Mothers Day - US style

Astrid and I went out for Mothers Day brunch last Sunday - observing the real ie US Mothers Day. Asti picked a real winner, the Village East on Bermondsey Street. Lovely Eggs Benedict, lovely pancakes with real maple syrup and gorgeous bacon...and the best Bloody Marys I've had in recent memory or possibly ever. 

If restaurants in London still allowed smoking, I could see that place becoming a family favourite/regular hangout and whiling away lazy Sundays there with newspapers and good conversation to round out the great food.

But, having to walk outside and smoke in the street is a real bummer. So my regular Sunday brunch venue will remain at home - especially if we get approved for the flat in Chiswick we're hoping for. The flat has a back garden as well as sufficient space indoors for genuine entertaining and civilized dining so with a bit of luck, BBQs and dinner parties will be in my future once again.

Osama Bin Laden is dead. Good riddance!

It's almost 10 years since the terrorist attack on the US that was ordered by Bin Laden.
I stood at my office windows and watched that day as the WTC towers burned, saw the 2nd plane crash into them, watched the fiery holocaust consume the towers and, finally and in a state of shock and disbelief watched their collapse.
It's been almost 10 years that I've lived with those images in my mind. Still fresh, and clear, and shocking.
I remember it all. All the details of desperately trying to reach my son Andrew on his cell phone. Getting calls and emails from colleagues all over the globe asking me to try to get through to their family and friends to confirm they were safely out of the towers.
I remember scavenging my office for face masks and de-con suits and gloves and flashlights to send down to Ground Zero with the emergency engineer team AboveNet sent.

We had colleagues there, knew network engineers working in the towers' data rooms and PA project managers.

I remember calling Alan and telling him a plane crashed into the WTC just as I arrived at work. And him checking CNN on his computer because at that point there was nothing on the BBC news yet.

I remember standing at our huge office window wall with Allen our Security Director and staring at the flames and boiling black clouds of smoke.
And time - minutes and hours - passing but feeling like it was standing still, frozen.

And I remember the incredible feeling of relief, and release, when I answered my cell phone and heard my son Andrew say "Mom, I'm ok, I'm safe."
But it's been almost 10 years remembering those who never got to make their "Mom, I'm ok, I'm safe" phone call. Remembering that ordinary, decent, innocent people were slaughtered in cold blood by merciless terrorists on orders from Osama Bin Laden.

So now finally Osama Bin Laden is dead. A small measure of Justice for us all.

Next Friday we'll be joining with our neighbours and holding an all day street party to celebrate the Royal Wedding. Doing a BBQ and everyone will bring food. Should be interesting as we are a very mixed ethnic/national group. I'll take photos for our housing association newsletter.

After reading an interesting article in the NY Times about sugar research and a bit of digging about in the associated studies, I decided to give up sugar. Not entirely, that would be too tiresome and fanatic. But in line with what I understood from those studies, to simply stop adding sugar to my coffee which I calculate is the major source of sugar for me. Thank goodness Asti secured a supply of Zucrinet for me. With enough of that my morning coffee is still quite acceptably sweet and tasty.
Since we don't eat much processed or packaged food I think we have very little hidden sugar in our diet. The shift away from processed food was a response to my dislike of the UK formulations - everything was too sweet or too vinegary or had a weird texture.

Coincidently, last week I had some extensive blood tests done so in a month I shall ask my doctor to repeat them and we'll see if there's any change. Again, according to the studies, the response to removing fructose from the diet is surprisingly rapid.

A harmless experiment and an interesting one.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

A good day at Oxford ACCU AGM.  Lovely drive there and back; sunshine and light traffic felt as if we were in some other country. ;)

The meeting was classic. Just goes to show what happens when you piss off old politicians. I, of course, always enjoy theatre and this was a very worthy production, long in the making. Among other excitement, Alan was elected secretary, taking the position over from a retiring colleague who had taken over from Alan over 10 years ago.

