webcowgirl

This was such a great weekend that I'm hoping I can make it my "Groundhog day" and just do it over and over, or preserve it in amber so I can enjoy it at my leisure.

Friday was Pinter's Moonlight at the Donmar Warehouse with dreamsewingmiko. Not only did I get a really engaging, intelligent play, but I got four hours with someone who's company I really enjoy. Lots of girlie bonding time and catching up and discussing plans for the future, like the Jerez flamenco festival and that trip to Patagonia I'm dreaming of (after seeing the article in the New York Times). On top of it we had Mexican food at Lupita and then gelato at Scoop, and the weather was amazing.

Amazing weather was the theme for the weekend as shadowdaddy and wechsler and I went to Colchester (awesome ruined monastery!) to canoe on the River Stour with Nomad Sea Kayaking. Not only did we get a lovely paddle on the river (with flowers blooming everywhere!), we saw some gorgeous country, literally right out of (or in) Constable paintings, and we had so much fun afterwards we went and took a walk down the banks of the same river, from the Dedham boat house to the Fen Bridge to the town of Dedham. It was a gorgeous little wool town that looked like a movie set. Then it was taxi to Colchester, nap to London, taco making and Alhambra. Really, it was such a nice, nice day and evening.

Sunday was London time, starting with the recording of the "As Yet Unnamed London Theater Podcast" that I'm getting involved in. It was nice talking shop about shows with people that I mostly know, and much easier (if less social) than meeting up in a pub. Then it was off to the Southbank for the London Chocolate Festival with exedore. We had a nice visit with each other and wound up sitting around in the sun doing nothing at the Victoria Embankment besides admiring the tulips and talking BS - we both had time to kill before seeing our next people of the day. I tried (once he left) to squeeze in the "British Art in the Age of the Comet" at the Hayward, but either it wasn't very exciting or the sun was just too awesome for the gallery to compete.

At any rate, next stop was Euston to pick up Lisa Crispin, a very nice lady I met at a testing conference last year. I took her and her husband to the Wellcome Collection to see the Dirt exhibit, which was a nice collection of narrative, medical specimens, literature, and some nice fresh art (includingn a piece by Bruce Nauman). I thought it was fairly thought provoking but am afraid I had to rush through the last room due to running out of time! Then we headed over to Angel to see the puppet theater version of the Tempest they're doing in conjuntion with the Royal Shakespeare Company. People, do not be mistaken: this is not a puppet show, it's a cut down version of the Tempest with world class actors that just happens to have puppet versions of Ariel and Caliban (most appropriate ways of depicting them, I think). Tickets are only £12 and it's a STEAL at the price, I tell you, a STEAL. Buy yourself some tickets while they're still available and go go go. I think it's probably suitable for 8 and above (it's about 90 minutes long, no interval) - I haven't had time to write my review up yet but I was embarassed by how little I paid.

And then it was home and a nice long chat with my new roomie and dishes and laundry and MAN I was tired. What a great weekend it was though! I had fun, I was happy, all my self doubt and self loathing were nowhere to be seen ... Where is the amber that it's hidden in? All I have is a few photographs ... but at least I can share them with you. Just imagine our terror as this pirate-captained boat bore down on us as we headed upstream ... yes, the weekend was just that fun.

I visited most of these states during two really long road trips, one in 89 and another in 95. I don't feel like I've really "done" the south, though. And I probably drove across Tennessee but I don't remember doing it.


visited 35 states (70%)
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And I've got a lot of places left to see the rest of the world - South America and Australia for a start, then sub-Saharan Africa, India ... the world is my oyster, I've barely cracked it!


visited 24 states (10.6%)
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Last night I came home from seeing The Mousetrap and finished my review for Joe Turner's Come and Gone (currently playing at the Young Vic). I'd pretty much finished writing it but needed to research the national origin of the various performers to see to what extent the dialogue coach had scrubbed an "English" accent out of the actors rather than anything else. My hypothesis was right: only one of the people on stage was American, and he was the best performer of the night. He's also pretty famous in general, so maybe there's more to his performance than the ease with which he handled the accent of his character. Still, this had me up until 11:30. What was I thinking? I needed to get some sleep. This became even more apparent at 4 AM, when I started having a coughing fit. I got it down for an hour or so then lost some more sleep. Bleah.

