A plague of Ladybirds upon you house

We have just returned from a weeks camping near Cromer, North East Norfolk. It was great, the camp ground was on an old Farm. It was packed, but there was heaps of space. We did lots of walks and visited various picturesque places, particularly those affiliated with the National Trust.

Unlike camping in New Zealand, there were absolutely no mosquitoes, which is absolutely brilliant (trick #1 to appearing british is to call everything brilliant like Harry Potter does). There are annoying quantities of hover flies, which is a bit disturbing as they have yellow stripes so at first you think they are wasps. What is more noteworthy however are the plague like quantities of LadyBirds.

These pictures were taken at Mundsley, which is where Steph's mum Wendy grew up. When you are by the coast, it is like this everywhere. You sit down on some grass and there is one every 10cm. You walk along a path down to the sea and you crush one of the little buggers with every second step and have half a dozen on your back by the time you get back to the car. With any other kind of bug it would be really annoying, but with LadyBirds it's somehow okay.

I went into a flower shop and asked the lady there what the story was. It turns out it is like his every 3 or 4 years. I thought it might have been a one off occurrence. Fortunately when you get further away from the coast it's not so intense - I guess they like the sea air.

Swine Flu Free

Hello Loyal Readers
I don't know how many of you there are but I hope it is at least our families...
So Richie blogged about the dress up party in Sheffield. It was really fun, my hair is still rather on the black side, but it looks OK, I am channelling my 17 year old self.

I am now on Summer holidays - the best part of being a teacher :o)
I am going back to the same school in September and I will have the same lovely class for 3 days a week, then have a year 5 class at the primary site of the same school (where I originally worked for 3 weeks) for 1 day and then the other day will be a mixture of other Yr 7/8 classes at the secondary - modern foreign languages!! Hahaha but it could be fun! I am pleased about this because it will be quite varied, but I get to keep working with mainly the kids I already know and it will be good to see them make progress over a whole year rather than coming in 2 months before the end. I also get to keep working with the same TA, who is a lovely lady - we make a good team. :o)

So holidays are great, not that I have done much yet. I have slept in, and been to the gym, and hung out with Rachelle (my flattie) and helped Bruce (cuz) move. We hired a car and drove from North East London to South London, a total of 37 miles and we probably spent about 4 hours in the car - mainly sitting in traffic.

Tomorrow I am hanging with Stacey and Anne, both recent arrivals from NZ. We are hitting Greenwich, if it is sunny we will picnic, if not, there are loads of nice pubs and a market and interesting things to see there.

In the last couple of weeks of school we spent most of it out doing trips while the school was being packed up ready for a big move into brand new premises. We went to Hampstead Heath, London Zoo, the bank of England and the RAF museum. The kids were pretty good throughout and I really enjoyed the Heath and the Zoo. Actually the RAF museum was cool too. The Bank of England was probably interesting if I had been able to actually read anything instead of herding my class around. I did get to touch a gold bar worth a quarter of a million pounds.

We also went to see Harry Potter which was fab! I love Ron, he is so funny. And I dreamt about riding broomsticks afterwards. Then I went out with 'the knitters' to a club night in Angel called I love the 90's. They played cheesy (and not so cheesy) 90's hits all night - it was totally awesome. I definitely channelled my 17 year old self that night. Anne and I stumbled across Tower Bridge at 4.30 in the morning as the sun was coming up and promptly woke up Richie to tell him how fun it was. I think he was really happy with me that night...oops. So Anne and I got up at the (I thought) quite respectable hour of 10.30am, and Rachelle had already been for an 18km run that morning. I think she wins, though we did dance for a solid 4.5 hours.

That day Richie and I went with Bruce and John to the Lambeth Country Fair. Yes, a country fair in London. We saw Sheepdog trials, falconry, a goat milking demo and animals made of vegetables (Actually not only animals - there were 3 Vege Michael Jacksons too). Random and fun!