He who controls the minutes, controls the world.
This will be an interesting year.

My only regret was that we decided to go directly home to avoid what looked like horrendous traffic heading farther into Oxford. I'd originally wanted to detour through Oxford centre to stop in at the ONLY decent noodle house in the UK and buy some chow fun - several orders of it in fact - to put in the freezer. This is soul food for NY Jews.

Up at Oxford today for the ACCU 2011 conference - specifically for the annual meeting/bloodbath where presumably they will be choosing a new Conference chair and committee members. This should prove interesting as the old boys are finally putting their collective foot down with the conference committee and imposing some sorely needed democracy and transparency as well as fiscal responsibility into the process.
We shall see. One lives in hope.

Three curses of increasing severity

May you live in interesting times
May you come to the attention of those in authority (May the government be aware of you).
May you find what you are looking for. (May your wishes be granted).

Have you seen Sfogliatelle in London??

For reasons unknown it is impossible to find this Italian pastry, called Sfogliatelle, in London.


WHY?????


I've searched all over Greater London, talked with shop-owners, people I meet, restaurants, farmers markets. searched the web, everything. Nada.
How can London not have these sublime pastries?


I've seen some vaguely similar pastries here but they are filled with greasy sugar "creme". The real pastries are baked with a ricotta cheese and candied citron filling.
The photo above is of a classic sfogliatelle served at Ferrara's in New York City. A San Francisco restaurant owner was recently quoted as saying...
"The sfogliatelle from Ferrara's in New York City. They are a textural party in my mouth. Crispy, creamy, moist, powdery joy and not too sweet. All I need is one of them and a double espresso."

Loved the teacher's comments on this.

Sadly the site I found this on now seems to be dead or down.

A Jew was studying Hebrew in Old Soviet Union
and a guard came to him and said: 'Stop wasting
your time. We're not allowing you to go to Israel.
Why would you study Hebrew?'

The Jew answered: 'If I go to Heaven, I'd like to
speak G~d's language and be understood.'

The guard replied: 'Well, what if you go to Hell?'

The Jew finally said: 'Don't worry, I know Russian
rather well.'

Happy New Year 2011

It was a pretty decent Christmas and New Years Eve. We even managed to fit in a visit to Asti over on the other side of London. We had dinner at Ron & Hillary's along with Pete & Laurie on New Years Eve and all watched the midnight fireworks. Amazingly, TPTB in London finally got the fireworks right; this year's display was fabulous, impressive, and beautiful. I made profiteroles for our dessert - the recipe is on my recipe blog Tales from the Kitchen Table.
It was actually a well needed rest for Alan and me.

If it's not one thing, it's another

I ventured out of the house on Monday in sub-zero temps to clear the snow off the car and drive to the local Tesco for milk and bread. The car was covered in 4 inches of snow and a layer of ice beneath that. But I did manage to get the door open and the engine started right up - what a relief. But after I'd carefully and thoroughly cleaned all the snow and ice off the car and was ready to leave for the store, I decided to just give my wipers a little flick to check that the washer fluid was working ok. I worried that it might have frozen, even though I filled it with winter -20 C type washer fluid. So I turned on the switch and - nada. No washer fluid, no wiper movement,  and no wiper motor sound; just silence. Checked that the bit where the wiper arm mechanism attaches was ice free - but still no joy. Thought I was give it a chance to warm up from the fierce car heater blowing air onto the windshield.  Nada. No front wipers, no rear wiper.

The car just passed its MOT perfectly last week. This is out of the blue and frustrating. Because of the chaos from snow and freezing temps and Christmas holidays almost on top of us, all the local Honda dealers are over-booked for repairs. Same for the couple of local garages I trust. My neighbour who usually does my car repairs can't really work outside in sub-zero temps. And electrical repairs are expensive. So this will all have to wait until next week or just after New Years. It's just not safe to drive without windshield wipers. Even if it's not raining or snowing, a car or truck could splash filth or water onto my car when I'm driving and I would be blinded without wipers. Arrgh! Frustrating.