I took my hacking and coughing self to work despite this (and very much due to not getting paid for sick days off work my first year). Woke up to some rather depressing tweets from people who'd been to the show I went to last night (the Mousetrap): one saying she was thinking about washing her hair to get it clean because it had been coughed on so much; the other saying she was "probably fighting off the cold Webcowgirl had given to me." It was really irritating. I have just had these colds settle in my lungs and I don't see myself as being communicable at day five; I don't have a runny nose or anything, just a dry, hacking cough. Hypochondriac jerks.

I made it through day at work with only about two coughing fits. Got my tickets to visit my uncle in Munich before the end of the day. Then, cough or no cough, I had an appointment with my Pilates instructor today, so I was going hell or high water (you don't want to stiff people for these things). Her house was on the more northern end of the Northern line and decorated with what I thought was great taste: old rock posters carefully frames, freaky bobble-head dolls, sweet springer spaniels hiding in the kitchen. She took it easy on my ankle but had me doing all sorts of fun stuff that challenged me in various ways. At one point, I was doing an exercise where you lie on your side with feet braced against a bar and one hand holding onto a horizontal bar on springs, then curve your torso upwards, led by your arm. The set of reps on my left side sucked; but then when I did the final set, I finally understood that you lift using your torso and not by pulling yourself up by your arms. This is a big deal because I am weak with my arm muscles, but suddenly VROOM I was able to curve up just like I was supposed to. I was so pleased I did three more on that side and then went back to the other side and did another set just to try to get it right. It was totally different and cool. We also did some semi-uh, what are they called? It is this thing you do when you balance on your butt with your body in a v, your legs pointing in front and your arms up overhead. Anyway, you can do an exercise where you lay on your back and hold onto a bar over your head and kind of rise into this position, the bar curving an arc in front of you, your arms following the bar and your body rising up into this V, your butt curling underneath you to get you into the right position: oh yeah, "teasers" they are called. Anyway, they are hard to do, and I have not done one once since I moved here, but the muscle memory was there, the way your tailbone curves underneath you to get you into position, and doing them made me feel happy. Afterwards I felt a bit shakey from working out all of those poor degenerated muscles, but I had a glass of water and played with the dogs and saw that one of the rock posters on the wall was for a Siouxie/Love and Rockets concert I went to at Irvine Meadows back in 1986 (memories!) and felt pretty damned alright with the world. I get to go back next week. Yay. :-D

Anyway,

Well, today was mostly oriented around driving to Cocoa Beach to catch a boat at 2 PM for a 2 hour manatee tour in the Thousand Island nature preserve. It was gorgeous; multiple mangrove swamps surrounding a giant lagoon (the so-called Banana River), with all sorts of wildlife just everywhere. I kept a tally of birds: Minor blue heron. Great blue heron. Cardinal. Anhinga. Brown pelican. Osprey. Ibis. Cormorant. We succeeded in seeing dolphins, who were racing back and forth against seawalls (protecting people's houses from erosion) catching fish, and also some manatees, who were doing their manatee thing (eating) but being very shy about coming near the boat. That was a little disappointing but we enjoyed the two hours of chilling out under the boat's canopy, and the scary fundies sitting across from us kept to themselves while the pack of four gay boys got more and more fun as we kept puttering around the channels between the islands. It was supposed to be roasting hot and humid today, but it was cooler near the coast and the breeze was pleasant; really, I thought it was just perfect.

Though short on manatees, this tour was a great nature lesson, and I took some notes, for your edification (and my memory): we saw three kinds of mangrove. Red mangrove: roots drop down, covered w/barnacles. Black mangrove: spiky upwards roots. White mangrove: expansive roots. We also saw lots of Australian pine, which the Nature Conservancy is working to rip out to help restore the little islands to better health. If I come back to Florida in the next two years, rather than staying in Orlando, I'd like to settle myself at the Beach Place guest houses, Atlantic Avenue, Cocoa Beach, where I could walk straight to the ocean, as we did after we were through with our boat ride. We never made it to the wildlife preserve we were going to see, but we had a great time doing what we did do and didn't feel rushed.

We then headed back to Orlando and stopped by the Clarion to pick up my rather tardily-arriving pile of tea from Silk Road teas; then went to Number Uno for more Cuban food (they treated us like kings and asked about my sister and my niece, which was totally gratifying) and then went to I-Drive for a round of Pirate theme goofy golf. It was just ridiculous and totally fun if a bit sweaty; it was cruel that so many of the holes had a water feature that actually meant the ball, if hit incorrectly, would be swept away into a pond in the middle of the property. The water also raised the ambient humidity to near-sauna levels. That said, I did get to shot a hole inside a cave, a lifetime first for me. (Pix are on FB if you're interested.)

