Happy Memorial Day

Held the annual Neihouse Open yesterday or I should say what used to be the Neihouse Open.  Four years ago when we started, we had beer and BBQ and bocce ball.  Now, we have beer and BBQ and 12 kids in our backyard.  Lots of fun and insanity all at the same time.  Great to see friends.  Danny wore himself out playing tag, being a dragon and splashing in the water table.  Maura was the social butterfly, trying to get held by every adult there.

The wall

Emily "pushing" Danny on the swing

Chilling with Princess Abby

Maura and Mommy.  Yes, I am wearing shorts.  My 20 year old self would be shocked.

Look at me trying to crawl.

Update coming soon...

Sorry for being lame and not posting much. Some computer trouble has slowed us down. Many updates to come once that's resolved.

One whole year...

I was just glancing at my blog to see if I still like the way it works and it hit me that this thing has been going for almost a year now. I'm not claiming that it's been going consistently, just that it's been around for a year. What has that year gained me? A couple of my friends give me a hard time if I don't post for a while and one of them actually makes comments. However, no one else does. So this is a plea to any of my other friends who read this. Please comment. It makes the blog more fun when it's interactive. And calling me a wanker does not count as making a comment!

Also, what do you want to hear about after a year of this? I think I should do something fitting for an anniversary post, but first I need to think of a topic. I guess I could do the top things that annoy me about Britain, but I believe that's been covered pretty well in other posts. Maybe I should rank the top ten meals I've had since Wife and I have been here. That's actually not a bad idea for a post, but I'm not sure it has the necessary import for something as momentus as a year of writing boring drivel. I'll keep thinking and look for a post on the 20th (unless I forget).

Cheers,
Frog

I Love it When a Plan Comes Together

Celebrity Big Brother has taken over British TV. It’s Big Brother on several channels several hours of the day now. Wife is watching the train wreck at the moment because Face from the A-Team is in the house as well as Jermaine Jackson. Following in Michael’s footsteps of looking freaky, it looks as if Jermaine has had a recent chemical peel. Face seems to be too cool for all of it and sits around smoking cigars. Yes, good people, this is the crap that’s on TV here. Where are ESPN and Food Network when I need them?

Other random rants and musings:

Figure this out. Before we were home for Christmas I needed to get the tax tag renewed on the car. Since we were leaving on the 16th I went in early in December to get it taken care of. Not so fast, young American. In England they don’t have the new discs at the post office until the 15th of the month, so I couldn’t renew my taxes yet. I didn’t find this out until I’d spent 20 minutes in line. So back I went on the 15th, as if I didn’t have enough other things to worry about with leaving the next day for two and a half weeks.

If I have to hear one more time about how this warmer winter is an indication of global warming with no comment on El Nino (proven to cause this type of weather) I will no longer have any faith in the scientific community in this country.

Would anyone else vote for Dennis Miller for president?

There hasn’t been much cooking lately, but wife did make some really good cod croquettes for dinner tonight. She’s becoming a better and better cook. I need to start practicing more or she’s going to get better than me, and my competitive side can’t let that happen.

Short post, but that’s what I’ve got at the moment. Maybe I’ll be better about posting more if I keep the posts shorter. Whatever.

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

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

Flatter than Kansas

Yes, it's true. I've now visited someplace that's flatter than Kansas. Wife and I got a chance to go to Copenhagen over the weekend since I needed to be there for work on Monday. We had a really good time, but I missed one thing I wanted to see: Legoland!

Denmark is the home of Legos, one of the best toys that has ever been invented. Unfortunately Legoland is about a three hour one way trip from Copenhagen. Not really feasible with just a weekend for our visit. But wife did get me a set of Legos while I was in meetings on Monday. They were even similar to the old sets that I grew up with. There are a lot of different projects you can build, and even some of the simpler designs can remain built at the same time. Let's just say I've been enjoying reliving a bit of my childhood.

Quick update

Just a short post at the moment with the big news. Fiance has now become Wife. Pretty exciting, huh? I'll post more later with stories of the wedding, incredible Italian food, artwork, and crazy taxi drivers in the coming days. There's too much to tell in one post. Plus there's all the moving plans that can now go full steam ahead. Hmmm, why do I get the feeling that life will never slow down again? And on that note, I'm heading home to tackle the jungle that is my lawn.

