My Apprentices

I dropped off my younger brother and sister to the Birmingham airport this morning so they could catch their flight to Boston via Amsterdam. They arrived about 12 days ago and boy, if ever there were 'house cats' these 2 are them. They are not the type to travel outside of their element for too long. It is funny how siblings can be raised in the same environment but be so different than each other.

I am not hating on them for not liking the food in the UK as the pickings are definitely slim when it comes to locating great food but these 2 had issues almost everywhere we went even while on the continent. If it wasn't McDonald's or pizza they were looking at it as if it was meant to eat them and not the other way around.


We were able to acquire cheap flights to Frankfurt Hahn and then make our way across to Paris before flying out of Charles de Gaulle airport on this past Wednesday night. As well I took them to Stonehenge and briefly stopped through Salisbury and Bath since we drove all that way to see rocks in the middle of an English field.

I have previously written about my experiences with Ryanair and this one-way flight to Frankfurt Hahn was probably the worst flight experience I have had with Ryanair. It seems we were fortunate to be in the midst of a stag party en route to somewhere and they were just plain out of control on board and the flight crew did nothing but facilitate them in getting even drunker on an 11AM flight.

We landed at Hahn and caught a bus to Luxembourg city where my firstborn son lives with his mother and stayed there in a hostel for 3 nights. I had never stayed in a hostel before as I believe they would disagree with me. In fact unlike my sister and brother I have never even been inclined to see a scary movie that involved a hostel so my expectations were pretty low.

They should have been lower. Really. Much lower.

I do not ask for much from a hotel when I stay in one. I mean clean linen/towels, an electrical outlet to charge my phone and laptop and decent shower. I can deal without TV/cable, a refrigerator or a nice view. This hostel had none of these things except clean sheets. And we had to go fetch those from reception. I had to borrow some towels from my son's mother because the hostel charged for them. They also charged for soap and I am really surprised they didn't charge for toilet paper although I am sure they tried but realized it was to the benefit of their cleaning staff to not do so.


The 'shower' was especially noteworthy for its terribleness. I have been in rain storms that got me wetter than this little spout coming out of the wall in the bathroom. And even better was the squeegee you had to use afterwards to steer the water on the floor towards the drain. Or maybe the the best part was that the bathroom lights worked on a motion detector and when you closed the cloth curtain to enclose you in the corner the lights would magically go off making you wave your hand outside the curtain trying to get the lights to switch on. You decide.


Anyway Luxembourg is a really cool city to explore and in my view maybe the most underrated capital city in all of western Europe. I wore them out with a lot of walking up gorges and down valleys and my brother got really cool blisters because he thought it would be gangsta to wear some heavy Timberland boots.


We took a short train ride to the nearby German city of Trier as my brother felt like he was missing something from the last time he was there and I stopped by there. Apparently he was. The crowd of people was especially strong for some reason on this particular Saturday and all the Germans seemed to be competing in an event to see who could irritate us the most by stopping in front of us or creating a wall of humans walking at a snail's pace.


They succeeded fairly quickly as my brother takes to people about as well as British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith takes to answering questions about her husband's taste in pornos.

We left Luxembourg train station on a TGV train heading to Paris on Monday afternoon and made it to Gare de l'Est in slightly more than 2 hours. I had booked a hotel in the area near Jardin Luxembourg on the south side of the river Seine and after staying in a hostel it seemed like a chateau.


My brother seems to have this notable ability to act as a magnet for weirdos. He was approached by one particular nutter who seemed to admire his aggression and made some gorilla motions while using both his hands to indicate on himself that my brother had huge nuts. And the guy who was in the middle of the subway train with a bag full of the type of stuffed dolls you win at carnivals. He had characters ranging from Superman to Homer Simpson and was performing a play with them. Unfortunately my French is too poor to understand the storyline between Homer and Pokemon.

We walked around and hit the normal tourist areas for a couple days and I even (for some reason) took them to the one tourist area I have always avoided. The area between Sacre Coeur and Montmarte is particularly seedy. I never get used to seeing sex shops next to the post office.

On a positive note I did have the best pizza I have ever had outside of America. I highly recommend Cafe di Roma on the Champs-Elysees although to eat on that road one must apparently be prepared to part with €14.20 for a 1 liter bottle of Pepsi. On a plus note they did give us some ice for free.


We eventually got tired of the bad weather and headed to the airport early for the 2100 flight to Birmingham on FlyBe.

