Bath and the English kittie

Greetings everyone! This is Scott logged in as Barbara by the way. Sorry we haven't posted in a couple of weeks, we will try not to make a habit of that. So what can you tell by the title of this post? Perhaps we've been attempted to bathe English cats? Not quite, these are in fact two completely unrelated topics that have happened since our last post. One, we visited the old roman town of Bath, and two, we successfully navigated the red tape and imported our beloved cat Sue!!! That's right, Sue is with us now and in good spirits. She's sitting in Barb's lap right now trying not to fall asleep. Thank you very much to Barb's folks for taking care of Sue for us the last month and a half. Sue says: "thnx fur feedin adn petting me, kbai".

So Barbara and I saw Bath! You may have heard of it before, it was originally found by the Romans (or at least recorded as being found by the Romans, they had a habit of deciding to start history from scratch sometimes) and is the only hot spring in the British isles. The used this hot water to create a pool and they...worshipped it! They actually built a temple over the area and made sacrifices to the goddess of wisdom and decisions, Sulis Minerva. The crafty little Romans used the hot water from the spring and piped it to surrounding rooms and pools. Bathing was a very important social event for Romans (I can just see the English Victorians cringing) so they really liked it I'm sure when it was steaming hot! So anyway, the baths were neat. Right next door is Bath Abbey which is also very cool. They say it is quite possible that another Roman temple exists in this area and that it most likely lies beneath Bath Abbey. It's another very awesome medieval church just like you see everywhere here. Bath is quite unique, almost all of the rest of its architecture is Georgian (English for neoclassical), and the town is protected so that you can't built anything modern in the city center. We've posted the pictures on Flickr.

On another note, last Sunday Barb and I met up with Fei Song in Reading. Fei went to graduate school with me at the Walton College. She happens to have moved over here a couple months before us to Bracknell which is town very close by. We hung out and talked with Fei for a couple of hours at a pub, it was fun. Another MBA classmate, Jamie Lanius, will be moving to London quite soon also. Hopefully we'll meet up with her sometime soon. Also I'm been in contact with David Deitz, a friend of mine from undergrad, who's been living in Leeds now for a while. He and his wife are moving to London in a couple of months so we plan on seeing them as well. Small world.

Barbara and I just had a very relaxing Saturday. We only left the house to go to the grocery store and pick up picnic items. We then proceeded to ride our bikes to a spot on the Thames and have a picnic. It was a lovely day in the 70s (I'm sure this temperature does not seem fair to those we know in Arkansas and Texas) with lots of sun. We were in a park area outside the oldest church in town. Just to paint a picture for you all, we were sitting there eating a French baguette with blue cheese, French sausage, and watercress and drinking a bottle of red wine while watching the swans swim by. Aaahhh. Suuuch a hard life.

As a side note, Barbara would like to add that she found out a piece of trivia about our home. We live in Caversham which is our nice little suburb of Reading. Barb found out that Caversham is the oldest known permanent settlement in Britain! Wow, I had no idea! Barb also wanted me to say that the bobbies actually do look like the guys on Hot Fuzz! Wow, thanks Barbara! I'm sure everyone was wondering about that. Yarrrp!!!!

DVD woes

Did you know that you can't watch American DVDs on a UK DVD player?

Neither did we.

Our plan was to just watch movies on our new UK laptop, rather than buy a TV and separate DVD player. Sounded like it could work, and we even bought speakers to hook up to the new computer. Before we left home, we'd chosen about 10 of our favorite movies from our collection to bring with us. We have watched several of them over the past week or two with no problems. Save one. Anytime we would switch between one of our American DVDs and a rented UK DVD the computer would ask us to manually switch the zone setting on our computer so that the DVD drive could read the disk. Okay, a bit annoying, but totally do-able. Just a few mouse clicks and you're up and running. Usually.

Well, last night I went out and bought The Other Boleyn Girl at Tesco, and was excited about watching it over dinner. (Scott and I had been trying to rent it for weeks only to find out that its release date was much later in the UK than it was in the US...I digress...) So we pop it in the player, Windows Media Player pops up and basicly tells us that since we have switched zone settings 5 times (a mere 5 times!!), that we now have an optical drive error. Huh? It further informs us that even if we were to uninstall and reinstall Windows, that it would not fix the problem since it's a hardware, not a software, problem. Meh.

