Booboo Magoo

So it turns out that Mike read the itinerary wrong – he leaves today, not yesterday and arrives Monday, not Sunday. Which kind of sucks because I was super looking forward to seeing him. I even made a sign to greet him at the airport with. I won’t be able to use it now because I’ll be at work when he lands.

Luckily (?) it’s random enough that it can be hung in the kitchen as a silly/stupid decoration. Andrew and Laura got a kick out of it, so I don’t think anyone will mind.

Buddy and Leia are safely back in Canada, and Leia’s been uploading photos like a madwoman. I stole some to post here (she said it was okay).

Me, Buddy, & Mike during our walk around Bayswater:

It was a hot day. We soon required refreshments.

Then we walked to Paddington Station.

They were really jetlagged for the first few days, so we didn’t really do much other than that. Once we were back at work, they did a day trip up to Manchester where Leia, super Coronation Street fan, met one of the stars of the show. She was super excited about it – I think it was one of the highlights of the trip for her!

They also did a day in Brighton, then took off for Dublin and Paris before making their way back to London to catch their flight home. I took off last Thursday to give them a tour of London. London Bridge, which I think was a bit disappointing to Buddy as he was expecting the much more iconic and prettier Tower Bridge.

We saw the Tower of London. Here’s me and Buddy at the Tower, a picture I am mostly uploading for Mom. Buddy is her best friend’s son – Buddy and I (and his brother, Cody) grew up as cousins, pretty much. She loves both of the boys like nephews, and I don’t think there are any pictures of us together since the school Christmas Concert days.

The plan was to go to Covent Garden and do some shopping, then walk down and see the sights – Piccadilly Circus, Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, Parliament Buildings, etc. Unfortunately, I forgot that not every body is used to walking everywhere all the time! Buddy and Leia were pretty bagged after shopping, so we hopped on the London Eye, and I pointed out the big landmarks we could see. Then we headed home and ordered a pizza and vegged out.

I’ve been pretty low-key this weekend. I probably would have gone somewhere if we’d realized earlier that Mike’s flight didn’t land until Monday, but we didn’t. I’ve been very domestically productive – laundry, vacuuming, bathroom cleaning, sweeping, mopping, dishes, etc is all done, but I’ve mostly been staying home and reading. I can’t wait til Mike gets home so we can go on MORE ADVENTURES!

It’s been over a week since I updated – shameful, but we haven’t really done much since Denmark.

My hip is recovered, and I plan to get back to the running tomorrow. We also had friends from Canada up – Buddy and Leia. I took pictures, but then neglected to get them off of the camera, and now Mike is gone to Vancouver for a week’s vacation (and also to get some necessary tasks done – renewing his passport and other such tasks that are just easier for him to do from Vancouver). He took the camera, so I have no recent pictures. Here is a picture that recently cropped up on Facebook of me, Mike, and two of his old nerd school friends. It’s only two months old. Same thing, right?

Anyway, Buddy and Leia got super screwed over by jet lag, so we didn’t get to do much with them over the weekend. This week has been a whirlwind – busy work, plus getting Mike ready to go. He left on Friday. Katy came up to London last night and slept over, then we spent today exploring London. We went to Borough Markets, then I took her through central London to see the Parliament Buildings and Big Ben and the London Eye, and Westminster Abbey and Soho. Lots of walking, but also lots of chatting and relaxing. She’s a relaxing person to hang out with. It’s nice. Due to tube issues, we barely made it to the tube station in time for her train. Like.. movie-level running to meet the train sort of shit. Luckily, she made it.

I hung out with Andrew and Laura (roommates) tonight, and now I’m chilling out in the too-empty bedroom. I’ve been making lots of comments about sleeping in the middle of the bed and eating lots of fish (which Mike doesn’t like), but I actually really miss him. I basically need to get a life and stop checking my phone for new emails every 5 minutes. Right now, I KNOW he’s on an epic bike ride with all of our friends, and then they’re having a massive BBQ/drink-a-thon. Insult to injury. Not only is my very best buddy gone for a week, he’s having a blast with all of our Vancouver friends. Totally jealous.