I also visited Tring, to see Emma, a friend from last time I was in London. She has left the rat race and lives about an hour North of London with her husband and 6 month old baby. The main attraction of Tring is an outpost of the Natural History Museum - basically one man's taxidermy collection - including 2 dressed up fleas! So strange! They were made/dressed in 1905, and you look at them through a magnifying glass, while surrounded by stuffed polar bears and zebras and wolves and any other creature you might care to mention.

That is about it for now. We are still Swine flu free despite Tower Hamlets being the area with the highest rate of infections... Eek I have become a hand washing maniac but it is hard to know if it is a media storm in a teacup.

We are off to Norfolk for a week of camping at the weekend which should be great fun, as long as the rain stays away!

Steph

London Weather

I don't know what all the fuss is about the weather in the UK. When not looking for a cup of tea, the natives around here are always complaining about the weather.

When we got here in February it snowed on the beach at Brighton which was awesome. I guess you could argue that that was bad whether, transport services across the country ground to a halt, and schools were closed. But it was the middle of winter and it did snow on the beach!

Since then however the weather has been great. Last week was particularly balmy with temperatures getting well above 30 in the capital. A heat wave apparently.

Today we got the first really awful weather. It started about 3/4 of an hour before I finished work and rapidly progressed from torrential rain to hailstones the size of your knuckle bones. And then it abruptly stopped. Everyone decided to rush to the tube and it started again, we only had a three minute break. Half way to the tube station there was a massive bolt of lightning that I didn't see but I sure did hear - it must have struck less than a mile away.

Safely at Kilburn Park Underground Station I made my way home. Paddington, my usual interchange, was closed because of flooding. The train got through and I got home only a few minutes slower than usual, but by then the rain had stopped.

It's not sunny yet but I reakon that's the last of it. 1 3/4 hours of crappy weather. The weather here is unbearable. Time for a cup of tea I think.

Goths and Pirates from 1969

Last Saturday we went to Sheffield to go to Mike's birthday. Steph knows Mike from her last expedition to the UK and from New Zealand. Mike and his partner Alex lived in Masterton for a year a couple of years back.

Mike was born back in 1969, the anniversary was on Sunday, I'll let you do the math. His party on Saturday night was a dress up party so we faithfully prepared costumes. We decided to dress up as Gothics/Emos, so we died our hair black, I bought tight skinny jeans, clip-on nose ring and a studded belt. Steph, well Steph surprisingly already had everything she needed in her wardrobe.

We turned up at the party and found ourselves surrounded by hippies. It turns out that it was a 1969 dress-up party. Oh well, we looked good, and it turns out we weren't the only ones who didn't know about the 1969 theme. There was a wizard and and elf queen and two generations of pirates.

We got talking to the pirates and were asked whether we were dressed up or if these were our normal clothes. Turns out, when not dressed up as pirates, the pirates were actually
Goths. Apparently we would have fit right into their circle.

Mistaken for a Goth by a Goth. Now that's a good costume.

Dancing in the Funky Fish

RIP Michael Jackson

So, on Friday afternoon I left school as soon as the kids did and met up with Richie, Rowan, Ian and Rachelle at Hyde Park. There was a whole weekend of concerts, kicking off with the Killers on Friday night. ("Hard Rock Calling") It was Glastonbury weekend too so I guess lots of the bands were doing both gigs. The weather was perfect, warm and dry and not too sunny! We had a picnic and beers while listening to Passion Pit and the Howling Bells, and then when the Kooks started we all got up to boogie. I had one of those experiences when you realise that you actually know loads of the songs, even when you didn't realise it.
When the Killers came on it was super exciting, because they are one of my fave bands in the world. We danced and sang ourselves hoarse. I love being in a huge crowd when everyone knows the words and sings along. It must be pretty rad for the artists as well, I imagine!

