blog.circusgeek

a personal blog with nerdy bits thrown in

Author: ryan

  • London Report 3 – National Gallery & Harrods

    Since my morning report, we've been all over town. Took the tube to Piccadilly Circus, and walked from there to Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery. We got to see an amazing amount of paintings from the 12th through the 19th centuries, by artists such as Renoir, Manet, Michaelangelo, Van Eyck and Van Gogh. After that we walked through St James Park to Buckingham Palace, then through Green Park and down to Harrods. What a giant store that is! It's very easy to get lost in the place, and they do seem to sell pretty much everything (though I couldn't find a hat that said "Lion Tamer" on it, heh). After Harrods we walked down to Sloane Square to try and find a pub we went to in 2001 and couldn't (it seems to have closed, bummer) before taking the tube back to our hotel. Before going back we decided to take the tube to an area known as Blackfriars and found a great pub and had a snack and a pint before continuing on to our hotel to freshen up a bit. After a stop by our hotel, we walked to a great pub / restaurant called the Inn 1888, and had a nice meal. After that we walked to a pub we walked by on our way to Regents Park yesterday called The Volunteer. It was packed with college-aged kids, so we only had a pint and left. Afterwards we walked back to The Globe (our 'local') for another few pubs before the 11pm closing time. Fun and busy day.

    Update on photos: still having troubles uploading, not sure if I'll be able to or not from here on out. Frustrated, but oh well. 

  • London Report 2 – The next day

    After my last post we walked up the street to the local pub, The Globe, for a pint. Afterwards we continued our walk up to the beautiful Regence Park for a bit, saw some herons and geese and swans (along with a lot of pigeons), and after about a half hour we walked down out of the park down another street and found another pub (the Prince Regent) and stopped in for another pint. 🙂

    We continued wandering around, exploring the area near our hotel. We ended up walking down to Oxford St. where the large shopping mall Selfridge's is, and naturally found another pub, this one called The Marlborough Head. We sat there for a bit before deciding to walk back up to The Globe for dinner.

    In case I didn't mention it, the weather is fantastic, probably nearly 70. We sat outside, had a few pints and a meal (though that came a bit late, as somehow the ticket was misplaced, the manager apologized many times, coming out to our table to make sure everything was alright). Kelly had the fish & chips (which were apparently good but she didn't get any tartar sauce, which she missed), and I had a delicious club sandwich (turkey, bacon, egg, mmmm). After another pint or two we walked back to our hotel room.

    We get in and realize it's only 9:30. I suggested we go back out, but made the mistake of laying down on the bed. Apparently I passed out cold. Woke up around 3:30am still dressed. Guess I was still exhausted from the day's travel (and, I'm sure, the fine ales).

    Woke up just after 9am today, feeling sore from all the sleeping but refreshed. We're going to go find some breakfast here in a bit, and probably visit the National Gallery, and if we have time after that, perhaps Harrods. I'm going to look for a hat, that says Lion Tamer on it in big letters (something for you Monty Python fans out there).

    Also, before we left I set up a bit of photo gallery software on my server, figuring this way I could upload pics to share in batches. Well, the uploading is going very slowly but the gallery is working, so you can check out the below address to view pics from the trip so far. Every time we're at the hotel I plan on trying to upload more photos, so I'm not sure when certain photos will make it there. Anyway, go to HERE for the gallery.

  • London Report 1 – Sound as a pound

    Kelly and I have made it to London and are in our hotel. I found an open WiFi connection from my room (if I sit in the right place). We got up at 8am in Portland, finished packing and getting ready, and by noon we were on our way to Kelly's sisters house. We made good time (just over an hour and a half to get a little north of Olympia) and had a good hour to sit and chat. We arrived at the airport at about 4pm, finished getting checked in and waited.

    We were flying on a 747, which was the first time I'd ever been on a plane that big. We had checked in online and got the last couple seats on the back right so we could recline without feeling rude. The flight was very nice. The service, food, etc, were all better than what we're used to flying Continental. Also, the seatback entertainment system was great, each one was served up with loads of content (probably 50 movies, loads of TV shows, documentaries, etc), and all of it you could pause, rewind and fastforward through. Pretty slick system. Didn't watch any movies but did watch a lot of TV shows, including some Little Britain. 🙂 

    For the first time, I dozed off on the plane a bit. Probably slept a total of 3 hours, but it was more than I'd ever slept on a flight before. Between the sleep and the 8 hour 45 minute flight, it was really pretty quick. Got on the underground (aka 'the tube') and made our way to the station nearest our hotel… got oriented, and here we are. 🙂

    I don't really have much for photos yet, nothing really exciting anyway, so I'll save the for later on. However, we're going to finish unpacking and go get ourselves a pint! 🙂 

  • Tomorrow(ish)… London!

