Becoming tour guides

Over the past month we have had family and friends come to visit. Very fun!! Makes me even more homesick and I never need to see stonehenge again. But it was a blast and I got to see more of England.


Lacock Village


Warwick Castle


More Warwick


Avebury, smaller version of Stonehenge


Village in the Cotswolds (can't remember name)

My Beloved Jayhawks

Well, Jayhawk football has yet again failed to make it to a bowl game in consecutive years. Of course when you blow two games in which you hold large leads in the fourth quarter you don’t deserve to go to a bowl game.

Since football is over we might as well talk basketball. The relatively minor struggles of the Jayhawks have been much discussed in my family recently, and I have a theory. Granted I haven’t been able to see all the games yet (still waiting on DVD’s from my friend back home that’s recording the games for me), but I did see the Florida game.

In spite of what everyone said about it being a well played game it didn’t look particularly well played to me. The final score was misleading about the offensive output due to overtime. Florida had massive foul trouble throughout the game so were not at their full strength. KU made several mistakes that would have been fatal against a team not plagued by even bigger errors. This wasn’t so much one team grabbing victory as it was which team made less mistakes.

On, then, to my theory. Comparing Bill Self and Roy Williams is inevitable. Roy coached for a lot of very successful years at KU and these early season losses to inferior teams were very rare. However I can’t recall a team that Roy coached that didn’t have an upperclassman who was a vocal leader. KU is certainly lacking that at the moment, but my hope is that Julian Wright finds his voice and yanks the guys out of their stupor.

What does this have to do with my theory? Well, not much actually, that was a bit of digression. Now really to my theory. To me it appeared that from the beginning of the season Roy coaches his transition game. He pounds that into his players from day one of practice each year. This leads to his teams always looking very impressive early because early in the season every team is more focused on what they’re doing than game-planning for their opponents. KU fans got used to this approach which makes early season setbacks tougher to take now.

Bill Self has a different focus. He believes very strongly that ultimate success is rooted in lock down man defense which requires effort and focus night in and night out. His determination to instill this belief in his players at the beginning of the year leads to an offense that can be pretty anemic and a lack of defensive adjustments.

However the more I think about it the more this approach reminds me of how Norman Dale approached the Hickory team. He knew what it was going to take to win in the end and he wasn’t going to be put off of that vision by a few early losses or some criticism from the fans. Bill Self is the same way.

He’s just now got the team understanding that you win games when shots aren’t falling by making sure the other team’s offense is struggling as well (USC and Depaul went a long way toward proving that). Now I think he could make this point much more quickly if he would do a wholesale benching of guys that aren’t giving effort for walk-ons that will. I always thought that was one of Roy’s most effective tactics.

Now that Coach Self has got them going down the road to believing in his philosophy he’ll start putting in the defensive wrinkles and offensive sets that can make this team lethal. Now he has time with Christmas break to truly add all the X’s and O’s that when combined with the effort can make KU a great team. You can tell by his most recent comments that he’s been waiting for this stretch of relatively few games and lots of practice time.

The next few months are going to be a lot of fun!

Rock Chalk!
Frog

Turkey, turkey, turkey…

As promised, here’s a recap of the Thanksgiving meal Wife and I made. Everything turned out pretty well. Juggling burners in our tiny kitchen was a bit of a challenge, but everything ended up coming out together and it was all really good.

We had a pretty aggressive menu planned for the amount of space we had to prepare it in:

Turkey
Dressing
Mashed potatoes
Gravy
Corn
Green beans with butter and almonds
Candied sweet potatoes
Jello salad
Rolls
Pumpkin pie

The turkey was done with the tried and true AB method. Blast it at high heat to brown it and then bake at a lower temp until the breast meat hits 161. Dressing was my grandma’s recipe that I’ve made for the family the last few holidays. It came out really well, possibly some of the best I’ve ever made.

For the mashed potatoes I tried something different. According to a couple websites and a cookbook on our shelf the best mashed potatoes are made by using a two part cooking process. The first cooking is at around 160 degrees for 30 minutes followed by a cool down period. After cooling down the potatoes are cooked again at 180-190 for another 30 minutes. This cooking process is supposed to keep the starches from breaking out of the cells and making the potatoes gummy. It seemed like it worked for that, but I don’t have a potato ricer or food mill so the effect was somewhat lost due to the lumps.

I couldn’t have been happier with the gravy. The only thing that was missing was more of it! Everything else was fine. Wife made it all possible with a ton of help throughout the day and by making the rolls and pie the day before. The rolls were from a recipe that her great-grandmother made, and the pie was extremely tasty, especially with the real whipped cream we made with it.

Mmmm….I might need to pull some leftovers out of the freezer for dinner.

