Yaarr Matey! Thar be pirates!

For those of you who weren't aware, September 19 is international Talk Like a Pirate day. In honor of this oh so important holiday (why didn't we have the day off??) my matey's and I got all decked out (er..partially decked out..) to wander along the river and cause a ruckus. Actually...I think the odd accessories were the only things that made it different from any other Friday night, but it was good fun anyway! Here are some pics of our crazy night out...


Captain Eamo


Pirates and their rum


Makin' friends with Nelson


Me hook


The crew


Land-lubbers


Preparing to set sail (that's a ship behind us...no really!)


Going...


...going...


...Gone! (oops...I'm a klutz!)

Yoga for charity

When I was a full time student, I was running all the time. And after my half marathon, though I was utterly exhausted, I was exhilarated too and it made me want to do more runs for charity. I considered another half marathon, but the timing wasn't right, and a 10K, but I have 3 parties to go to the night before (not good for training!)

Then I discovered an entirely different way to do exercise for charity! On 2 November I'm going to join 499 other people to do 108 yoga sun salutations for charity. Nice and slow (I hope...) but it should be fantastic...and I get to go to the 2008 London yoga show for free and be led by 9 of the top yoga teachers around the world.

This is where the plea for money comes in. You may notice I've added a new widget to the blog for my Justgiving page. I'm trying to raise £1 for every sun salutation I do. It's only £108 so even a tiny bit will help!

Click on the widget to go to my donation page. The charity I've picked is called The Special Yoga Centre, a charity dedicated to providing yoga for special needs kids and people who wouldn't otherwise have access to yoga.

Gee Whizz where'd the weekend go?

This weekend was so jam packed full of activities...it whizzed by faster than I could have imagined. I'll leave out the less exciting activities (gym and laundry...yay!) but here's the play-by-play from this weekend:

3pm - Met up with my nutty friends to buy crafty supplies to make masks. Why you ask? I'll tell ya in a few hours...

5pm - Regroup at friend's house for mask making with mojitos (this hour was sponsored by the letter M)

6.30pm - Don my newly created and amazingly coordinated geometric mask and then realise I only have 1.5 hours to go home and get ready before dinner reservations..aack!



8pm - Meet with the masked brigade for a super posh dinner at Just St. James (sans masks of course...we're not that weird). We had live jazz...champagne..and amazing food followed by cocktails in the basement bar.





10:45pm - Hop in a taxi to the masquerade bash and serenade the taxi driver with an oh so random array of song including 'Wade in the Water' (he loved it...really he did)





11:15pm - Find our Irish crew in line, don our masks, pose for ridiculous photos and enter the masquerade ball where we meet some veeery interesting characters (Jessica rabbit?)





Time fuzzy - Dance with bubbles and...vegetables? Yes...weird party...





Early AM Sunday - Wander off home (acting all odd of course) to get some sleep before busy day #2



8:30am - Wake up and wonder why I planned so many things in one weekend (shakes head...)

9.30am - Hop on the tube (love the tube) to South Kensington to attend an Alchemy of Voice workshop

10am to 5.30pm - Meditate and chant and have a fantastic time! I highly recommend people looking up The Alchemy of Voice by Stewart Pearce...amazing stuff.

6pm - Don't rest...just go to find friends among the crazy crowds at the Thames festival on the Southbank. Discover they're watching Korean break-dancing in the middle of the crowd...so settle for some tasty Korean food and Korean break-dancing audio (he he...)

7.15pm - Wander along the river and get distracted by all sorts of pretty stalls with crafts, and shirts, and CHURROS! That's right...I said churros...YUM! Stand in the longest queue in London for the tasty fried treat. Then wave hi to Albert Einstein in the sand.



8pm - Locate the dancing Greeks (my friends...not performers) and hit the dance-floor under the watchful London Eye for some jump-n-jive and swing dancing (err...some people did that dancing...I think I did the jump-n-flail but was good fun anyway and yes that giant pink blur is the stage)





9pm - Wander to the other side of the park for the Petebox guy and the dare-devil free-runners. Dude...cool! (picture is fuzzy...but imagine big blocks and guys doing flips and throwing themselves at walls)





9.30pm - Walk across the Jubilee bridges - give props to the Jamaican drummer man - consider staying in the cold for 30 more minutes to watch the firework display over the Thames, but then remember that a whole weekend has gone by in what felt like the space of a Friday evening...and I have to work tomorrow. Oi...time flies!