    Tomorrow we leave for London, to spend eight days sightseeing and pubcrawling! We spent the night packing and getting everything in order (including having our friend Miranda over to get keys so she can take care of our cat Guinness, and then taking her out to dinner as a thank you). I think we've got everything pretty much ready to go. Nearly everything is packed (I hope) aside from what we'll need for the morning.

    We'll drive up to Kelly's sisters place north of Olympia around noon, where she's agreed (bless her) to drive us the rest of the way up so we don't have to pay for parking for a week and a half (apparently it'd come to $150, ouch!). We take off from Seattle and arrive in London just over 9 hours later. Woohoo! It won't be until Sunday (about 4am here) that we arrive, but it will be nearly noon there. If I can manage SOME sleep on the plane (I usually can't) then maybe I'll be able to hit the ground running.

    We'll be bringing Kelly's laptop so hopefully we'll be able to get online there to report and post pictures. More to come! 

  • Outing with work folk

    Today SuperSweetCo launched a new version of the fancy new web-based collaboration software. To celebrate, the team who make it go went out after work for food and drinks. We started off walking up to Jake's Grill, which is on the ground floor of the historic Governor Hotel. The happy hour menu at Jake's is incredible, everything is $1.95, and it's not all small appetizers, but full meals such as the 1/2 pound cheeseburger with fries. I had a small hummus plate and it was delicious. After sitting around and sipping on a few pints of Guinness we walked down to Kells to meet up with a few more coworkers. Had a great time.

    Kelly met up with us at Kells (she had a happy hour with a friend not far away) and we rode the bus homeward together. We ended up taking a bus that ends up pretty far away from home, but the weather was great so we decided it wouldn't be a problem. We get off the bus on the corner of 15th and Alberta, only to remember that it's Last Thursday, a monthly event held up Alberta for about 20 blocks, with art, crafts, musicians, hippies, yuppies, and everything inbetween (good blog about it with pics here). As we turned the corner we ran into our friends Ty & Aymie (Aymie had a table set up selling her bead works). Chatted with them for a bit before wading through the heavy crowds to get home. Apparently a couple hours later there was a brawl between some drunken idiots and cops, ending up with riot cops showing up. Some moron apparently threw a beer bottle at a cop, the cop tazer'd the moron, and then the moron's friends started fighting back, and it escalated from there. Sheesh. Bunch of morons.

  • Here come the Fuzz

    This afternoon Kelly and I joined Mr. & Mrs. Ghost Dog to see Hot Fuzz. The movie was hilarious, and anyone who likes Shaun of the Dead will like Hot Fuzz. Both films were written by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, and star Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. And both films do the same thing, take a style / genre of film (zombie movies, or in this case, 'action cop drama' movies) and put a unique (and comical) twist on the whole thing. I highly recommend it.

    Also, during the previews, we saw one for another movie starring Simon Pegg called Run, Fat Boy, Run, which also looks to be pretty funny. Too bad that won't be out until 2008.

  • Unghhh

    What a week, and what a day.

    The past week has been pretty crazy at work. SuperSweetCo is prepping a new version of the software that I worked on a few months back. The UI is changing a little bit, which means that there's quite a bit of work for me to do. I can only hope the changes are received as big improvements. Stress!

    After work yesterday I decided to walk homeward for a bit, the weather was nice, and I needed the physical and mental break from the week. I ended up walking about halfway home (at little over 3 miles) before catching a bus. Once I got home I drank a few beers and watched some movies from Netflix that K had already seen during the week. One of them was a pretty good (and quirky) romantic comedy called Happy Accidents. In general, anything with Vincent D'Onofrio I like… and Marisa Tomei isn't hard on the eyes either.

