Life in London

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.