I realized today when I was looking at my kindle that I read too much. I got the kindle in March, I think. Since then, I’ve read over 20 books. I much prefer a work commute spent reading on a train than one spent stressing over traffic, and the kindle has made it that much easier. Highly recommend the kindle. I never thought I’d be an e-reader person, but now I can’t imagine going back to regular books.

Anyway, this was kind of a rambly, pointless post. Buddy and Leia are passing back through in for a few days on their way back to Canada, and I took Thursday off to take them around. Should be a good time. I’ll try to get some pictures going

First thing Sunday morning, I got up and went for a walk/run. Mike had pointed out that Kastellet was shaped like a star, and well…IT NEEDED TO BE DONE!

After that, we showered and had some free hotel breakfast, then packed our bags and checked out. The hotel had a luggage room, and was nice enough to let us rent bikes for the day, so that’s what we did. We rode around pretty aimlessly – Copenhagen is amazingly set up for biking. I think I mentioned before that pretty much every road has a bike lane, and all of the drivers are super aware and super friendly to cyclists. It is pretty much the only time I’ve ridden on streets without being super nervous. The only problem I had was that the bike had back pedal brakes, and I appear to have a bad habit of backpedalling when I just want to coast, so I ended up accidentally stopping a few times. I actually managed to throw my hip out pretty badly by accidentally backpedalling. The good part of that was that it was still comfortable to sit and bike. Walking sucked though.

We managed to find Hans Christian Anderson’s grave. Lisa, lover of books, enjoys this.

Mike uses it as an excuse to rock out.

Then we went to the zoo. We tried to blend in with the monkey biography pictures. I am apparently a constipated monkey.

And Mike is a special-needs monkey.

We got bored of the zoo after a while, so we grabbed our last amazing Danish hot dogs, then went to check out Christiania. We don’t have any pictures from here because there are enormous signs that say NO PHOTO. Christiania…smells like Vancouver. I hope I’m not being too vague when I say that. It is very well known for smelling like Vancouver, but they are not fans of photographic evidence. We enjoyed a drink in Christiania, bought a super ugly sweater for me, and it was time to head back. We dropped off the bikes and grabbed our bags, then made it to the airport with plenty of time to wait in the long Easyjet line up. Only…there was no line up. We made it straight to the counter and checked in, then went through a security (Mike got extra screened for not having the sunscreen in a plastic bag). We sat around and enjoyed beers for a while. My back/hips were getting progressively worse by this point, so I tried to keep them loose with walking and leg swings and gentle stretching. I also took a painkiller, which I usually try to avoid.

The flight itself was pretty awful because of the backpain, but our luggage made it to the carousel quickly, and we had no problems with security. I ended up calling in sick on Monday and seeing a chiropractor. She popped my hip back into place. Since then, I’ve been in pain, but not as bad as before I saw her, and it’s been getting better and better all week. I hope to be able to be back to running again next week. Mike’s rash has all but vanished (thank god). We also came home to the news that my cousin/family friend/whatever Buddy and his girlfriend are coming to London and are going to stay with us for a few days, so hopefully we’ll get some interesting blog posts out of that. Viva la weekend!

We had decided that there wasn’t a band playing on Saturday or Sunday that we wanted to see more than we wanted to explore Copenhagen, so after we got up Saturday morning, we packed our stuff. Mike needed room for the gas masks, and we decided we could sacrifice our air mattress to make the space. I gave it to a group of guys who were still lying in their tent with no mattress beneath them. They seemed pretty stoked. We also had about 8 beer left that we didn’t want to haul, so I put on my grass skirt and leopard-ear headband and played beer fairy to a bunch of confused Danes. Their English was very strong, but they kept trying to reaffirm in different ways that the beer was, in fact, free. This was a baffling concept to them, but once they were sure they understood, they insisted on giving me hugs. Basically, dudes in every country can be won over quickly with beer.

We did the short walk to the busses, and made our way back to Copenhagen. We hung out for a bit until we could check in, making use of the hotel’s public computers to book and extra piece of checked luggage (tent) and check email/facebook. Then we had a brief nap. I’d slept pretty terribly the night before because I kept waking up convinced that my sleeping bag had pulled the skin off of my legs. Bad combination of sunburn and hot sweay, lotiony legs. It would only take me a brief second to realize that my legs were fine, just sunburnt, but still a terrible, panicky way to wake up. We cleaned up, then made our way to Tivoli Gardens, a rad ass amusement park. What can I say – Mike knows the way to my heart.