We finished up around ten then went back to the hotel, where we got the accounts sorta settled and then packed, took showeres, and did the normal end of day/end of trip stuff. I figure I'll be heading out of here around 2PM tomorrow; I've got a late checkout, but it's not nearly as late as I'd like it to be, so I'll have some time chilling in the lobby. This has really been a great trip - this part, anyway - and I certainly won't mind staying here for a while longer and getting in one last swim during the heat of the day.

I just spent three days (or two days and three nights) in Madrid with wechsler.I've wanted to show him the town where ham is king and delicious cider is available everywhere for ages; this was my third trip so I hoped I could do a good job of hitting the highlights.

Well, travelling Easyjet did not help, as we arrived about two hours later than expected and missed having a late Spanish dinner (they start around 10 PM); it also meant that I slept until almost noon the next day (because by the time we got to the hotel it was 2 AM). Fortunately our hotel, the Hotel Moderno, where I stayed with lovelybug when she and I went, was very much open when we arrived. I appreciated its location even more this time: right on Puerta del Sol, behind the Corte Ingles, next to La Mallorquina (one of the best bakeries in the world) and a few blocks from the Chocolateria San Jinez.YAY!

The majority of day one (which pretty much started out as "hey let's find some lunch now") was devoted to the Thyssen-Borgenzia museum, which had a great exhibit on called "Tears of Eros." It claimed to be examining the relationship between sex and death, but mostly to me it was an excuse to group together great work by artists I really like in themes I personally found interesting. So we had Millais, Von Stuck, Moreau, Bougereau, Matisse, and eveｎ　Ｂｉｌｌ　Ｖｉｏｌａ　（ｎｏ　ｉｄｅａ　ｗｈａｔ　ｋｅｙ　Ｉjust hit here) looking at Adam and Eve (and the snake), Nymphs and Sphinxes, Andromeda and St Sebastian (? - w/ the arrows), St. Anthony, Narcissus and Endymion - it was great! We took about two hours to go through the exhibit and afterwards I bought the catalogue. We _also_ wound up spending another two hours going through the main collection, about which I'll say it included Rafael and O'Keefe and had a room full of Gaugins and leave it at that.

Oddly we did not make it out to a flamenco show or even to see the guitarists at the Meson de la Guitarra - the waiter at the restaurant we went to for dinner was so rude it just about had me in tears, and then it was hotel room and reading time. Oh well. Guess I'm feeling a little sensitive or something.

Sunday, well, it should have been El Rastro day, but the rain was sheeting down outside and I decided to just catch up on my sleep and wait for it to clear up. Finally it let off and we went to the other branch of the Tears of Eros show, which was continued in a gallery a few blocks from the hotel. I was hoping to catch the Convento de Descalzados Reales (16th C religious art), but the four remaining tours were all booked up. Ah well. Lunch was Cocido Madrileno- a soup course followed by big chunks of various pork products on top of garbanzo beans (plus wine and dessert). It was perfect for a pre-winter day. Then we headed over to the Botanical Gardens and poked around amidst the spots of sun for another two hours or so. We started to get cold and tried to do the Prado, but as Sunday was free day there was a line of an hour to get in and we just couldn't do it. Instead we headed back to the hotel and I (ahem) tried to find some work clothes at El Corte Ingles. No luck, really, but it did pass the time nicely before dinner. Post dinner we went to Meson de la Guitarra but the guys were off; still, we sat around and drank sangria and shot the breeze and absorbed the atmosphere until we were both seeing crosseyed.

Today was the usual waste a lot of time packing morning with a great breakfast at La Mallorquina (a toasted ham egg and cheese sandwich with a circle cut out for the egg yolk to show through), then shopping for souvenirs here and there because pretty much every museum in town was closed. We wound up getting chocolate again at San Jinez, much nicer without the crows of Saturday. Then it was pretty much time to head to the airport - or would have been if we hadn't had our plane run an hour late again. Damned Easyjet, they are costing me sleep. Anyway, it was a pretty fun weekend (if only we'd flown BA) and I only missed the internet just a tiny bit, really.

I got my vacation info from work (how many days total I'll have, as it turns out 1.5 days less than I have now) and also was informed of how much "pro-rated" vacation I'll have for the rest of the year ...

and I did the math and it turns out there's really just no way in hell I can swing going to Australia this winter - it kind of relied on being able to take another 2 weeks vacation at the beginning of the year (which is when the Tango Foxtrot vacation days were reset), which I won't have - my total number of vacation days are through the end of March.