Frog

It keeps going and going and going...

The list of things to do that is. I met with my realtor today to talk about what to do to get my house ready to sell. Now I can add that to the list of things to do. It's starting to look a little crazy taking on this much. It doesn't help that I'll be gone 3 of the next 5 weeks for work. Fiance has been great. She keeps reassuring me that we'll be able to get everything done.

Next week I'll be in Europe for CeBIT. I'm looking forward to the show a lot. I've attended a wireless show in New Orleans before, but this should cover a lot more technologies. It'll be interesting to see what the newest gadgets are.

Before that I'll be stopping off at our UK office for some meetings. I hope to have a little time to get at least a little bit of a feel for the area. I've been once before, but I didn't pay much attention to the towns.

Those bachelor party pictures are still coming. I'll have some posts about CeBIT next week too.

Ciao,
Frog

We survived!

Well, the Bachelor Party was a success. The guys and I had a great time at Copper Mountain skiing. Darn Olympics, though. It made everyone want to ski and board. The mountain was packed on Friday and even worse on Saturday. I've been to Copper several times and had never seen the upper lifts so full.

Unfortunately I was an idiot and didn't bring my camera battery charger. I thought the camera was full, but it was completely dead. Thus there won't be any pictures until I can get some from the other guys. As soon as I have some I'll post them.

There was only one bad part about the weekend. My beloved Jayhawks lost to Texas Saturday night in very bad fashion. I just hope they can bounce back in the coming week to wrap up second place in the Big 12.

Wedding and moving plans are proceeding at a frantic pace. Fiance got a lot of invitations addressed this weekend while I was gone. Now I get to stuff the envelopes. I'm so excited I can barely contain myself. There. Did you see that excitement? It was right there. Just kidding, Sweetie. Stuffing is much preferred to actually addressing. See, Mom, there was a reason I let my handwriting become bad.

As far as the move goes, it looks like I'll probably be going to England early in April to find a place for us to live once we get there. Fiance trusts me to find decent places to at least take pictures of to send to her. We both think this is preferable to living in a hotel while we find a place. Plus it seems that it's a 50/50 split on places over there being furnished or unfurnished. Having the place picked out will let us know better what to pack.

That's the latest. I'll be back soon with pictures from the party.

Frog

The best part of wedding preparation

That's right, it's Bachelor Party Weekend! Just me and the guys, skiing, drinking, acting roughly half our ages. The only downside is the drive to Colorado, but it'll be worth it. There'll be the one boarder in the group (the best man) doing an impersonation of Lindsey (sp?) Jacobellis, the guys new to the sport falling and trying to figure out how to get up, and the rest of us trying to be like Bode.

Maybe I can even get Nike to start a cult up for me. Are you a Frogist? Hmmm, not quite the same ring to it. Besides, I don't want to have to wear that skin tight outfit the Olympic athletes do except for the snowboarders, who wear their pajamas. A sure sign of the apocolypse will be when a snowboarder realizes that aerodynamics will help them out as well so they put on a Speedo and win the gold in snowboarder cross (you were warned about rambling so don't complain to me).

Back to the party. Three days of skiing with snow conditions that are excellent. Check back after the weekend for what are sure to be some great stories (and probably some boring ones too).

Oh, and since this is supposed to be a blog about a move to England, I'll have a "Countdown to Move" update whenever I figure out what the exact date is.

Frog

Links to links to links....

Added some links on the right. More to come, but these are some that I frequent. If you read blogs, you know about Waiter and his blog Waiter Rant. Excellent writing style as well as interesting stories.

Alton Brown is a chef on the Food Network that I really enjoy watching. My fiance says I want to be Alton Brown when I grow up. I don't think I'm that bad.

ESPN Page 2 is great for entertaining articles about sports. The Sports Guy is particularly entertaining.

That's two posts in one day. We'll see how long this keeps up. I'm guessing for about a day more at best.

Frog