We don’t have too many photos because we put most of our stuff in a locker so we could RIDE THE RIDES. The rides were pretty awesome. It’s not the largest park I’ve ever been to, but the rollercoaster was awesome, and they had this plane ride that is all fast and loops around like you’re an insane WWI fighter pilot that was super rad. Here is one of me by the little garden on one end. You can KIND of see rides in the background.

Before moving on, we stopped for a relaxing beverage in a super ritzy looking patio. I had the most delicious chai tea latte I’ve ever had. It was so delicious that the first thing I did when I reached English soil and had mobile access was text Katy to tell her how delicious it was. So good.

Then we decided we needed a few couply photos.

It was right about this time that the man in the tutu started running around and swimming in the fountain behind us while all his friends cheered. In North America, that sort of behavior gets you evicted from theme parks. Not in Denmark. No security showed up. People just watched and clapped, and when he was done having his fun, he got out. We also noticed that the security restraints on the rides were…somewhat less restrictive. The really dangerous, upside down, crazy ones had 5 point harnesses and locking stuff, but we went on one roller coaster that was seriously just a lap bar like you’d see on a kiddie ride. No real danger – it didn’t go upsidedown or anything, but it just struck me that we are sometimes a little overzealous with the safety in North America. No one got hurt, no one did anything stupid. Was just fun for everyone.

After Tivoli, we went for all you can eat pizza and salad. Apparently all I can eat is two pieces and one salad, but that’s okay because it was pretty cheap. Only 89 Kroner! I loved the prices in Denmark. 100 Kroner is about £10 or $17 Cdn dollars, so you’d get bills for dinner that were comically large numbers – 180 Kroner for two people to eat pizza and have a soda, or 100 Kroner for a t-shirt. Also, you feel pretty rich carrying around bills with numbers like 500 on them.

We then went back to the hotel and crashed. Hard. The air mattress and tent were good as far as camping go, but it’s hard to beat a real bed.

We woke up on Friday and Mike’s rash had just gone insane. Bright red, all over his body, terrible, ugly rash, so we decided to get it looked at by the First Aid Tent. Consensus – sunburn heat rash. Apply Aftersun. He has asthma and breaks out in full body rash at the first hint of sunshine. HE’S TAKEN LADIES!

Anyway, we got him his aftersun, then did a whole lot of…nothing. Wandering around looking at stuff, and stopping to relax and read/watch stuff on iPod.

We walked around the main festival area too. Mike bought 3 WWII gas masks from a random tent. This was apparently a necessary purchase. I bought a grass skirt and a leopard-ears headband…so not exactly in a judgment space here. We seem to have forgotten that we had a camera, which is kind of okay because we didn’t really do anything. I did find this picture of us taken by a random Australian chick that tagged along with us for a while. I have no idea why Mike is being so creepy.

A little bit more hanging out (it was a vacation, we were RELAXING, yo), and it was time to see NOFX, the highlight of the whole festival for me. They were amazing and funny and awesome. We stayed mostly outside the tent. We weren’t scared of death – 9 people died from being crushed in 2000 at Roskilde, and the event was being super strict about not pushing and no body surfing and basically NO UNSAFE MONKEY BUSINESS. It just was way more relaxing to sit outside and enjoy the show and not get our ear drums blown out. Anyway, NOFX was amazing. Highly recommend.

After that we went back to the tent for our second night of tenting it.

After our fabulous sleep in the amazing hotel of awesomeness, we woke up bright and early and enjoyed our last civilized showers for a few days. We had noticed the day before that the hotel had bikes available for rental and decided to take a couple out for a spin. They are not the most amazing bikes ever, but they did the job. We rode around for about 2 hours taking in the sights of Copenhagen.
Here we are by another fountain.

All of Copenhagen looks like a real life Disney movie. Makes sense, it is the home of Hans Christian Anderson, who the Danes are pretty obsessed with. There are statues and whatnot of him everywhere.

Finally, we decided it was time to go to Roskilde. We caught the train at the Metro to the town of Roskilde, where I made Mike pose under the train sign. He was not terribly thrilled, but I maintain that someday, he’ll be happy I made him pose there.