    Today I had to get up early to help my friend Jenn move. In general helping a friend move is relatively easy, not because I'm all that fit, but it's normally pretty straight-forward… move stuff from point A to B. However in this case my friend Jenn swapped houses with a friend who lived about 3 blocks away. This might sound simple, but it's not. It meant that myself and the 10 other hard-working blokes had to fill the moving truck for a couple hours (climbing and descending steps and stairs, weighed down with heavy boxes, furniture and appliances), only to get to the other house, unload all that stuff, only to refill the moving truck with the stuff from the other house… effectively starting all over. Despite a couple beers and a short pizza break, after four hours I was exhausted. I'm not used to that level of strain. Oh, and the best part was about half-way through it started raining. Whee! All my complaining aside, I was still happy to help Jenn move. Just hope I never have to help move a house-swap ever again. It's a bit like rubbing salt in a wound. 🙂

    After getting home and washing the stink off, and spending a couple hours relaxing (and letting the soreness set in) K and I joined Mr & Mrs Ghost Dog at the Mash Tun for a fantastic meal and some delicious beers. One of the beers that both GD and I enjoyed was a brown ale called Turbodog from Abita Brewing Co. in Louisiana. It was a delicious, quality brown ale with a slightly sweet and bitter flavor. And, it's got a cool name! 🙂 Had a great night, but I'm feeling very sore. I suspect tomorrow is going to suck. 

  • Ant report, beer, hotel, and a trip to Washington

    I've been busy the past several days. Work has been very stressful. I have a lot to get done prior to a new software release (coming in a couple weeks). On Wednesday I worked from home, and had an "Orkin Man" come over and look into the ant issue. To my great relief, we don't have carpenter ants (whew!) but instead have a non-destructive nuisance called oderous house ants. Apparently it's pretty common in the area, and while they can be hard to get rid of, they're not a destructive. We'll see what we can do with store-bought ant-killing pesticides first before paying for an extermination treatment that's usually reserved for carpenter ants. Apparently the inspection was free, at least, unless we get a bill in the mail later.

    On Thursday my brother Travis and I got together for our weekly beer drinking session. Had a good time, though made it an early night (due to the aforementioned work stress).

    Friday after work I met Kelly and our friend Miranda at the McMenamins Back Stage Bar (mentioned before) and had a delicious spicy mac 'n cheese dish with blackened chicken, and a couple pints of Terminator Stout. Later we drove Miranda home to hang out, but not before stopping at Belmont Station to buy a few beers for the weekend (Smithwick's, Coniston Bluebird Bitter, Old Speckled Hen, and a few other things). 

    Today was pretty productive, despite sleeping in a bit. Kelly and I finally booked a hotel for our upcoming trip London. We chose the Park Plaza 'Sherlock Holmes' Hotel. Despite the rather touristy name, and after digging around for probably 20 hours total in the past week (using a combination of Bookings.org, TripAdvisor, and a great Google Maps and hotel search mashup called MashedHotels) we found the Sherlock Holmes was in a good location for a "decent" price (I added quotes because pretty much everything in London is really expensive). After some knuckle-gnawing, I opted for the more expensive 'suite' room. I figured that since we will be there for 8 nights, I wanted to spend our nights in as nice a room as I could afford this time, rather than going for the low-end budget route we usually go for. After booking the hotel, and going to get a haircut, Kelly and I drove about a half-hour north into Washington to visit my longtime friend Sean and his family at their new house. They had just finished moving this morning to a house that sits on ten acres of land in a beautiful and secluded area. It was great seeing them again, and I'm glad they finally found the spot they'd been looking for (for the past several years). After getting back to Portland we hung out at the Mash Tun with our friend Jenn at the Mash Tun for a bit, before going home. What a day! 🙂 

  • Travel news, and stupid ants

    So something I didn't write about earlier like I should have, Kelly and I booked our flight to London late Sunday (yup, after I ate two full plates of meat, maybe that had something to do with my complicity?) We're leaving Saturday, April 28th, flying British Airways direct from Seattle to London, and will return on Monday, May 7th. We're both really looking forward to the trip, despite Kelly's recent unemployment. This all seems so familar. Perhaps this means Kelly will find a kick-ass job and start shortly after our return. It just seems so weird. See Kelly's post for all we plan to do while in London. All of that aside, we'll also make it over there a couple months before the smoking ban that will take effect in July. My last chance to enjoy a pint and a fag in an English pub. Hooray for me!

    Now for the downer, Kelly yesterday pulled a beeping smoke alarm from the ceiling only to get covered with ants. Here we thought we'd solved our ant problem, only to discover hundreds of them in the walls. We have an exterminator coming out tomorrow, but dammit, so annoying, and potentially a very expensive issue. Grrrr. Stupid ants.

  • Full

    To follow up on yesterday's post, we went to the Brown Derby with my family, and though I wasn't able to get the burger I wanted (they were only serving their champagne brunch) I did eat copious amounts of meat and potatoes. My mom informed me that I celebrated my first birthday at the Derby, and naturally ended up wearing most of the birthday cake. Anyway, pretty fun time, I'm probably going to be full for a couple days.