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a real conversation with a coworker about an hour ago:
her: "are you catching the bus again tonight?" me: "no, i only caught it last week as i had to pick some tickets up from kowloon" her: "oh. it is good when an expat gets on the work bus. the driver drives more slowly and carefully if there is an expat on the bus."
crikey.
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i feel it my duty to point out where we will be sitting this weekend so that you can find me on tv... (click to see it bigger):
Proof (sorry about the gratuitous urinal shot):
had a lovely afternoon in hammersmith at a pub, where we caught up with kirsty, her hubby james, anna moo, nic, steve & emma, dale, ricky and fen. gorgeous day, great food and great company. perfect way to catch up. bbq at jonathan and laura's last night, j's parents were in town, and it was a nice chance to catch up with them. delicious feed of burgers, snags and chucken - I could hardly move by the end of the evening...
heading to covent garden today to meet up with john and jane pascoe, and then am going to kill a bit of time with the camera while rach has her baby shower at tim and sarah's place.
made it to balham and are now hanging with sarah, charlie and penny. after a bit of yelling (at me) penny is now asleep and charlie is doing jigsaw puzzles with rachel. charlie is hilarious - he says "uh oh" and "cup of tea!" constantly! here's a photo of feeding time at the zoo:
just back from edinburgh and we're looking out at a wet and gloomy tuesday morning in london. had an amazing time in edinburgh and the wedding was fantastic - a spot of rain during the day, but the ceremony was lovely, the reception was absolutely marvellous, and we met - and reunited with - some awesome people. i took a load of film photos which won't be ready for a few weeks, but we did take a few with rachel's camera. damon and lynn looked fantastic (damon was in a kilt!) and everything went beautifully. i was actually playing music with paul (the best man) when he met damon and so after dinner when they were bashing out a few tunes on the guitar, they invited me up on stage for a few kiwi songs - great fun. thankfully i had tanked up on red wine so wasn't nervous at all...
sunday we wandered around edinburgh and went to a lovely michelin star restaurant "number 1" in the balmoral hotel. loved it - great food and great staff in a beautiful old building. a bit of an indulgence, but hey - it's not a regular occurrence :-)
monday we saw the castle (photos are on my other camera sorry) and then caught manju and sunethra for lunch at a small organic cafe in downtown edinburgh (urbanangel). took a bus trip around the sights to kill a bit of time and then we had a cheeky wine in a beautiful old bank building called "the dome" before heading to the airport.
a few photos from the wedding are below, but i've got plenty more from the weekend on the other camera - but i'll sort those out when we head to sarah and tim's place today (we're staying with them for the rest of the week).
landed safely in london after an uberlong flight - 12.5 hours. thankfully we managed to upgrade to premium economy using points, which put us upstairs in the nice quiet bit. i ate a monster amount of food and watched a ridiculous amount of tv - all good. the crew were awesome and i even managed a bit of sleep despite it being a daytime flight. had a great dinner with katy, sam, anna and kieran at a local bar / restaurant "the duke" and today we had a lazy day, with a coffee in richmond, a 1.5 mile walk down the river, and then a great pasta lunch in a little italian-style cafe. i had forgotten how good gnocchi is...
currently chilling out at sam and katy's place and tonight it's dinner in covent garden.
off to edinburgh tomorrow afternoon from gatwick and then back monday. sorry, this isn't very thrilling but here are a few photos from the morning walk. click on them to make them bigger:
we spent most of this weekend eating. dinner with the binningtons on friday night, dinner with cam and carolin and the wadhams on saturday, and then lunch with the hoffman clan today (featuring the ridiculously cute evie). today was a quiet one, i got the curls chopped before we took off for lunch and after helping kylie and alex with their new iMac, i ended up doing a bit of work and just schmoozing around the house while madam got a pedicure. three more sleeps until london and edinburgh - can't wait, and it'll be especially awesome because sarah (robinson) isn't working at the moment and we'll be able to keep her company and get some quality time in with charlie and penny.
we head to edinburgh on friday afternoon and then we're back on monday night. the week is pretty much free, and on saturday we'll have a pub lunch somewhere to see everyone and then on sunday rachel has a baby shower which she insists is not a baby shower (the official name is "afternoon tea"...)
here are a few photos from the roll of film i took last week (for the technically curious - pentax k1000 with ilford 400 b&w). i'm still learning the limitations of the camera (it's 30+ years old after all), but it looks like it does need to be slightly undercooked (so when i'm using a 400ISO film, i set the camera to make it think that it's a 800ISO speed film - hence giving it a bit less light than it really needs).
click on one of the thumbnails to see bigger shots, and use the arrows on the sides of the picture to move to the next photo.
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from left to right: lucy (john and kate's second schnauzer), rachel (my first wife...) and nick and rachel at isola last weekend during nick's whirlwind 5 hour visit to hong kong.
sorry team - I had to do a little overhaul of the site, as you can see. this should be permanent (well, at least until we leave hong kong one day). i'm busy putting some of the photo pages back together, but if you're curious, here's why i've had to do this (again).
i've use apple's dotmac site hosting service for a few years - it's pretty good and generally reliable, but the main weakness is that i can only publish stuff from a single computer and i can't edit anything online. not very useful at all, especially when i want to post stuff when travelling or if rachel calls me from work to demand that i remove the latest embarrassing photo of her from public view.
another problem is that the dotmac service has recently been overhauled and is no longer working as well as it used to. apart from stability issues and weird dodgy behaviour, i can only access some of the control panels from firefox and safari (not internet explorer). that's no problem when i'm not at home, but on the road it's a pain in the kapootie.
the new site can be edited from home, from any computer hooked up to the internet, and even from my phone. plus, uploading new stuff is a lot quicker and a lot easier. this of course means that i'll update the thing more often, although quantity doesn't mean quality...
i'm still tweaking bits and pieces here and there, and i'll be adding old photos as the days go on - but in the meantime if you see any problems, just head to the Contact page and let me know.
