Category: London Calling

My sister, brother-in-law, and niece left for Heathrow moments ago – ending a 10 day visit.  

It went well, aside from Dawnise being under the weather for much of it.  

We and they wandered around London – Dawnise managed to rally for a couple Christmas markets, a walk down Regent street, and a trip to Fortnum and Mason to see their famous Christmas windows. I even dragged them to Greenwitch to stand on the prime meridian.

We cooked (and ate) Christmas dinner, had Sunday Roast, had tea and home-made scones, ate a bunch of mince pies, panettone, stollen, and drank gluhwein.

When they weren’t touristing we hung out here, played games and watched some Christmas movies.  

They’ll arrive back in Seattle mid-day, in time to get home and keep their dogs calm during the evening festivities.  

Our plan for this evening is to stay home, maybe have a couple friends over, and – assuming we stay up late enough – hopefully get a glimpse of the fireworks display over the Thames from our balcony.

Whatever you have planned for New Years Eve, and Dawnise and I wish you a safe and joyous one, and hope your 2020 gets off to a fantastic start.

Last Friday, December 20th, marked half a year in the UK.  And the next day marked our 23 wedding anniversary.  We marked our anniversary on Friday evening with the always-excellent Beef Wellington for two in the dining room of the Goring hotel.  It was a brief moment of calm in an otherwise hectic December, and the evening before my sister, brother-in-law, and niece arrived for the holiday.

The balance of December has been chocked full of stuff.  We even managed to squeeze in Christmas Tea at the Ritz – something Dawnise has literally wanted to do for years.

To rewind a bit… Just after Alfred & Jodie left London for New Zealand, some friends from Luxembourg arrived in London.  We used their five year old daughter as a good reason to experience the particularly British Christmas tradition of Pantomime before they left for the continent and Dawnise and I headed to NY for a weekend.

A weekend in NY?  Who’s crazy idea was that?

It all started ‘cause ‘Nise was going to end the year just shy of status next year, and we were talking about where we could go to get her the last couple thousand miles she needed.  I’d been saying for some years that Dawnise needed to visit NY around Christmas, but since we’ve been “over here” around the holidays for the past several years we hadn’t ever made it happen.  When to my surprise I found inexpensive tickets from London to JFK we overlooked – as in failed to even consider – the duration of the flights (aside: it’s nearly as long from London to NY as it is from London to Seattle – spherical distance is weird) and booked tickets and a hotel in midtown.

We arrived mid-day on Friday and spent the weekend walking around NY.  Christmas markets, Central Park, Grand Central Station, Rockefeller Center, shop windows on 5th Ave – and even managed to meet up with friends for lunch.  Our Sunday afternoon departure got us back to London early Monday, and I was only slightly later than normal arriving at work.

If that seems a bit mad, well, it was – and at some point during the weekend we started toasting to “crazy schemes and questionable decisions.”  Once said, it stuck, and we invoked it frequently while wandering the length and width of Manhattan in freezing cold (but dry) temperatures.
It was exhausting.

And really good fun.

Before we had cooked up the idea for the NY trip, we had planned a weekend Christmas market getaway to Belgium (Bruges and Ghent) with good friends.  When the French rail strike caused Eurostar to cancel our train two days before the trip, we manage to redirect to a weekend in Bath and Oxford.  Props to Airbnb for graciously handling the refund, and to the grumpy but efficient woman at the national rail counter who got us confusing group rates tickets from London to Bath to Oxford to London.  The Bath downtown was Christmas market-tastic, and we did our best to drink enough gluhwein to pretend we were on the contingent.  The Oxford market was smaller but it, and the city, were lovely – and we got incredibly lucky with the weather – a cold dry weekend.

The weather continued to cooperate, and Monday evening – far later than we would have normally – we had the experience of buying a Christmas tree and walking it home, over my shoulder, through central London.  The kilted fellow who sold it to us gave Dawnise a discount for taking a tree that had lost a bit of its crown in transit.  He likely thinks he got rid of an unwanted tree – Dawnise saw it as a way to get the charlie brown tree she wanted at a discount.

I love win-win situations.

