Hill Slugs Ad Hoc, Saturday, 2 January

31 December 2015

Wow! Hey! Brr! Winter on Saturday!

We'll keep it short -- something in the 40 mile neighborhood. Meet at the Hopewell Administration Building on Main Street, across from Ingleside, in Pennington, for a 10:00 a.m. start.  Extra-milers can start with me from my house at 9:30 a.m. Please let me know if you're doing the extra miles and if you want coffee with that.

London Lights, Part Five

 Near the British Museum, Bloomsbury, London

28 December 2015

Today is our last day in London. After sorting out our seats for tomorrow's flight home (it's now mandatory that one stop whatever one is doing 24 hours before one's flight in order to check in and pick seats), we hopped a bus to Bloomsbury.

The British Museum is like the Met in NYC, only free. So we went back in and randomly chose the oldest part of the collection, which was once King George III's library of books and curiosities. There was plenty of Greek pottery, a few clocks,  a giant marble toe, and various other odd things that kept us busy for a few hours. Only towards the end did I find things worthy of blog photography.

This is a boxwood carving that stands at about eight inches tall:

Two of London's best surviving book stores are in Bloomsbury: Skoob (at the Brunswick Center) and Judd (north of the museum). Both were open today (a lot wasn't because today is one of England's many seemingly random "bank holidays"), so we nosed around there for a while.

The top of Saint Pancras (Pancreas) station (now also a hotel), not carved from boxwood, and slightly bigger than eight inches:

And, finally, one more for the collection of holiday lights: Carnaby Street.

So, that's it for my ten days in London in 2015. It's time to pack up the little tree, stuff the Hobnobs and bags of candy into suitcase corners, and try to zip the thing shut.  In a few years' time, I'll try to remember all of this, scratch my head, and say, "When was that? 2015?" Then I'll remember the Colnago and say, "Definitely 2015."

London Lights, Part Four: Kew Gardens

Kew Gardens

27 December 2015

The Victoria and Albert Museum is a strange place. The focus is on textiles and decorative arts. We didn't spring for tickets to the shoe exhibit. Instead we spent a few hours looking at baroque furnishings from Europe from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It's not really my thing, but it's not not my thing either. It beats paintings of naked angels.

There was this:

And a flask that requires the drinkers to go mouth-to-mouth with a deer:

A work by Chihuli hangs in the main entrance:

In the evening we met up with PDaniel and went to Kew Gardens for "Christmas at Kew." I was expecting more of a standard lit tree experience than the let's-see-what-else-we-can-do-with-LEDs experience.

It was all outdoors. Much of it involved lights that changed colors faster than I could focus on them.

At the entrance to the path:

The greenhouse:

Along the path:

Trees lit from below (we got closer later):

The land of the singing gumdrops: Each tree tracked with a choral voice. One or two appeared to be mute.

Lit from the ground:

These changed color too:

Fire on the ground, and a creepy sun face (all sun faces are creepy):

The pointy things again:

This tree was interactive, the colors changing as kids turned cranks:

Finally, a static display, and my favorite of the evening:

Snowdrops and crocuses (and, by the way, PDaniel informed us that no, daffodils don't normally bloom here in December):

Fountains:

Moon in mist (real, not a display):

The entrance tower again, different pattern: