Sheep Guarding Llama

Today was another busy day for me. Still lots of work to do to get caught up from Dominica and my trip abroad. I started work at seven this morning to give myself a bit of a chance to get the ball rolling before most people come into the office and start piling up new requests.

Today is Dominica’s first day back in the office for a week and a half. She took seven days off giving her a total of eleven days since the last time that she was in the office. That is enough to start to forget how to do your job! She had to really think to figure out what time she had to go in to the office this morning.

Oreo was definitely ready to go to daycare today. He hasn’t had a chance to burn off his energy in a while and is raring to go. Dominica said that when she got him to Doggie Paradise that he lept from the car and was wagging his entire body when he saw his “second family” up in Wallington. He is very excited to be back to his regular, happy routine. He doesn’t like going without his play time.

Today was a very pleasant day. It started off heavily overcast but the sun was out and burned off the clouds and it was a bright and sunny day after that. I walked over to Food for Life for a late breakfast. I haven’t had that in two weeks.

It was busy enough today that I skipped lunch since my breakfast was on the late side. I figured that it would just be better to wait for Dominica to come home.

It is strange to be here on the coast with our nice, calm, warm weather – the apartment is holding 68° without any heating devices turned on – and to realize that dad’s house near Rochester, New York, is getting pounded with a serious blizzard including white outs and driving, horizontal snow! It is a different world between here and there. Just as different as it is from here to England, in fact. Actually, I think that weather in the United Kingdom is more similar to the weather here in New Jersey than either is to the weather back home.

I managed to upload the rest of the pictures from the UK today. Be sure to check out our Flickr UK 2007 set to see all of the images. There are one hundred and seventy three of them. The images uploaded today include most of Dominica’s second day touring London by double decker bus which was the sunny day as well as her tour of the Tower of London. They also include the pictures from our tour of Belfast on Saturday morning including a few of Belfast Castle and Belfast Cathedral.

I did some research today and Windsor House is the current tallest building in all of Ireland and stands at just twenty-three floors. That is twelve floors less than the apartment that I live in now. Although there is another skyscraper being built in Belfast and three more in Dublin that are supposed to overtake Windsor House it will be surprising if Ireland has anything as tall as the 1930 structure at which I reside for a very long time. We did get to see Obel Tower under construction while we were in Belfast. When it is completed it will have only half as many apartments as Eleven80.

Dominica got home with Oreo at six thirty.  We couldn’t decide what we wanted for dinner but finally settled on Nino’s.  We actually were both in the mood for McDonald’s which we haven’t done for dinner even once in the fourteen months that we have been living just up the street from one.  Walking to McDonald’s is as easy as walking to Food for Life or Airlie Cafe almost.  It is really that close.  But we never, ever bother.  It isn’t a very nice McDonald’s and they don’t take credit cards.  That is why we couldn’t go there tonight.  The cash situation is a bit tight after the trip to the UK.

So our evening is Italian take-away, some Ballykissangel and more late night work for me as I keep attempting to get caught up at the office.

Today is back to normal for me and it is the last day of Dominica’s vacation. We got up a little late but managed to make up the sleep that we were missing. So I jumped out of bed and went right to work. Dominica got up just a little later and we got breakfast together at Airlie Cafe before she drove north to go get Oreo.

Today is foggy and misty here in Newark, New Jersey. Surprisingly it is much warmer than Belfast and a little warmer than London but otherwise the weather is about the same. Not quite what I was expecting to return home to.

It was an expectantly busy day for me. I have a ton of catching up to do after having been out of the office for an entire week and from having so many of my coworkers on vacation. It is all that I can do to keep up with everything. But this is no surprise. This is the price that you pay for going to Europe for a week and a half.

Other than work, nothing really happened today. Dominica met her parents with Oreo just north of the Catskill Mountain on Interstate 81. They had lunch at a diner there where they had a really good vegetarian menu, she tells me, and swapped Oreo over. Oreo was very excited to see Dominica but went to the car to see if I was there too.

Dominica and Oreo got back between two and three in the afternoon. Oreo was very excited to be home and rubbed his belly on every piece of carpeting that he could find starting at the front door of Eleven80. He is so goofy. He is a little itchy from having been around grass for ten days. His allergy is pretty acute.

I worked until almost seven and then we watched a few episodes of Ballykissangel. We have finished the fourth season and are now working our way through the fifth season. Oreo was very happy that we were just laying in bed and relaxing. He snuggled and slept.

Amazon’s new Kindle eBook device is shipping in just a few weeks and looks to be very interesting. At $400 it isn’t cheap but this is the first book reader of its kind and promises to be groundbreaking. The screen is said to be epaper – looking and reading like actual paper which means lower eyestrain that traditional electronic reading devices. And instead of hooking to your computer or connecting over your WiFi or whatever the Kindle comes with its very own, free, EvDO service allowing it to get new content from almost anywhere in the United States and Canada via the cellphone service. A very interesting concept indeed. I am looking forward to seeing how this product pans out for Amazon. The potential is definitely there.

Dominica went to bed a little before ten and I went back to work until nearly one in the morning. There is a lot to do at the office and I have a lot of catching up to do. We are in the “crunch” leading up to early December that is felt throughout the financial industry. Late December is very slow but leading up to it is a mad rush to get things done. And with so many people on vacation there is just no way to get enough done during the normal hours. So here I am working all night.

