House saga

The house has taken a ridiculously long time, even by English
standards, and we still haven't exchanged contracts. However, we
haven't been spending the time idly. We've been spinning in circles.

The kitchen -- with its 30's era galley, 50's era linoleum, and 80's
era cabinets -- needs to be renovated immediately, and so we talked
about doing a ground-floor extension as well, to give us more space
and light. However, we also mentioned wanting to do a loft conversion
someday, to give us an extra bedroom, and everyone told us to do the
loft conversion first.

The reason is that, in England, you can extend a house by up to 10%
without requiring planning permission, and our local council is
aparently notorius for denying loft conversions. Thus, we should do
the loft conversion first, and then get permission to do the ground
floor extension.

Which is fine, except the kitchen still needs to be renovated
immediately. So we scrapped our original plans and started talking
about what we could do in the original space. The big thing is
knocking down the wall between the kitchen and reception room, and
installing an island, to open it up and give us more counter space.
Saturday I met with an architect, who wasn't particularly helpful.
(She rushed through the house in 10 minutes and then said it would be
"fine.") As Jess put it, this won't be a "wow" factor, it will just
be functional. (It will also be much easier on the finances.)

Here is our current drawing. Of course, this doesn't factor in little
things like type of flooring, countertop, cabinetry, tiling,
appliances, range hood, sink, lighting, electrical points, water
lines, or waste lines. And I don't know what they need to do to take
out a wall. And it's not actually to scale. But other than that,
it's a great plan.

We also need to strip the walls (it is covered in anaglypta, a thick
vinyl wallpaper) and replaster the entire house. While we're at it,
we're going to re-wire the electric, since it looks like that hasn't
been done in 70 years, and then of course we'll need to paint
everything. (No doubt Jess and I will do the painting ourselves,
although I haven't told Jess yet.)

It still won't be until mid-February before we have the keys, so we
have time to get more quotes and line up a contractor but honestly, I
can't wait.

Click to enlarge

Year in review

I started 2010 hating my job, frustrated with England, missing my
family, and struggling with Jessica.  My work permit was expiring in
April and I was seriously considering moving back to California (or
worse, Georgia).

Then in March everything fell into place.  I changed jobs and joined a
real company, with real people and real projects.  Spring came and I
realised how much the winter had been affecting me (in part because
I'd been stuck inside working from home the entire time).  My uncle
got better, which had really been worrying me.  I started And no doubt
in part because of all of the above, Jess and I stopped fighting and
started working together.  And believe me, it was fantastic.

In May, we decided to take the next step: Buy a house together.  By
August, we were despairing of ever finding a place we liked.  London
is full of beautiful houses, all way out of our price range.  What was
affordable were tiny terrace houses on ugly streets and backing onto
railroad tracks.  We must have looked at 100 houses, if not more, and
didn't make a single offer.

In September, things changed again.  First, we got engaged, and did so
on a beautiful clear evening on the banks of the Thames.  Then we
found three -- three! -- houses we liked.  We made offers on all three
and one was accepted.  I told everyone we'd be closed by the end of
November.

Then our financing fell apart, thanks to our idiot mortgage advisor,
and we basically had to start over.  And our solicitor took forever to
do the property searches.  And generally buying a house in England
sucks.  So now it's mid-December and we'll be lucky to close by the
end of January.

But of course that's only half the story, because the property hasn't
been updated since 1978, and the kitchen since the 1960s.  In addition
to the electrical, we want to add a single-story extension to the
back, and create an open plan dining area.  It's going to be lovely,
but it won't be March until we can move in.

In the meantime, we're desperately searching for a wedding venue that
isn't, technically, a wedding venue.  In England, the wedding laws are
pretty bizarre: You can have a Christian ceremony in your local
Anglican church, you can have a Jewish wedding anywhere, or you can
have a civil wedding (like a justice of the peace) at a venue licensed
by the State.  We don't want a Christian wedding, we can't have a
Jewish wedding, and a civil wedding is so rigid, I actually find it
offensive.

So we'll do the civil wedding privately, and have a larger ceremony
for friends and family.  Hence the need for a non-wedding venue.
Obviously we don't have a date yet, but we're looking at May or June.
(I want June 15, as that is the day we met, but Jess is more
pragmatic.)

The rest of the year was rather uneventful, with the exception of
Jessica's new nephew. (Welcome, Asher!)  In August, Jess was going to
visit them in Chicago while I was going to California to visit my
family, but then we were both bumped off our flights (the joys of
traveling standby) and so we spent the weekend in Amsterdam instead.
(Frustratingly, I have a friend in Amsterdam who I've been trying to
see all year -- but when we got there, my phone was dead, so I
couldn't get her phone number, and of course I'd brought a US
converter, not a European one, so I couldn't charge it, and we never
did meet up.)

