We'll always have Paris

Last week, we took the Eurostar under the Chunnel to meet my folks for a few days in Paris. (I also took the opportunity to meet some remote co-workers at the Amazon.fr office.) We had a wonderful time, and finally managed to edit most of the footage down to the following four segments:

Bus Tour

One thing that's worth doing in any big city is hopping onto one of those open-top buses and getting a quick introduction to what all's available, where things are in relation to each other, and what looks interesting enough to merit a closer visit on foot. The following is set to the credits score from the Bourne trilogy, which featured many a high-speed chase through the streets of Paris:

Be Our Guest

This is kind of a parody of all the pictures (and slides...endless slides!) that my Dad used to bring home from my parents' trips to Europe, in which my Mom nearly always happened to be snacking on some local delicacy. Since Paris is synonymous with grossfine cuisine, it seemed appropiate to document some of the highlights as we chewed our way across the capital:

Eiffel Tower

Well, you can hardly come to town and not visit this emblematic icon. Although we walked by and under it enroute to other stops, we didn't go up the elevator until our final morning in the city, before dragging our luggage back to the Gare du Nord. Note that, while it is fairly straightforward going up the tower, there are two elevators coming back down; the one we took terminates about halfway down, leaving you to navigate the stairs for the rest!

Lourve

We allocated one full day to exploring the famous musée of Paris, dutifully stopping to verify all the plot twists in Dan Brown's factually-challenged bestseller:

Of course, there is so much more to be said about Paris, and France and Europe in general, but that'll have to wait for another time :-)

A Poke in the Eye

My parents arranged to meet a few of their college buddies from Capital over in Europe for a reunion tour, so got to spend a few days with us at the beginning and end of the trip. One thing we got to do was finally take a ride up into that big wheeley-thing that decorates the Thames pier:

aka "Football"

Christopher has always been the more sports-minded of our kids, and adapted to England quickly enough by joining both his school's soccerfootball team, as well as their cricket club! These are a few short snaps from his first official game:

Lyme Regis

DailyMotion allows me to use my original audio track, but the video quality is rather poor, even with "HQ" enabled:

Conversely, YouTube forced me to change the audiotrack (still processing, as the current version is silent), but clearly provides the best video quality:



I suppose that if this is the worst I have to complain about, I should count myself pretty fortunate :-)

YouTube Hrmm

It took some time to upload the second and much-longer video from our Easter vacation to YouTube, and when it finally was posted, I was startled to see that YouTube had automatically deleted the audio track. At Laura's request, I had set this episode to Yes' "Roundabout," a fitting pun on the dozens of roadside roundabouts we circled while driving through the English countryside. However, apparently Google has a spankin' new algorithm which actually listens for, and recognizes, popular tunes which may appear in your video, and refuses to play them until you can demonstrate copyright holder approval.

A similar warning had come up when I uploaded Stonehenge, but with a fairly light restriction that still allows the movie to be played in America, Britain, and a lengthy list of other net-centric nations. Even so, I assumed the detection was made against metadata, as I had not only titled the post to match the song, but had even listed "Spinal Tap" as a keyword. However, in the second vid, I hadn't mentioned group, album or track (although it's possible QuickTime .mov files retain some of the MP3 metadata, which I was lapse in not purging).

Anyway, the long and short of it is that I'm heeding the recommendation of this post to simply switch to an alternate video host for potentially litigious clips. Annoying, and in my mind, counter-productive, because frankly some of these 60's- and 70's-era bands could use a little modern publicity!

Stonehenge

The kids got two weeks off from school for the Easter holidays, and we decided that we'd been "playing it safe" (keeping close to Maidenhead and it's immediate rail-accessible environs) long enough, so decided to strike out into the verdant verge for a 4day camping trip along England's "Jurassic Coast", down around Lyme Regis on the southern Atlantic coastline.

