It looks like the A24 is getting a bit poshed up ready for the Olympic cycling event coming through on the 28th and 29th July.. It's actually falling over a weekend, so I guess I won't be watching from work after all! Still, I'm sure there will be somewhere we can sneak to catch a glimpse!
Even the roundabout by Denbies is getting a re-vamp, with a special commemorative statue of a couple of cyclists, made up of oak leaf shaped bits of metal, or so I've read..
I was up in London on Thursday for work. I knew the conference centre was in Westmister, but I was totally blown away by the view out of the window!
The Shard is so nearly finished now. In the early morning mist, the top was in the clouds! After the conference finished I decided to do the tourist thing and check out Big Ben and the houses of parliament.
Something seemed to be going down in parliament. Everyone had poured out to watch the arrival of lots of posh looking cars with interesting number plates.. 1 CAM, 1 NAM, 1 POL, LEM 1, 1 CZE (not that I was writing them down or anything!). Then someone arrived, just out of view, to much applause! A bit of googling later, and it turns out the funny number plates belong to the fleet of cars used by the high commissioners of various countries, and that Aung San Suu Kyi was speaking that day!
Next up, I dashed over to the Science Museum. I saw in the Metro that morning that there was an Alan Turing exhibition on, so I couldn't miss that!
Pleasingly, they had a nice cybernetic tortoise there!
and an enigma machine..
It also looks like they've updated the space section too, with a few bits I recognized from the National Space Centre in Leicester, and a new globe-y thing!
Oh, and in Covent Garden, I spotted a really bizarre double shark headed frog thing holding up a phone box, as you do!
So here's a little inventory of kitten gifts we have received so far:
Some worms, a mouse, countless live spiders, a chicken kiev, lots of chicks, a live pigeon, a chocolate biscuit and today, half a road kill squirrel..
Nice! Still, it's the thought that counts! I was quite impressed with the chocolate biscuit though..
Over half term we decided to nip over to France for a few days, James wanted to visit Taize for the first time, so we planned a few stops en route both ways. By lucky chance, we spotted that we'd be skimming past the town of Giverny on the way home, where Monet lived, and the location of his famous water-lily pond! This opportunity couldn't be passed up!
Not a bad view, once we finally managed to battle past the hundreds of tiny French children who were being forced to re-create Monet's masterpiece with scrappy bits of paper and pencils by their Art teachers! It was a beautiful garden, they were obviously going to extreme lengths to keep it in perfect shape, with gardeners every few metres, pruning and re-planting things all day long! I bet Monet never had it looking quite so good!
Another nice surprise was that inside his house was the biggest collection of Japanese art I've ever seen, with loads Hokusai and Hiroshige prints. What mighty fine taste he had!
Brighton never ceases to amaze me. A new shop has opened that sells pearl tea! I have never seen this stuff outside of Chinatown before, and have always wanted to try it!
I got to try it this week, and have decided this is definitely my new favourite type of drink, ever! They're very customisable, so I think they're going to do some pretty good business out of me while I work my way through them all! So far I've tried banana milk tea with custard, and banana milk tea with mango popping pearls and tapioca pearls! Yum! =) Just as well I don't live in Brighton anymore..
So, last week we decided to give Geocaching a go. If you don't know what Geocaching is, I would describe it as a global treasure hunt, a kind of Pokemon game for the real world. It works by people hiding little storage containers out of the sight of 'muggles' (non-Geocaching folk), ready for others to seek out using a combination of GPS and clues left by others. These containers range in size from something the size of a watch battery, just holding a log book, all the way up to huge buckets full of goodies to swap! If you're lucky, you might even find a special prize left for the first few people to find a cache, or a trackable device! Geocoins look like medallions, and they are each assigned a mission - like travel from Lands End to John O'Groats in 6 months, and the idea is that when you find one, you help it to hitchhike to a cache nearer to it's goal, while its owner tracks it online!
It is actually unbelievable just how many of these caches are scattered about the place. I've got the geocaching app on my phone that helps you find them, and it showed up about 20 within a half an hour walk from home, and there was even one right on our nearest roundabout! I wondered whether maybe Horsham was some kind of Geocaching hotspot, but when I had to travel to Stoke Gifford and Westminster for work last week, I thought I'd check there too...it turns out they're everywhere! I actually found out the other day that there is one on Antarctica, and there's even one on the International Space Station! Wow!
Anyway, last week I managing to convince James to look for one with me, and he begrudging agreed, although he did think the whole concept was quite pointless! After one false start, creeping around in the undergrowth, in the dark, using a phone torch (looking very arrestable) and finding nothing, we tried again the following evening, a little earlier, looking for a different one this time. Within minutes it was found! =) The GPS led us straight to it, and with just the removal of a couple of stray looking sticks there it was.
It actually turned out to be a pretty fun game, and that evening we managed to uncover another 3 in town, and a further one on our fieldy walk a few days afterwards! Some people have even specifically put them in historically/geographically interesting places you wouldn't normally find, with a bit of narrative, so it can be educational too! Highly recommended.
So we worked out last night that the kittens are about to turn 1 year old, any day now!
It's amazing how much they've grown since we got them last summer. I just thought I'd upload a couple of then and now shots, so you can see how much they've been eating!!
Last summer..
Hooray for the weekend! It looks like it's going to be a nice one!
For more skies from around the world, check out http://skyley.blogspot.com
It's definitely cooled down a bit since last week, the vineyard people were harvesting all the grapes on Wednesday, and I was back in my snow coat today! Here's a photo from my lunchtime walk up towards Ranmore Common, overlooking Box Hill and Denbies.. it's a great view up there!
For more skies from around the world, check out http://skyley.blogspot.com.
This is the sort of thing that would happen if you left me in charge of town planning! Good old Ottawa.. check it out on Google street view =)
I love all the flowers and flags the royals have wheeled out for the wedding next week - this is what the pavement in front of Buckingham Palace looks like at the moment.. hmm.. I wonder what their colour scheme is going to be..
They've also built some temporary studios outside the palace for all the international press to use:
It's time to try again with the pumpkin plants! Hopefully they'll actually do something this year before being eaten by slugs. I have actually managed to plant them in April rather than September this time, so there is at least a glimmer of hope we will have a pumpkin in time for halloween!