Otherwise, we just had a few small trips -- New Year's in Wales,
weekends in Paris and Madrid, the Bristol balloon fiesta, and
Edinburgh fringe.  We were planning on spending two weeks in
California over the holidays, but then I got put on a ridiculously
busy project, and won't be able to go anywhere until March.  (Jess, on
the other hand, has already booked a week in the sun with a friend of
hers for January.  Not that I'm jealous or anything.)

So that's my year.  If judged by the difference between the beginning
and the end, it was probably the best year of my life.  (And I'm
looking to break the record next year.)

New year

It's a new year and I have 42 vacation days + 9 holidays. That's almost 2.5 months!!  Do still you wonder why I moved to England?

To be fair, 7 of those were carried over from last year, as I'd planned to spend a couple of weeks in California.  Unfortunately, due to project commitments, I only got to spend 3 days there.  (4 if you count the fact that I missed my plane...again.)

And 10 of those I'm 'buying' as part of 'flex' -- which is kind of like unpaid leave, except I don't pay tax, so somehow I come out ahead.  (I still haven't figured out the tax system here, obviously.)

And 1 of those holidays is for the Royal Wedding, April 29.  Still, 8 holidays isn't bad -- you yanks only get 6, unless you work in government.

Plus 5 weeks vacation here isn't just normal, it's the law!  The basic calculation is 5.6 days x the number of days you work per week, so 5 days per week = 28 days per year.  (That includes public holidays, though.)

So enjoy your 2 week holiday this year, and I'll understand if I get over to see you more than you come over to see me. :-)

Winter 2010, London

Click to play

Pamplamoose

Pomplamoose has got to be my favorite YouTube 'meme.' Their cover songs are fine, but I find their videos oddly irresistable. Maybe it's because music is such a mystery to me, watching it be created is just fascinating. Anyway, they just did a new collaboration which I think is great:



Here's an example of their regular work:

A White Christmas, but at what cost?

Bets are now on that it will be a white Christmas in England, but the severe weather we've been experiencing all month has had quite a toll on the economy:

• On Saturday, only 16 of 650 planes departed Heathrow, stranding 400,000 passengers.  On Sunday, most flights were cancelled, and the airport says it will take 5 days to get back to normal.  However, the next four days are calling for snow, fog, sleet, and rain, all with freezing temperatures. (Jessica is stranded in Chicago, and I wish her godspeed coming home.)
• 20% of trains were delayed or cancelled due to snow.  When I went into central London on Saturday, every tube line had partial closures and/or severe delays.  (Most of the problems were where these trains ran overground.)
• The AA (equivalent of the AAA) reported up to 1,500 hours calls per hour, with 28,000 callouts on Monday, nearly 3 times normal.  Tailbacks (traffic jams) of 6-8 hours on the major highways are not uncommon.
• As England doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving, we also don't have "Black Friday."  The Saturday before Christmas is generally the busiest shopping day of the year, but this year footfall was down 24% over last year, despite the economy improving.

Meanwhile, the UK Transport Secretary said he was "seeking scientific advice to decide whether heavy snowfall was likely to be a regular occurrence in Britain," in order to justify investing in more infrastructure.  Genius.

P.S. Sunday night dropped to 16F (-9C) in London.  That would normally just be an academic fact, as I wouldn't be stupid enough to venture out into that kind of cold.  However, for a long and complicated set of reasons, I had to go out to do some gardening and get a pizza.  Not quite sure what I was thinking.

Why can't all presentations be this cool?

Here are the actual slides.  (37 seem to have been lost.)  Google Docs includes a 'slideshow' option but you can't change the speed -- obviously it was significantly sped up for the video.  Still, very cool.

Life of a blog post

Just to prove I have ADHD, consider this: Yesterday's blog post started with the thought that tea bags contain way too much tea.

A single tea bag can easily produce 3 cups of tea (if judged by color alone).  And it can do so in less than a minute.  Yet I remember from "Angela's Ashes" that the mother steeped the tea leaves for five minutes.  So I wanted to know if tea drinking had changed over the years, but I never found an answer for that.

Instead I got a brief history of tea from the UK Tea Council.  They also included an 'FAQ' with some very interesting facts:
- Per capita, the largest tea drinking nation is Ireland, followed by Britain.  (I'm not sure where China fits on the list.)
- Brits drink 165 million cups of tea per day, compared to 70 million cups of coffee
- 98% of Brits spoil their tea with milk
- All tea comes from the plant, Camellia sinensis (although there are 1,500 varieties of that plant).
- The only difference between green tea and black tea is the amount of oxidation that occurs, which breaks down the tea leaves and turns them black.
- Tea was rationed in the UK during World War II.
- In 1953, Tetley introduced the tea bag.  Today, 96% of tea is from tea bags.

The Tea Council also had a grisly account of tea smugglers that make today's drug cartels seem pretty soft.  It also noted that when William Pitt the Younger reduced the tea tax in 1784, he made up for it by increasing the window tax.  (There was also a brick tax.)

