Slow start to the year...

Well, 2007 is a couple of weeks old now and it has been a slow start to the year. Nothing really worth mentioning has happened, but I thought I would write a little something just to stay in the habit.

We bought plane tickets for our summer vacation. We will be going to Cairo for a week at the end of May. This is a big trip for us as it coincides with our 10th wedding anniversary.

I have been trying to record whenever I get a chance. I am going through the process of recording scratch tracks of all of the songs I am considering for this album. There are a ton of songs in contention. Already they are starting to weed themselves out as they often sound different to me when I listen to the rough recordings of them. It is a fun process for me, but I have to be careful not to get too withdrawn. Last night I cooked dinner (and did the dishes) before disappearing into my studio until 10PM (hoping the food makes up for me being a neglectful husband for the evening). It's hard to make good progress when limited to 2.5hr slots. It feels like I am just starting to get creative when it is time to pick everything up and get ready for bed.

I have started the year with a renewed commitment to riding my bike to work. This commitment is fueled by the fact that they raised the price of a train ticket to London bridge. It now costs me about $10 every time I take the train to work, when riding my bike is free. The downside is days like today when I show up at work looking (and feeling) like a drowned rat and finding that the change of clothes in my backpack has been soaked through.

There has been one very exciting thing that has happened in the new year. Our local Mediterranean deli has reopened. It closed last November and I have really been missing it. It was my favorite shop in our neighborhood. I would stop in all the time for cheese, bread, olives, hummus, pitas, chorizo sausages, and other tasty snacks. It was torture for them to be closed over Christmas. But now it is open again and a balance has been restored to the food force.


JE

Not just another New Year...

This year we went above and beyond the call of our New Year celebrating duties by going to watch the fireworks in central London. An event such as this requires planning with military precision. The biggest challenge is the transportation. After midnight, the trains that we would normally take to get home are not running, so we had to figure out how to get home on the “night-bus”. Yes, the night-bus is as scary as it sounds. The other challenge is finding a good location to watch the fireworks along with 350,000 other drunken Londoners. The final challenge is to avoid getting trampled on the way home after the fireworks are finished. We successfully completed all three challenges, and the fireworks were brilliant. I am really glad we braved it, but I doubt we will pluck up the courage to do it again next year.

As an added bonus, there was a live American Football match on television when we got home (at around 2:30AM). I was even more excited when I found out that it was the Chicago Bears vs the Green Bay packers in the final game of the regular season. I was so excited to watch the Bears play, having heard how good they were this season. Sadly, they were complete shite! I decided to go to bed at half time when they were loosing 23-0. So much for being unbeatable this season. From what I saw, I doubt they will make it past their first playoff game.

A few pics from our New Years adventure…