From Roskilde the town there was the option to take another train or a bus to Roskilde the festival. We picked the train. We should have been a little bit suspicious when we saw that the train looked like the WWII trains used to haul people to concentration camps, but it was all nice and cute on the inside, even if I did have to use a luggage strap and a case of beer to keep the window open.

WE SHOULD HAVE PICKED THE BUS. It turns out that the train takes you to one entrance, and the bus takes you to a completely different entrance. On the opposite side of the festival. Where the tenting area is. Which is where we needed to be. Roughly 3.5 km if you know where you’re going, but if you’re us and DON’T know where you’re going, it’s more like 5 kms. Across uneven terrain. In the baking sun. While carrying all of your clothes and camping gear. Basically awful. Really and truly awful.
By the time we made it to the tenting area and got set up, we were ready to just chill the eff out. So we grabbed the bedsheet and headed to a nice grassy area near a lake and spent the afternoon drinking (me: coke zero, Mike: beer, both of us: water) and hanging out. I read Emma. Mike watched stuff on his iPod. Super chill. Super necessary.

After a while, we ventured off to get some food. Here is me by tent city, which was relatively close to the food. See how tent city looks shitty and terrible? Imagine that in food form, and you have the festival food. The best meal I had there was cheese and jam on a bun. I wish I was joking.

We found a human-sized hamster wheel. Mike tries it out.

We also notice that the small rash that started appearing the other day is getting worse. Here is the back of one of his arms. This was also on his legs and stomach, and was apparently very itchy.

Mike takes some antihistamines, and we go back to the lake, where we find some woman’s birth control. With one pill left. Are we seeing the start of a new little Roskilde Dingus?

We spent the rest of Thursday relaxing and exploring at our own relaxed pace, then crashed around when the sun went down.

There is just WAY too much stuff to say about our trip to Denmark for one post, so I’m gonna break it down by day. Here’s Day One!
Wednesday, June 30
For some reason when we booked the flight to Copenhagen, we thought 8am was a great time to fly out of London. And on paper, it sounds great, but when you actually do the math – be there minimum of one hour prior to departure, train from London center to Gatwick takes 30 minutes, it’s a 15 minute walk to the train station…it basically means getting up at 4:30am to catch the flight. Which is the SUCK. We flew Easyjet, which is pretty much known for being cheap but not exactly awesome, and that was pretty much our experience. We got to Gatwick, and the line to check in was about a bazillion years long. Basically, nobody made it to the front of the line in time for their flight. Everyone just stood in a line that moved super slowly, and when it got close to your flight time, an Easyjet employee went around yelling your destination city, and everyone going to that destination stepped out of line and was served next. The flight itself was pretty uneventful – it is a budget airline with seats that don’t recline and no in-flight entertainment, save for the comedy-show stylings of safety announcement attendant.
Easyjet is super proud to announce that they’ve gotten us into Copenhagen an astounding 5 minutes early. Unfortunately, there is a snafu with everyone’s baggage, and the baggage is another 90 minutes later hitting the carosaul. So, we got to wait 95 minutes instead of 90 for luggage. The highlight of the airport wait is listening to a woman chastise her son, Dingus, for playing with the luggage carosaul. Yeah, you read that right…Dingus. There is a 3 year old child somewhere named Dingus. Ha ha. Dingus.
Anyway, once we had our luggage, we realized the second bit of folley to our GET TO DENMARK SUPER EARLY PLAN – we can’t check into the hotel until 2pm. We take the Metro to central Copenhagen and walk around for a bit. I get to experience Danish drunk food for lunch, even though it is only noon and I am nowhere near drunk. Basically, Danish drunk food is a bagette with one end cut off and a hole cored in the middle. Then they squirt in your choice of toppings and jam in a hot dog. A bacon-wrapped hot dog, if that is your wish. I approve of this.

We kill a bit more time taking photos by a fountain in the main square. We tried to get a couple picture, but people kept walking in front of the camera right before it snapped, or Mike was too slow getting it balanced, or it fell over…basically, couple photo just wasn’t meant to be at that time.

