We have a thing living in the drain of the shower. This is not a small thing, a creepy little bug or a mouse. This is a big thing. Think the monster in the blue lagoon. Actually I've never seen the monster in the blue lagoon but I imagine if I had it would be an appropriate likeness. Kim and I were watching tv this afternoon and suddenly there is massive gurgling coming from the direction of the shower. I'm not talking a few glugs. I'm talking like 20 seconds of really disgusting loud gurgling and glugging and water splashing. I kept waiting for the jaws music to start and some scary sort of sludge/slime mixture to ooze out of the bathroom towards the living room and swallow us or eat us or be followed by some scary, slimy, sludge covered monster who would swallow or eat us but fortunately for us it didn't and the scary noises stopped and we are still alive. Well they didn't really stop all together they sort of stopped and started over a period of 5 or 10 minutes. I wanted Kim to go close the door to the bathroom but he didn't want to go near the bathroom and neither did I so we just turned up the tv and tried somewhat unsuccessfully to ignore it. I thought for a while it had ruined my appetite for dinner but fortunately I'm resilient. Also fortunately my computer is as far from the shower as possible in our apartment and Kim is the one cooking dinner in the kitchen only feet from the shower drain.

So at work we get free fruit. Yay!

But they cut the stems of the bananas so short that they are impossible to peel!!

What I learned at work this week:

If a method is undefined and the error shows just the method name this is a standard c++ linking error. If the entire method signature is shown this is a good sign that you forgot the extern "C" bit.

Now if only it hadn't taken me half a day to figure that out... Well that and the conversion of strings from C to FORTRAN but lets just not even go there.

Kim and I have been working on furnishing the flat, here are some of our purchases

This is my desk, it is a pretty good height and it has two convenient drawers in the front, I'm really happy with this purchase especially because it got my computer off the dining table.

This is a bureau that we really liked especially since it is arts and crafts style which matches quite a bit of what Kim already has. One of the little doors has a tendency to swing open but hopefully we'll be able to fix that with a tiny magnet or something.

Who doesn't need an occasional table? Actually it looks great in the hall and has already taken up mail collection duties.

This is a coffer we put in the hallway, supposedly coffers are meant to hold treasure but this one is currently storing my yarn. I really like all the carvings on the front.

A few weekends ago we painted the hallway. We did the green walls first, which took a whole day with all the borders and corners and such. Little did I know that the trim was going to take WAY longer. We have a lot of doorways in our hallway for one tiny flat. Having phone and electrical cords running along the edge of the trim does make getting a clean line between the green and the brown a bit tricky but I'm really happy with how it came out. It has a sort of old fashioned feeling about it. Here is one photo that I took, I'll try to get some better ones some day when there is a bit more light.

We do still want to replace the carpet and do something about the doors but one step at a time.

My brother was here this weekend and I finally managed to sneak in a bit of culture - I also managed to spill chocolate milk all over a clean, fresh pair of jeans but lets not talk about that. We went to see a play at the Menier Chocolate Factory called "Rookery Nook". It was a 1920's style farce and it was quite fun. Most of the jokes were rather predictable and it all ended in a fantastic flurry of chaotic, silly activity but I enjoyed it and it seemed an appropriately English choice to take our guests to. I particularly liked one of the actors who managed to keep quite a piercing stare on her face (directed mostly at her husband) despite all the silliness going on. We also visited the design museum where we picked up these fantastic lids! They are engineered to fit a variety of thread sizes so that you can re-purpose old jars and they are quite sleek and cool looking. We saw them in an exhibit of the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year winners.

We also visited Churchill's WW2 bunker downtown, saw the end of a parade, and ate lots of good food. Sadly my brother and his girlfriend had to leave and I'm back to multitasking between laundry and ironing and blogging.

I actually don't have anything all that interesting to write about the recent protests in London but since people have been asking me about them I thought I would write a quick summary. Yesterday I walked to work among a wash of city workers dressed in their best jeans with a few random older men in khakis and really ugly ties who don't seem to understand how to both dress down and blend in at the same time. I am still in training at work so I didn't even get out of the office for lunch but a few people I work with manged to glimpse some of the protesters from afar. I left work late last night and I hopped on the tube near work and rode under bank thus avoiding any remaining crowds. Today on the way to work there were some extra policemen outside of bank and a block or two north but other than that things were back to normal. I worked through lunch again but one of the guys in the training class had to run an errand near work and he said there was some action that looked like the police storming an empty building near by.

Sorry I can't provide more exciting tales, as long as training is going on the most adventurous reports I have to make are about interfacing with C and Fortran, which in my opinion should cause a bit of rioting on its own.