On Saturday I attempted to do a job application, and then we took the train to Brighton, for Claire's birthday. It was great to head to the seaside on such a hot day. We had a BBQ in their garden and then headed out to Lucky Voice Karaoke. I love Karaoke when it is singstar or when it is in private booths, so you only make a fool of yourself in front of people you know!

After a couple of hours of singing we went out dancing and danced the night away in a club called the Funky Fish. Richie and I were sleeping in a tent in the garden, but the weather was perfect. We awoke to the neighbour having a tribute concert to MJ, playing his hits over and over again, and singing along loudly! We joined in.
The rest of the day was spent lazing in the garden, reading the huge Sunday papers (Mainly about Michael Jackson and Wimbledon) and eating left over BBQ food. We made it down to the beach in the afternoon, and although the water looked lovely, it was still pretty chilly!

Bruce has convinced me that I should go to Bestival in September, it sounds really fun and there is a bunch of us going now. Richie has not been convinced yet!

Eventually we dragged ourselves back to London, and I finished off the job application, and here I am at school on my lunch break. 2/3 of my class are sick today (so I have 3 students!!!- is it swine flu??? There are rumours flying!)
The kids are now arriving back so I will sign off and put some photos up when I get home. :) Steph

Ramblings not about Killers Concert at Hyde Park

It's been so long since I posted an entry here, I couldn't remember the web address, so I had too use Google to find the blog. This would not have been a problem if I was using the 'laptop', it has the blog bookmarked, but I'm using the 'netbook', aka the baby computer. Steph is finishing up a job application on the grown-ups computer.

For those uninitiated with the concept, a netbook in a miniture laptop. They became the craze last year I think. They are basically an ordinary computer with everthing scaled down. The one I am using now is abut 25cms wide, 18cm deep and 2cm high, when the screen is folded in. The keys are quite small which takes a bit of taking used to, however they they are increadibly convinient to carry around and come with build in wireless networking, so in theory you can take them anywhere and use the internet.

This one was the cheapest one I could find, the bottom of the range Acer AspireOne, it cost £198. This is quite cheap, but it is also quite slow. It is actually much slower that the laptop dispite having significantly more ram (1024MB over 746MB) and an apparantly faster (1.6Ghz rather than 1.2GHz) processor. The lack of speed is probably mostly due to the solid state disk, not it's size, but it's speed which incidently is a number hardly aver quoted.

This lack of speed is fine for me because I enjoy (or at least like the idea of) getting the most out of not-top-of-the range hardware. You could get a fast one, but it would cost a fair bit more than an equivilent ordinary laptop. I would only recommend getting one of these as a second computer, mostly for the cuteness factor. If you carry a poodle around in your handbag, you definately need one of these, they do come in pink.

But I have digressed from my original digression. In using the netbook to blog, I needed to first find the blog, so I Googled for 'Steph and Richie'. As I hit the search button, I thought, this is a bit pointless, there is no way our blog is going to be on the first page of Google's search results. But it was, number two, second highest rank in worldwide google searches for 'Steph and Richie'.

For those who don't work in or near the web development industry, this is a big deal. Earlier in the week my boss got a frantic call from the manager of the franch office, 'the french website is no longer on the first page of natural google search results.' There are large businesses that specialise in Search Engine Optimisation that will take large sums of money off you to 'try' and get you on the first page of Google searches, and our little neglected blog is there without any effort. Maybe I am in the wrong business.

But maybe not, if you google for 'Travel blog', 'New Zealander's in London', 'Neglected blog', or even, you won't find our blog at all. The only reason our blog comes up so high with 'Steph and Richie' is because it is a fairly unique phrase on the internet, and quite possibly because blogspot.com, which our blog is on, is fairly popular on the internet.

So as I was saying, we went to a The Killer's Concert at Hyde park last night. Steph has now finished her job app and I now need to pack my bags as we are going to Brighton for Steph's cousins's fiancee's (Alec & Claire are now engaged) Birthday Party. So maybe I'll write about The Killer's gig tomorrow.