So we call Dell's support line to ask them about it. We go through the first technical support guy who says that it's not a manufacturer defect so it's not covered by our warranty. Would we like to be transfered to the Dell store to purchase a new disk drive? No. No we would not. Scott asked to speak to his supervisor. Mind you, we'd already been round and round with this first guy for a good 15 minutes about how there was no error message saying that changing the zone settings would do permanent damage! So his boss got on the phone and told us the same thing. Only in a more official manner. So we asked to speak to his boss. His boss, guy #3, gets on the phone and tells us that, yeah, what we've done doesn't usually happen very often, so they don't really have a standard way of dealing with it. Okay. What does that mean?

Somehow Scott manages to convince him to send us a new disk drive, free of charge, and walk us through installing it when it arrives. YAY SCOTT!! (See why he's my hero?!) So we promise the guy NOT to switch between watching US and UK DVDs anymore. Oh yeah, but we have to send back the one we have that's stuck on the US zone setting in return for the new one. Ah well. One can't have everything, I suppose.

Our new drive should arrive on Monday. I'm a bit sad that we won't be able to watch any of the disks we brought with us, or have any more of ours sent from home. But I also can't wait to finally watch our new movie! : )

Henley-on-Thames

Scott and I decided to forgo our trip to Bath last weekend for a "leisurely" 9 mile Saturday bike ride downstream to Henley-on-Thames. The "bike path" that the map showed turned out to be little more than a fisherman's trail along the Thames! Hee hee! We finally got so frustrated with the weeds that were taller than we were, the 2 foot wide clearance, and the stinging nettles (not to mention having to walk our bikes) that we turned back and crossed the river to see if it was better on the other side. It was, but not by much. Determined to press on (we were 3 miles downstream at Sonning by this point) we found ourselves riding in a cow pasture with big black and white dairy cows gazing lazily at us as we tried not to hit the tree roots by the riverbank and get pitched into the river. We had to lift our bikes over several fences (maybe 5) along the way and walk our bikes in many spots... but we made it!!!! We were so very sore by the time we got there, but it kind of felt good knowing that we'd done it! We just tried not to think about the return trip.

Henley-on-Thames was gearing up for their yearly regatta which is taking place this week. Evidently it's a very posh deal. Anyway, the town was gorgeous and very quaint. It's in the foothills of the Chilterns, and, as the name suggests, right on the Thames river (just like Reading and Caversham). We saw where the Wind in the Willows museum was and had a picnic lunch in a field between it and the river. There were little kids playing cricket near us, and we heard an English mom call her kid a cheeky monkey! Hee hee!

Scott and I walked around the town and window shopped. We found a rare bookshop where I got to hold a £50,000 (that's ~$100,000) first edition of Ian Flemming's Casino Royale. We were also allowed to handle a special limited first edition of Fahrenheit 451, signed by Ray Bradbury, whose cover was made of a material containing asbestos. Cheeky publishers! We stayed and chatted with the bookshop owner who kept bringing out treasures from behind lock and key for us to see and handle. She was one of the nicest and most interesting people we've met over here. We saw and held a first edition of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and she told us of how they'd just purchased a signed copy of Jane Austen's Emma at Sotherby's for over £200,000. Evidently there are only 9 known books ever to have been signed by Jane Austen, and this was one of them. It had just been sold to an american collector for an "undisclosed sum". Such an awesome shop. Here's their web address should you care to check it out: http://www.jonkers.co.uk/

Bless that bookshop owner for another reason: she informed us that we could take our bikes home on the train. EUREKA! I was no longer dreading the trip home! Previously our understanding was that only foldup bikes were allowed on the rail system. Man. For £4.80 each it was a bargain to stand on the train holding our bikes. We had to change trains once, and the smaller stations don't have lifts from one platform to another, so we had to carry the bikes up and down flights of stairs. But no matter! This was definately preferable to riding them the 9 miles back, I thought!

We're both still sore and a bit sunburned from our most recent adventure. It was alot of fun though! I'm really glad we did it. But before I try something like that again, I'm seriously thinking of investing in this new bike seat: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B000VEG97I/ref=s9subs_c3_at3-rfc_p?pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_s=center-3&pf_rd_r=0BXPMDSW8575VY9TFVB3&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=139042491&pf_rd_i=468294

Until next time,

Barbara