first off, if you haven’t actually checked out my photo pages recently, lookee here. stunning photographic genius at work in kew gardens and cornwall.

i used to think the brits had the market cornered on horrible reality shows with distraction, a show where people voluntarily torture themselves for prizes. Witness: the episode where contestants drink their own urine in order to win a car.

however, the stunt where 20/20 disgustingly calls the adoption process “the ultimate reality show” and makes it appear that the “winning” couple takes home a new baby has that beat by a country mile. the sickest bit? uri geller sues, says he thought of it first

lots of fun new playmates joining the e.u. at midnight tonight. which’ll come in pretty damn handy once i am married to a brit citizen (j gets his citizenship next summer). woo hoo! i can go live and work in latvia!

yet more evidence that my fucking country sucks ass

now i’ve seen it all

updates from the world of jen: i just moved. no time yet to take pics of the flat, which is very big and very nice, but located up a very dodgy set of stairs, on top of a honda dealership. wierd. whilst getting engaged and moving are all very exciting and promising developments, unfortunately it means that i’ll prolly have to cancel my trip to greece. lots of expenses coming up (trip to the states for Alex’s wedding and to meet the family, a wedding, and our plan for world domination) which were not in the picture when i booked the tickets in january. oh well, I suppose greece isn’t going anywhere. bah.

three day weekend over here, but as per usual, the weather will be shite. hope it’s sunny… wherever you are. enjoy.

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so here’s the ring!!

(who knew how hard it was to take a pic of a ring?!?)

the girly stuff: 1940’s platinum green tourmaline with twelve diamonds. beautiful beyond belief. classic, unique and gorgeous.

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random curiosity:

if this is true, anyone who knows about my sweet tooth knows i am in some serious trouble…

the reason my latte makes me late to work every morning (i.e. people with too much time on their hands…)

reality is not a game

give me a beckham break!

finally, a belated congrats to all my peeps who took part in the reproductive rights march on washington this weekend. you’re all awesome!!! wish I could’ve been there, but you did me proud. keep abortion safe and legal!

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lots of sun, fun, and drinking this weekend!

friday night began with innocent beers at the local pub, but come last orders, somehow morphed into impassioned conversation about sex, politics and religion over too much jack daniels and wine at a friends house, and concluded with a very unbalanced walk home.

saturday, understandably, got off to a rough start as we tried to prepare for our engagement barbeque. cleaning, cooking and running last minute errands is made all the more trying with a hangover. luckily, the weather was amazing, and as the tides of people came and went, everyone seemed to leave a lot fuller and more inebriated than when they arrived, which is surely a sign of good fun.

sunday was more fabulous weather, and we went for an excursion to kew gardens to bask in the sunshine and enjoy a little patch of nature in the middle of london. returning home sunday night, we met up with kerryn and stef (the best friend next-door neighbour metalheads) and their old friend from s.a., and all headed down to the pub for more beer and too much food.

monday morning was so glorious that we both skivved off sick and went shopping for houseplants, then had a picnic (bbq leftoversand beer) down at tooting common, including a rousing game of scrabble (which i won, but only by dint of pure luck).

it’s not officially summer yet, but it’s so close, i can taste it…

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Because I’ve been running around since the beginning of the year (Rome, Amsterdam, Bath, Cornwall, firewalk, glassblowing, rock-climbing, etc., etc., etc…) I have not really had a chance to properly keep people updated. But in typical “Jen” fashion, I have gone and fallen in love and gotten engaged in the space of just a couple of months.

Jonno and I are getting married at New Years Eve, in Capetown, South Africa.

Here’s the rundown: We met on Christmas night, and have been seeing each other for a couple of months. We’ve been basically living together since we started going out, and over Easter weekend I asked him to marry me.

Jonno:
saffa (S. African)
smarter than your average bear
loves surfing
works in finance
easily cheezier than velveeta
patient enough to put up with my shit
likes peanut butter
makes really bad puns
plays guitar
thinks it’s funny that i’ve named his car
younger than me
always gives me the first bite of chocolate
understands and enjoys baseball (!!!)
understands and enjoys cricket (???)
been married previously
dreams of running a beachside bar in costa rica
likes metal
likes punk
has lived in London for 5 years
likes peanut butter some more
has laser-beam intense green eyes
has agreed to run away with me and join the circus
practices juggling for our future circus careers

Pics of him here from when we went away for easter weekend. We’re coming Stateside in september, so those of you who’re in Boston and New York will get to meet him then.

There you have it: another hit-and-run update from your correspondent across the pond…

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this weekend marked the occassion of a big milestone in my life – my first trip to ikea.

i now possess in-depth understanding of their marketing and sales techniques. it works basically like this:

you go in there with the notion of purchasing a few essential, cheap, yet stylish home goods. perhaps you even have a list. most certainly, everyone who goes in has a budget.

upon entering, you find yourself captivated by all the pretty colours and showroom design ideas. as you wend your way through the maze, you find yourself putting more and more items in the provided bright yellow carrier bag, simply because they are kinda cool looking, cheap, and you could probably use a new *whatever*. and you think it’s ingenious that you can buy things in modules or separate pieces and start trying to calculate the price of the model entertainment centre, without the cabinet and with wood doors instead of glass.

