Long overdue.

Sunday, July 2nd, 2006

Umm…hi. Remember me? I used to blog here—and I actually do still blog here, I’ve just being doing it at a rather glacial pace…

Where to begin? Well, I guess the biggest change around here is that Jeremy and I have finally moved into and gotten settled in our new home. It’s a bright, airy, remarkably spacious flat with wooden floors, central heating, and neighbors who are only occasionally noisy. Best of all, there’s more counter space in the kitchen than I know what to do with, and there’s a gas stove and convection oven that make a cooking a real treat. We still have no bookshelves and no wardrobe for our clothes, but we have a nice bed, a comfy sofa, and a second-hand Xbox to entertain us, so the place is finally feeling like home.

Not long after moving in, I took off with Jeremy for the Reboot conference in Copenhagen. For me, the highlights of the conference included a riveting presentation by Steve Coast of OpenStreetMap which made we want to run out and buy a GPS device to start mapping the streets around here, an extremely engaging and thought-provoking discussion on the value of European diversity, and a great spoken-word essay by Jeremy in praise of the hyperlink (which I am proud to say I helped brainstorm and research). The conference also gave me the opportunity to see Copenhagen for the first time. It’s a great city: the people are incredibly friendly, the architecture is lovely, and there are tons of cafés and restaurants. I never really managed to get my head (or tongue) around the Danish language, though I did make a noble effort to try to speak as much Danish as I possibly could—a kind of pointless undertaking, I suppose, since every Danish person I met spoke better English than I do.

Just a week and a half after Reboot, the @media conference took place in London. I didn’t actually go to the conference, but I did go up to stay in London and hang out at all the post-conference social events (yes, I am a geek groupie). In the day and a half that I had to explore London on my own, I went to the Museum of London at the Barbican. which I’ve been meaning to do for years and which was really fun, though overrun with schoolkids; to the church of St. Bartholomew the Great, which is a hidden gem of a church with lovely Romanesque architecture; to Samuel Johnson’s house, where I got to stand in the attic in which Johnson’s dictionary was compiled; to Covent Garden, where I just hung out, drank coffee, and bought a summer dress; to Neal’s Yard Dairy, the fantastic and smelly cheese shop where I tasted (and bought) some scrumptious Duckett’s Caerphilly cheese; and to Neal’s Yard itself, where I sat in the World Food Café on a gorgeously sunny day and ate a fresh Greek salad while looking out at the friendly, colorful bustle of the square below. The rest of the time was spent hunting for the London Stone with my friend Jen, partying with geeks, and sitting in St. James’s Park on a Saturday afternoon waiting for the Queen to go by in her carriage—and she did! And I saw her! And I took a picture, which will be going up on Flickr soon…

And that pretty much takes us up to the present day. I’m hoping that, now that things have settled down a bit, I’ll have the time—and more importantly, the inclination—to get back to blogging. I feel somewhat out of practice after letting it slide for two months straight, but hopefully this post will go some way towards getting me back in the groove. We shall see.

Comments

1

Dirkie again

Today i finaly got my copy of Dirkie Lost in the Desert and have made a voyage in time to 30 years ago. I m very happy. Tank you to all of you for the precious help.

2

Hello stranger!

I kept waiting for you to deliver some horrible news … the curse of being an old person - you become a pessemist :-)

Glad to hear you were just busy! In less than 3 months my wife and I are off to Berlin to sample another European capitol … have you ever been?

Cheers!

PS

Your email field seems to be on the fritz … wouldn’t accept goodisrelative@yahoo.com as a valid email … I’m hurt!

3

Your home sounds lovely, Jess. I am too envious of the hard wood floors. I have carpeting, very old carpeting. I am so glad all seems well. Hope to hear from you soon

Sorry. Comments are closed.