so, i lied about the time pressure -- well, not really... i just put in another £ (that's about $1.60 to us american folk) and so i have some more time. did you see that?? i got to use a "£" sign easily. it's quite annoying you see, this british keyboard -- the "£" sign is where the 'shift 3" key is. then the "@" is where the quotation mark should be, and the quotation mark is where the @ is. confusing? there's also an extra key before the return key... so my pinky can't reach over that easy -- i'm not quite sure what extra keys are on here, but somehow there's an extra place for them. that's nuts.

cheerio from jolly old england!! here i am in my hotel lobby using the 'net. london has been beautiful... the sun has been out and the breeze a'blowin' -- quite nice weather. we have done a TON of walking yesterday and today... tomorrow we're leaving for a trip to dover, canterbury and leeds castle. then we catch a night train to scotland for two days... back to london then off to paris. phew! hope the weather continues to be this nice for the rest of the trip.

must go -- i've bought 10 minutes and i can see the little bar dwindling down... pressure!! hope the usa is doing fine -- i haven't seen the news since i got here.

in case you didn't hear me the first dozen times, i'm going to london, scotland and paris for two weeks. i'm done with packing and ready to get this show on the road. by this time tomorrow... uh, i'll be about three hours into my seven hour flight across the atlantic. i've got this feeling i'm forgetting something -- but as long as i've got my passport, credit card and plane ticket -- i'm good to go.

goodbye for two weeks -- quidnunc.org will be back in full force after june 4th. cheerio and au revoir!

i just realized that by the time i get back from my trip i will have traveled (whether by plane, train or automobile) close to nine thousand miles in the time span of one month. and, i'm not done... boy, i'm already tired. :)

i mentioned, sunday, that i visited the titanic artifact exhibit. at the beginning of the exhibit, you are handed a card with the name of an actual passenger and at the end you find out whether they died or survived the sinking. i received the name: mrs. john jacob astor (madeleine force astor). i had wanted to research the name and see if i could find anything out about the woman. well, turns out i got a pretty good name -- one that was actually mentioned in the movie "titanic." i found the info on a site comparing the real facts with the movie's facts:

"John Jacob Astor was a real person. There was a big scandal going on at the time, because John Jacob Astor, a millionaire in his late 40s, had married an 18-year-old girl who was already pregnant with his child. This scandal is mentioned in the movie.

In real life, John Jacob Astor tried to get into a lifeboat with his wife, Mrs. John Jacob Astor (Madeleine Force), saying that she was "in a delicate condition". However, he was ordered off the boat by Second Officer Charles Herbert Lightoller.

In real life, the 18-year-old wife of John Jacob Astor survived and gave birth to the child, whom she named John Jacob Astor V. His estate gave her an endowment of $5,000,000, on the condition that she never remarry. Years later, she did remarry and thereby gave up the five million dollars."

today my mom told me i couldn't donate blood any time soon since i lived over in london for more than three months... apparently, i could possibly be carrying mad cow disease. i've never been one to volunteer for blood donations, so i'm not very bummed.

today i visited titanic the artifact exhibit at the opryland hotel. i hadn't intended on being in nashville, but the titanic enticed me... it was an interesting exhibit -- took about an hour and half to walk through. it included treasures brought up from the ship, such as jewelry, clothes, bolts, coal, etc...

the best part was probably the very first thing you saw as you walked in -- the bell rung to warn of "iceberg, straight ahead!" next, and most chilling (quite literally) was a rather large chunk of ice sitting in the section of the exhibit devoted to the actual lifeboat (or not) portion of the ship's journey. it was to show you how cold the water was that the passengers were subjected to -- you were supposed to hold your hand on the ice for as long as you could stand (for me about 5 seconds)... the point being, that the water was actually several degrees colder than that. frightening!

the "big" deal of the exhibit was the two ton portion of the ship that was brought up on the last journey down -- in 94, i think -- it was neat to see, but honestly not all that impressive since it just looked like a big chunk of metal with some holes drilled in it and places for portholes.

when i entered the exhibit, i was given a card with the name of an actual passenger and their class on the boat. women are given womens' names and men given mens'. i received the name of a first class woman. anyway, at the end of the exhibit, there is a wall listing the class sections' passengers -- divided by "survivor" and "lost." my lady's name survived, but her husband did not. my mother's second class name did not survive, nor did her husband. both my dad and brother's names (of third class males) died. that was probably the most impressive -- to actually see a list broken down like that.

jon got me hooked on a show called "good eats"... a highly informative show on cooking, yet entertaining and sometimes strange. a show i'm craving right now, but don't have any to watch. bummer.

this picture looks like a close up of a regular sized computer screen pasted in with a regular sized guy... actually, i saw the ad in the hammacher schlemmer catalogue today. now, who wakes up and feels the need for a computer monitor that big? (and at the low price of $20,000+)

"unlike a flat, one-dimension computer monitor, its hemispherical projection screen encircles the user, blurring the lines between the real and simulated world." yeah, only people in the simulated world would actually own one of these things...

look at my cousin chuck and veni's (who is my oldest cousin) horse.

9 days

for the art, museum and/or rodin freaks (such as myself): i hope i have time to visit the new tate modern while i'm in london. the tate is my favorite of london's plentiful museums, and bonus that rodin's "the kiss" is on display -- which is one of my favorite sculptures of his. i'm planning on visiting the musee rodin while in paris as well, and hopefully getting my fill of rodin before i leave.

in a very non spice girl way... girl power!

there's nothing quite like bacon.

there is a guy who's hitchhiking around the world, and he's keeping an online journal. the concept is rather daring -- first of all, hitchhiking. second, he's hoping for the generosity of online readers to open their homes to him for a night's rest. i don't know how long he's been campaigning for his travels, but he's got a rather long list of invitations already. amazing. i wish i was so adventurous. |via: usr/bin/girl|

the traveler's site listed a few books on, what else, traveling... a couple looked really interesting, so i had to add them to my amazon wishlist. which, by the way, is obnoxiously long.

i bought the book "eating the cheshire cat" by helen ellis yesterday. i've only read the first couple chapters and so far it's... well, interesting. the novel opens with a mother and daughter in the emergency room... 16 year old daughter drunk out of her mind -- with two broken pinky fingers. turns out, old mom broke them in an effort to "straighten" them to perfection.

i know the setting is in alabama (near, around and in tuscaloosa), which is mostly why i have been wanting to read it. from what i understand it chronicles three teenage girls, two of which end up at the university of alabama... where they are encountered with sororities and the greek system's "machine." i'm curious to know more about the "machine" since i've heard about it in passing for a while. hope it's a good read. if nothing else, it's a major break from my standard line-up of the british novels i so adore.

again, another bookmark for me. a good source for a bunch of recipes.

one of my favorite writers on the web, maganda, is writing somewhere else now... (post is solely a bookmark for me.)

congratulations to my friend, lynn, who is getting married today!

"Swiss Post initially mulled plans to issue chocolate-flavoured stamps, but they were dropped for hygienic reasons and because extensive licking could remove the adhesive and cause the stamps to disintegrate."

i wonder if there are people out there who have problems of "extensive licking" with regular stamps. god save self stick stamps...

geez, britain's got foot and mouth, and paris has museum strikes... what in the heck am i supposed to do in europe??

why have my horoscopes been so dead-on accurate for the past month? it's hard to believe those things considering some non-psychic-friends-betty is just sitting at a computer making them up each month... but i swear mine are being written by the gods.

anyway, i'm going to california for two weeks tonight... then i'll return home to get ready for a two week trip to europe. i'm wishing that one day someone will pay me to travel to fun places.