Blog Slacker Squared

Wow...June, July, August...yup...I was blog useless! Rather than do a detailed recap, I'll just summarize those months for you and move on.

June - Rain in London
July - Work and a lovely sunny holiday in the states
August - 80% unenjoyable...I was ready for September
September to date - just plenty of work but things are looking up!

A random bit of information...one of the pictures I took on my trip to Venice has been added to an online travel guide. Neato!



And in just a few weeks I get to dash off to Istanbul for 5 days to relax and spend time with my American girls who...(sniff) will be leaving me all alone in London very soon. Yes...there will be all those Brits...but it's nice to have a bit of homebase in London. The people who don't give me a funny look when I say 'high school', 'awesome' or 'trash can'.

I'm not going to make any promises in this post...cause I'm not sure I can take the pressure. I'll just say over and out for now until my next random blog post arrives :)

Barthhelona!!

May certainly got away from me. Earlier in the month I had a big award ceremony for work that kept me crazy busy, but in the end was really successful...even got a promotion! To celebrate, I took off to Spain with two of my favorite people, Miss Lynn and Miss Molls and we had a crazy rockin' time in Barcelona. Really relaxing...amazing architecture...and a much needed day trip to Montserrat, a monastery in the Pyrenees.

Check out the pictures here.

Barcelona

It's definitely not comprehensive though because like a spaz, I somehow managed to delete nearly 100 photos from my camera during the upload! (Sniff!) So...you might just have to Google La Pedrera. And I did take awesome pictures of the football stadium with a crazy Barcelona v. Argentina match on...but alas...they're gone along with every photo I took along our bus tour. Go figure! Also managed to delete some things from our day trip too...but luckily, Molly had some of those so I've credited her in the slideshow.

This pic I took with my phone as we were hiking up the Pyrenees...pretty awesome up there!

It's raining, it's pouring...

You know how in movies to show that someone is having a bad day they make it start raining and then a car speeds by and they get literally drenched with water? That happened to me today. No lie! The funniest part was that I was having a brilliant day so instead of getting frustrated, I was cracking up on the sidewalk thinking about how I always see stuff like that in movies but have never seen it in real life. So...I hopped on the tube soaking wet and getting weird looks, but my book was too good for me to care. Then I played in the puddles on the way home instead of trying to scoot around them on high ground. It was so much fun to just enjoy the weather and truck right through the puddles with people watching you like you're mad. I figure they'd thought about it too, but just hadn't worked up the nerve to look like a weirdy and try it. Lucky for me...I'm having a day where I'm pretty much up for anything so I figured...why not.

Anyway...wanted to share that with you. Perhaps later I will backtrack and upload the pretty pictures I took over the weekend when we had absolutely gorgeous weather! I tell you...the royal gardens are absolutely amazing.

I win!

How time flies. I haven't had internet access at home recently and crazy days at work, which will hopefully explain why I spent time on my lunch break today taking a quiz to see how many 5 year olds I could take in a fight. 22...not bad! Perhaps I should consider going into elementary education...hmmmmm....

22

Crazy World...

Friday...everyone thought spring had arrived. The sun was out. The weather was warm. Birds were chirping. Flowers in bloom.

This morning...






Yup...that's the view out my window. Yup...that's London at sea level. Yup...it's APRIL!
Our poor planet is ill and confused :(

With Earth day approaching...perhaps I should Do The Green Thing as a present to cheer her up and bring out the Spring!

Dublin!

Finally got all my pictures uploaded so you can see em all. There are still a bazillion funny one's on Aditi's camera so when I get those, I'll post some of them too. If you click on the link after the picture of my hammy travel companions below, you'll go right to my photo album:)




See the rest!

Makin' Changes

As you can see...I've made some visual changes to my blog. Figured I'd spice things up a bit! And since I've been super sucky at my resolution to keep in touch, I'm going to need to give you a recap of the last 3 months (um...can anyone tell me where they went??)

