Sunday, 31 July 2011

Road Trip

Good news! Our air conditioning is fixed, and we have headed out from the basement to recolonize the rest of the house. It's wonderful to be back in the upper levels of out home, and so nice to cool down again.

It was also my birthday this week. Here is my cake:


Ice cream cake is brilliant!

We went of a road trip to Connecticut to see Sarah's family this weekend. Had a good trip, and clocked over 800 miles of driving:




Sunday, 24 July 2011

Basement Life

I turn thirty tomorrow, and find myself living in a basement. To be fair, it is my basement, which we've been forced into by the heat. Our air conditioning broke some weeks ago, just in time for this weeks near record breaking heat wave. Its been up above 100F for the past few days, and the humidity around here has been intense. Running is like having a sauna.

I've been enjoying living in our basement. We've rigged it up with a portable air conditioner, some fans and a blow-up mattress. It's like a little ice cave from which we take occasional forays into the hot wastes of rest of the house. We've transferred all our toys into the basement, chased out the crazy spider-monkey-crickets, and have a radio and Netflix to keep us occupied. Its cozy.

And I turn thirty tomorrow. I think I had believed I'd be more of a real person by thirty. I definitely didn't think I'd still be doing thinks like coating the kitchen with a thin layer of juice due to an unfortunate incident with a soda stream CO2 canister, water and concentrated ginger ale. This was yesterday.

But it's fun figuring stuff out, like it's fun liking in our basement:




Their coming to fix the air conditioning tomorrow. Finger crossed.

Sunday, 17 July 2011

Dave and Char's Wedding

The happiest thing we did in the UK was go to the wedding of Dave and Char, in Bucks near where Dave and I grew up. Dave and Char were also the ones who originally inspired us to write this blog, after I read theirs.
The wedding took place in Dave's parent's garden, and was a wonderful day. Here are some of the photos I took:







This is one of my favourity photo's ever:


Summer Heat

As the summer heat rises, and with our air conditioning on an enforced break due to terminal failure, we are resorting to new tactics to stay cool:



Whilst this may look like a pool, it was much cheaper to install...

Thursday, 14 July 2011

Pepper Harvest

We arrived back from the UK yesterday, and were completely amazed at the bountiful harvest of chillies we'd managed to produce with our not so careful gardening the past two months:



One of the plants was bent over under the weight of one monster chilli. I put a picture of the chilli's we got, and one of me next to them for scale.







Contrasting this with our crop last year, I think our 'leave them for three weeks in the hot sun with no water other than rain' strategy definitely paid off...

Now, to make some chilli!

Sunday, 10 July 2011

Family Trivial Pursuit

We are currently in England on vacation (holiday), and have been having a great time seeing all our family and friends here.

Yesterday, we played Trivial Pursuit with Andy and Marion. As classic Trivial Pursuit generally asks strange and obscure questions from the early 20th century, we decided to play a revamped version from 2004.

However, it turns out this doesn't help much. It's amazing how little we all remembered about bronze medal winners in the commonwealth games, or early Internet development. This, combined with our lack of boxing trivia, led to a rather elongated game, with tragic results:







Eventually, Marion got a Sports question right, and won the game!




Congratulations Marion, for winning and putting us out of our trivia based shame.

More photos of our Hols to follow...