Oreo missed me and came out to the living room to sit on the futon beside me while I worked. He has definitely missed being home.

Today is the final day for us in the United Kingdom. Time to head for home. Because our flight is comfortably late in the day we were able to sleep in until a normal time, pack up the hotel room and head on out. We weren’t too rushed although after having missed one flight this week we are being extra cautious. I calculated ahead of time and figure that we have to be ready to go and at the front of the hotel by ten forty in the morning to be completely safe.

I am glad that I figured out the safe amount of time that we needed ahead of time because it ended up taking a full hour and a half to go from the Comfort Hotel to Heathrow just two miles away or so! It is crazy how long it takes to do everything in London. No matter how close you are you can be an hour away. We took the hotel shuttle service to the airport and then discovered that we had to catch the Heathrow Express to get us to the right terminal! Still, I had allotted for a lot of these types of problems. So we were doing okay.

Once we were checked in and had our seats assigned we figured that we could relax and get some food. We had tried to check in online last night but the hotel Internet access didn’t work and doing from the BlackBerry was impossible because the site used images and non-standard stuff that the BlackBerry couldn’t handle. So we had to take our chances getting seats when we got to Heathrow. Unfortunately we were unable to get seats together because we checked in so late. At least we were somewhat near each other.

We ate at Garfunkel’s in the airport. It was good. Very slow. Everyone was going crazy trying to get their bills so that they could rush out to their planes. We had a really long time to kill so it wasn’t much of a problem for us but it definitely ended up killing all of our spare time. It took about thirty minutes for our fish and chips to arrive, for example. About an hour from the time we sat down until we got the bill and we were carefully moving things along as quickly as we could. So it was fine.

I did have a chance to try actual British Christmas pudding (aka plum pudding.) I was somewhat surprised to find that the infamous plum pudding is simply the English version of fruitcake. Fruitcake generally being, in my experience, much more dense but really the same thing. It makes sense as, in America, fruitcake is the Christmas dessert and is actually a pudding although Americans almost never use the term.

After lunch we did some very quick shopping at the duty free shops in Heathrow Terminal Four (the famous International terminal that handles a huge percentage of the world’s international flights) and then headed to the gate to get ready to depart the old world for the new. We boarded and got delayed for about twenty minutes which wasn’t bad at all.

Once we were in the air the gentlemen sitting next to me figured out that Dominica and I had gotten separated and offered to switch seats with her so that we could sit together which was awfully nice of him because he had a window seat and switched into a centre aisle seat.  So Dominica and I got to ride together almost the entire way back to Newark.

The one thing that turned out bad is that, for once, both Dominica and I had planned on using the in-flight entertainment (watching The Simpsons Movie and Hairspray) to kill a bit of time.  But within the first five minutes of the flight the entire system died and we didn’t get to watch anything at all or even use the cool GPS system to see where we were.  So the flight seemed a lot longer than we had thought that it was going to and we didn’t manage to watch any of the movies that we half wanted to see.  So we spent the time listening to our iPods.  Dominica listened to “Lake Wobegon Days” by Garrison Keiller and then “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid” by Bill Bryson while I listened to “Notes from a Small Island” by Bill Bryson.

We landed in Newark, picked up our luggage, got through customs (who were friendly but didn’t say a single word to us at all) and were off in our taxi towards home.  Boy were we glad to be home.  It is too bad that it was so late, almost seven thirty, because we can’t get Oreo until tomorrow.  So we ordered in a pizza and watched some Ballykissangel and called it a night.  Dominica will be heading out to get Oreo first thing in the morning.

This is our final morning in Belfast. We got up around eight and got the room all packed up and headed to our last UK breakfast. This will be our final opportunity for beans and mushrooms at breakfast.

We finished eating and checked out of the room just in time for Owain to meet up with us and take us on a driving tour of Belfast. He took us down the Falls Road and the Shankill Road which are famous as the major hot spots during The Troubles. We got to see a lot of the famous murals there which was really cool.

We didn’t have a lot of time for sight seeing so everything had to be done very quickly. We got to see a lot of the Belfast neighbourhoods, Belfast Castle and Belfast Cathedral. Today we finally got a chance to take at least a few pictures in Northern Ireland so that we can prove that we were there.

Owain commented on how strange it is that many of the famous sights in town he was seeing for the first time as well.  So often we don’t manage to see the things that are local to us but will travel all over the world to see the things that the people who live there don’t bother to see.  Dominica, for example, has only entered Manhattan four times since we moved to the area almost two years ago!

We had lunch at a pub near the cathedral and then it was time to get to the airport. We learned from last time and flew today out of Belfast City Airport instead of Belfast International so we were much closer and the airport was smaller. Although both are very small.

This time we had plenty of time before our flight and just waited it out at the airport. The flight back to London was quick and easy. We took the “Hotel Hoppa” to the Comfort Hotel and just crashed for the night. We tried to get online and do some updates but the Internet access at the hotel didn’t work. Which was probably best as it would have been $20 or something crazy for one night of Internet access. That is one thing that is very noticeable about the UK – nothing is ever included in the price. No matter what you want, it is extra. The prices start high and you get nothing for your money.

We watched an hour or two of BBC and got a feel for what people watch at night in London. Londoners must watch incredible amounts of television since no businesses are open, transportation shuts down around midnight and everything is too expensive to take advantage of. That pretty much just leaves television.