Back to Basics

Don't worry, we haven't died. I stopped blogging weekly in January and turned to biweekly. And then one week we were working late on blog Tuesday. The next week it just didn't seem right to break the even-dated blogging routine and then by the following week, the habit was broken. Not the best excuse I've come up with. In fact, it's probably in the bottom 5. Basically our views were slowly dwindling down into double digits and I couldn't be bothered to put some thoughts on the internet. Sorry, guys. That isn't to say it won't happen anymore. I doubt I'll keep this up biweekly, much less weekly, but I'll try to come back here and give you something.

So now, an update on the last 3 months. Time, as it does, is flying faster than ever. Jodi and I have grown increasingly busy and that time just keeps slipping away at its usual stealthily constant and fleetingly transient way. Returning to the blog will also encourage me to take more pictures. I find blogs quite boring without pictures so I would force myself to take pictures of events in our lives despite the fact that I despise doing so. I've found photos often diffuse the ingenuity of a given moment but without them, it can be difficult to remember specific details about the moment. This usually leads to exactly one picture taken during each "moment" with little care given to it until it's time to return to the memory. This paragraph was NOT supposed to be about my photographic philosophy. That's what happens when I haven't written in a while.

On the subject of photos (though this paragraph will not be about them) the ones in this blog will be random. Or maybe not. I haven't actually arrived at the photo selection process yet. Anyway, March was a pretty standard month. Nothing too exciting happened although British Summer Time began which keeps the sun out longer, right? Also we took a holiday just after St. Patricks Day and did nothing. It was wonderful.

In April, the snowball effect of Congress planning really took off. While big projects are ultimately coming to a close, it takes a myriad of micro-projects to seal them up. For example, in order for the back stage passes project to be closed, we have to go through staff and performers' schedules and make sure they have the exact access they need in the exact venue (or sub-venue) they will be on the exact day they need to be there. And there are about 2,500 people on that list. That's one of my 3 main responsibilities.

So far in May, we've continued snowballing but it's reached a terminal velocity that kind of allows us to ride it right up to congress. It's fun, but if you lose your balance you will fall o ff and get smashed by everything that's been picked up so far. Deepest analogy evaarrrr. Maybe not. Anyway, we're busy. But enjoying it. Since moving to Norwood in South London we've continued taking the 6:41 am train into work but now we tend to leave between 4 and 5 pm... sometimes 6. Turns out helping plan an event like this takes time!

 Isaac, one of my best friends from high school, happened to have a layover in London!

 SAVN.TV was filming on location in London a few weeks ago...

We went to a theme park with the youths from our corps. It was a bit cold. 

History in the Harbour

Jodi and I aren't big on holidays. Well, I'm not big on holidays so Jodi is only big on a few. Mainly Christmas. Anyway, Valentine's Day, being a holiday, was all but ignored. We made (Jodi made) eggs Benedict which apparently has to be capitalized that way and it was delicious. End of blog-safe celebration. Most of the Boundless 8 came over for dinner and desserts which turned into mostly dessert and watching Hercules. No selfie came of this party, though.

Last week was fairly normal until Friday, when Jodi and I took the day off. We spent the morning cleaning and packing for a weekend holiday to Fareham and Portsmouth with Alexa. We have mutual friends, the Malletts who live in the Portsmouth and they had offered for us to stay at their house while we were living in England so this weekend we took advantage of the offer. We went to the UK's TYB/TYC (Territorial Youth Band & Choir) concert in Bournemouth which was very good but made me miss performing with the territorial groups from the West. It made for a late night but we were on holiday so we didn't really care.

On Saturday we went on a Portsmouth tourism extravaganza. We started with local sights near Fareham- Titchfield Abbey, St. Peter's Church, and the coast. The first walls of the church were built in 680. I didn't forget a digit there. 680. As in a millennium before our country's founders were born. It has since been expanded and modified several times over the last 1335 years but I was still severely impressed. Even Titchfield Abbey, the newer of the two structures, was built almost 800 years ago!

