it's sort of like line dancing?

we stopped off at the keystone for a quick pint on our way home from work. richard wanted to go for a run, i wanted to go for a pint. it wasn't a difficult persuasion. we left early, after the surprise morris dancers arrived. one song is quaint, the second gets tedious.

a couple of my my favorite shots--that's the 'rampant rooster' you see. hmm. and i just like how bored and embarassed the man in the striped hat looks...



sorry i'm not so good at blogging lately. nothing too new--job is good, not too crazy busy, but not much has changed. still getting used to the people, the job, getting up early, etc. i do enjoy my lunch most, down by the river. the weather has been fabulous this week, so i've been hanging out, people watching across the river from the tower of london.

i get my first paycheck tomorrow, woo hoo! we'll be having a nice curry tomorrow night to celebrate. all the onion bhajis one can possible imagine, i'll tell you what...

work

i seem to have lost the adapter that lets me transfer pictures from my phone to my laptop. i was going to show my daily lunch spot alongside the river thames on the south bank near london bridge--but you can kind of picture it in your mind, right? good.

work is going well. i had a scare last week and thought i was totally in the wrong position for me--but it turns out i just didn't quite understand the dynamics of the company. my company recently merged with an american company. i'm on the team that is handling the first major project between the two, and there is a lot of anxiety going around my department and project--and i kind of absorbed it all like a sponge. it didn't help that my boss was out of the office in moscow for other business things, so i was left to fend for myself in status calls with directors of both companies. my week left me really tired and grumpy all weekend. but after a good talk with my boss yesterday, i have a much better idea of what it is exactly that i do. and i'm really busy, but i'm getting into the swing of things pretty quickly. i'm really glad i'm not expected to do all that other crap i thought i wasn't being paid enough to handle!

other than the new job, i've not been up to a whole lot. richard and i manage to travel to and from work together most days, which is great. i have a shoulder to fall back asleep on in the mornings and the evenings. woo! i'm still way out of practice with the daily routine, but i guess that's normal. richard manages to iron all my clothes, make me tea and breakfast and get me out the door in the morning. i'm not kidding. it's fantastic!

'we apologize for any delays to your journey, but...'

so, fairly regularly, you hear announcements on london trains about delays on the tube, delays on the overland network, etc. it's to the point mostly where you never hear the announcement the first time, because you're expecting the delay, so the salt in the wound comes when they feel the need to tell you why. it's usually 'signalling failure,' or 'a passenger who has taken ill.' once, on trip back to guildford, it was because some kid hurled a brick at the 70-mph train i was on, in which the driver's window was shattered. he was okay.

so today, en route to london, they're going through the normal delays, and at first i didn't catch which line was delayed, but i did hear why: '...due to an unexploded WWII bomb that is near the track'

what the...?! i think what surprised me most though, was that in looking for a suitable online story of the event, i found a half a dozen other news stories over the last few years of unexploded WWII bombs found in london. mainly east london, where they're building for 2012 olympics. creepy.

i might actually listen more closely to the reasons for delays from now on. actually, no i won't. it's probably something that's really common, like a 2,200 pound ticking WWII bomb.

ooh, and i just found this--a picture of the detonation!