Two Turtle Doves and a Concrete Mixer

Hoorah we're back in blighty for Xmas, break out the goose fat we are in fact freezing. Here's Susan at the South Bank yesterday with surely the best of the London festive lights, it's a real concrete mixer adorned with neon, no less. BTW, do most concert pianos sound out of tune to anyone else these days, or is it just Doug's notoriously warped pitch hearing? We saw Imogen Cooper playing Beethoven, and we're still not sure who won :-) Doug has a theory about piano tuning but it is a very very very boring theory. Mind you he tried to tune one himself once, should try everything once.eh?

Boomerang & the black eye !

From the archives, took this photo in Sydney nearly two years ago, still think it's hugely funny - look very closely, the boomerang sales dude has a black eye :-)) Thought this pic was lost, but now it's found !

Call me a cab !

Ever thought how handy a personal cab could be ?

I have seen many things...........

Frys Electronics, for those who don't keep the faith, is likely the biggest bestest properest electronics store in the world. Doug waxes lyrical about the very original store in Sunnyvale twenty odd years ago, and now it is a franchise with each store bigger than any warehouse store you've ever seen. Frys still sells everything from diodes to fridge freezers. Well...........the day after Thanksgiving in San Diego, Frys had a one-day sale, but we didn't know that and went there looking for a $5 memory card adapter. The car park is bigger than Oxford anyway, but was totally full, and people were warning us on the way in to 'run away', which we didn't get?! The sale prices were about half price, and the whole store was full of one long line of thousands of people waiting to pay with high value tvs, diodes, oscilloscopes, all sorts of loot. Dumbstruck, we asked a guy near the checkout how long he'd waited in line to pay - 3.5 HOURS !!! The store was expecting to take $2.4m on one day.......it was like boys go shopping frenzy on a public holiday, sunny day when the pubs were open and the football was on................or was it a dream :-)

Dreamy Draws

Another vintage Southwest trip just completed, this time mostly to Phoenix and San Diego, and naturally with Las Vegas included lest we should forget what it looks like ;-)

Amazingly we bumped into Robert Criste ('Karma' previous blog entry) in Phoenix, who blog readers will recall we first met in Nashville, and kept in touch with, he was in Phoenix for a business meeting. There's more to life than meets the eye you know. As it happens we had just discovered ' Aunt Chiladas' http://www.auntchiladas.com/ because Robert's wife Lesa had previously suggested this Mexican bar in Phoenix..........so we'd just been talking about them !

Now, Aunt Chilidas is on 'Dreamy Draw Drive' no less, and to prove it here's a sign. Turns out this Mexican bar used to be frequented by miners from the nearby Mercury ore mine & smelting works, and mercury fume is an hallucinogen (so I'm told), hence the name of the street :-) Is it really a good idea to eat at the old mercury works, one asks? Here's Doug and a compadre showing what the long term effects can be.

We liked Aunt Chilidas, here's another sign from the same place behind the bar there.