That just about catches us up.  My sister, brother-in-law and niece arrived on Saturday, and we spent the first couple days wandering around the city.  Unfortunately the cold Dawnise had been trying to fight got the better of her, and much to her chagrin and frustration we skipped our traditional Christmas eve cocktails at the Ritz.  It was really only through the miracle of modern medicine (Dayquil) that Dawnise managed to help cook a proper Christmas lunch for 7.

Boxing day has been punctuated by bouts of heavy wind and rain, but that didn’t stop our guests from wandering out in the mid afternoon to see more sights.  I imagine when they return it’ll be time for a bit of tea and a reprise of Christmas dinner.  They head back to the states the morning of New Years eve – plans between now and then are sketchy, but I’m confident a good time will be had.

To everyone reading this – we hope your holidays are full of cheer and laughter, and we wish you the very best in the start of the new year.

Cheers. 

In August of 2005 I got an email that would turn out to change everything.

It was from a recruiter, who’d found my resume online, asking if I was interested in talking to a small game company.  Nine months later began what would turn out to be over a decade of working with a remarkable group of people.  But that’s a story some of you already know, and for those that don’t it’ll be a story for another time.

I don’t remember first meeting Alfred, but I do remember meeting his wife, Jodie and their newborn daughter when she was brought into the office for a first visit.  I had no idea in those early days that Dawnise and I would become so close to them.

Alfred and I found working together to be fun and effective – his optimism and willingness to “just try it” being a great counter-balance to my skepticism and desire to understand “the whole journey” before setting course.  I could tell you all the reasons it wouldn’t work, and Alfred would start doing it anyway.

We and our spouses found mutual interests outside work, and started spending evenings together for dinner and games.  Dawnise babysat their daughter while they were at hospital having their second, and again when they had their second son.  We started traditions – like the annual bacon party that started when Dawnise and Alfred mused over burgers made entirely of bacon, which lead to the purchase of a meat grinder, and to bacon burgers so good we tried for years to improve on them, or even reproduce the first years’ success.

When my sister moved to Seattle, we dragged her with us to meet them, and it wasn’t long before her then-boyfriend-then-fiance-now-husband got roped in as well.  Alfred likes to cook, and we love to eat – it was a perfect match.

When Dawnise and I moved to Luxembourg, we visited with them when we were back in Seattle.  And in the years after we moved back and downsized into an urban dwelling Alfred & Jodie hosted our annual ice cream social in their kid-friendly backyard in the Seattle suburbs.

They were undoubtedly our closest friends in Seattle over those 15 years.

It could just be me, but I’ve found making friends as an adult is tricky.  And making close friends… Well, tricky doesn’t even start to cover it.

When Dawnise and I were readying to move to London we figured we’d visit while we were here, and then we’d pick up where we left off when we were back in Seattle.  

Turns out we were half right.

As we were prepping for the move to London, Alfred and Jodie let us in on the secret that they’d decided to leave Seattle and move back to the other side of the world.  Having come to Seattle from Australia, they’d decided to move to New Zealand, and planned to leave Seattle before the end of the year.

So a month or so back the family packed up and left for a multi-week “farewell to America” tour. Dawnise joined them in Florida for a week at Disney World and came home just before the entire clan landed in the UK for a two week stay.

While they were in London we met up for dinner, hung out with the kids, and hosted them at our flat for American Thanksgiving.  (Side note: Dawnise absolutely nailed cooking for 10 people out of that shoe-box sized oven.). The next day we met for dinner at a pub near their Airbnb, went back to their place to chat, and say farewell.  The following day they were flying to Auckland via Hong Kong.

As we left, and Dawnise and I walked back to the tube, we tried to focus on being excited for them, on their new adventure, and ignore the feelings of loss tugging at us.

Make no mistake, we are excited for them.  And despite the utterly ridiculous time in transit, we’ll go visit once they’re settled.

But being excited doesn’t mean for a second we’re going to miss them any less.

I just found a cookie in our oven.

Well, it was a cookie once, or since it’s a UK oven, maybe it was a biscuit.  Either way, by the time I found it, it was a cookie-shaped lump of carbon.

You might not think it terribly odd for a cookie to go rogue – make a daring escape off the back of the baking tray and land in the back of the oven.  Out of the proverbial pan and into the, um, convection wind tunnel.

In general I’d agree with you.  What makes this ex-cookie interesting is that we haven’t made cookies in the 5 months we’ve lived here.