From there, I got to reading about the East India Company, which lost its monopoly in 1834.  Faced with competition in China, it turned its attention to cultivating tea in India, and within 50 years tea imports from India where greater than those from China.

Competition among tea traders also ushered in the 'tea clippers,' fast sailing ships meant to get from London to China as quickly as possible.  They could travel at 20 knots (23 mph), compared to 5-6 knots (6-7 mph) for most cargo ships.  Even so, the return journey took over 3 months, often longer depending on the winds, and when the Suez Canal opened in 1869 -- shaving 7,500 miles from the journey -- they could not compete against the bigger and more reliable steamships.

(I also noted with pride that the clipper ships were pioneered in Baltimore, where they were used to outmanoeuvre the British blockade during the War of 1812.)

1869 was also the year the US trans-contintental railroad was completed, followed the next year by the Indian trans-continental railroad, making the world a much smaller place.  Prior to that, only a handful of people had circumnavigated the globe, with journeys between 2 and 9 years!  In 1873, however, Jules Verne wrote "Around the World in 80 days," which was actually possible.
(The book included an elephant, but the balloon was strictly an invention of the movie.)

It was also interesting that England went from taxing tea as a luxury, to excluding it from sales tax, considering it a necessity.  I tried to find a list of similar items exempted from VAT, but could not find anything consistent, but that led me to another court case in cakes. 

I mentioned years ago that cakes and biscuits were taxed differently (and apparently chocolate-covered biscuits are also taxed differently than regular biscuits) based on a court decision that about Jaffa cakes.  In 2008, Marks and Spencer won a 12-year legal battle with the tax man over their Chocolate Tea Cakes, which were originally classified as chocolate biscuits but have now been reclassified as cake.  The interesting bit, though, was that M&S was allowed to keep the £3.5 million (about US $7 million at the time) refund.

We're talking about tax paid by the consumer -- not by M&S!  So even if the tax shouldn't have been collected, it's not clear why M&S gets to keep it.

As for my original issue, I found there's about a teaspoon of tea in a teabag, there are actually 3 grades of tea bags (whole leaf, fannings (or broken leaf), and dust), and everybody else in the world thinks its disgusting to re-use a tea bag.  I still think it's wasteful, but I'm probably not going to abandon tea bags; I will just start a compost pile at the new house.

Oh, and I found instructions for a tea bag rocket to try at home. I hope Jessica's not reading this.

A lesson to be learned from tea

When tea finally reached England around 1650, the Brits took to it with enthusiam.  However, the East India Company had a government monopoly on imports outside Europe, and so they kept prices artificially high.  In addition, the Crown imposed heavy taxes on this 'luxury import,' starting in 1689 with a near-ruinous 25p per pound!  (It was reduced to 5p per pound 3 years later.)  Even the American colonists had an issue with the taxation on tea.

As a result, by the late eighteenth century, a remarkable organised crime network was importing as much as 7 million pounds annually, compared to a legal import of 5 million pounds!  The cheaper tea ensured it became a drink of the masses, but the illegal tea was not subject to any quality control and so was often adulterated, using leaves from other plants, or leaves which had already been brewed and then dried. If the colour was not right, anything from sheep's dung to poisonous copper carbonate would be added.

In 1784, aware that taxation was creating more problems than it was worth, the government slashed tax from 119% to 12.5%, cutting the cost of tea in half. Smuggling stopped virtually overnight.  (Unfortunately, it was too late for the Americans.)

In 1964, the British government abolished tea duties entirely, and today it is considered so essential it is even exempt from VAT (sales tax).

White Christmas

Of course, a white Christmas in London is defined as a single snowflake falling on the roof of the London Weather Centre in the 24 hours of 25 December.  At least, that's how the bookies define it. The capital has only seen snow on 13% of Christmas days since 1950, but that doesn't stop thousands of people from putting a 'flutter' on it.

Two weeks ago -- before the earliest snow fell in England for 29 years -- the odds of a white Christmas were 6/1, meaning a £100 bet would pay £700.  Today that bet would only return £450.  Today's forecast is for another artic blast, and so the odds will probably drop even further.

You can also bet on the number one song for Christmas.  That is usually the X Factor winner (the equivalent of American Idol), although in the last few years people have conspired against them, buying Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' and Rage Against the Machine.  Unfortunately, this year the conspirators have selected a song of silence -- seriously, a four minute track of musicians in the studio not playing.  While I think that is very English, I also think it doesn't have a snowball's chance of winning.

And if you're a little more adventurous, you can bet that the lowest recorded temperature in England will be beaten, the Thames will freeze over, or that Big Ben will fail to chime due to being frozen solid.  The odds of the latter is 100/1 but, worringly, the odds that the temperature will drop below -26.1C (-15F) are just 16/1.