EMP in the US

I have lumped the above into one post because with all the football watching, and good friends, every weekend feels like a celebration.

The boys had to find their own things to do while I watched the Denmark game that started at 7.30am (ouch that’s early).

Luckily, on the weekends, the afternoon match-watching takes place outdoors, so our friends had a good idea to keep the kids occupied and set up a sprinkler:

After or during the weekend matches, there is usually a barbeque going, and after watching tense games, and therefore drinking quickly, there is much hilarity in the post-game digest:

I was building a bottle-organ out of all the empties.

Someone else benefits from all the barbeque spillages:

My birthday was a great day of football watching (and baby-cuddling):

We later watched the Germany game outdoors, with more BBQ. In fact, I didn’t have to cook at all on my birthday! We are having the real celebration on Saturday when David is back.

PHEW! That ends my posting-bonanza. Sorry it’s a lot to catch-up in one go!

Thomas continues to have his nose in a Tintin most of the time, and he continues with his “Secrets of Droon” series. Luckily there are hundreds of books in this series in the library, so it will be a while before we exhaust these.

The boys have taken more interest in the piano lately, perhaps because I haven’t been playing much.

Thomas has started trying to “compose” pieces:

I remember doing this as a kid. Thomas is helped by the fact that I have stuck the letter names of the notes all over the piano. This backfired a bit, when they got hold of the stickers when I wasn’t looking, and we had notes like “P” and “z” in the scale. Also, I noticed Thomas using an “h” on one of his compositions.

Ollie too has become more interested. I have been using what must now surely be the only way to teach solfège:

I have also been trying to maintain some old skills. When I worked on “The Bill” we seemed to be constantly fixing radios. The boys have a set of walkie-talkies, one of which wasn’t working properly.

I took it apart, but actually the problem is a mechanical one, which I tried to fix with blu-tack. The knob is not engaging with the pot properly (an unfortunate problem in any context). It held for a bit, but Ollie’s strong hands made short work of breaking it again.

Sorry for the long silence – I’ve been busy with all the football!

Last week I decided to have a bit of a sort out with all the boys clothes, I can’t believe we have so many! It was quite a long process, and the boys found ways to amuse themselves while I got on with it…

I gathered together most of the jumpers my mum has knitted over the last 4 years…

And I ended up with quite an amount to take to the charity shop:

It feels good to be getting rid of that much, and now I have to go through my own stuff!

…probably not a good word to mention much after yesterday’s game. And, have I mentioned before, that I had dinner with him once?
We set up in the car port: (apologies for cross-posting)

Cable run:

Cable gantry:

The game:

It was a very enjoyable afternoon. Ollie busied himself going around the Circle begging for food. I got next-door to kick him out, only to find he’d gone next-door-but-one and obtained a cupcake!? Then I had a quick hour-and-a-half to sober up for some dinner guests. The chap who helped David build our dining table and my instrument came over with his wife and son, and they make great company, so all-in-all we had a super day, not too bothered by the England fumble.

Moving on to another type of green, I took the boys for a long walk through Pine Park this morning, in the drizzly rain. It was very er… green.

Fractally ferns:

I thought this looked a bit like a pair of long pants:

We saw this amazing web, though i didn’t realise I’d also captured it’s creator until I looked at it on the bigger screen:

This looked like some sort of mutant clover…

The boys had started to get a little bit fed up by this point. Thomas kept saying “I’m not comfortable in this forest with all these bugs!”

Finally we made it back to civillisation and the golf club.

It’s very annoying that there are no buses on Sunday, but luckily David came and picked us up from town. We had walked for nearly 2 hours, and the last part of the pine park is very steeply uphill! I’m definitely ready to relax in front of the Germany v Australia game. Off to the car port…!

“If you eat too much sugar, then you get fat and they take your ears away.”

I was berating Thomas for not washing his hands before lunch, having been to the supermarket and having seen him drag his hands on both the floor, and the tarmac in the car park. (Does that sound weird to other parents, or is this perfectly normal behaviour?)

Anyway, his response was, “well, now that I’ve put the germs in my mouth, the white blood cells are going to come and gobble them up.”

“well, let’s hope so.” I replied weakly.

“It’s true because it says so in my Body book.”

On Sunday morning, we got in the car and headed home. The drive home was much longer, as we had to head inland east quite a way before the Throgs Neck Bridge could take us across the Atlantic inlet to head North and East.

We soon came across the first proper rain we had seen in a week:

And familiar scenery:

I was actually gutted to come home after the bustle of the city especially as the first thing I did was sort the clean washing from before we left, but having the girls from next-door pop round the next day, to ask the boys to play soon cheered me up, and by the next evening, I was grateful for my little Fletcher Circle community with friends to talk to right next door.

Saturday morning. We took it easy – the boys had gone to sleep at around 11pm the night before, so we woke up slowly and went for breakfast. Then we got ourselves organised for our last tourist excursion. We tried to work out the best half-way point for driving into the city, with parking and subway costs. I bought tickets for the Empire State Building online and printed them out, along with some parking vouchers, at the hotel’s “business centre” (a room with two PCs and two printers). Then we set off down the Long Island Expressway towards Queens. We struggled a little with finding the parking, and ended up in an extremely dodgy-looking lot with an extremely high Rasta fellow in charge. (we agreed that, if we had to spend the whole day in the tiny box that was the car park booth in the sweltering heat, you’d probably need something to get through the day). As it turned out, this was the wrong parking-lot for our voucher, and we decided to park at the next multi-story along the road, rather than scout out any other scary lots.