When Wedding Photographers Get Photoshop Insanity

Can you spot the insanity in this photo?

After Death Wishes

A Catholic priest, a Protestant minister, and a Rabbi
are discussing what they would like people to say
after they die and their bodies are on display in
open caskets.

Priest: I would like someone to say "He was a righteous
man, an honest man, and very generous."

Minister: I would like someone to say "He was very kind
and fair, and he was very good to his parishioners."

Rabbi: I would want someone to say, "Oh look! He's
moving!"

Someday your prince charming will come; unless he took a wrong turn, got lost, and is too stubborn to ask for directions.

Early Birthday Surprise

Tonight, when Alan arrived home from work, he handed me a very prettily wrapped box with a card wishing me a Happy Birthday. Ten days early but I couldn't resist opening it immediately. Yes! It was the 1TB Samsung portable usb hard drive I've been drooling over and wishing for. The perfect birthday present. I'm so pleased he got exactly what I wanted rather than taking me out to dinner or buying me some jewellery. I have piles of jewellery already and going out to dinner at a restaurant is nice but nothing extraordinary. But a 1TB portable HD? Ooooooooh, drool!

I know, I know, but I'm so pleased, so happy.

And it's still snowing. Day 3 now. Everything covered with an increasing layer of white. The road are impossible a third world nightmare. I just hope the Tesco delivery truck is able to bring the grocery order tomorrow. The whole country is in a transportation crisis, near paralysed by the bad weather. We're only taking  few centimeters here, mind you, but it's panic time in Great Britain.

How Computers Can Suck the Joy Out of Life Sometimes

This has been a really bad 6 weeks for me in terms of computer hardware.

To start with, I was talked into exchanging computers with my husband. (Don't let this happen to you, girls and boys! Just say no!)

I won't go into what a nightmare and disaster the exchange was. Nor the massive loss of important files that it caused. 

Then my router died. But my ISP, of course, didn't believe me when I called it in and made me jump through hoops testing everything on their insane check-list for dummies before they finally conceded that I was correct,  she's dead Jim, send the lady a replacement router. OK, that's usually a next day delivery - especially as I had called my ISP before 8am. But no, they neglected to mention that they were out of routers - in the end it was 6 days before the replacement arrived because there was a weekend in the middle of it all. So the replacement arrives - after 6pm of course, meaning I sat home all day waiting for a DHL package that was placed on the local delivery van at 8am and trundled all around London before being dropped off. Mind you, the local DHL warehouse is about a 7 minute drive from my house so I did offer to pick it up but was refused. 

Anyway, it's night and I finally get the new router, connect all the cables and power it up. And....

The Internet light doesn't come on. All the other lights are merrily glowing bright green but the Internet light remains sullenly dark. Being an IT person, I start to methodically check everything it could possibly be. Turn router off and then back on, reset router, check that phone line is live, check router control panel in my browser, etc. Finally, I call my ISP. Explain all the troubleshooting I've done but as usual, they treat me as if I was lying, and demand I go through the same routine I've just done to eliminate the obvious possible problems. They finally concede that it MIGHT be something on their end but it would need a 2nd level support tech. I go through to 2nd level support and the idiot woman there who is NOT an engineer or any sort of real tech person by any definition is clueless and tries to get me to go thru the exact same testing routine. I tell her to read the ticket's notes. She demands I unscrew the central phone block and reconnect my router to the test block inside the wall. She refuses to check if the issues are on the ISP end, claims that isn't possible. (Chorus of, "Oh Yes It Is!"). I tell her I have to hang up to disconnect the phone block etc and get the case number. Then I get a drink, light a cigarette and curse incompetent tech support to the depths of hell. 

