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!