After a quick lunch at the Malletts we headed to Portsmouth for more history. I'm usually a selective and somewhat ambiguous history buff- there are random things I'm interested in like medieval architecture, pirates,  and renaissance era ships but I don't actually know much about any of them. We first visited the Mary Rose museum, which is a huge black structure with bits of a ship inside it. At least, that's what I was expecting. The Mary Rose was brought to the surface in 1982 and was a pivotal discovery in the realm of naval artifacts and culture. There was a lot discovered from what was under the ship that I always thought has been common knowledge since the 1700s but has actually only been known for the last 30 years. The way the museum is set up is also quite impressive. The inside is shaped and formatted like the decks of the original ship and parallel the parts that were brought up from the excavation. There are windows on one side showing the ship and artifacts on the other in places they would likely be placed when the ship was in use. There were also recreations of crew members based on bones and clothes found inside which gives a unique perspective into life on a 16th century warship. Check out the wikipedia page. It's legit.

On Sunday we went to Portsmouth Citadel and had a lovely roast dinner with the Malletts and one of their daughter's family. We're always down for roast dinner. As if our Sunday couldn't be any more British, we watched two football games and lazily lounged until it was time to head back to the train station. We learned that Sunday trains back to London are ridiculously busy and may not even have seats available. Usually on commuter trains this is fine but we were 90 minutes from London so we ended up walking pretty far down the train before we found suitable seats. We took the tube from Waterloo to Elephant & Castle only to discover there was no rail service from that station and the bus was our only alternative. After an annoyingly long bus ride we finally made it home happily enough.

 Eggs Benedict.

Titchfield Abbey and beautiful coastal weather.

Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth.

Us in front of the HMS Warrior.

The skull of the Mary Rose's purser. 

Biweekly Blogging is Best

This every other week blogging seems to be working well with our schedule. It seems like we always have an uninteresting weekend followed by an interesting one. The last fortnight was no different. Last weekend we stayed home and the week was spent working. Nothing exciting to report aside from a delicious dinner with Mark Nelson (whom I know from Pasadena) who is here for ICO. The most recent weekend, however, was full of excitement in the most normal sense of the word. Because of a bus strike on Thursday I wasn't able to make it to Wood Green for worship practice. I was texting our worship leader a live report of the unfortunate news and she invited us (Jodi, Alexa, and me) to their youth music night, which is on every Friday before the second Sunday of the month. I know this seems oddly specific, but "Second Sunday" is a special day at our church where the youth stay in the whole meeting and the service is done slightly differently.

Friday we stayed in town after work so we wouldn't have to deal with Southern London trains to get back up to Wood Green. We went to a Mexican place behind the Top Shop in Oxford Street that had the second best burrito I've ever had in my life. It was good. It might just be because we are so far removed from burrito country that my standards are dwindling... the only downside was the price- nearly £10 for a burrito! That's like $15! I'm a volunteer! Anyway, we continued on to Wood Green only to discover that one of the sinks had flooded into the main corridor. We assembled an emergency flood response team out of moms and one kid and after an hour of mopping, dabbing, and wiping, the floor was mostly dry. Our corps officer Jonny actually had to climb through a tunnel or something to stop the flood. I wasn't there for that part so it might be a little exaggerated. The music night itself was loads of fun. We hadn't done much with the youths of our church before then but they were all open to hanging out with us which was nice. We played a Taylor Swift song together which I had never heard and Alexa got two of the boys to do some choreography with their cornet contribution. After the jam, we played a game of around-the-world table tennis but the corps only has maybe 8 or 9 ping pong paddles and there were definitely more of us than that. The rest of us used song books which, surprisingly, worked rather well.

On Saturday Jodi went to the corps again for a women's breakfast while I stayed home and played Civilization V. If you like Risk and/or Settlers of Catan, don't play Civilization. You will get addicted. When Jodi returned from her event that afternoon, we went grocery shopping which was the one unexciting thing that happened that weekend. On Saturday night we went out to dinner with Gabriel Carrión, a friend from the Chicago Area who is on a surgery rotation in London for Med School.

