All The News Thats Fit to Blog

Hello, I hope that you are all doing well out there in the wide and wonderful world. Right now I am in my bed, having a nice mellow evening with the lovely Alletta Brenner, maybe you've met her, she is a diamond let me tell you. Well then, as some of you may well know neither I or the little lady have made a post in some time. Thus, what I am going to do is fill you in on our doing's, going's on, and what not's.

The first and foremost change is that I am no longer working as a gardener. After a few weeks working with Dan, I began to see that it wasn't going to work out. Nothing against him or the work, I was just not going to get enough money/hours by working with him. Plus, it became clear that if both Alletta and I were earning our income from Dan that things could get a bit sticky. Best not put all our eggs in one basket. So now I am working in a bike shop! This new line of work is a wonderful change in my life. Basically I get to play with cool bikes and bike related gear, clothing, and components all day. Which is wonderful!! The name of my company is Cycle Surgery. I work at the West Hampstead branch. My co-workers are all very lovely people. It is a very friendly and low pressure atmosphere. So far I have sold two bikes! I started on the 16th so now I've been there for three weeks, my goal was to sell a bike in first month (I admit it was a modest goal). Once I've been with Cycle Surgery for 3 months I will qualify to get trade prices on all merchandise and bikes at the shop. (For those that do not know what trade price is, it amounts to as much as two thirds off! a very good deal). So in four or five months Alletta and I are going to buy new road bikes! All very exciting.

London is proving to be a very nice place to live. Fall is now in full swing and the weather has not been too bad. We have had a few nice days here and there but I am sure that the nasty weather will come around soon enough.

Alletta and I went to a few concerts in the time since the last post. First we saw The Go! Team in mid October. It was a great a great show. There were two opening bands. One, which was real good called Operator Please and another, which was not good, known as the velvet peaches (they are not even good enough to justify yperlinking, Yuck!). Operator Please had good energy, they actually had a presence on stage, played with the audience ect. The other guys well they sucked, no presence, the lead singer thought he was Robert Plant, but let me tell you he was not. I was overwhelmed with joy every time there songs ended. They were a Detroit band with nothing to say. The not so leading lead singer was sensing his inability to 'rock' the audience in any way and left the stage before the rest of the band even finished their last song. Then The Go! Team came on and rocked our socks off!

More recently Alletta, Tanya, and I made a journey out to Cardiff, the capital of Wales, to see Arcade Fire. The show was amazing! The trip no so amazing. We decided to save some cash by sacrificing time and rode the National Express (Grey Hound of the UK). The ride was meant to be 3 and a half hours long, we ended up doing that plus another hour and a half! All of the delay came form just trying to leave London! That was less than fun. To make matters worse the toilet on the bus was busted in two unfortunate ways. It was failing to flush and the door was busted. So every hard left turn yielded swinging doors and sewage. Yes, it was less than fun for those at the back of the bus (that was Alletta and I).

Despite all of this I real enjoyed the show. I do not know how many of you know Arcade Fire but you really should check them out if you haven't They are amazing!!That goes for everyone, parents, aunts, cousins, friends, Romans, countrymen, whoever! BUY THEIR ALBUM! It's worth it!

Because of the Arcade Fire trip to Wales our Halloween was not very eventful. (The Concert was on the 30th, thus we came back on the 31st, didn't feel much like a party.

The future holds exciting things to come along. Alletta is going to give a talk at a conference in Swansea (it's in Wales). For Thanksgiving Alletta and I are going to Dunbar in Scotland. Eden Graisbery Blair, our former Forest Grove High School Teacher, is a new Mum and we shall break bread with her new little family. All very exciting!

Okay well that should do it for now. I don't wanna go on to long. May you be in peace my friends and family. Until I blog at you again.