you begin to get disoriented, and find yourself wandering in circles. after a while you realise that it’s been 4 hours since you last saw natural lighting, or breathed air which had not been recirculated. and you find yourself in a mammoth warehouse trying to match little numbers to what you scrawled down on your reference list, and pushing giant trolleys in a dazed manner, and the panic begins to set in as you start to think “how the fuck do you get out?!?!?!” and by the time you reach the holy grail of the cash tills, and queue, and put all your stuff on the conveyor belt and you start seeing things like a set of 10 rubber spatulas and track lighting for inside the cupboards, and you start to wonder “*what* am I buying??” before you realise it is far too late, if you want to have any hope of getting out alive, you have to just hand over your wallet and make a frenzied dash for the daylight right past the exit sign…

and in the dazzling light, you blink madly while your pupils adjust and realise that you are now out £200 and one whole weekend afternoon of your life, neither of which you will ever get back…

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why do four-day-workweeks seem to drag on so much longer than normal?

in any case, it’s the weekend. not too much planned – after-work drinks tonight, a few bbqs, some moving (moving in w/ j and need to start packing…again!), a little planning for the may bank holiday camping trip to inverness (the scottish highlands, for those of you not familiar). the weather has been gorgeous, and hopefully will hold the rest of the weekend. if it stays sunny, perhaps head to richmond, or kew gardens for a little vitamin d.

enjoy, y’all. peace out.

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big weekend in cornwall.

more to come soon. for now, pictures here

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so, one might reasonably ask, after firewalking, what’s next?

the answer: glasswalking, of course!

phoenix house will be sponsoring a glasswalk in the fall, and i’m already on board. not only do you walk across 30 feet of broken glass, but apparently, you do it backwards. sounds like good fun!

in the meantime, i have to start gearing up for the “tough guy challenge” in early july, which i am doing with a team of collegues. so far our training plans include going for after work drinks to develop our training plans.

still no plans for the May Bank Holiday. tossing around the idea of going camping for a weekend in new forest, which is supposed to be lovely, but not sure how warm it’ll be at the end of may. but perhaps something else will crop up at the last minute. there’s also the matter of j’s passport, which only has two free pages left, and will take 3-4 months to get a new one as he has to send it back to the embassy in s.africa, and which he needs to have a u.s. visa in for september (alex’s wedding in maine), so travelling together outside the uk will be a pain for a while and puts a damper on the summer plans. ah well, we’ll see what happens.

in any case, that’s what’s next up for me.

apropos of nothing, people are dumb: what price beauty?

have a good easter weekend, and those of you back home, be sure to have plenty of peeps for me…

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lots of sporting news. and some not-so-sporting news.

the red sox are back on track. we like curt. we likey him a lot. kate and mitzi head down on a road trip tomorrow to baltimore to see tim wakefield kick some oriole ass. i’m very jealous.

my other b-boyz (yayyyyyy!!!!) start their stanley cup playoffs against montreal (boooooo!!!), and i’ll be listening over the internet.

in the not-so-sporting news…

iraq has turned into a bloody nightmare, saddam has been ferried out in secret, and yet georgie is being his usual blustering intractable self… at the expense of human lives. the *only* positive to come out of this insane disaster, is that people may finally be starting to wake up.

in the meantime, back at home, amnesty puts facts to what we already knew: america’s judicial system is in the same class as those of iran, china, and vietnam.

and because we now live in this kind of world, it is seemingly not enough that we all have national insurance numbers (the brit equivalent of the social security #). not enough that we are constantly under surveillance by cctv. not enough that we have to have tv licenses, and driver’s licenses and (soon) biometric passports. now they want a national identity card. mark my words, the u.s. will not be far behind.

only one more sleep til the long weekend. i daren’t look at the weather forecast, since a) it will be wrong and b) even if it’s good, it’ll be wrong.

i need a break. the state of the world is getting me down, and while it won’t make anything better, rainy or sunny, a weekend away from news of bombings and bloodshed and fear will do wonders for my sanity…

have i mentioned i can’t wait?

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I have redeemed myself, (at least partially) and managed to get up the photos i owe ya.

here’s rome, here’s the annotated travelogue
here’s bath, here’s the blog
here’s the amsterdam chicktrip
here’s my firewalk (sorta). the annotated travelogue/pictorial essays for both are here

next up is cornwall this weekend, and then greece in june!

keep your eyes peeled on this space

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i know.

i’ve been terrible over the past few weeks. sporadic updates, no pictures, no colour commentary on current events.

i plead guilty.

just been really busy. and i have tons of pictures (somewhere in the neighbourhood of 200), but need to find some new dig. photo software to organise them, and publish them. and i haven’t had any time to find any.

but i figure being really busy is a good thing, as there has been way too much time when i was bored outta my skull. so i apologise, but only half heartedly. because it’s nice to have a *life*.

in the meantime, i am very excited about going to cornwall this weekend. the plan is to head down super-early in the morning, stop by stonehenge for sunrise, and then spend the next four days lazing in bed, taking walks along the beach, browsing quaint shops, going for day trips, and eating and drinking a lot.

i can’t wait.

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it’s been exactly a year that I’ve been in london now! i remember dragging my stuff to my new flat like it was yesterday.

it’s been dramatically crazy and surprisingly eventful and stuporously boring and achingly lonely and excitingly adventurous and wrenchingly heartbreaking and tooth-and-nail hard and unbelievably fun.

if i had known exactly what i was in for, would i have still gotten on (or off) the plane? of course. i wouldn’t trade a second of it.

this is what i wanted, all of it, the whole experience. if i wanted predictable and steady and innocuously pleasant, i could’ve stayed my home and saved myself the rollercoaster ride.

but i’ve always enjoyed rollercoasters. they remind you that you are alive.

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