Sunday was long but undeniably fun. Church was the usual second Sunday craziness and I was still able to play bass with the worship team despite skipping practice. After church we took 11 of the youths down to Elephant & Castle in Southern London to wait for a tour bus with about 80 other teens from the Central London Division. The tour wasn't actually the exciting part of the trip- it was spending 3 hours in bus with our teens. Any Salvationist will tell you if you want to get to know someone, spend an extended period of time with them in a cramped vehicle headed to an Army function. Loud laughter, sweets sharing, and jeering jokes were spread in overwhelming abundance throughout our old school double decker buses. We turned into a bit of a tourist attraction as well, waving regularly at other tour buses and and yelling friendly hellos to walking tourists. We are on a lot of Europeans' Facebook pages this week.

Monday was a mostly uneventful work day until we decided to make cookies that night. We decided taking whoopie pies to THQ the next day (Jodi and I now work from UK & Ireland THQ on Tuesdays) would be a good ice breaker for our new colleagues. The oven was a little warm from when Jodi had made dinner so I put the butter in there to soften it up. We started the rest of the prep work but soon discovered we were lacking one ingredient. Rather than walking all the way to the grocery store (about a half mile) we walked to the corner store which conveniently carries powdered sugar (or icing sugar as it's called here). When we got back we finished the prep and preheated the oven. We were ready to start baking when Jodi smelled something burning and opened the oven to discover the butter melting onto the bottom crumb tray in the oven. My bad. What didn't melt was nicely softened but unfortunately we didn't think to take a picture of the mishap for our blog...

Around the world.

Jodi and Gabriel.

Transport Troubles

Moving to Southern London has not been without it's troubles. Overall it's easily a better fit for us... not having a kitchen was getting old. There is, however, something Northern London has that the south side of the Thames is still lacking- the tube. The Underground is a fantastically frequent and conveniently commonplace method of travel throughout London, mostly because of the fact that it's, well, underground. No traffic, no pedestrians, and no weather means the trains can run almost seamlessly year round. The trains in Southern London, however, are mostly on the National Rail system which is almost entirely aboveground. The National Rail is notorious for it's tardiness and tendency to cancel routes altogether without much warning. Additionally, the stops are often miles apart instead of a few city blocks which means getting to one often requires taking a bus. This weekend somehow seemed to be particularly challenging for our travels...

Thursday should have been a typical work day. Worship practice at Wood Green is on Thursdays so Jodi will usually bring Alexa home so they can bake something- and I never complain about that. Last Thursday, however, I wasn't needed at rehearsal so we decided to go to Chipotle in Oxford Street for dinner with the Boundless 8 and a new guy from the International Audit Department, Jonas. After dinner Jodi and I went to Starbucks with Alexa and Cameron where we chatted until about 7:30. We took the Victoria line to Brixton as usual but when we came out of the station, we saw that our bus was already at the stop on the next block. We ran to the bus and got there as the last two people in the queue were boarding. The driver, however, didn't think our sprint was worthy of his time and he closed the door before we could get on. We ended up having to take three buses to get home. Stress.

Friday we decided to have an impromptu family dinner, which ended up actually being most-of-the-family dessert. We stopped at Denmark Hill, where the others live, because some of them wanted to change before heading to our house. The bus ride from Denmark Hill to Upper Norwood is usually about 30 minutes. For some reason, on Friday it was 75. Strike two, London transport. Strike two.

Saturday was both fantastic and awful. We had decided a few months earlier to help out our territory at the Camp America job fair here in London so they had more people to operate the booths and didn't have to send as many from the States. But this meant waking up at 5:30 for me and Jodi. We usually wake up at 5 for work, though, so it wasn't terrible. The commute there was easy, too, so all was well. For a while. The fair itself was a lot of fun- it made me miss working at camp but we were able to find some quality staff members for several camps in the West. After the fair we started home but only made it halfway. Trains to our neighborhood were all cancelled because of a "problem on the tracks". We managed to make it a few more stops on another line but then got stuck in New Cross Gate. I still have no idea where New Cross Gate is. Fortunately, we have apps that tell us what to do in these situations but the bus route it put us on took us right into the heart of the only area in London we were told to never visit at night. And it was definitely after dark. We never actually felt in danger but we've also walked the streets of Tunis with armed military police (as in M16 armed) so we are considerably more seasoned travelers than we used to be. Ha. Yeah right. Anyway, we got on the wrong bus, switched back to the right one, transferred to our homebound bus, and then finally made it home 90 minutes later. Strike three, London transport.