January and February were insanely busy at work, especially since I was still getting to know what my job was! For those of you asking what exactly my job is...I think I know now. My title is Marketing & Events, but basically I get to project manage an awards programme for 11-18 year olds called CHANGEit, run a leadership programme for pre-career leaders called Frontrunner, and organise a big conference for the graduates of all our programmes. It's a lot to do...but I'm really enjoying it. (Check out the CHANGEit link in my link-list...it's the blog I started on the awards and you can read about all our finalists...they're brilliant and make me wonder what I've done with my life!)

So...back to busy...the reason I was so busy was that we got all our nominations in for the awards, then we had to create a shortlist, and in the last half of January, I started tromping all over the country to visit more than 20 campaigning groups. I got to go to Liverpool, Newcastle, Hartlepool, Oxford, Dover, Portsmouth, Reading, Wigan, Milton Keynes, Brighton, Kent, Leeds and Birmingham (I think I got all of them). I was basically on a train for a month. I do have some pictures from those trips too...just have to get them off my phone and I'll post them up.

In betweens the work travel I did manage some fun times with friends...Molly and I took a day trip to Brighton that was cold...but hilarious. (Molls gets all the photo credits)













Hmm...March. Yeah...that didn't slow down much with work, and cause I'm a masochist I signed up to run a half marathon too. So on Sunday 9 March I took a coach to Silverstone Formula one raceway, strapped on my running gear and took off with about 7000 other people. I did finish...took me 2:26:10...(had to walk a little bit) but...I finished! That was really my only goal since I hadn't really had time to properly train. My favorite bit was that I was passed by a speed walker...a man in armor (no lie...he's in the pictures!) and a dude in a full on sonic the hedgehog costume! Made me giggle and wish I had a camera. Lucky for me...they take lots of photos at those things.







After all the runnin....I decided it was time for some fun. We wandered about in the rain and cold for St. Paddy's day weekend in London...lots of concerts...crazy people in green...irish dancing...so much fun. And then for Easter we jetted (well...trained and ferried) to Dublin for a quick visit. Lucky for Aditi and I, Molly and Eamonn used to live there so they were good tour guides and had fun Irish friends to hang with. I should have the link with all the Dublin photos posted tomorrow (For sure this time!) And when I get more funny ones from Aditi's camera...I'll post those too :)

Okay...that's enough of a recap for now. I'm really gonna try to post more often cause I forget everything I do so it would help me figure out where my time goes too. But I make no promises....

Hope you like the new look!

Capturing

There are things in this world that never cease to inspire awe. For me those things are sunsets, the ocean, the moon, a skyline, little kids...I could go on and on. The Tower Bridge is another of those things. I never walk, run or drive past without smiling. It captures my full attention and makes me want to photograph it again and again. Tonight I did Just that. On a leisurely (and cold!) walk on the Southbank I came upon it, with no one around, all immense and aglow. Feeling it necessary, I whipped out my snazzy new phone (yup...still excited) and took yet another picture of that bridge. The funny thing is that though I've seen it and photographed it before, each time feels new somehow. It's like capturing that expression of joy on a child's face when they make a new discovery and are glowing from the inside out with pride and exhilarating newness. I wish I could remember these moments in the regular bits of my day. But I guess I'll have to do with them intermittently. Lucky for me things like that are all over London. It's one of the things that makes this such an incredible city. So...it's likely I will continue to photograph this bridge over and over again when that same feeling of wanting to capture joy washes over me. Hope you're okay with that :)



STAY TUNED: This week I'm off to Oxford, Newcastle, Leeds and Hartlepool for work so I'll be taking pics of whatever captures my fancy (or the little bits of place I get to see between meetings). On the next installment...Snippets of England!