There are a lot of interesting points to visit between Berkshire and Dorset, but one that had long topped our hitlist was Stonehenge. A lot of the locals here shrug, "but it's just a bunch of rocks," typically to go on about how Avebury is both larger and less commercialized, if you go in for that sort of thing.

But that's not it at all. Stonehenge is more than a pile of rocks: it's a center of myth, legend, and folklore dating to before the time of wallpaper screensavers and forwarded emails with 3MB attachments showing precariously perched kittens and dancing babies. It's the primordial lodestone, a keynode of ley lines whose ferric poles pull at our cultural consciousness. Not to even get started about Seekers, Aspirants, Ovates, and your new-agey Hierophants!

"And their legacy remains...hewn, into the living rock of Stonehenge."

Hello! Goodbye.

Tuesday I interviewed for a teacher assisting position at Chris's school and got it! It is the perfect way to learn the local school system and school culture. I'll be working in a year four classroom just down the hallway from Chris. So, after Easter I'll be saying hello to lots of new people.

Unfortunately, I have to say good-bye to Narcoossee Community School a bit more permanently than before. Originally, I had taken a leave of absence from the school, but that leave is now nearing expiration and I need to let them know if I am returning or not. Since I'm not going to commute across an ocean, I guess I have to say that I am not coming back. Sounds like a door closing with resounding finality.

Brown looks to Bezos

Wow...how often does working on a retail website give you the opportunity to influence public policy?

People in England will get more online powers to rate GPs, police, childcare and councils, Gordon Brown has said. He said it was wrong that consumer websites such as Amazon...had "higher standards of transparency" than those for public services.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7934042.stm

Takeaway: always do your best...you never know who may be watching!

Walking clubs

Going for a walk in England has been surprisingly different from walking in the United States. Of course, you still have to pick up one foot, move it forward, set it down, pick up the other foot, move it forward, set it down, and repeat as often as needed to get to your destination. Some things don't change when you cross an ocean. The difference is where you walk. In the US, typically I would go walking along residential streets or on the bike/pedestrian path beside the main road. In the England, people typically go walking over public paths (such as the Green Way) that lead you over open fields and natural areas. Sometimes these paths cross private lands that have a public right of way, which means the public has a right to free passage across private land, provided the public doesn't damage the private land in any way. This means that, even though we live close to the center of town, we have wide open natural areas very close at hand.

I've recently been on organized walks with two different groups. The advantage to these groups is that someone usually knows where he/she is going, has a map, and has probably been over the territory before. For me, this avoids the possibility of having to call the emergency rescue people on my cell phone. With the Thames Valley American Women's Club, I enjoyed a hike that included Hellfire Caves, the family (I forget which one) mausoleum, a lovely old church, and green rolling hills as far as the eye could see. We traveled along several rights of way, one of which took us through a pasture past some rather puzzled horses. Our leader also goes geo-caching, so we searched for and found a cache near the mausoleum. The box of treasure was hidden under some fallen branches, so it really took some digging through leaves -- which I would never have done in Florida, the home of fire ants, poisonous snakes, cockroaches, and every other creepy creature imaginable.

The second trip out and about was with the Wesley Walkers from the Methodist church. On this trip, I was the distantly youngest person; most of my fellow hikers were old enough to be my parents! But this did not slow any of them down. We crossed stiles and trudged through muddy fields over a four or five mile trail. Sometimes the trail resembled a slightly shorter path through the grassy fields, so I was glad someone had a map on this trip. Happily, this walk ended at a nearby pub!

Time on my Hands

Since we moved into our house in early December, we emplaced our furniture around a variety of holiday decorations, including a Christmas tree. After those decorations came down (eventually :-), we determined there was a distinct gap in the dining room where the tree had once gone, and which none of our existing furniture adequately resolved.

Therefore, our Valentine's Day gift to the family was a grandfather clock, which filled the space marvelously without breaking the bank (trust us to find a pressboard grandfather clock!)

Oh, and for your BBC English lesson of the day, particle board is called "chipboard" in the UK :-)