The CD Says it All

Since Martha and Kevin visited close to Nick's birthday, they took the opportunity to remind him of the musical dominance of the land he left behind. They made this CD, which reminds us all in bold red, white, and blue glory of what the A really stands for =). From The Presidents of the United States 'peaches' song to 'the boss' screaming 'Born in the USA' it's American hit after hit. It's nice we now have a soundtrack for our July 4th 'Independence Day' BBQ!

mm, mm roadkill

The funniest moment of my week:

I was riding with the two Ollies (IE’s two directors are both named Oliver) to my first client meeting, and the second Ollie (not of Ollie and Claire) turned to me and said, “The greatest thing happened this morning!” I was expecting a big sale, or maybe something related to his family. But no: “I picked up a deer!”

“You WHAT?”

“I picked up a deer! It’s my first one: it was in the middle of the road, freshly killed, nice size. It’s in the boot (trunk) of my car.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“Skin it and eat it. I can’t wait! I can’t take it home until tomorrow night, though.” (and yes, that means the deer sat in the car for two day. Gulp.)

Although initially repulsive, the image of Ollie in his Savile Row hand-tailored suit, loading a big deer into his small boot, is hilarious. Nick and I came up with these taglines for this moment:

“Savile Row suits: as individual as you are.”

“Brits are taking sustainability to whole new levels.”

I also have to note that before this moment I thought "eat roadkill" was only a punchline to "You might be a redneck if you..."

Endnote: Nick is a big proponent of finding pictures to go with our blog, but I thought this time I would spare you the search results of “photos: roadkill to dine for”!

Look, ma, a real job!

Big news at Casa Burdette: the consulting gig has turned out even better than I could have hoped and I’ve been offered a full-time position with IE Design Consultancy!

IE is an exciting, dynamic company of 16 that offers “brand strategy, design delivery and digital solutions,” or in laymen’s terms branding, graphic design work, website development. It’s a really creative environment, with a ping pong table right in the main work area! IE was started 12 years ago by Ollie, of our very good friends Claire and Ollie. The company has exploded in size in the last two years from four or five employees to 16.

We’re calling my role ‘Value Stream Manager’. The job will be split between project manager of larger projects and managing internal improvement efforts. There is a real need for my particular skill set. In the past, with a smaller company and smaller projects it didn’t matter that there was not a high level of project management or focus on standardizing processes. Now, though, they are winning larger projects and experiencing some growing pains. It feels like such a great match to me, and I am thrilled at the opportunity to make a real difference! They've already won a huge project, partly sold by emphasizing their professional approach and 'new full-time project manager.'

I start full-time April 16. In the meantime, I am wrapping up the consulting phase with them and with John, my other client. I’ll also be taking about a week and a half off to enjoy Mom’s visit, starting this Sunday! Life is really great at the moment, and light-years different from the long 'autumn of our discontent,' or something like that.

BJ and Katrina do England

As we continue to try to catch the blog up with our life (it’s currently about 2.5 weeks behind), here’s a post about our second visitors of the year: our pastor and his wife from Pittsburgh BJ and Katrina!

In an amazing display of smooth-talking skill, BJ managed to convince his Missiology professor at seminary that rather then taking a final in his class, he should be allowed 2 weeks to go to England and visit with churches there to see how they are doing church and mission in what is a much more secular culture than America. Freed from his need to take a final, BJ and Katrina high-tailed it over here and spent about 6 days with us in Birmingham meeting with people and doing some site-seeing, then went down to London for another week.

It was great to have them here and we had a blast showing them our friends and church here, English pub life, and some sweet castles and cathedrals, Olde Worlde style. We took a day and went out by train to Coventry, which is known for its cathedral that was destroyed in WWII and rebuilt in the 50’s. Kenilworth Castle is just a bus ride away, so we went there as well, on a very English (cold and rainy) morning. We have some pics of their visit here.

BJ posted a few other pics of their trip on his blog too.

Happy Birthday, Nick!

Today Nick hits the quarter-century mark! In typical Nick fashion, he made his own double-layer cake yesterday, and we are cooking dinner for friends tonight. The celebration started when Martha and Kevin were here and we went to a premiere league ‘football’ game (SO exciting!) and will hopefully continue tomorrow night when we go out to celebrate just the two of us.

This is one of my favorite days of the year, as I think about everything that Nick is. He is kind and caring and makes everyone feel special, hilarious and playful and still a kid at heart, deep, sensitive, smart AND wise, passionate (especially when it comes to bridges!), a wonderful friend and an amazing husband.

Life here gets better and better, and we are feeling more at home, but it’s still lonely spending a birthday away from friends and family, so if you get a chance, share some birthday wishes!

Nick's Olympic Site Visit

Last week I had one of my coolest days of work since I started: A paid sight-seeing day in London! Well, ok, the 'sites' were pretty much the future Olympic Park I am working on and I had to act like it was all business, but I was there with my camera and tube map like any tourist. We got to go up a tall building to the official London 2012 observation deck, where I took the following picture of the industrial waste of East London.