We use the oven pretty frequently, and it’s never smelled like burning cookie, so I guess this cookie was missed in the so-called professional deep clean of the kitchen before we took residence.

The cookie discovery was prompted by an inventory of our cooking supplies in advance of (American) Thanksgiving.  We’re going to attempt to feed 9 people out of an oven the size of a shoe box and a 24” wide four element cook top.

To be fair, the kitchen fixtures in our flat are fairly “bog standard” – and in many London flats they’re all you could squeeze in.  But our kitchen is actually surprisingly large.  It’s (much) bigger than the kitchen in our Seattle townhouse, and actually larger than the kitchen in our previous house, in the Seattle suburbs.  So I figure the kitchen has standard fittings because it’s a rental, and the owner has little incentive to spend money on nice things their tenants are unlikely to take care of.

So normal fixtures, but still, 9 people…

It promises to be entertaining.

Once Thanksgiving is in the rear view, we’ll start to figure out Christmas.  This will be the first year since 2012 (our first year in Luxembourg) that we’ve been “home” for Christmas, since then we’ve been in Europe for markets and spent the holiday with good friends (and incredibly accommodating hosts) in south east London.  This year my sister, brother-in-law and niece are coming to London.  High on the list of questions will be “how does one get a Christmas Tree home on the tube?”

Stay tuned.

But for now, to all the American recipients of this message, here’s wishing you a very happy thanksgiving.

Cheers.

As I type I’m sitting on a flight back from Atlanta to London.  I was in Seattle last week for business, then took a side-trip to Florida to visit my parents “on the way” back.  It was a good visit, and I’m glad we could arrange it.  

We kept our townhouse in Seattle.  Partially because we weren’t sure when we were going to move, which complicated the logistics of renting it out, and partially because I planned to be back in Seattle regularly, and my employer prides itself on being frugal (read; frustratingly cheap) and I figured our place would be more comfortable than any Seattle hotel offered in its place.

So when I landed in Seattle last Sunday I took a Lyft to “our place,” let myself in, and stood there in the doorway for a few minutes – trying to put a name on my confusion.

“The cats aren’t here to meet me at the door, that’s probably it.”

That wasn’t it.

“It’s cold in here – and too quiet – that must be it.”

Nope, still not right.

I latched the door – irritated that I couldn’t put my finger on the wrong – grabbed my phone, turned off the cameras and vacation mode on the thermostat, before bringing my bag upstairs.
I unpacked a bit, and my sister and brother-in-law arrived – visiting with them made me forget about the whole damn thing.

For a while.

For a while.

The rest of the week was early starts, late returns, stolen moments with missed friends, and each time a feeling of not-quite-right-ness when letting myself in.

I don’t remember feeling the same when I was back a few months ago.  Maybe I won’t feel it when I’m back early next year.  We’ll see.

But sitting on the plane, knowing I should try to get some sleep but not feeling ready, I can’t help but think about it.

It was still our place.  It felt familiar.  It had a bunch of our stuff in. It had a washer and dryer that can wash and dry clothes in a reasonable amount of time (a rant for another time).  But it wasn’t home.

Dawnise was missing.  The cats didn’t greet me at the door.  It felt like “our other place.”  I suppose it’s like going to a vacation house – but having never had a vacation house, I can’t really say.

So I’m on my way back to London – where the cats will undoubtedly berate me for the couple days they’ve spent alone* – remembering the feeling, first had when we were living in Luxembourg, of not quite knowing where home is.  It’s not our place, and the stuff in it is new and not all ours… Never the less, its home.

At least for now.

 * Dawnise, amusingly, arrived in a different part of Florida yesterday to join good friends at Disneyworld on their ‘farewell to ‘merica’ tour and won’t be back until the weekend.

I was late leaving work the other day, and the graveyard gates were locked when I arrived.
We don’t live in a graveyard, of course.  That’s ridiculous. I walk through one on my route to work.

The Bunhill Fields Burial Ground [1] – last resting place of, well, a bunch of people, including Defoe and Blake, and a bunch of Cromwells – but not that Cromwell.

The stone path through is worn and uneven – collecting deep and barely avoidable puddles in the rain – and the iron fence edging the path has been built around tree roots and trunks.
The headstones visible from the path are hundreds of years old.