Now that's a nice looking bird.















Gravy doesn't photograph well, but it sure is tasty!



















The table all set and waiting for us to dive in.

Cheers,
Frog

Being lazy...

As my friends back home so kindly pointed out, my blog has sucked lately due to my laziness of not posting. Well, we’ll see if I can’t do a little bit better about that.

The sad thing is that there has been plenty to write about since my last post. My sister came to visit Wife and me in the middle of October. We had a good time seeing a lot of the south of England including Stonehenge, Bath (again), Lacock village (my sister wanted to see this since it is the village where they filmed the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice), and London (in the pouring rain).

It was also Wife and my six month anniversary. To mark the occasion we went to see Wicked in London. It was great that we finally got to see a show together since we’d tried twice before and always been thwarted. We almost failed this time as well since Wife was not feeling well at all. Her fear of missing something motivated her enough to power through and she ended up having a pretty good time.

A couple weeks later we had more visitors as our friends who had just gotten married in August came to visit for a long weekend. Wife got to take them to Stonehenge (she’s getting sick of those rocks) and around Winchester while I worked. The next day we all went to Warwick castle, which was very cool. Madam Toussad’s has bought the castle so there are some of those creepy wax figures around, but it doesn’t detract from what a cool castle it is. There was also a huge trebuchet. It looked like it was in working order, but sadly we didn’t get to see it fired.

Wife’s family is here at the moment to celebrate Thanksgiving with us. They’re out and about in the country for the first few days of this week with Wife while I’m stuck working. They’ll be back tonight, though, so the feasting can commence tomorrow. It’s going to be quite an ordeal and I’m looking forward to cooking. Look for documentation of the process in a future blog post.

That’s the quick update. I better quit before I start complaining about England again.

Cheers,
Frog

Barcelona

One of my favorite cities. Great atmosphere and some really interesting things to see. Aaron and I went for a long weekend. Ate way too many tapas. I was afraid the resturant was going to have to roll us out.


La Rambla. Main pedestrian street. Lots of shops, people and street performers (see below).



Barcelona had some of the weirdest buildings I've ever seen, all of them by Gaudi (Next 5 pictures).

La Sagrada Familia (still trying to finish it 100+ years later)



Casa Batllo

La Pedrera

Chimneypots on the roof of La Pedrera


The beach with 5 guys trying to be acrobats (strangely enough it wan't attracting the girls)

Mussels + Beer = Brussels

Went about a month ago. A little behind posting, will try to do better. Aaron had a buisness meeting so we took the ferry to France and drove up to Brussels. Good city for just a day visit.

Cliffs of Dover from the ferry


Grand Place


Another view of Grand Place




Aaron and I enjoying Mussels and Beer (belgium blonde)


Manneken Pis

Sheep on a Hill

Or Wales. Went to see Snakes on a Plane, before the trip. Don't think the English quite got the movie. Aaron and I were cracking up and everyone else was a little too serious.
Wales was beautiful. The countryside reminded me of Ireland. Drove a lot, almost the entire country in one day. On the map distances don't look that long...


Inside of Tintern Abbey




Caernarfon Castle



Aaron took this picture. Already had climbed up two towers, didn't think I could make another. He went up and took a picture of me waiting.

Cooking up a Storm

One thing that is definitely an upside to being here is that we’re cooking a lot more since moving. Eating out is about the same expense as back home (if you keep to our method of thinking that if we spend a dollar back home we spend a pound here). What is different is the availability of the food we would normally have gone out for. Back home if we were eating out it would normally be for Mexican, Chinese, or any of a number of ethnic cuisines. Since the most common of those was Mexican, that’s not as much of an option here.

There’s also not as much to do in the evening since there’s not a house to maintain and we’re not preparing for a wedding and a move. In the last week we’ve had roast chicken, rigatoni with tomato vodka sauce, chocolate chip cookies, beef and lamb stew (see below), and spaghetti with tuna, caper and tomato sauce.

Needless to say we’re eating much healthier now, which is funny if you consider some of the British cuisine. My favorite was the traditional dessert that one celebrity chef made on TV. It was basically lemon flavored fat with a little flour. The actual name was something on a pond with the pond being the lemon flavored fat. How that was appetizing is still unknown to me.

But that’s the bad of British cuisine. There are some good things. The fish and chips is great, and beef and ale pie is very tasty, especially if there are mushrooms included. And there’s always bangers and mash or liver, bacon, and mash, neither of which Wife will eat.

When it comes down to it, though, any more we’re just as happy cooking dinner at home. It’s been really nice having time to do things like make stock. Wife is taking on one baking project a week and is getting more interested in cooking. Now we have to each have nights where one of us cooks.

But that’s enough rambling from me. Here’s the stew we had tonight.