Before

And here is what we have 5 years to make it into:

After?

I think changing the sky to blue might be the hardest part. Anyway it is a really exciting project and it was fun to go down and get a sense for the grand scale of it all. Since we didn't have to meet at the site till noon, I even had time to go to the recently developed Paddington Basin, near its namesake station. This area has a couple of amazing moving pedestrian bridges that are more art than bridge, most notably the famous 'rolling' bridge. I snapped a few photos with a friend and posted them here.

All in all, a gold-medal-winning day! That was horrible. What a bad way to end a blog post.

Manchester

The next stop on our recent sight-seeing blitz of England was a day in Manchester with our friend Anthony from Pitt. Anthony works for a company in Pittsburgh setting up really complicated testing devices, and gets to do a bit of international traveling for his job. When we found out he was working near Manchester, we thought it would be a great chance to get another English city under our belt.

Like most northern English cities, Manchester has gone through some rough times in the last 30 years, but (so a few websites claimed) really woke up when an IRA bomb went off there in the early 90’s and got moving with an urban regeneration scheme. Today there are tons of new buildings and commercial districts in the city centre, and the city commissioned a number of sweet pedestrian bridges to really help the tourism industry out (or at least bridge tourists like me).

We took the train to Manchester Piccadilly station, which was a fun experience in itself. High-speed Virgin Pendolino trains just recently began running on the British rail network, and they are pretty slick. They have about 125mph top speed, and to avoid slowing down on the turns that were designed for 1870's trains, they actually lean into the turn. The whole train rotates imperceptibly, but sometimes you will look out the window and only see sky or only see grass. It's a very advanced system, and it cuts journey times down a lot. It only took 1.5 hours from Birmingham to Manchester.

After meeting Anthony in town, we headed to the Manchester United Stadium, where a game was playing that day. We were early for the game crowds, so we went into the stadium museum to see all of the (hundreds) of trophies won over the years. Then it was off to a newly developed part of the city, near the Imperial War Museum for lunch and a tour of the museum. We finished the day walking around the arts and cultural district to the north, and getting dinner down in the recently-converted canal district. At 9 we said goodbye to Anthony and hopped the train back home. We were exhausted, but for a one-day trip, we did a pretty good job taking in the sights and sounds of the city. We would definitely recommend it for any future visitors to England. You can check out some of our pictures from the trip here.

The Gilmour Girl

Laura had emailed us near the beginning of January to see what the middle of February looked like for us. We told her no one was coming then and that we’d love for her to visit. We didn’t hear back from her for a bit, and figured she couldn’t make it. Imagine, then, our happy surprise when she emailed about a week before her flight to see if that would still work for us! She flew in Saturday, February 9^th and stayed for just under a week.

Laura was here for the worst of British weather. She arrived the day after the big snow storm, and the entire week was cold and raining. A lot. At least it was authentically English! To add to the warm welcome of her first day, Nick and I both had pretty bad colds. We figured it would be alright because she’d just want to sleep her first day, but she was ready to hit the ground running Saturday morning! I think Nick and I went to bed before her that night – I don’t know how she does it!

Despite our illness and the terrible weather, we had an amazing time. We did mundane things, like grocery shopping, cooking dinner, and singing along to very random songs together, and more exciting things like great day trips, eating table-sized naan, and drinks at the ‘famous’ Jam House. I only worked one of the days she was here, so we were able to ride trains around the countryside together. As our first American visitor to come specifically to visit us, she was the guinea pig for communal living and random day trips, most of which turned out well! We visited:
· Wolverhampton – don’t ever go! Although the museum has some sweet clothes to dress up in, that’s all there is to see.
· Stratford – a must for anyone who’s read Shakespeare or has a penchant for quaint English villages
· Kenilworth and Coventry – amazing castle ruins and a beautiful cathedral. Highly recommended, just be sure to dress warmly!
· Oxford – Laura did this one on her own; highly appropriate since she’s from Oxford, PA!

If you haven’t yet, check out the rest of the pictures for a full view. Next up? Meeting Mitri in Manchester….

We’re back!

February flew by at the Hotel Burdette, and we have a brief break in the action for a blog post or two. To those of you who gave up on the blog over the last three weeks…well…I guess you’re not reading this anyway, so I’m not sure why I am addressing you. To those who stuck with us, 'Ta for that' and read on.

Since the last post, the snow has melted, I have not had a proper snowball fight with my South Indian friend, two sets of guests have come and gone, new cities have been visited, sweet bridges photographed, and job offers made. In short, it has been a crazy February.

We’ll try to step through events in some more detail, and I’ll start with our first guest in England: Laura! Laura came for a week in mid-February, when the forecast was 10 days of straight rain, possibly the most authentically English week here yet. We made a ton of day trips, some better than others, and have a jolly good time. Laura did us a big favor by labeling and posting her trip pictures (208 of them) here already, but we figured to put up a few more to satiate our photo-sharing impulses. Check out our crazy pics here.