And then I had to deal with the fish incident... Seems there are as many nutters in Birmingham as there is in Paris.

Something's Fishy!!

I have been away from Birmingham for a few days because my little brother and sister are visiting from America and I took them to Germany, Luxembourg and France.

I was planning to write about that tonight until one of the weirdest things to ever happen to me occurred today.

First off I must tell you that I have been borrowing a friends car for a month or so while I have been trying to get finance for a new car. It is a decent beater that gets us from A to B and helps me to stay true my American heritage and remain free from utilizing public transport.

So last night my wife picked the 3 of us up from Birmingham airport and when I kicked her out of the driver's seat I smelled a faint odor. Or at least I think I did. I didn't pay much attention to it as it was that faint. Maybe my wife had a tuna fish sandwich before she picked us up.

So today I had an appointment at Barclays in Small Heath and when my brother, sister and I got in the car I smelled a stronger smell of fish but thought that maybe it was the surrounding area. We drove over to Barclays and they stayed in the car while I was jerked around in Barclays. When I came back outside and opened the driver's side door the smell overpowered me. It smelled worse than 8 cans of shark shit.

I quickly came to the conclusion that there was some dead animal inside the car or in the engine bay. It smelled like fish but it had to be a rat because there are some serious sized rats around here and I am no where near any water.

So we pop the hood and find this...




Yes, indeed that is a 10" gutted silver fish sitting on the manifold of a Vauxhall.

I have no idea how it got there. I called up the guy I am borrowing the car from and he confirmed that I have the only key to the car. There is no spare key. So just how this now half cooked fish got there will be a mystery that is probably never solved.

My New Problem

And the poor get poorer...

I shut down my laptop this morning to take it with me while I was on the go and there was absolutely nothing wrong with my screen. I pull out my laptop to look at something and find a white 6" by 4" rectangle box illegally occupying the bottom right hand corner of my screen.

I am not that upset because the way things have been going for me lately I am accustomed to things going from bad to worse. But at the same time I am perplexed to how it occurred. My laptop was at my side for my short walk and went through no traumatic events that would make incur its wrath.

But now I open my laptop and half the screen is now white. It has gotten much worse. And when I pressed on the back of the screen it got slightly better but obviously that is not a long term solution.

Mac shop; (in the Bullring) here I come....

BBC2 wants me to grow my own drugs! UPDATE!

I have an update to the post that has brought much traffic to my blog in the recent weeks that you can find here!

I received the hops and lavender pillow that I ordered from eBay in the mail yesterday and was quite curious as to how it would work on me. I paid a total of £7 for the pillow and the shipping which seemed worth it to me considering that it was ready-made to use as opposed to trying to source hops and lavender and a small pillow to put in.

Once I opened the small package the scent of lavender was immediate to myself and anyone who walked into the room even though the pillow was still sealed in a small plastic covering.

When I was contemplating going to lay down I busted it open and kept it in front of me to see what the effects would be and I can say after maybe 5 minutes I started yawning... Frequently. I would yawn maybe every 30 to 45 seconds in fact. Then after another 10 minutes my eyes were very heavy and I had to fight to keep them open.

But then after a few more minutes the yawning and heavy eyes was not so constant. I now felt mildly tired and stayed awake for maybe another hour or laying down on my living room carpet. I then decided to go lay down in bed and brought the small pillow upstairs with me wondering how long I would lay in bed as at this point it was perhaps 90 to 120 minutes before I would normally fall asleep.

I estimate I was sleeping within 10 to 15 minutes of having the black bag underneath my chin as I lay on my side. Tonight I will try using the pillow only when I lay down in bed and not before and post write here on this post how that worked out.

Here is a photo of the pillow next to my passport so you can have a proper perspective regarding how actual size of it.

In the News

When I write of the events of the past almost 10 years I try to write about them during the same month or week that they occurred years prior. A month like March is particularly hard to write in because I can remember so few things occurring in this month. Thinking about that maybe this is because I generally do not like the month of March. There are no holidays during March and generally the weather is still cold and wet and you are just waiting for the winter to end.

So with that I give you this...

Finn creates USB 'finger drive'

A Finnish computer programmer who lost one of his fingers in a motorcycle accident has made himself a prosthetic replacement with a USB drive attached.

Jerry Jalava uses the 2GB memory stick, accessed by peeling back the "nail", to store photos, movies and programmes.