Cheers,
Frog

I Miss my Nerd Friends

Well, at least the friends I had before that title. Work life is very different here than back home. The people are very nice, but they aren’t technical. Being the only engineer in an office is challenging. Most of the time nobody has a clue what I’m talking about. I haven’t seen so many glazed over looks since I went to conventions in high school.

Another thing that’s strange is that almost nobody goes out for lunch. Granted there aren’t many options that are close by, but for the most part no one has time. I guess it’s the mark of a growing company that you have to work harder and have less time for things like lunch, but at some point it becomes counter productive because morale drops.

If you think I’m on about food again, you’re wrong. Back in the US lunch was always a time to have a little social interaction to break up the day. It gave me a chance to vent frustrations to friends/coworkers who had similar frustrations. While we all like our jobs it was nice to be able to discuss what we really thought of situations without being diplomatic.

I have a coworker here that Wife and I hang out with fairly regularly. Her husband and Wife normally get bored because we’ll take the discussion on a work tangent because we don’t have that outlet during the day. That outlet is definitely something that I miss.

Or maybe I’m just depressed because the police force here in the UK seems to think that being politically correct and making sure no one is offended is more important than making sure no one gets blown up: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2372471.html

Time for another sandwich at my desk. I miss Chipotle!

Frog

Borfesztival

Didn't get much of an impression of Budapest. Nothing stood out, but still a fun trip. Lots of beautiful buildings and a very fun wine festival. Hungarian red wines tasted like rubbing alcohol to me, but liked the whites.

Are you ready for some football?

I sure am. Could someone please send me a DVD of a taped game? I’m dying over here. And anyone that asks what I’m talking about because they have “real” football over here would be advised to not say this to my face. I miss my Chiefs. I miss my Saturday afternoons at Memorial stadium. I need football!

Listening to the first half of the Chiefs game last night was nice. I even got Bob Gretz shilling for Price Chopper. Of course it wasn’t the most exciting game to listen to, but I guess that’s what Herm brings to the table.

Wife has said we could get Sky with their Sports package since they show two NFL games a week, but I’m more tempted to get ESPN’s GamePlan on-line. I’d get more games and a wider selection. Plus then I could get GamePlan for college basketball, which is even more important.

Haven’t done another for and against so I think it’s about time to bring that back:

For: Multiple varieties of sausages at butchers.

Against: Chicken and beef stock is the equivalent of $5 for a 15 oz. can.

For: Being able to walk to the grocery store.

Against: The grocery store we like moving too far away to walk to.

For: The TV shows Top Gear and Saxondale.

Against: Almost every other British TV show.

For: Guy Fawkes Day (Nobody seems to know whether they’re celebrating an attempt to blow up Parliament or the prevention of that attempt).

Against: Christmas items appearing in stores already.

For: Beautiful, Welsh countryside.

Against: Slow, winding roads through Welsh countryside.

For: Friends and family coming to visit us.

Against: Going to Stonehenge innumerable times.

For: Hungarian white and sparkling wines.

Against: Hungarian red wine (aka, rubbing alcohol).

Hope everyone is doing well. Sorry I haven’t been keeping things up to date.

Cheers,
Frog

Budapest

Little late on the post. Budapest was fun. Lots of food and drinks. Guess that's what happens at a buisness meeting.


Hungarian Parliament


St. Stephen's Basilica

View of Basilica from across Danube


State Opera House

Inside Opera House (wan't supposed to take pictures, so no flash)


Bridge that links pest with buda. Buda Castle up on the hill.


Matyas Church. Really cool church. Rebuilt several times, so get a lot of different styles.


Statue Park. Took some of the communist statues from around the city and put them in a park. Really surreal walking around giant statues in the middle of nowhere.

Copenhagen Part 2

Radhuspladsen. Big square next to City Hall. Lots of tour groups.

Another view of the Radhuspladsen from Tivoli Gardens.



Tivoli Gardens. Roller coasters, cafes, ballet, and open air concerts.



Square along the Stroget. Long pedestrian street with shopping (lots of shopping).



Right side of canal is part of Slotsholmen (Danish Parliment).



Carlsberg Brewery.


Not quite sure where I took this picture.

Copenhagen

Seemed like there was a palace around every corner. Lots of history, that I know nothing about. Too much mayonnaise on food. Fear of missing something (FMS) kicked in big time. Think we saw most of the city on Saturday.


Rosenborg Slot


Little Mermaid. Family tradition to take picture of the back side of statues.



St. Alban's Church


Nyhavn. Bars and cafes along a canal. Great place to stop for a Carlsberg.


Aaron took this while enjoying a pint. Bikes ridden everywhere and no locks.



Amalienborg Palace