Finally it is time to check into our hotel, and we love our room. It is lovely and has a huge big king-sized bed that is super comfy. It’s also done in a purple and white color scheme, which I love. We had a quick nap and a shower, then hit the town again, this time without big heavy bags.
For some reason, we decide to eat Mexican food. In Copenhagen. It is gross. Advice: don’t eat Mexican food in Copenhagen.
We walk around a harbour area. It looks like pictures of Newfoundland

After a while, we stop for a drink (I have water. Mike has beer). We also buy a bag of the local delicacy, salty liquorice. It’s actually pretty good!

We walk around some more, then finally settle in to a pub. Mike has a beer and gets me to try the local party shot, sma gra, which is salty liquorice dissolved in vodka. I know, right? Sounds vile. I love it and decide it needs to be poured over ice and sipped like scotch.

We ended up sitting with a middle-aged guy from Texas for a while after this, shooting the shit. His name was Mark. He worked for an oil company who had offices in Denmark, and was out on business (read: alone). Seemed like a nice guy.
Danish people are, in general, all tall, thin and blonde. I think it’s because they bike everywhere. Pretty much every street in Copenhagen has a separate biking lane, and even young children (think, like, 6) bike on city streets. They also all speak English, in general, and all of the signage is in both Danish and English, which is handy, because I don’t speak Danish. They all seem to know that Mike won’t speak Danish and address him in English, but think I am Danish, which is weird because although blonde, I am not tall and thin.
By now it was night, and even though we’d had naps, we were still pretty tired, so we headed back to the hotel. The square was much quieter though, and we managed to get a couple photo by the Fountain.

I read for a while at the hotel while Mike watched stuff on his iPod, then we crashed for the night.

We’ve been on a bit of a movie binge since we got the new TV, and ended up catching the new Sherlock Holmes movie, which lead to me downloading the complete Sherlock Holmes series for my kindle, which then lead to me googling 221B Baker Street to see if it was real, and discovering it not only existed, it had been transformed into the Sherlock Holmes Museum, a replica of the boarding house that Holmes and Watson (fictionally) lived in. Sherlock Holmes was, of course, not real, but 221B Baker Street was, and that location was an actual boarding house from 1860-1934, so in 1990, they turned the location into a replica of the suite Holmes and Watson shared. What did that lead to? Well…elementary, my dear Watson.

Anyway, since Mike is the bossest boyfriend ever, he indulges my silly whims to see weird and interesting sites around London, we went.

The good thing about it being so new is that it was a lot more interactive than many of the other tourist attractions. When you visit 300 year old castles and whatnot, you tend to be forced to follow a specific path through the attraction, and areas are roped off so you can see but not touch. It makes sense because the stuff is OLD and it would not last through thousands of people sitting on it and touching it and all that other stuff. The Sherlock Holmes Museum is a bit different. Nothing is really roped off, and you’re totally welcome (in fact, encouraged) to pose on chairs, and pose next to wax figures of people from the books, and all that other jazz.

This, of course, is right up Mike and my alleys! Neither of is very sure about this fellow in the mask:

But I’m more than willing to give this dead dude a lap dance. Dude looks pretty horrified by it.

Mike does his best to imitate his look of horror.

Anyway, it was a fun way to kill half an hour. After that, we went walking in and around Regent’s Park, which is actually bigger and awesomer than Hyde Park. Hyde Park has a lot more attractions, and just general Stuff To Do In Londonness appeal, but Regents Park is way prettier and fun to lounge in.

On the way, we found a bust of JFK, which doesn’t even really make sense because dude..London? I’m cool with just accepting the fact that it’s there.

Mike is more WTF about it

The first thing I noticed in Regents Park were the paddleboats. Since I am a huge dork, and Mike is an awesome boyfriend (see first paragraph), we went paddleboating!

We did a lap around the island thing in the middle, then paused in the shade to cool down, chat, and watch the cute little ducks (and geese and whatever other birds were there)

Mike found a leaf that looked shocked, so we had a bit of fun with the macro setting on the camera.

Then we were ready for lunch. We decided to pick up some snackies from a grocery store and sit in the park, since it was such a pretty day. It took a while for us to find a grocery store, but on the way, we did find Prince Albert Road *snicker*.

We finally managed to pick up some beer, diet pepsi, cheese, ham, bread, and grapes, and made our way back to the park to feast and enjoy the weather. Mike still finds it especially cool that he can enjoy a beer in a park without getting fined.

