All knitting will be covered in another post.

Has it been a month since I last posted??? Crikey! I'm saying crikey because that's like, British or something, right? Because, you see, I've not been idle, lo, these many weeks. I've been very, very busy. After I got back from my overnight jaunt to Florida, home of beach-goers, old people, and my parents, my freaking assistant quit, and then I had to go to the London office. My boss is pregnant, and since the baby is cheekily pressing against mom's diaphragm, making it hard for her to breathe, said boss/mother had to move up her maternity leave by a few weeks, which meant that I had to rush over and do all my annual goal keeping/routine setting/corporate BS all in one go, so that she could stay at home with her feet up and wait for the little pudding to burst open. Or whatever.

But this trip was different. Spanky came with me (her birthday present), and we celebrated her birthday in Edinburgh (which for some reason is actually pronounced Edin-burra, not Edin-burg, which is really irritating, but I suppose not any stupider than some of our strange American idioms, right? Is idiom the right word there? Probably not.)

ANYWAY, Scotland. Ahem. Edinburgh is built on a large volcano. There are many bridges with long stairways leading from one level of street to the next. We had the good fortune to be there on the day of the World Rugby match between Italy and Scotland. Scotland lost, if you must know, on their home turf. A sad, sad day for the mighty Scots team. I got lots of pictures of this:



This is Edinburgh castle. It is really fantastic, and although the audio tours aren't free anymore, I suggest that people with lots of extra dough or a better exchange rate than mine pick up said tour anyway, because we were left dragging jet lagged and listless up one level after another where Spanky's short attention span for history was sorely tried. Also, the Scotland crown jewels were totally not worth the sixteen rooms full of historical dioramas that you had to suffer through in order to get to them, but the STONE OF DESTINY was totally worth it. The Brits stole the stone (where Scottish royalty was crowned) to London with them and put it under their own king's throne, and it stayed there for SEVEN HUNDRED YEARS until 1996, when it came back to Scotland. Gives me a shiver just thinking of that even now!

Edinburgh from the castle:



Next, we took the train down to London, where Spanky got to know the city, and I worked. We walked around at night, and also saw:


The London Eye, which if you didn't know, is sponsored by British Airways. The pods don't stop moving along the platform as you get in and out and once each pod empties of tourists, a team of strapping youngsters goes in and checks each pod out with metal (bomb?) detectors to make sure nothing was planted during the ride. It was fun, but also scary, and I stayed on the bench much of the time. Can't beat the views though...


London from the London Eye

We also saw the Gilbert and George exhibit at the Tate Modern. Yes, we saw the slides, but we also saw the line to get on them, so rather than wait, we just watched. Just as fun!

On Saturday, we took a coach (that's 'fancy bus' to us Yanks) tour to Salisbury Cathedral and Stonehenge. Contrary to what my boss told me, there were no old grannies on the coach, just this guy:



This is David, our tour guide, who talked the entire day long, and didn't give us but TEN MINUTES to look at the Magna Carta room and no time at all inside here:



Salisbury Cathedral. Apparently that tower on top is French, unlike the rest of it, and is actually buckling the metal poles put in to prop it up. The whole mythology about Salisbury is fascinating--how they built the city (and church) up on top of a flat hill so that they could see enemies coming, but after the area came under control of England, they felt like they would be more protected and anyway there wasn't any water on top of the hill, so they moved the entire city, stone by stone (including the church) down the hill and into the river valley a few miles away.

And then there was this:



Didn't we have beautiful weather? By the way, that picture of David, he's leaning on the two different kinds of stone that were used to make Stonehenge. The one on the right in the picture is very hard, and the one on the left can be carved. I don't remember what the difference was-like which were used for which. You can see in the Stonehenge picture on the left the little "nipple" on the top of the stones that were used to keep the transverse stones up there. David really liked saying "nipple" and used the word a lot during our tour.

We also went to Bath, but the only cool picture is me standing in front of the Roman bath that still has the water in it. Again, we had like 20 minutes to explore the whole town INCLUDING going through the baths, so I was a little irritated by this point.



Anyway. Then we flew home, and I've had assistant interviews (2nd interviews tomorrow!) and I have to move my office on Thursday, and I have another work trip coming up at the end of the month, to Minneapolis.

BUT on the plus side, I did get a TON of knitting done. I'll cover it all in the next post. Man, I am so glad to be back where a dollar is a dollar, and not .45!