saturday evenings

couple
Originally uploaded by josihartfiel

the partys over

melt's off in china, jesse's back in austin, and the sun has reappeared again. suddenly practical and driven again. budget to adhere to! marketing to do! mphil to start!

perhaps its the brightness creeping through the damp into my head. or that i've dried out a bit in the alcoholic sense. or that all the exercise is finally bringing my spirits back up.

the weekends ride to the north downs was glorious. it's always boring for the first 80 minutes, until when, right after cobham, i turn right at the pub, suddenly i'm on a one track road surrounded by fields and hedges. sun, butterflies, horse&riders, ockham's dog show and country fete. the smell of cows. quiet forests with ancient oaks. hills where i stop the 20 minute uphill slog to gaze back at london's towers, 30 miles off under a crystal blue sky.this goes on for another 4 hours, until i decide my legs have had enough, coast the 10 miles downhill into some town, and catch the train home.

texas reunion

his highness rocked up yesterday morning and proceeded to do very little other than look surprised at my accent every 5 minutes, making everyone laugh in the process. aspHalt. duylinh looked confused by the ursuline girl in london. mel landed later in the rain.

there's little talk of past and future, instead endless self-refrencing; she said he said. the weather and the tube. made worse as la contessa and melt and i communicate dialy - text, phone, skype, email, mental telepathy - and consequently our conversations are criss crossed with what we said last week and laced with light emotional refrences. intimate, endless, and layered with a solid base of shared understanding and knowledge.

tonight, we're cooking for 14. conversation should improve with more strangers.
hungarian cherry soup as a starter (cherries pitted), 8 pounds of chicken thighs, lots of vegetables and duylin's ingenuity served as a main.

endless helicopters

due to last nights failed bombing attempts, the city's quiet today. except for the constant buzzing and racket up in the sky, as all the news stations try to make something of empty streets.

in a mildly worrying way, the police held off releasing details to the news until 8pm, deliberately, so as not to disrupt regular work and commuting. they'll cordon of streets and shut down tube stations in the name of saftey, but everyone should be in the offices above the empty streets, busily working away.

sunday afternoons with the laptop

in between writing up a discussion paper for a non-profit i'm working with, and editing a colleague's sustainability statement, i read this and loved it:
marketing to the new middle class soweto + zulu wild west craziness in j'burg.
"They grew up in a mud hut, two blond kids regarded by their tribal peers as Zulus. So when the new dawn broke over South Africa, the Alcock brothers took the rainbow nation by storm - Khonya brokering land deals for 200,000 tribesmen, entrepreneur GG bringing the party spirit back to Soweto."

why the cost of solar pv has gone through the roof

they've all gone here: In the last 24 hours, Google produced 10,044 kilowatt-hours of electricity from the sun.

sunny days

i'm back on the bike, back on the courts, and back running (somewhat). the muscle tone is just gone. and will take some time to build back up.

and the concept of sitting in gardens at lunch is lovely but then my eyes start to hurt from the sun and i need to go buy a pair of sunglasses.

so i wander, and come across these. and then i have to go back to work.