The Universe Knows

Today...my horoscope was eerily on point. I regularly read my horoscope on MSN, not so much as a predictor of my day, but just to keep me aware of the bigger picture...the multiple influences. On a regular day I can often find a vague connection, but nothing like today. It wasn't a big deal really...it said I would be antsy waiting for a phone call and to just get on with my day because the call would come in the late afternoon. I was indeed antsy for not one, but two calls today...and I took it's advice and just charged ahead with my regular day and wouldn't you know it...around 4:30pm I received both the calls I'd been waiting for...one about the gym and the other to say my phone was fixed. Huzzah! Things were falling into place today! It's about time too...because both of those issues had to do with the CRAP customer service in this land we call England. All I wanted to do was change my membership from one club to another and they've been giving me the run around between clubs for 2 weeks! And the phone..I tried to keep my number and for the first week...I couldn't get calls from anyone because only half of the transfer went through. But...my perseverance paid off and they pulled through. Now if I can only convince the gym that I deserve a discount for all my troubles...hmmm....

Oooh...there were two other eerie little connections today too. I made a call to a colleague who was just picking up the phone to call me. Then...just as I was going to send her an email, one arrived from her. And just 30 minutes later, as I was writing to another colleague...she was emailing me at the same time too! I must have connected to some cosmic flow!

As for the rest of my day...mentally working on my powers of persuasion and the evil eye...you know...in case they fight me :)

New Year....New Start

This year my list of resolutions was long. So many things I want to change, upgrade, delete... My whole world has been in transition for the last year and half, I suppose the list of resolutions is simply me trying to put the pieces together to make a new whole. The tricky part is knowing whether those resolutions will put me back as I was and not as what I'm meant to be. And perhaps...I'm thinking too much about this in the usual Heather style.

And so...I share with you one of my top, and most achievable resolutions...to reconnect. That's what this blog started out as after all. A means of connecting with everyone back in the states. It's something I've neglected for quite some time, partially because I've reached that length of time where you realise this is where you live...it's not just an experience. Though...if I could, I'd keep myself in that place where I'm aware that London is an experience. London isn't just this normal place I live...it's extraordinary. I wish I could remain aware that at any moment, this experience could be gone.

Often times my awareness of this experience comes when I get homesick and think about going back to the states. And as much as I think I would love that, a little part of me cringes because there is still so much I want to do over here. Daytrips...more european holidays...finally visiting the British Museum! As hard as it is to be so far away from everyone I love, I know that London is where I need to be. So to make the distance easier...I need to reconnect by sharing this experience with everyone. It's not a me here and you there kind of thing...I can be in both places by simply sharing my life. Even if it is via the world wide web!

As long as this post is...I'm going to share with you the things that made me giggle today so stick with me. I'm usually pretty good at waking up and heading to the gym on the weekends, but this morning I realised what I needed more, was spiritual exercise. I needed time to think, and walk...something I was really good at when I was a student, but not so much now that I have a full time job. So instead of the gym, I woke up and headed out to Hyde park. On the train, I sat down next to an empty seat with a book on it. Someone had just left it there so I picked it up since I hadn't brought my own reading material. When I started flipping through it I found a label inside and discovered that this was no ordinary book. It's a traveling book. It wasn't just left there, it was passed on. As the label said...It's serendipity in action! Someone somewhere set up a website called Bookcrossing and it's brilliant! You register a book on the website, and then you set it loose. in this case, someone set it loose on the tube...I found it...read a few stories and tomorrow, I'll release it again. It'll be neat to see where it gets to and I can't wait to release my own book out into the world and see where it goes.

After the serendipitous book finding, I got off the tube and began my wander through Hyde park. It was a gray day today, but quite warm considering. On the serpentine I usually love seeing the swans and there were all kinds of swans in their in-betweens stage. They still have that brownish gray fuzzy down on them, and their beaks are still gray. Teenage swans in that space between ugly duckling and graceful swan. I took this picture (with my fancy new phone) and couldn't help knowing how they felt being in the awkward in between stage.



Later, wandering through the park, there was an adorable family with two little girls blowing ENORMOUS bubbles in the park. It was hilarious to watch the joggers try and dodge the massive bubbles to keep them in the air as the little girls screamed and ran after them. Now THAT is the way to spend a Sunday afternoon. The other bits of my day just added to all the things I love about being in London...my friends...Whole Foods London (a magical place)...yummy sushi...the view of the London Eye from my kitchen window. All in all...life is good.

So...in probably more words than necessary, that was my day and this was my first step toward keeping my resolution for 2008.