One of these days, I really have to get started again on the England trip journal entries. The good part is yet to come – walking in Yorkshire and climbing over dozens of stylish stiles.

Walking used to be a much bigger part of my life before I bought a car and became a suburbonaut – when I lived in Seattle, I didn’t own a car, and often walked home from work when I lived in Fremont and worked at the top of Queen Anne Hill. It was about a 45 minute walk, mostly downhill, through some of the prettiest and most interesting neighborhoods in Seattle. It was not strenuous walking and I never felt like I was really “working out” that much.

A few months after moving here and becoming much more sedentary, I gained about 40-50 pounds.
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Not one, but two entries are up in September for the England travel journal. I’m slowly learning to work with images, with the help of the new book. I think I messed with one of them too much, and will fix it later.

I’ve finally started transcribing the next England trip journal. I’ve been putting it off for a long time because:

• 1. it’s really long, because I stopped writing daily entries for a week.
• B. We took a boatload of photos the whole time, and that means Photoshop.
• Tha-rrreee. I got bad news from home in the middle of that week, and have been mulling over how to present it in the entries.

However, I decided to break it down into workable chunks by location and date, so that the lengthy “afterwords” for each place were easier to deal with.

So maybe at least one, possibly two England/Scotland entries by tonight.

Also, I bought a really helpful book:Photoshop Elements for Digital Photographers”, and is also pretty funny.

It’s high time I started getting the next England journal entry in (when finished it will pretty much be the entire month of September, with a little bit of story to finish up in October, 2003).

I kept the journal in a small, handy Moleskine pocket journal (the kind with the integral rubber band, lined pages, and a pocket for receipts). I bought mine at the local “Container Store;” they always seem to have a few of the small and large blank journals in stock, along with some different Moleskine books that have extra receipt pockets.

I’m not sure, but I think I have an extra blank one kicking around that I bought as an extra Christmess present. May start carrying it with me, don’t know. But I was astounded recently when I was doing a little background checking that there’s quite an enthusiastic online fanbase for Moleskine journals – and even a blog. Even Neil Gaiman uses them, apparently (or did when this blog entry was posted).

Sadly, according to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (now living at BBCi), the marketing of the Moleskine as “Bruce Chatwin’s notebook!” is a bit, well, spurious at best. However, it’s a decent little blank book and probably a very similar design to the one Chatwin used and enthused about in his book “The Songlines” (which I read long, long ago).

Oh, dear.

A little more browsing at H2G2 led me to this entry on aspiring writers. I think I just heard Marvin sighing very, very sadly and patiently.

For some reason the UPS (uninterruptible power source? universal power sucker? The whatsit that sits on the floor) has been making a lot of funny noises lately – just now it started clacking and beeping almost constantly. Actually, we have two (one of them I think may be connected to the TiVo… heh heh) and they’ve both been acting beepish and clackish. I don’t know if it’s worth waking Da Hub up over (he’s already asleep). If he becomes partly conscious when I go up, I’ll tell him.

It’s never a good thing to wake a technically-minded husband out of a sound sleep just to tell him “Honey, the thing is beeping again.” But this gadget is starting to make quite a racket, and that’s never a good thing.

England Journal update in progress: Oxford and Boarstall House

Here’s a taste of what’s in store for you in the next day or so (I just have a bit more tweaking to do):

Happy End of Friday The 13th!

There’s a new England journal entry now posted under the September archives. All that and we’ve barely gotten out of the Cotwolds and on our way to Oxford before going on to York.

That’ll be a longish entry, but the one after that was a week’s backlog of the whole Scottish leg of the trip. One great big long entry with lots of photos…oy.

Scottish leg.

Stop thinking about kilts, dammit. Time for bed.

Another entry to the England trip journal is now posted under the September archives. It covers the last day or two in London before departing for the Cotswolds.

In looking over the diary entries again after several months’ rumination time, I’m convinced we didn’t spend enough time in the Cotswolds, and spent too much time trying to cover too much ground.

Next trip, we’re planning on going back to the Cotswolds with a car, so that we can get into the little villages and do a lot more walking in between. So beautiful there.

Another couple of day’s worth of journal entries from the September trip have gone up. They take a lot of time to fool with – aside from typing the entries in pretty much as I wrote them, but without the bad handwriting. That’s only the beginning – then there’s choosing the pictures, messing with them in Photoshop Lite to get them looking halfway presentable, cropping, etc. – and then I realize that I’ve copied the thumbnail size image from David’s photo album (where the original uncropped unmessed-with images reside) and have to do it all over again. And somewhere in between, a lot of Web surfing to find relevant links and maybe discover factual errors and interesting sidelights.

One more picture to post – while we were away, my cat Stuey (Studebaker Baker to the vet) was boarded, and I missed him a lot.

So here’s a nice picture of him.