As a first time visitor to the U.K., and indeed Europe in general, I felt a bit of responsibility to showcase some of the best aspects of the country to Melissa.  Possibly as part vindication of my chosen city of residence, but mostly just because I try to be a good host.

To that end, what could be more English than Afternoon Tea?  The venue was the classical Palm Court in the Langham Hotel, complete with a pianist for the majority of the afternoon.  What more could you want?

When we’d stuffed our faces with more sandwiches, desserts, scones and cupcakes than I care to remember (or will admit to my trainer), it was time for a leisurely walk.  Which didn’t last long it seemed like as good an evening as any to have a bit of a pub crawl on the way home.  Turns out, there are quite a few pubs between Oxford Circus and Tower Hill.  Not to say we visited them all, but enough to make the bus ride home a little blurry.

As usual, there are a few more images in the gallery.

I had a friend visiting this past week from the Homeland (Lethbridge in this case) so it was a busy 6 days of pretending to be a tour guide or tourist depending on my level of familarity with the given outing.  We covered museums, a musical, a bus tour & boat ride, lots of walking and a healthy sampling of London pubs in our time together.  Not to mention the excurisions she handled on her own.  Friday was her last full day here so I took the day off and we wandered through Regent’s Park to the London Zoo.

I had my camera handy for the latter, there’s a few shots here and the rest in the gallery.

It was almost a year and a half ago now when my hosting company upgraded a few things on the backend of my server.  One of their upgrades was to force a new version of WordPress (the blogging software I use here) which broke a lot of the customizations I had made to the old version.  It was largely my own fault as I was making changes to the core of the program and not the templating system that they’d intended users to modify.

The most annoying (and difficult) things that broke was the fact that the site menu structure (the red bar on the right there) had disappeared from the gallery making navigation a pain in that area.  This site uses a combination of the aforementioned WordPress for the framework and Gallery 2 for the photo gallery (and a plug-in called WPG2 to glue the two together).  Using a standard WordPress template will nicely integrate the gallery into WordPress, but not the other way around so I had to do some tinkering to get the WordPress menus to show up correctly while browsing the gallery.

Long story short, the WordPress menu is now available throughout the site and I’m rather pleased about that.  Also, WordPress upgrades should no longer break anything.  I hope.

I haven’t posted many fencing photos in quite a while, but I’m still taking a lot.  They’re now being posted over at my clubs website in the gallery there.

I’m up most mornings to see the sunrise these days, but due to the usual English weather (overcast) and my flats orientation (South West) I don’t get too excited about it.  And as a general rule, I also try to avoid overly complex things at 6am as I often find enough challenge in mundane tasks like opening the milk or heaven forbid, working the kettle.  Bringing my camera out during these sub-human hours is a daunting task, but every now and then I think it’s worth it.

Exhibit A

Just the one today, but the Miscellaneous album for 2010 is open now so I’ve got a place to file all of my disjointed shots at least.

Just testing some social site integration.  In theory, this will post a note to my facebook page as well as my wildly under used and under followed twitter account.

Maybe one day I’ll incorporate my sad, barren flickr account into the site as well, but for now it remains shunned.  Ok, that’s not entirely true.  I still use it as my dumping ground for roller derby photos.  Like this one:

[flickr size=”small”]http://www.flickr.com/photos/evilkitchen/4338121763/[/flickr]

But honestly, I like having all of my photos in one place on my own server.  Even if it means I never get a “Super Cool Way Awesome” sparkling animated .gif award from a total stranger for one of my images.