When I call back the ISP 10 min later, I tell them I have an open case, give them the ticket number, and ask them to pass me on to 3rd level support as the 2nd level tech said she couldn't figure out what was wrong with the router. Finally!! As soon as I spoke to the 3rd level tech support guy, I knew this was a professional at last. He asked to review the ticket first, then asked me a couple of sensible questions - and listened to my answer. He said he thought the problem was indeed on the ISP's side, hang on a moment - I heard him typing, and voila! I was connected to the Internet. And yes, the little green light was now glowing brightly. He said there was an ongoing issue with static IPs and account configurations not being saved properly.  So after only 3 hours of tech support hell, I was back online.

But there was more aggro to come. The new laptop started shutting down randomly. Alan said it was probably just overheating.  Erm, JUST overheating? You just took away my reliable if clunky old PC tower to give me your unreliable laptop? I was assured that if I raised the laptop by putting it on a wire rack, the improved air circulation would prevent it overheating. Ok, it's on the wire rack, it stopped overheating.

For almost a week. Till tonight. Just now. 

Hmmmm. I'm thinking about the agony I went through installing Win7 on this laptop. And installing all the apps, and transferring files. And the lost files. and on and on.

And now, I have no idea if the thing is going to up and die on me. If? More like when.

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;
But there is no joy in Mudville - mighty Casey has struck out.

Finally Back Online Again!

Last Thursday at approximately 6am my router died and I lost internet access. Despite calling my ISP, O2 before 8am. it was only finally tonight at 6pm that the new router arrived. And of course when I plugged it in there was still no internet and I was required to call O2 tech support and argue with first line moro//tech support that the issue needed to be escalated to higher support, when I reached 2nd level support they were slightly better but still basically idiots. I finally ended up calling back again and this time I was passed on by sheer chance to 3rd level support who took a look at the files, chatted with me for a moment and then admitted that there might be a config problem on their end. Twenty seconds later I had internet access and the network engineer (yes, a real network engineer NOT a tech-support-droid) was apologising for the 5 day insanity, delat, and aggro.

Anyway, finally! back online. I'm putting off doing my email until tomorrow because I HAVE HAD IT for today. It's a cold glass of white wine and a smoke for me.

When men mess with their wife's computer or Where have all my movies gone?

So, my massive film archive is gone. Into the bit bucket, gone with the wind. A product of 6 years of careful and often difficult collecting, lovingly selected. Six years of films I will probably not be able to collect back in their entirety.

Bastard!

Basically several years ago Alan pressured, whinged, moaned, and talked me into getting a used but powerful development computer from the company he worked for before it went into Administration. Being basically a nice person I finally agreed and carefully transferred all my files to the new machine. My old laptop was then reconfigured for linux. All my films were neatly organised in a folder, cleanly named, and actually regularly watched. But then about 6 months ago Alan started hassling me that the big computer was using too much power and producing too much heat blah blah blah and I should trade it for his laptop that he wasn't using.

After dragging my feet for months he finally got so insistent and annoying that I stupidly gave in. It was one of those things were it was just not worth the cost to our relationship as he was making it into a cause celebre. Because the video files were so huge by this point, he brought home a portable drive for me to transfer my films onto. I copied all my video files onto the drive and then discovered that the laptop wasn't going to be able to hold them all. We agreed that I would get my own portable drive after I got back from NYC and the files could stay on the portable drive until then.Because it was really Alan's work portable drive, I did move 30 GB of files onto my laptop to free up some workspace for him. But my remaining stored files all had names like Barb's files to transfer - do not delete!

So I went away to NYC and when I got home, my computer had been wiped clean and re-installed/re-configured as a linux development machine. So ok, since then I have been sorting out and setting up my laptop and because WIN 7 is so very different than Win XP it wasn't until tonight that I reached almost the end of the alphabet - Videos - and discovered that about 80 GB of classic films, the most irreplaceable, rare, and cherished of my collection were MISSING ! So I went to the portable drive, figuring they were on that but no, nada, not there....

And yes, Alan had deleted them from the portable drive.

That's all I can say about this. I'm just stunned by it all.