People sit on the benches taking their coffee or tea in the morning, squirrels scamper amongst the headstones and up the tree trunks.

In the morning commuters rushing to work dodge around people out for a stroll. On nice evenings crowds gather at the pub at the far end.

Occasionally the caretaker is seen about, doing whatever one does to care for a field of grave markers.

Even in the wet, dodging puddles underfoot and fat drops from the trees above, it’s become the favorite bit of my commute.

Anyway, they lock the graveyard gates at dusk – so as the days get shorter, I’ll have to find a different route home.

I’ll let you know what I find.

[1] https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do/green-spaces/city-gardens/Documents/bunhill-leaflet-map.pdf

Three months ago today Dawnise and I landed in the UK, made our way to our temporary accommodation, and alternated between being jet lagged and worrying about the still-in-transit cats.

In the last three months we’ve: gone to a wedding in Barcelona, found a flat, moved in, found our local pub, hosted a birthday party for a friend, won an actual UK pub quiz, had a couple BBQs in the London summer, met out-of-town friends for afternoon tea, had our first overnight house guest, taken the tube a bunch, gone to the theater (Dawnise more than me), gotten a new passport (Dawnise more than me), gone back to Seattle (me more than Dawnise), gotten haircuts (if you’ve never tried it in another country, that may seem trivial – it’s not), met our new neighbors, and in two days time we’re hosting the first annual UK version of the ice cream social.

It seems like forever and only yesterday – all at once.

The summer days are getting shorter, and the morning temperatures are getting cool and crisp. Soon it’ll turn into a fall and winter just as cold, dark and wet as in Seattle. I think it’s safe to say we’re both looking forward to it.

Hope this finds you well.

… Dan, Dawnise, & the Cats

Just over a week ago the humans packed up their stuff, unceremoniously shoved two cats into a box, and took a car across town from our temporary flat to our “permanent”  flat.

We’d already nailed down our short list of “pre-move” needs, and once we moved in we got to work on transforming the flat from “habitable” to “comfortable.”

A week later it’s still work in progress, but there is progress. We’ve gotten the TV off the floor, and the first couple area rugs should arrive today. We even helped host a birthday party on the weekend, despite our dining chairs having not yet been delivered, and Dawnise made ice cream with the brought-from-Seattle ice cream machine and heavy-ass-also-brought-from-Seattle step-down transformer.

We replaced the old and sightly grotty (I continue to work on my capital E English) combination washer/ineffective-dryer with shiny new dedicated replacements, and I managed to unstack the dryer to fix the installers eff-up without injury (thanks to Mike for spotting me and to Mary for supervising).  

As an aside, if you’ve never seen a washer/dryer stack walk across a room, reinstall one transit bolt and run a load.

No, really, don’t. It’s bad for the machine and not great for the laundry closet, either.

I assembled a barbecue and unlike Luxembourg – where making fire involved multiple trips around the city and learning the French word for ‘adapter’ – the LP regulator and canister matched up on the first attempt. It was almost anticlimactic.

I have a 20 minute walk to work, we have two tube stations in striking distance (barbican and old street, in case you’re working out a route), and the neighborhood seems to go from bustling during the week to pleasantly chill on the weekend.

Oh, and we have a pretty excellent view. (If you look carefully you can spot St. Paul’s, The Eye, and the top of The Shard. Also three ugly brutalist concrete monstrosities, blech.)

A contractor came yesterday to look at the relatively short list of things that need fixing, so hopefully in a few more days we’ll have another working shower.

On the less easily fixed side, the downstairs hall lights, outside the bedrooms, are on motion-sensors that see the cats, so the first night was a disco party all night long. There’s no switch to override them aside from the circuit breaker, which is fortunately just outside the master bedroom.

We’ve got a list of the key items of furniture we need, and a list of places to look for them, so we expect the flat will be ready for a flat-warming ‘soon.’

Now we move past the ‘moving here’ phase into the ‘living here’ phase.

Hope everyone is well, and of course if your path brings you to London, let us know.

Cheers.

…Dan, Dawnise & the cats.

Hard to believe it’s been a month already, but indeed Thursday this week marked a month that Dawnise and I have been in the UK.