The evening has been mostly spent watching The Big Lebowski and relaxing. I think it’s going to be pretty soft for the next few days because on Wednesday, we fly to Denmark!! I’m not bringing my laptop or phone or anything because it’s a music festival, and we’re sleeping in a tent, and frankly I don’t feel like babysitting it all, but I will attempt an epic post soon after we return!

Sunday ended up being kind of a do-nothing day, but not really, if that makes sense.

After Mike’s spurt of insane working hours, I pretty much let him dictate the pace of the weekend, since it was his first real break in a long time. We’ve been on a bit of a mission to make our house more social (see:BBQ). I cleaned out the living room and put up some posters that were just laying around and got rid of garbage. The living room LOOKED much nicer, but since we’d cut off sky, we didn’t really have much to watch. Our place in Vancouver had an xbox, which is fantastic way to stream media from computers to the TV. We decided this was necessary in order to get more people in the living room, so took off to Computer Exchange to pick up a used one.

Of course, the Northern Line was down from Kennington to Morden for “planned engineering” – they do this about one weekend a month – so we had to train it to Victoria. It was a beautiful sunny day, so we decided to walk rather than tube it to SoHo.

We managed to pop up just as the Changing of the Guard was starting.

We didn’t stay for the whole thing was it was pretty crowded, but we saw a bit – enough to cross it off of our list of London Things.

A bit north of that, we stumbled on the Winston Churchill War Rooms. Mike has a huge interest in anything WWII related, so we popped in. I originally went in because it was something we could do that related to Mike’s interests instead of going to another castle. Mike likes castles, but he’s not in love with them like I am. Anyway, I am totally glad we checked it out. Very neat little piece of history, and Mike finally found some pictures/momentos he’s interested in.

After that, we walked up to Piccadilly Circus where there was a Hare Krysna parade taking place.

We weaved our way through the crown to our favorite massage parlor, then went to Computer Exchange to get the xbox. Sorry they are just shitty iPhone pictures, but we didn’t bring a camera because we were planning a do nothing, lazy Sunday watching TV in our pajamas. (Isn’t it awesome how we moved to London to sit around in our pajamas and watch TV. We SO could not do that in Canada, apparently). I should really know better by now. This is LONDON. Even when nothing is happening…something is happening.

Once we got the xbox home, we found out that the older TV in the house didn’t play nice with it. It kind of worked, but there was an annoying flashing thing that kept happening. Mike ended up ordering a cheapish TV on Amazon, which almost killed him. I don’t know if it’s his career, or his being a boyness or what, but I have never met anyone SO fussy about TVs. The last one he bought in Canada, he researched for pretty much two full months before he committed. It was an awesome TV, but damn! That’s a lot of time spent just picking at TV.

Since then, we’ve mostly spent evenings hanging out and watching old episodes of It’s Always Sunny and Extras and South Park and Family Guy, except for last night when we went to Camden to hang out at World’s End pub. We needed to go back there to pick up Junior the tshirts he was wanting the night we went when he was visiting, but they sadly are not selling them anymore. I got a tank top instead.

Tonight, Mike is going to the wrap party for the last show he was working on. I will have to ask him when I’m allowed to use titles of stuff he’s worked on. I think it’s when it hits his imdb? I dunno, but anyway, they’re bowling and doing karaoke, which are super dorky activities I LOVE, but spouses aren’t invited. I think I am going to do laundry and read. This weekend will likely be a little bit soft as we’re off to Denmark for Roskilde.

Of course, the last time I said that, we ended up having a pretty eventful day, so I guess we’ll see!

Oh, in completely unrelated news – Joseph the homeless guy who sits with his German Shepherd Milo at the Old Street Tube Station shaved his head and his beard. I miss him with hair, although I suppose he’s cooler for summer now. He wasn’t at Old Street this morning – I saw him out and about at lunch when I went to post a letter. Apparently, he just decided he was sick of his beard. Oh, and Milo caught his lip on a fence and has a booboo, but is expected to make a full recovery.

I guess I never mentioned Joseph and Milo before. They’re just kind of there. I say hi to them every morning – they’re part of my day. I also buy a diet pepsi from the newsagents downstairs a few days a week. And most days, nice kitty (a grey short-haired persian who lives in my neighborhood) is around for a head scratch on my way home. It sounds silly, but it’s really nice to be seeing similar faces every day.

London is becoming home.

Lots of news around the Posh Palace that I’ve been terrible about keeping everyone up to date about.

Firstly, Jack and Karen (the Irish roommates) have moved out. They decided it was time for them to be grown ups and get their own place without roommates, so that’s what they’ve done. In their place, we have Andrew and Laura – New Zealanders fresh to London.

Secondly…the saga with the r-word. Oh god the r-word. I will be forever traumatized by the r-word. It all started a few weeks ago when Karen decided to get a late night snack, and a rodent of some kind jumped out at her when she opened the pantry. A few days later, the same thing happened to Jane. So we decided to call an exterminator. The exterminator came, pealed back the skirting boards on the pantry and other cupboards, then laid big ugly dangerous looking rat traps. I grew up in Alberta, where there are no rats, and am pretty much repulsed by even the word, so I named him Ricky (Mickey Mouse, Ricky Rat – get it?).

At the same time, we went through the pantry and cleaned up any loose food (mostly some cereal that had spilled on a lower shelf – we think that’s what Ricky had stopped by to snack on) and wiped everything down. A week later, the traps still hadn’t caught anything, so we decided that Ricky was no longer visiting us now that we weren’t being very good hosts, and called the exterminator to come back and collect the traps.

Around this time, we were showing the house to new potential roommates. The kitchen looked terrible with all of the skirting off, so we put it back on to show the house.

About a week after that, the kitchen stunk a bit. I did the usual things you do when the kitchen stinks – take out the garbage, wipe out the microwave, and do a look for anything rotting. Didn’t find anything, but I pinpointed it as coming from the pantry.

Ever read Nancy Drew? She was always taking off and doing stupid things to investigate mysteries like walking around abandoned houses at night and confronting crooks. Apparently I am the Nancy Drew of kitchen smells. Instead of getting a boy to look, I decided to pull off the skirting by the pantry.

It turns out that the exterminator had NOT come to get the traps, and under our pantry was a dead, maggoty rat. I am not usually a girly girl – I capture and release my own spiders, and can take out the garbage, even though I hate doing it. Dead maggoty rat, however, was past my level of grossness tolerance. I screamed like a little bitch and jumped on a chair. I am not sure why I had to jump on the chair – it’s not like it was some sort of undead Zombie Rat, but it was necessary at the time.

Mike was at work still. Luckily, Jane’s boyfriend Michael was there, spraying weeds in our backyard. He had actually come to fix Jane’s window, and just decided to spray our weeds while he was at it. He is pretty much the best roommate’s boyfriend ever. He doesn’t even LIVE here and he does all that awesome shit. He came in from outside and cleaned up the dead rat, maggoty rat for me. Needless to say, I pretty much love Michael right now. He can do no wrong in my eyes. I actually sent Jane the following texts soon after:

You are never ever allowed to dump Michael. He just cleaned up dead maggoty rat from under the pantry.

Never. Ever. Leave. Him. Ever.

Then, a week later, he bought a BBQ for the house. Well, not really for the house – for himself. He doesn’t have a garden, but likes to BBQ, so it storing it here, and letting everyone else use it.

We had new roommates, a new BBQ, and a need to thank Michael the Dead Rat Remover, so we had a BBQ on Thursday.

Sarah is a vegetarian, and everyone likes different things, so we had Make Your Own Skewers. Chicken, beef, halloumi cheese, and assorted veggies. It was super yummy and social and fun. Mike unfortunately was at work til 9 or so, so he missed the food part, but was back in time for socialness. Ace was back in London on his way back from Canada, so we had 9 people in total.

We’re actually on a mission to make the house more social. 6 people live here, but you barely ever see anyone. When Karen and Jack left, we got them to get rid of some reclining chairs that prior roommates had left behind. They were big and ugly and took up too much space in the living room. It’s way more inviting and open now. We’ve also been hanging up cheap art we’ve found at charity shops and in storage to make it homier. Little by little, it’s getting prettier, and people are spending more time in common areas.

Anyway, I need to get on to making dinner, then waking Mike (he was at work til 7am – no seriously…7am. wtf?) He’s napping, then after dinner we’re meeting friends at a bar.

Will try to do something touristy and new on Sunday!!