Day 1, June 4, 2015 - Arriving in London

The tour company calls June 3 Day 1, but come on, i left DC late in the afternoon and all i did was fly. That's not day 1, that's getting to day 1. But okay, I'll put up a picture anyway, since it was my first time seeing New York City from the air. I had no idea how huge it was.

the flight was an overnight one, I did not sleep at all. It wasn't that bad, I had plenty of entertainment along.

June 4 is the real Day 1. So we're making our descent toward Heathrow and I manage to get these two amazing shots:

Okay, so that's Windsor castle.

I land and wait to go through customs until Karen & her gang from Belle Glade arrive. Little did I know how huge Heathrow is... I was very fortunate that they came in at the same terminal. I would have been waiting awhile had they not.

It took some time to get everyone together at the airport. Our group had 5 kids and 6 adults and our big group was a busload, 49 of us total (including our driver and tour guide John). we had 2 groups from New Orleans area schools and one from Utah. As we would come to find out, we could not have handpicked a better group. The kids got along great, the adults were cool... 

The Utah kids ended up delayed until the next day, but the rest of us went to the hotel and dropped off our stuff, John marched us to the rail station and we went into the city. Did A LOT of walking around and after dinner most of us went to see Wicked at the King's Cross Apollo Victoria Theater. 

Cody, Jaxson, Kirsten, Eric & Benny, aka "Florida" as in "FLORIDA'S HERE" whenever we regrouped.

Our first dinner... the rest of Florida... the backs of those heads belong to Jayna, Frances and Angee, across the table is Marc & Karen.

I don't look tired at all... right?

My Amazing Journey

I'm going to try to get this done in a timely manner... late in the summer of 2014, after seeing my sister Karen's photo album from her trip to Europe with my nephew (also known as her son) Matthew, I decided I was going on that trip when Eric (my nephew, also known as her son) went. I had not yet committed until my boss was kind enough to officially grant me the time off when i finally got up the nerve to ask. That was November. It seemed like it took forever at first, but then all of a sudden it was May and my trip wasn't very far off.

I'm writing this from my travel diary, and posting some of my pictures so as to share my experience. I decided to keep a diary since i can't remember anything from one minute to the next, and since i made that decision, I figured I'd put my to do, to buy, to pack lists in the diary... and a few weeks before I left, I also recorded some of my thoughts, most of which went like this:  "HOLY COW, only (fill in the blank) days until i leave for Europe, EEK!"

I will try to keep this all concise. TRY being the operative word. Since it is late, for now, i will just post this one picture. My anal-retentive self had to be prepared, JUST IN CASE... (a friend commented, "are you planning to go to jail or something?")

today my heart broke in half

i have an amazing niece... actually, i have a lot of amazing nieces... and nephews, but liz is special.

The amazingly wonderful and beautiful offspring of Ken and Robin Holthouse:  Ashley, Kate, Liz, Rob, Emily
Photo stolen (borrowed!) from Ashley

to me, liz is what you'd get if you managed to bottle pure joy.

liz has special needs due to a condition called hydrocephalus which went undiagnosed for 18 months until she started having seizures. liz is 18 now and today she had to present her senior project, a documentary she made with the help of her amazing parents and her extraordinary siblings, ashley, emily, rob and katie. some things i didn't know before i watched this.

Normal on the Outside

liz's seizures take things away from her, but not her joy, and certainly not the joy she gives me.

watching this video, i learned that liz has trouble making and keeping friends. i actually had the nerve to be shocked. i didn't know. i never suspected. and it makes her sad. OF COURSE IT MAKES HER SAD. i have reaped the rewards of having liz in my life and never really thought much about the parts of her life i don't see. and that just kills me.

liz's goal for this project... it's not just about her. she knows other kids are out there who have the same experiences she does. she wants to help them, make life better and happier for everyone. i spent the better part of my day sharing her video with everyone i know. i also watched it about 20 times. "getting it" more every time.

liz is a gift. a really big gift. she did an amazing job on her project. i was also struck by the eloquence and insight of her sisters, not to mention the production quality and skill of brother rob. when exactly did they all become such elegant and talented adults?

listening to liz speak about wishing people would invite her to do things, it made me sad. i feel like i've taken so much from liz and given so little back. i want liz to experience the joy she gives everyone else.

please watch her video. share her video.

big fat w00t!!!!!!!!!!!

my attempts to send these pictures just gave me a headache...

still could not ruin the   B_E_S_T__ D_A_Y__ E_V_E_R_!!!!!!!!!

for more pictures go here (copy/paste if link doesn't work):
www.aboveallohio.com/sher_enterprise

thanks to buckwheat for helping me out.

also, check back here because i was using my puny little free camera from kodak... i took this picture with it through my binoculars, a technique pioneered by my brother steve. that's why it's a little fuzzy.

anyway... check back because i was chatting with two guys next to me that had monster cameras with mile long lenses and they've promised to send me links to their galleries when they get them up.

 B_E_S_T__ D_A_Y__ E_V_E_R_!!!!!!!!!

