Hallowe'en

Costumes from the US, yes, but witch's hats from the Non-Stop Party Shop right up on Ken High Street...

The Griswalds do Rome

Alice's parents arrived on a Saturday, and after giving them plenty of time to rest up and get over their jet lag, the whole party took off for Rome on Sunday. All credit to Al for the logistics - from the very civilized mid-day flights (why exactly did we ever do early morning ones???), a wonderful flat a couple of blocks off of the Spanish Steps, and the pre-ordered tix for both Vatican Museum and Villa Borghese, the first visit to the eternal city for all of us couldn't have been better.
One of the only questions was spending money, and as you can see, after finding that Brookings First Bank & Trust cards worked in the ATMs, everything was copacetic.
About halfway through the labyrinthine Vatican Museum, Abby made it quite plain that "I want to leave" but 1) she wasn't too put out to pose for a few shots like the above, 2) none of the rest of us were going anywhere until we'd seen the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and 3) not a lot of choice in the matter anyway since once you're in, you're in for the whole schlemiel and we didn't get out until about an hour later anyway. No problems that a big ol' serving of spaghetti carbonara couldn't help...

...as we had a fantastic lunch at the Amalfi restaurant near the Vatican. This was only the first carbonara for the girls and of course, they loved it. Abby said, "It's as good as yours, Mom."
Here is the dome in St. Peters.
Here's Kate in St. Peter's. She's such an angel (hahahaha). She told me to write that.
And all of the above was just day one. On Tuesday we took it a little easier, wandering southwards from our apartment past Spanish Steps (still an active debate within the fam as to the number of steps - after several times up and down with multiple, independent counters, we still can't say if it's 136, 137, or 138 steps in all), Trevi Fountain, and finally down to Trajan's Column and the Forum. Al and the girls took a little break - see if you can spot Abby's orange t-shirt to the left of the Arch of Titus in the below photo - while John and the grandparents walked up and around the Palatine Hill and into the Farnese Gardens (photo above).
After that, it was off for another meal (carbonara, anyone?) overlooking the Colosseum, and then into the massive amphitheatre for our last big sight of the day (Abby counted 9 in all that day, perhaps too much for any human).
The girls had read a book about the gladiators while we were touring the Palatine Hill, and Kate was happy to explain here about the multiple levels of basement and sub-basement (visible below) through which the gladiators, lions and Christians, and all else could be channeled up into the arena for the enjoyment of 50,000 or so spectating Romans.
After days like this one, you can imagine that we were perfectly happy to settle in for an evening of wicked fresh salad (Doc in particular) melanzane parmigiana, and of course...
...a little Professor Leyton on the dual-headphoned DS.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the, well, uncounted number of gelato stops during the week, this one directly outside the Pantheon.
And by popular (i.e. Kate and Abby's) demand, we even returned to the Trevi Fountain by night, where of course it looked as cool if not cooler than in daylight and also had about as big a crowd - tourists, huh?
We were sad to leave, but as with our Paris adventure last year, it was clearly felt by all that this would not be our last visit to this incredibly beautiful, historic, and welcoming city.

(PS - forgot to mention that there was also lots of time for reading aloud Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - we're about 3/4 of the way through it now and both girls and Pop are getting quite curious (hey - I can admit it) to see how it all turns out. And while we're on the subject of less-than-high culture, we also managed to get in viewings of School of Rock and Hairspray during flat downtime, frequently accompanied by some wildly good (and creatively popped - there were no large pots with lids that fit, so it was always chancy) if decidedly over-peanut oiled popcorn. John and Alice respectively devoured Lustrum, Robert Harris's new novel about Cicero and Caesar, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, Stieg Larsson's thrilling conclusion to the Millenium trilogy of Swedish...ummm...mystery/political conspiracy/anti-skinhead/feminist/computer hacking/socialist novels. Easily worth reading, and easily read too - Larsson is not a literary master, but as far as plotting and page-turningly good narrative crafting go, look out. To round out the roster, Dr. Kim was working on a biography of a past Korean president, and Mrs. Kim absolutely loved Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs (a book with Venice connection, yes, and not Rome, but at least the same country...) while Kate's doing another Dianna Wynne Jones book, The Lives of Christopher Chant - here ends the media review)
[Posted by John, Alice, and John again]

We're back!

The internet lives again at 28 Pembroke - lots of blog catch up work to be done, but at the very least, here was our Saturday morning with Abby finishing "The Gruffalo" on her own for the first time. Kate helped only silently, pointing to words or pictures as assist - Dad was not quite so restrained, and got called on it. It was a nice lazy one - Al and I on the papers, and the girls reading away. No laptop in sight, true, but they've been pretty hard-used since Wednesday when the light came back on the router...

Jimmy's still down!

After believably farcical calls all Saturday with the "escalated" tech support team, we were finally told that the line modification which took place Friday would require further steps – that would take 1-2 business days! – to restore service. I’m not proud to report that I noticed my hands shaking with poorly controlled rage at this point. So now we’re expecting – maybe – to have the connection working again by end of Tuesday, or precisely two weeks of downtime.

I’m just waiting to have a working line again so I can fire BT and switch over to Orange, O2, Virgin broadband etc. but of course the problem is that no matter which I choose, they’re all going to have to come over the monopoly BT phone line which I fear can always experience little snafus like the current one – sigh.

The coup de grace was a call Sunday morning from another well-meaning but completely powerless “escalations” team member who I think thought he was doing us a favour by calling but since he had nothing more to say than that we’d have to – surprise! – wait until Tuesday night at the earliest for service, it seemed more a matter of rubbing salt in our wounds than anything else. I was taking a brief Sunday morning nap (CrossFit workout the previous afternoon – ask for details if you want to get buried in ‘em) and only heard of bit of the drubbing this poor guy took from Alice: “What exactly needs to be done? Is it one step or ten or fifty? When will this happen and who will do it? Just for my background, please – what’s the critical path?” Of course he didn’t have answers for any of this…I only wonder if the CEO of BT would be experiencing the same thing if his broadband had a similar fault. Alice rather cynically suggested that he probably has a redundant backup with another (if not several) other providers.

Unconnectedly yours….

Apologies for radio silence/monopolies suck

It's not all BT's fault, really (just mostly, the bat rastards) - ever since getting back from a wild and wonderful August of travelling in North America (have to say that since we had such a spectacular visit to Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia - aaaaaaah) we first've been too busy to upload photos and stories on the page here and second (it's day nine and counting) since 23 September have been completely without broadband/internet access at home. God bless British Telecom - seriously, it's now past comic, past tragic, and well into Zen "you'll only get what you want when you truly don't want it anymore" stage when Alice calls 'em up every day to say that whatever fix they thought did the job yesterday (the day/night synch is off because it seems most of the "work" is being done from India) well, didn't.

[Horribly obvious thought coming, but...] Who would've thought even 10 years ago how tricky life would be without always on access to things like email, VOIP phones, web banking, Al's hourly car rental service, Tube service updates, or silly little things like BT's customer service (hah!) website - not to mention the vast infopaedia that is the global information superhighweb.

Sometime, someday, we'll be back on line (if anybody's been wondering why the Skype phone's not working or why we haven't been ringing you either, well...) but for now, let's say that this has been a hell of an instructive object lesson in monopoly power. And from the decidedly inconvenient first-person perspective, I can confirm (along with Warren Buffett - he loves these) that it is just so much better to be on the side of the monopoly, rather than, say, the absolutely trapped rat of a customer of same.

Oh, yeah - and Alice is a year older! Funny how that goes...

Too brief SD interval

In between a US business trip and this week back in the office in London, I managed to steal a precious two days back in Brookings with Al and the girls, who've been visiting the grandparents for the last week and a half (and having just a bit of a good time at it too). They've got four grandparents providing attention and love, not to mention cooking up a storm or chaperoning to the pool, waterpark, fitness center (this is an encouraging sign, I think, that that's an attraction), Zesto's, etc.

Even better, Al's sister Amy, her husband Chris, and their twin daughters are now in town so there's even more fun - the twins are just between Kate and Abby and the four of them (thankfully) are fast friends. I didn't have my camera with me, but Grandma Dee sent along a few pictures from the visit so far...
Growing up, yeah, but still game for Anne Geddes-like poses with the nasturtiums out back
Saturday morning rolls at Hagman's Secret Garden, and...
...two girls almost as happy to see their dad as he was to lay eyes on them. Soon enough, I get to join them for a week on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, but it's not the most fun calling in to hear from 4200 miles away all the shenanigans they're getting up to.

Derby and Chatsworth

Another incredible weekend visit with our friends out of town - the highlight of which was visiting Chatsworth House, recognizable to any Austen devotee as Austen's own inspiration for Mr. Darcy's family estate Pemberley and also used in both the BBC/Colin Firth (hurray) and Keira Knightley (not so much) film versions. I actually missed the bust statue of Darcy/Firth sadly - with good cause as I was trying to shepherd four kids, but too bad nonetheless. As beautiful as the house itself is, the gardens are even better - above Alice stands at the top of the "Cascade" fountain with a wing of the house in background.

Just to give you an idea of the scale of the place, this is the same water feature from the other direction - Alice was standing where that group of little smudges is in the upper left of this photo. All four kids - Kate, Abby, and their hosts Sarah and James - spent a lot of time here, but only until they found the 8 foot tall hedge maze to rampage around.But I'm getting ahead of myself - regular readers of the blog will recognize (facing from left) Nick, Sarah, James and Diane who have been kind enough to host us any number of times at their house right outside the Peak District in Derbyshire.
Not everybody was super excited about touring the house itself, although they did find lots to interest them inside, including...
...the old looking up at the ceiling trick.
In this case, though, no trick - there was something worth attending to, captured here by KAG.
The most exciting part of the day for me was watching all four kids scramble up some rocks that they found after crawling through the coal tunnel (back to website if you're curious). This shot (Abby's red face gives some idea of how much running was going on, and she was determined not to be left behind by the big girls) was taken after the successful climb to the top but just before Abs almost pitched down and hurt her back or bum - thankfully it was only almost as her sister had a firm grip on her hand and managed to swing her rather gracefully down to the next stone, with the only cost a doozy of an abrasion on her own thumb from rubbing up against the granite. Somehow my description of it as a badge of courage didn't make the hurt go away - that only happened when we'd got back to the bag check and Alice dug out (how's this for prepared?) the first aid kit from her backpack complete with bandaids - presto! All better...