Ah well. Time to figure out what to do for Christmas.

In the meantime, it looks like my last "effective" day here will be Friday, and then I'll have three weeks to "kill" before the new job. I'm having fantasies about using some of this time to go to Scarborough again, and of course I'm out of the country next week (and in Penzance over the bank holiday weekend) ... but does anyone have some great ideas of what or whom I should see or do between now and August 30th?

We're in the house in Scarborough. It's an awesome place - full of really interesting books (I'm guessing maybe 2000 or so), musical instruments, and interesting things to cook with. It's also decorated with fascinating antiques, shiny things, and bits and bobs from around the world (for example, the bathroom has a Tibetan mandala painting). It's like taking a vacation inside someone's mind, with all of their memories and experiences. I feel ridiculously at home here. In fact, I love it.

Out the front windows, over the red tiled rooves is the little protected fishing harbor, with the touristy beahfront promenade (gambling arcades, ice cream shops, chippies) curving away from it. Hovering behind us is a hill with a castle on top - maybe Norman but I'm not sure. We're about to walk out the door and find out, though. Later on I'll report on the Knickerbocker Deluxe and the other karaoke joint on the waterfront. (Note: regular updates on my Wewbcowgirl Twittr account, including photos. Much easier to manage from a phone than LJ posts.)

Oh yeah - also expecting a call from a recruiter today. Will report back on that.

Mondays are often a good day for me, as I'm at work with enough sleep and tend to feel more able to handle the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," as it were. But today is payday, and I've been approved for some training next week (giving me something to look forward to), and I'm going to see a play tonight with my friends C and Josela, so I am feeling pretty good about today.

wechsler has uploaded pictures from our trip to Nice on his Flickr account. They're awesome! (Also the source of the new user icon, which makes me laugh every time I see it.) I swear that I was reverse aging while I was gone.

Whinging about having nothing to read appears to have been tremendously successful as I now have piles of books winging their way toward me. Some of them winged their way with me after bathtubgin's do on Saturday, and I've started The Whitby Witches (which she lent to me). I'm not expecting anything genius, just a fun kids' story with magic.

Overall not a bad weekend, even though I spent most of Saturday moping after feeling like I was kicked to the floor Friday night. I wish I could get my happy back faster after people upset me - I hate watching valuable weekend time waste away when I've got so much to do but am to crushed to move. Since it ended well, at least, I'm in a good mood today, and that's what counts.

Also: in a series (in which I read Jo Clayton books around the world): me and Dancers Rise, by Jo Clayton, Entrevaux train station, France.

Yesterday was a fine and sunny day, and we took advantage of it to visit Entrevaux, a mostly untouched medieval town that seemed like it should be the set for Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The real point of going there wasn't seeing the town so much; it was taking the teeny little train way up into the mountains. We saw all sorts of adorable abandoned (mostly) train stations, old water tanks, ancient side cars, and lots of gorgeous scenery, all along the river Var.Since we were crazy and caught the 9 AM train, we actually got back in time to do something else; in this case, visit the Chagall museum. Unfortunately giant paintings of old testament scenes don't really do it for me; we thus chose to flesh out the lovely sunny day with a visit to Phoenix Park, which looks like it has a brilliant Asian art museum, but which we visited for the flowers, birds, and animals. Unsurprisingly our good weather broke while we were there and a front rolled in, but we got back to the hotel without getting rained on too much - and I got to try Jasmine ice cream.

Today was not really what I was expecting, as wechsler woke up with a fever. I suspect ye olde 24 hour flu. I am also feeling a bit under the weather (just tired, headachey, and congested), so the piles of naps we took today weren't unsurprising. W did rally enough to make it to the Matisse museum, but since he was sitting down in every other room I decided we'd best skip the Roman ruins on site and head back to the flat for some chillin'. When he finally woke up at around 6 he wasn't even energetic enough to walk the three blocks to the beach, and sadly due to some holiday (Assumption? Accession? Ascention?) all of the pharmacies are closed. I do home the paracetamol is helping with his fever, cause that's all we've got.

Thus tonight is quiet. I went out and got some roast chicken takeaway, and I really have no idea what tomorrow will hold. I'm guessing tonight I'll finish my Jo Clayton book and maybe take a shower (woo!); W does't even seem up to a board game, poor thing. And, sadly, there is no internet in the room, so I'm forced to write from the lobby of the hotel. Not ideal, really.