Pie

i was just reading the cake story. yes i wrote it, and i lived it, so i didn't NEED to read it but i did anyway.

the cake has been dubbed "Red Velvet Fudge," by the way. it was sort of a cross between fudge and a cake, i thought brownie, but it was moister (is that a word?) and denser. and it had a thin layer of almost cakelike somethin' between that and the frosting. it was murle's birthday cake so he cut it. it was super thin so he cut giant slabs, but they were too heavy to lift, so he had to cut them again.

onto the pie... a week later i once again found myself in the kitchen (my own this time) with apple pie on the agenda. there were no incidents... no animals (or humans) were harmed while making the pie. i did not cut myself, bleed on anything, drop anything into anything... there were no crazy metamorphoses (a word?) at any time in the pie making process. no reason to do a pie drawing... and while i do not miss the stress, the confusion, the 37 phone calls to my mom (it only took 4)... smooth sailing does not translate into a good story. i DID get brave and experimental and mixed in some cream cheese, but i didn't notice a difference really. i think i was too meek. it's pointless to experiment if you're so timid about it that you can't even tell the difference.

anyway... i do not anticipate baking again any time soon, the fire department can stand down, go home, see their families. move along folks, nothing to see here...

(for pete's sake, could someone leave a comment for once?)

the great cake adventure

so last night i had a cake to bake. and i am housesitting at a friend's this week. turns out that's essential to my story.

i went to the store, bought what i needed and went to their house and started assembling. alright, where does angel keep her mixer?... hmmmm

after ransacking the kitchen not once but twice (i found beaters which gave me hope... false hope) i called mom. there was also no whisky thing, so i resolved to use the blender.

my mom was afraid it would break it down too far. of course i had no idea what that mean, but i tried not to "over mix" it. which i never really knew you could do. i put all the liquids and eggs into the blender, got as much of the eggshell out as i could, and then added the dry stuff, stirring it in first of course. DUH (i'm pretty good at this after all!)

so the only instructions i didn't really follow were beat on low for 30 seconds, then on medium for two minutes. the blender only has high, higher and holy cow that's fast... and i also had a tiny delay getting it into the oven after mixing. the instructions said to put it into the oven IMMEDIATELY... except for i was making tater tots.

of course tots bake at 425. and while i had sychronized cake readiness and tot completion perfectly, i had to let the oven cool down. my mom said just turn it down and leave the door open for a minute (she's very smart).

so instead of "immediately" putting the cake in, it was a minute before i did (i swear it wasn't more than a single minute) but, by then the cake batter was doing funny things and the color was kinda funky... like tie dye and swirls and stuff. i put it in the oven anyway and went to play video games because i do not have video games at my house.

after a bit i thought perhaps i should check on it...

somehow, even though the pan was level when i put the cake in the oven, and the batter was level in the pan, and the pan remained level when i went to look at it...

in one corner of the pan, the batter had gone out... like the tide. i found it between two other corners, where a giant mound had grown. it was like i baked a balloon under there... or a groundhog... but like a baby ground hog because it was big but not THAT big.

here's a terrible picture i drew of it, since i didn't take a photo.


i let it bake some more and the mound shrunk a little, so i let it go a little longer and took it out of the oven and let it sit.

it all fell down.

i cut a tiny piece off one of the sides and tasted it. not bad, seemed moistish... so i let it cool, put it in the freezer after half an hour because the instructions that i love so much say that's what to do to make it easier to frost... so i went back to mario brothers... for 3 hours. (now you know why i don't have video games in my house)

when i took it out of the freezer, it had shrunk away from all the sides about 3/4 of an inch... it also shrunk away from air. so now it's about an inch thick and flopping around in the pan like a dead fish... i didn't know what else to do so i frosted it. (i used extra in the one corner, to make it look even.)

well, now that it's frosted, it weighs like 180 pounds. i dislocated my shoulder getting it to my car... and now the tires on that side look a little flat.

and of course i am going to serve this cake to my friends without a word of warning.

i'll post the list of survivors tomorrow.

beans beans

so i'm out to dinner with my family... nothing fancy... might have been an applebees, definitely not a denny's but other than that, hard to say. either way, i found myself in desperate need of the restroom.

so, in i go.

i'm there, doing my business, minding my own business, when i notice dripping and a small growing puddle on the floor in front of me, right under the door. i raise my gaze and see that the drops are dripping from the bottom of the door. glancing higher, i see that the drops that are dripping are coming from the slime that is slithering... down the inside of my door. ew

and then i recognize... baked beans. really? what is going on in here?

i look all the way up, and there, hanging her head over the top of the stall door, is a giraffe. poor thing is spewing baked beans like niagra falls, right into my bathroom stall. why? who knows, but i feel sorry for the poor girl, she's obviously sick as a dog and my heart goes out to her...

and then i feel a drop

kind of a plop

more like a splotch

on one foot
then the other

and i look down and BY THE HAMMERS OF GRABTHAR AND MANOLO BLAHNIK!!!!!!! giraffe-puked baked beans are splashing all over my BRAND NEW JIMMY CHOO LOAFERS!!!!!!!

...

and THAT is when i realized it was a dream. jimmy choo doesn't make loafers.