Bicycle!

Well, I finally did it.  I got a bicycle.  Ive been cycling to work everyday now for almost a month.  Although occassionally I still take the train if I have plans to go out after work.  I cut through residential areas.  The city produces these free maps for cyclists. The maps give routes with little or no traffic and routes that have dedicated bicycle lanes.  

Totally unrelated, or maybe not, I have been noticing that the sun seems to out for alot longer here than at home.  So of course, I looked it up.  According to a couple of websites, London will have about 16.5 hours of sunlight on the summer solstice; Boston will have 15.  An hour and a half may not seem like much but I am one of those people who wakes up when the sun comes up.  Right now, that is 5AM!  And it is not yet dark at 9PM even now.   I need to get some blackout curtains!

Anyway it takes about a half hour to get to work.  And of course the link below is the soundtrack of my journey.  I think I may be overdressed.  

Soundtrack of My Journey

The "Ocho"

Our celebration of eight years of marriage involved an extravaganza of events and food.  The foods included my honey’s favourites: steak, beef stew, roast beef, murgh makhani (butter chicken), bacon, eggs, cream teas, and pancakes.

The first event was Kew Gardens.  Someone recommended it to us, but I can’t remember who. Anyway, it was amazing.  It is a zoo for plants (thanks Susanne). We went into the Palm House where there were many huge and interesting palms (well named house, eh?).  My beloved gave the large central palm what we lovingly call: The Statue of Liberty Treatment.  On the New York leg of our honeymoon, we visited the famous statue.  As we approached, my wife could not resist snapping shot after shot of it.  If you stack the photos on top of each other, you can make a flipbook of our approach.  With the palm, the flipbook is a three-dimensional treatment including overhead shots from a walkway.  After that we saw the Water Lily House, which was cool because they were in bloom.  Real interesting plants, water lilies: with just the leaves on the surface and the flower a few inches out of the water.  It is a stealth plant.   After that, we went to the most fabulous rock garden I have ever seen or could imagine.  I loved the little stuff growing out of rocks everywhere, little mounds of plants, and splashes of colour.  We also saw the blooming azaleas, but it was a bit much for our allergies, so we high tailed it out of the there.  There were massive trees all over the place too.  Some of them had little stories of how they came to be there; all of them had little plaques.  Many of the trees were grafted, so it reminded me a little of Wanskuck Park just a few block from our old house in Providence, which was an estate that had a few imported grafted trees.  Although in typical Rhode Island fashion it was just a miniscule version.  Wanskuck isn’t even an acre (0.4 hectares).   Kew is 326 acres.  So we saw only a small fraction of it.  It was quite beautiful so thank you to whoever recommended it.  

Next event:  A Little Night Music, a musical by Stephen Sondheim, my honey’s favourite composer.  We saw Follies, another Sondheim, on our honeymoon.  So it is very appropriate to see Sondheim on our anniversary.  It was really good.  It had that Sondheim thing going on where not only does the music have that little unconventional twist, but so does the story line.  It is like mundane content with really quirky characters.  I really enjoyed it.  Everyone in the show was really good.  There were no weaknesses.  All had solid voices, even the chorus, and all had solid acting: you believed that they were the really the characters.  

Final event: Mystery Movie.  As already explained on my wife’s blog, we went with a few of friends from her school.  This is where a local theatre shows a film before its release date: the catch is, you dont know which one. Three of the four of us were hoping that it was Star Trek.  It was.  I did cheat and read up on the eight films being released that week.  I think I would have made it through any of them.  Although one never knows when the Lume of Fate will reappear…  Anyway, my wife pointed out that I wasn't really embracing the spirit of the 'mystery movie' if I looked up all the possible choices. I guess she's got me there, but the way I see it my actions show more how excited I was because I just couldn't wait to find out... As far as Star Trek goes, I was under the impression that it was going to be about Kirk Spock and the others prior to joining StarFleet.  (My honey says that I am the only person who would watch that movie!)  So I was a little disappointed.   But I still enjoyed it, despite what my wife’s blog says.  I am going to stay away  from giving it a Sobe rating because there seems to be trouble brewing at Global Younging over who can give such ratings! There were a few minutes devoted to preStarFleet, but it quickly turned into a typical Star Trek movie: action and special effects interspersed with Treknobabble.  They used time travel and alternate realities to explain things that just don’t jive with the original.  But there were plenty of nods to the original.  For example, Kirk served under Pike, but only for about five minutes, and there was no Menagerie, but Pike does wind up in a wheelchair.  (You have to remember that when I was a kid, there was no cable and Star Trek reruns ran everyday…  I don’t know the ships call sign, I can’t tell you any stardates, and wouldn’t be caught dead at a convention, but I have seen every episode of the original series at least five times.  There really was nothing else on!)  Another homage was that Sulu had this really cool sword that unfolded, a far cry from the foil he used in the original.  We also got to see Kirk taking the Kobayashi Maru simulation, which was quite amusing. There were many others: not least of which was Leonard Nimoy was in it playing his older self.   He must have it in his contract that he appears in every Star Trek film.  Lets just keep our fingers crossed that the contract expires when he does.  All in all, I was pleased.  I wanted to see it anyway.  It seemed most of the other attendees wanted Star Trek too because there was a burst of applause when the title appeared.  It was pretty cool.  The staff in the lobby were placing bets on which film it would be.  It was a very festive atmosphere.  But that was because it was The "Ocho"...just can’t get enough of it!