Aside from a couple days in Spain to attend a wedding (an epic busses-didn’t-return-to-the-villa ’till 5am wedding), we’ve been pretty focused on getting life put together.

We signed the lease on our flat, got keys at the start of the week, and our goods were delivered by the movers on Thursday.   Since getting keys we’ve been flogging our newly-issued UK Amex pretty hard buying what we need to setup the flat to be habitable. 

As an aside, props to Amex – no credit history in country? long standing relationship with Amex? Great – here’s a card with a sensible credit limit.

We’ve got the critical services established (power, gas, water, internet – yes I put internet in the same list as water and power) and have spent a couple days at the flat accepting deliveries, returning to our temporary accommodation at night to confused and slightly PTSD looks from the cats (where WERE YOU?).

We’ve got room for guests – a guest room and sleeper sofas.  We’ve used some of the “partially furnished” furnishings to setup the guest room – sans mattress so far (there was a mattress, trust us, you’re glad we didn’t keep it).  The master bedroom, at the moment, is a bed and a collection of shoes (before you jump to the stereotypical conclusion – they’re about half my shoes).

When we get back to our temporary flat tonight we’ll review the list of pre-move-in necessities and figure out when we shove the cats into a box and catch a taxi across town to introduce them to our “other flat.”

In less copacetic news, I managed to come down with a cold and then (literally) ran across our new neighbourhood (note the spelling, I’m working on learning capital-E English) when it turned out I had a faulty set of flat keys and needed to admit a cleaner to the new flat.  And if that wasn’t enough, the lift at the new flat was misbehaving the day of our goods delivery, so I ended up helping the movers more than expected.  I generally feel like crap.  I took a lovely couple hour nap on a sofa in the new flat this afternoon, and I’m hoping I have a day or two to kick this cold.  Tomorrow involves more spending money so we can get a new washer and an actual tumble dryer – ‘cause fuck keep calm and carry on, I want a dryer.

Dawnise has done an admirable job keeping us feed and shifting our stuff to the new flat one travel backpack at a time, and she’s even managed to spend a bit of time exploring her new city.

We’re both looking forward to having more than the clothes and shoes we packed on the flight – you don’t realize how nice a different pair of shoes feels until you’ve worn the same two pairs for a month.  Or maybe it’s just us.

Hope all are well, and until next time…

…Dan & Dawnise

Over the last week all the mammals have all basically settled into their new enclosure – and as temperatures hit 30C/90F, we’re happy the current enclosure has air conditioning.

I spent the week at work, which was something of a return to the familiar as I’ve been visiting this office and these teams several times a year since joining Amazon.  I have a desk and all the trimmings and a new notebook with a UK layout keyboard – which is sending my brain into fits each morning when the return and shift keys are the wrong shape, and a couple other commonly used keys are in the wrong spots.

Dawnise did a bunch of grocery shopping (you forget all the stuff you need when you have none of the stuff you need) – and we managed to cook in our kitchen – which was clearly made more to look at than to actually cook in.  We managed to make a reasonable approximation of Mexican food – complete and accurate, aside from re-fried beans (surely they exist, but not at the local Tesco). She looked at more flats, wandered through Borough Market, and generally enjoyed that this time we moved to a country where we mostly speak the language.

We’ve made a lease offer on a flat* – and assuming they don’t discover anything unacceptable about us during the so-called “referencing” process we expect to move (again) in the middle of July.  We’ll have a guest bedroom, reservations on a first-ask-first-served basis.

Week after next we’re heading to Spain for a few days for a friends’ wedding – they were awesome about leaving the invite open around our move uncertainty – and we’re looking forward to celebrating with them.

Today we’re going to find some brunch, head to a birthday picnic this afternoon (here’s hoping we can find some shade so Dawnise doesn’t burn to a crisp) and are having dinner tonight with a colleague and his partner.

We continue to marvel at how willing the Brits are to tolerate a completely stupid laundry system (oh. my. god. becky. the dryer is soooo worthless!), stress about finding food for the cats that Ivan isn’t allergic to and that they’ll both eat (we brought some from the states, but it won’t last forever), and be confounded at the seeming lack of pet supply stores in this part of London.  It’s hard to tell if Amazon and other online retailers are filling a critical need, or if they’ve driven all the local shops into insolvency.

Until next time,
…Dan & Dawnise

* top floor of this building