier was faster than the washer, to give you some perspective. It screamed along at 85 minutes.

Sadly we had to go home at the end of the day to our temporary housing. I am dying to move there permanently! Next week, Wednesday, is the target date.

Two days ago we went to the London zoo. We took the tube, walked 20 minutes to the zoo, spent about 4 hours there, then walked 20 minutes back to the tube and had dinner in Hampstead. The kids are real troopers. This whole walking thing is great. Yesterday we took the bus part way down the hill out of Hampstead to go to the O^2 center on Finchley Road. It’s a cool place with about 8 restaurants, a movie theater, a sports club, a very large super market, a big book store and a few other things as well I think. After checking out the super market and picking out a few items like soap, we separated and I decided to walk back up the hill on foot. It was quite steep at first and I was huffing and puffing for the first little bit, but it quickly got to a more manageable steepness and I just basically walked up the hill. I find that when I start exercising, I can also start watching what I eat. If I am not exercising I can’t be bothered to watch what I eat at all. So, I’ve had a two whole day stretch go by without stuffing myself into oblivion during lunch or dinner. TWO DAYS! That’s like a world record for me.

BTW, I thought the best part about the London zoo was the butterflies. There were other cool spots, but the butterflies were great. My favorite butterfly:

A nice butterfly:

My favorites picture of a butterfly:

There was even a mirror at the end, where you were supposed to check yourself to make sure there weren’t any hitch hikers on you:

The Brits have a good sense of humor and they don’t mind scarying the crap out of kids. This is what we encountered on the way to the Dragon:

I don’t have the one which says, Dragons are really fast. That was the one which got Jason asking every 10 seconds for the next two hours, Do you think I could beat up a drag with a kung fu kick? Do you think I could out run a dragon if I run this fast? And then he’d take off running as fast as he could. On and on and on, about 30 different “do you think I could” questions.

No picture of the Dragon I am afraid, but this little fella here is worth being afraid of:

This is the deadliest snake in all of Europe. Do I remember it’s name? No. Not nearly as scary looking as the Mambas and the Vipers though. Whoa!

The aquarium was cool, and here’s the obligatory picture of Dory:

This show featured several animals, two of which ended up on ropes over my head where they took a dump:

and

I was seated with a bunch of teenage girls who screamed every time one of the animals stopped overhead. Somehow the animals only dumped once each, and all the other times were just to freak us out. The girls almost pushed me off the bench twice. When the lemur took his turn, it was so big that I asked the girls to move out of my way so I could take a picture of it. They thought I was very weird … I was just kidding.

So the British are into potty humor, at least at the zoo.

I just discovered about 40 pictures Sue took of the kids at Princess Diana Memorial Park (part of Hyde Park) in Kensington (or Notting Hill) or both. Luckily I will be able to delete about 39 of those pictures since they are all duplicates. A nice park. I’ll get to them eventually.

Thanks for reading!

If you want pictures, skip this entry - I left the Camera in Hampstead by accident.

Today I was very excited because my bank statement arrived with the correct address. With it and passports we can now register with NHS, get library cards, and get a pair of cell phones for free with a monthly plan.

NOT!

No, you need a credit history. So, no cell phones for us. If we get separated at the zoo we need to use the force to find each other. I am so pissed I can’t see straight, and I am not sure if I am pissed more because of the fact that this is an inconvenience for us, or because I have been waiting a whole week for the bank statement so I can get some new toys to play with. Either way, I am pissed off. To make matters worse I have to wait three months before I even try because they automatically refuse another credit check for three months after a failure, no matter what the reason for the failure is. I am considering FAXing them my US credit report which I got copies of before I left the US just in case that will help.

Last night I finally went to the bar next door which keeps us awake with the sound of crashing bottles at 2am, as they throw the bottles away after a fun filled evening. To be honest I was too intimidated to go into this bar, which is really surprising because this bar serves - are you ready for it? - Thai Food. Yes, this rocking bar was the first bar in London to serve exclusively Thai food (upstairs I found out later), started 11 years ago or so.

I sat at the bar, a lonely man, and asked the bar tender for a nice beer. He gave me a Discovery I think he said, although the accent is just killing me around here. It was so good I had to ask him if it had any alcohol in it, and he told me it was only about 3 to 3.5% to which I replied, “Why are ya wastin’ my time, mate?!” I watched a tennis match as I downed the beer, and then I needed something else. I said, “I need something else to drink.” “What would ya like, mate?” “I don’t know, how about some whiskey?” So he made a couple suggestions and ended up giving me some whiskey on ice and a little bottle of ginger ale. I said, “What’s that called?” He said, “Whiskey and Ginger Ale.” I was in awe.

By this time I was pretty buzzed and I spotted some Scotch, which I have previously decided is a very manly drink, so I told the bartender that I wanted some Scotch. He said, “Why? Terrible stuff.” He said, “Try a Guiness!” I told him I have had many a Guiness in my time but left out the part about how proud I was of my Black and Tans:

(clearly I lied about pictures)

So I insisted on the Scotch, straight up?? no ice. I felt very manly, got very drunk. I asked him why nobody was leaving him any tips, and he said that only Americans do that. I decided to prove him wrong and walked 50 feet to my apartment, and that was that.