The finger is not permanently attached to his hand, so it can be easily left plugged into a computer when in use.

Mr Jalava says he is already thinking about upgrading the finger to include more storage and wireless technology.


"I'm planning to use another prosthetic as a shell for the next version, which will have removable fingertip and RFID tag," he wrote on his blog, ProtoBlogr.net.

Half of Mr Jalava's left ring finger had to be amputated last summer after he crashed into a deer while riding his motorbike near Helsinki.

He says he was inspired to create the unique storage device when doctors treating him joked that he should have a USB "finger drive" after finding out that he was a software developer.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/7949018.stm

Published: 2009/03/17 16:45:05 GMT

© BBC MMIX

Mind the Gap?

I went to a new dentist's office this morning looking to get a tooth fixed that a filling fell out of a few years (yes, I did say years) back. I mind was already made up before going inside that I was probably going to have the tooth pulled but I was interested in perhaps having the tooth saved if possible.

I had gone to a dentist to have it repaired not long after I arrived in Birmingham but was told by the dentist that it would first needed a root canal. I have had one root canal before in my life and like most people, enjoyed it about as much as one would enjoy a person sticking toothpicks down into a hole they made in your tooth.

I do not have a bad history with dentists just the methods they utilize to numb pain. I typically require the highest level of local anesthesia allowed legally to a human being and yet I still feel the drill. Once while under general anesthesia having my wisdom teeth removed while in the military (I wanted a few days off) I woke and sat up in my chair scaring the dentist out of his seat.

So the first dentist I went to a while ago couldn't get very far because the pain was too intense. He gave me a prescription for some horrible tasting antibiotics and I never returned but he did put a temporary filling in.

So last Friday I woke up with a bubble on my gums underneath where the said tooth is located and decided that as I will be traveling this week maybe I should have it looked at... And probably pulled.

So I looked on Yell.com for a dentist in the area that could offer general anesthesia or nitrous oxide because I am a scared little girl when it involves drills inside my mouth and found one not to far away in Edgbaston. I called asked if they accept NHS patients and was told much to my surprise by reception that they did. An appointment was made for Monday morning.

I left the house early with my wife because I knew that there would be forms to fill out and what not and because I had a feeling I would be behind a truck that would slam into a white van and so it was. We arrived at the dentist's surgery about 20 minutes before my appointment and I filled out my forms.


I was seen by the dentist only a few minutes late and had my tooth looked at. The options where then laid out to me and I was told that it would cost £300 to perform the root canal and cap it with a porcelain filling. I was quite taken aback by these words as I was told that they accepted NHS patients and after a long conversation that I couldn't be bothered to repeat found out that they do 'accept' NHS patients but that they only accept NHS payment for certain treatments.

And root canals nor porcelain fillings are included. But the anesthesia and the tooth extraction are.

Is £300 worth not having a gap in the back of my mouth?

All Greek'd Up

Tonight I went out to a Greek restaurant here in Birmingham named Zorba's to eat with my wife and children. I found them on the Internet and decided that we would give it a shot.

The exterior of the restaurant was beautiful and stood out from the buildings around it like a rose blossoming from a crack on the sidewalk of Birmingham. I cannot recall seeing any shopfront like it in all of the 4 years I have been in Birmingham. Perhaps it was due to the lighting showcasing the shop in the night but it was very impressive.

Too bad that was the best the place had to offer.

The interior was better than average but slightly conflicting between traditional Greek and Victorian era architecture. In the main dining room it had Victorian style chandeliers and other ceiling fixtures but ostentatious Greek art and drawings on the walls. In a side dining room that we ate in the decor was cool and very much in tune with the outside of the restaurant but the white Xmas lights flashing kind of made it look a little tacky.


We were given menus and took out time looking over them as we waited for our drinks. The starter menu was more expansive than the main course for some reason and when I think of Greek food I am sorry but lasagna and rigatoni are not up there at the top. We ended up ordering 4 starters and just nibbling on them between us.

We ordered one of my favorite salads named Caprese, an assortment of Greek sauces including Tzaziki and hummus, and a few other dishes. None of them were particularly any good and only the sauces and fresh pita bread with Haloumi cheese was really any good. A plate of Calamari rings tasted like something I could buy frozen from the supermarket and cook at home on my own. In fact most of the starters were like that.

I think they over-charged me as well. I guess the moral of the experience can be summed up in 3 words.

Book, judge and cover.