A short walk to the subway revealed a shuttle-bus replacement service in place. (Just like London then). Anyway, we made it to the familiar Penn Station and walked to the Empire State from there.

At security, they very kindly relieved us of our penknives, and said we could collect them on the way out. We were very lucky not to have to queue at all. It looked like it could get very busy in season:

Then the elevators take you up to roughly the 80th floor (your ears pop), but then you have to choose whether to wait in the queue for 15 minutes for the last elevator, or to climb 6 flights of stairs. Some members of our family can be quite impatient with queues, so guess which option we took:

I should point out, for reference, that these stairs are not air-conditioned. The boys did really well, in fact they were faster than me! But it was definitely worth it for the views at the top.

Looking south-westish:

The spike: (boys have been read to, and watched “James and the Giant Peach”).

I won’t put up the millions of shots that I took, but I liked this one facing north, where you can see Central Park in the background, with it’s perfectly straight edges.

We again walked back down the 6 flights of stairs, though Ollie was carried, and Thomas was whimpering by the bottom. It’s a long way down…

The boys were seriously knackered when we reached the bottom:

We grabbed a bite to eat at the nearest affordable spot (a Subway) and the boys perked up a bit with some ice cream. Then it was back into the subway to head all the way south to Ground Zero.

Ground Zero is sort of an anti-climax in that it is, after all, a building site. But on the other hand, it is also quite awe-inspiring because of the scale, and also because of the buildings that survived around it. I’m not normally one to indulge in popularisation of shared-but-distant grief, but I defy anyone to stand at a place where thousands of people lost their lives and not feel at least a little reflective.

The church across the street:

Our plan had been to get to the World Trade Centre stop, then walk across to Fulton Street to get the J or Z train back to where we parked the car. It turns out, that these trains don’t run on the weekend and the entrances were closed. Terrific. It was also trying to rain, but failing. I think all the rain evaporates before it reaches the ground in the city, it’s so hot.

We found another subway entrance and were told to take an A train and then change, but miraculously ended up on an F train, which, on the map at least, shouldn’t have come anywhere near where we were, but took us straight to the right place, to get back on the shuttle replacement to our stop in Queens.

The short walk to the car park was also interesting from a different perspective…

I was relieved to see our car was still there, and still contained my laptop in the boot, which we have been using for in-car entertainment for the boys.

We headed for home. We’d had a really really good day. The boys had managed a lot of walking in stifling heat. I think Ollie fell asleep before we even got out of the car park. It was around 8pm.

We looked for a place to stop and have dinner near the hotel, bearing in mind it was nearly 10pm at this point. This one was simply too gaudy:

We decided to go to Chilis, which is a chain. Luckily it turned out to be happy hour where you got two drinks for the price of one – win!

This was quite an expensive day for us, the Empire State tickets were $22 each for David and me (boys free), the parking was $14, the subway tickets are $8.25 each for David and me, plus lunch and dinner, but it was definitely worth it for a once-in-a-lifetime experience. We had been deliberating whether it would be worth it before we left, but in retrospect, it definitely was.

Friday morning. David went off to hear some papers at the conference, and I thought I’d do some New York Shopping, elise-stylee. We went next-door to Target! (this is like the American version of Primark). It’s great! I can also shop there online, so that might be worth a visit. One of the reasons for this excursion is that David was due to become a godfather that afternoon, and he had forgotten to bring any long trousers, or a shirt or any shoes, so I was just checking out what we could cobble together.

Then we went back to the hotel to try out the pool. Unfortunately, it had been closed for maintenance, and, while they had re-opened it, it wasn’t heated! It was FREEZING! But the boys and I braved it nonetheless and had a pretty good time splashing around.

David came back at lunchtime, and we dressed up to go to the baptism of our neighbours’ youngest – Vasilisa. David managed to borrow a shirt from a friend at the conference, and with a quick stop at Target for a pair of $20 long trousers, we set off for the northern New York suburbs.

There was some pretty impressive scenery along the way, and I have nurtured a strange attraction to steel structures, which there were also plenty of:

The church we went to is beautiful, and I would’ve taken some more photos of the inside, if I’d realised that was allowed before I had to take the boys outside for being too disruptive… (sigh).

Still, David played his role, part of which is to empty the used baptism water. (note that he was wearing his crocs with his fresh-bought Target trousers and borrowed shirt):

Afterwards, it was smiles all round, and a beautiful, if very hot, day.

We managed to fit in a quick barbeque with the friends at the baptism, and really see a fantastic house in suburban New York, then we had to head back for David to play another gig.

The drive home was great for urban landscapes – I think I’ve really missed cities. This is what comes of living in a forest. There is actually so much forest where we live that apparently there have been not just one, but two small planes that have crashed and never been found! I couldn’t get enough steel and brick!

We were pretty exhausted when we got back, and after a quick snack, the boys and I were soon snoring. David slunk in from his gig at about 2am.