(Hopefully sooner than later)

Ryan

Another School Year Begins

A month into our life in London, and we are settling in nicely. Ryan has been working part-time for our flatmate's landscaping business, and I am also working for him as an administrative assistant. So far we are getting along well together, we often cook big vegetarian meals as a household and are enjoying the benefits of sharing the grocery bill, which now includes a big weekly organic produce box that I am particularly thrilled about. For the most part, I am feeling healthy, just a few headaches here and there. Ryan however got bitten by some kind of exotic bug last week and ended up in the ER with a massively swollen hand and arm! (Unfortunately we didn't think to take any pictures, but I can assure you it was gruesome looking). Anyhow they gave him a heavy load of antibiotics and he seems to be fine now. Other than that, he has been applying for jobs around London, aiming for something working for one of the city's many universities.

Last weekend we went to a really nice dinner party at the flat of some fellow London Marshall Scholars. There is a sizable group of us here in town together this year, and of those a lot of great people that Ryan and I both get on well with. We are looking forward to spending more time with them all, perhaps instigating a kind of weekly pub night together. One this is for sure, this year will be a far cry from the kind of isolation we felt last year at times up in Scotland.

I am finally all registered and signed up for classes at LSE, which will start next week. This year I will be taking the following courses: Foundations and Key Issues in Human Rights, Complex Emergencies (about humanitarian disasters and political crises), Population and Development, Terrorism and the Rule of Law, and War, Peace and the Politics of National Self-Determination. LSE is a really fantastic school, and already I am really impressed by all the resources it has to offer, not the least of which is a really cheap student gym where I can train for my next marathon!
There are about a zillion student groups and sporting clubs, including a rock climbing club (which we will most definitely join) and a cycling group as well.

The weather has been quite good in London this last month, though elements of autumn are definitely beginning to creep in. Still, it is much warmer and drier than Edinburgh, and so that is doing wonders for my disposition. Before the weather changes too much I hope that we can get out a bit on our bikes and explore the surrounding countryside.

All in all, I think that it is going to be a very good year!

lots of love,
alletta (and ryan, though he never gets off his bum to post on his own!)

Our new dog!!!!!

Our flatmate Dan just brought his pet to come live with us (he had been up in Manchester with Dan's mom), and so now we have an awesome new member of the household!

Meet Chunky!


We love him soooo much!

Some pictures of our new flat!

London here we come!

So after a great deal of excitement and only a few major mishaps we have finally made the big move south to our new place in London. Our new place of residence is in a really great flat with our roommates Tanya and Daniel in Camden, just minutes from the Chalk Farm tube stop. Our new place is extremely nice and homey, and in many ways like our old place in Eugene. It has wood floors, big windows and is very nicely decorated. It is in a 1920s era block of flats with a courtyard of trees in the center. There are lots of families and people from all over the world living in the complex and it so it always smells like delicious cooking! We are within a short walk of the rest of Camden, with all its amazing pubs and music venues, as wells as nearby Regent's Park, Hampstead Heath and the really nice neighborhood of Primrose Hill. We are within 20 minutes of central London and yet our neighborhood is so pleasant, full of trees and families and quiet streets. I still can't believe how quiet and nice our apartment is. Our roommates are great. Tanya is a freelance photographer and Daniel is an actor who runs his own landscaping business. They have great tastes and share many of the same interests as we do. So far we are having a really fun time. Last night we had an illicit barbecue in the back yard and bought tickets to see Arcade Fire together in October. After a big trip to Ikea for storage stuff we are getting settled in very nicely in the new place, and can already tell we will be much more comfortable than we were in our old place.

The last few weeks have also been quite exciting. My mom came to visit us and we had a really fine time hanging out together and seeing the sights. Ryan went down to London early for a job interview and so the first week of September was spent just my mom and I getting the house packed up. I was in charge of putting on a charity concert in Edinburgh on the 5th to raise money for sustainable development programmes in Darfur, Sudan and so that has been a major preoccupation for me since finishing my dissertation. In the end, despite an enormous amount of work, we had a pretty low turnout at the concert. Still we made money for the charity and I learned an enormous amount about putting on gigs. Hoping to try again and put another one on in London this year for the same cause once we get settled in and I get a chance to become more acquainted with the music scene here.