By Sunday transport had already struck out so we were good to go... or not. We got to church fine and after church we had a lovely lunch and chat with some new friends from the corps. They also lived conveniently close to a National Rail Station that could get us all the way home with only one transfer at King's Cross! We made it to King's Cross just fine but when we checked the prompter, there was not a single southbound train leaving the station. Now, King's Cross is not exactly a small station by any standard. There are 27 platforms if you count the international platforms and NONE of them were going south. We live in the south. We decided to take the Victoria line (one of six tube lines through KC) to Brixton again, despite the poor luck we had with it two days before. The bus driver was insanely fast this time, which kind of made up for the whole we-aren't-sending-any-trains-through-Farringdon fiasco.

On Monday we were back to our typical travel schedule. No more weekend random maintenance and closures, no more transport issues. We got to our train station and when we got to the platform noticed that they were still announcing issues with Farringdon. A few minutes later, a Tulse Hill employee came onto the platform to tell us there weren't any trains going into London from our platform. This wasn't the end of the world... there is one other platform that goes into London. When we got to that one, however, the train due to arrive at 5:56 wasn't there yet. It was 6:45. It ended up coming only 5 minutes later so we weren't delayed by much but we still had to walk about a mile to work when we got into the city. Fun times.

Today's travels were normal and only one train was a little late. While these situations were all pretty terrible, they are usually few and far between. I'm just funnier when I'm annoyed at something. This week should be good as far as transport goes but there's snow in the forecast for Thursday which the trains dislike...

We didn't take any photos this week but here's a tube and rail map!

Back to Blogging

So it's been a while since we've posted a blog. Like, a month. Lots has happened but we won't go through it all here. I basically decided that while we were on holiday, we wouldn't blog. And then that continued for another week. I doubt we'll keep up the weekly pace.

Anyway, week one of our holiday. The cruise. We took a Mediterranean cruise through 6 cities and 4 countries and I'm going to limit myself to one sentence for each. We first flew to Genoa, Italy, which was pretty uneventful. We had to take suitcases on buses which is not fun but if you're going somewhere cool, like Italy, it's worth it. Our first city on the actual cruise was Rome. Rome was Jodi's favorite city and the only city where we paid for a full tour. Our tour, as you can see in the Facebook album, included most of the typical touristy sites including the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and Vatican City. After Rome was Palermo on the island of Sicily. The port was conveniently close to the main part of the city so Jodi and I explored on our own and managed to get some fantastic photos and gelato. No wifi, though. Even in restaurants that said they had wifi. We then crossed the sea to Tunis, the capital and port city of Tunisia. some words of advice: if you travel to Tunis, have transportation ready or be prepared to walk through gauntlets of taxi drivers that are NOT afraid to literally run after you in search of a fare. After Tunis we had a day at sea where we officially grew tired of our ship's entertainment amenities. We decided it would be a good idea to visit the outdoor jacuzzi when it was 40º F and ridiculously windy. Then we realized how terrible that idea actually was. We were happy to leave the ship the next day when we arrived in Barcelona, which was my favorite city. While Jodi was hoping to exercise her Spanish here, we learned instantly that locals speak Catalan in Barcelona. Neither of us speak Catalan. But Barcelona is beautiful and clean and full of artsy, food-loving culture so I was okay with that. Our last city was Aix-en-Provence in Southern France. It was probably the coldest city but there was something incredibly homey about it. It felt like a movie. I was able to use my painfully rusty French and we found a cafe that served crepes and espresso so, naturally, we indulged. We then returned to Genoa, spent way too long in their tiny airport, and returned home.

Our time back in London was short. Three days after we returned from our cruise, we left again for Los Angeles. Our friends Sam and Leah were getting married and we were frankly growing homesick. a welcomed retreat. Fun fact: the couple that got married met at our wedding. It's kind of our fault. Anyway, we paid visits to old friends and bought more American things than we should have at superspeed because we only spent 6 days in LA. And one of them was reserved for Disneyland. Unfortunately in all of this haste, we forgot to take any pictures of anything ever. So enjoy the cruise photos.

Last week we were at work catching up on everything we missed the three weeks preceding. Exciting.

Click here to see our cruise album.

Safety drills...

When in Rome...

Tuning a tuun in Tunis, Tunisia.