In other news, the move down to London was a big debacle. We had reserved a van ahead of time to drive all our stuff down to London, but when my mom and I went to pick it up it turned out the thing was a people carrier not a hauling van and it wouldn't work at all for what we needed. After a feeble attempt to remove the seats and put all our stuff inside, which failed miserably, we ended up returning the thing and calling all over town until we found a company that had a large hauling van available. When we finally got the thing, we realized we had erred on the side of caution and gone too big! The thing was extra long and tall and very hard to maneuver. To make matters worse, it was a manual transmission, making my mom the sole driver as I don't know how to drive stick and wasn't about to start on a rental vehicle in the UK! Unfortunately, mom had not driven a stick since 1963 and certainly not done so on a hilly terrain in rush hour traffic! We had a terrible time driving the thing back to my house, stalling at several stop lights and getting it stuck in an alleyway where we had to ask this nice guy walking by to maneuver it out for us. By the time we got the van home and packed it, it was after five pm, and I had developed a terrible headache. In the end mom drove down to London in one shot, with no dinner and no stops to rest or pee for over eight hours with me in the passenger seat loaded up on painkilers and groaning. Once we got to London we got lost for an hour and finally made it to my new house after 2 am. What a mess!! All in all, mom did a heroic job, so if you see her give her a big clap on the back!

Anyway, we are now here in our new place, and despite these initial hiccups, we are looking forward to a fantastic year.

alletta

FINISHED!!

Ladies and gentlemen, as of 2:30 yesterday afternoon, my dissertation was printed bound, and finally turned in once and for all. Now that I am done, and reveling in my freedom, I thought I would finally sit down and make an entry to the blog!!

Things are going pretty well here in Edinburgh. Ryan and I managed to secure an awesome flat in London just north of Camden and so that is a relief. A couple weeks ago we went on a final cycling trip in Scotland, starting just north of Glasgow and making our way north towards Inverness. As you can see, if was a beautiful way to end our days in Scotland.

The Festival has begun!!

For those of you who don't know, Edinburgh erupts every August into one heck of a good time, with the Festival season... While we all call it 'The Festival' it is actually a whole bunch of festivals and events that all take place simultaneously, turning our city into a massive international party. Just a few of these are, the International Festival (which includes dance, opera, classical musical performances and some theatre), the Fringe Festival (theatre, art shows, comedy acts, music), the Film Festival (you get the idea), the book festival, the Jazz and Blues Festival, as well as loads of fairs and arts exhibitions.

As you can imagine, just about every conceivable venue in the city has been commandeered. In addition, the parks are all full of big tents, outdoor beer gardens, clubs, and buskers! At night, there are fireworks, massive outdoor parties and crowds of people all over the place. The change was stunning, last week business was as usual, and then all of a sudden the city was full of tourists and performers! The whole city feels transformed, and well, festive!

Today there is going to be a massive parade through town. (I'll post pictures as soon as I get them). We have also bought tickets to a bunch of shows, the first of which we will see tonight. So far the line up includes: Emergence-C! (a one man show about race relations in America), The Complete Dickens Unplugged (YES, this production is written and directed by THE Adam Long!), Wit, Into the Hood (think Into the Woods, in the Ghetto, with Hip Hop, and Breakdancing). We are also trying to get tickets to a showing of a new John Waters comedy that includes a Q&A session with him afterwards. This Thursday we have been invited to see the Tatoo (a massive bagpipe performance up at the castle). Tickets were completely sold out and impossible to get unless you were incredibly rich, and so we had given up on the idea of seeing it and were really depressed, but then last week we got an email from a member of the Marshall Commission who was in town and they invited us to come along with them for free! So that was incredibly lucky! We are also hoping to catch a number of art exhibitions, and the Box Wars if they do it again (imagine modern day gladiators, in giant cardboard costumes).




Aside from all the festival stuff, life is moving forward for us. We have found a place to live in Camden, in a big old house with 5-6 other people, and will be moving down to London on the 7th of September. Ryan continues to apply for jobs not in the betting industry, and I am continuing to slave away on my thesis, though the end IS near. I promise, once its done I'll post a copy online for you all. On Tuesday, our very good friend Ashley will be back in Edinburgh for the end of our European tour, and then at the end of the month my mom will be visiting for two weeks (yay mom!).
All in all, the month of August looks like it is going to be the highlight of our year here. Might as well go out with a bang!

love you guys,
Alletta