Packed and ready.

Check this out...

I had to take a picture because this is amazing! That's all I've packed for the three days that I'm going to be gone this weekend. That's pretty darn good considering that I'm the girl of "just in case" and always pack more than I need because, you just never know! AND the purse and the rain jacket can both fit inside of the back-pack, there's still that much room left--I suppose that means I can do more shopping. It's a little bit sad because I would really like to dress very cutely in Paris. I have so many lovely clothes that are worthy of Paris but traveling like this doesn't really allow for that kind of vanity. I'll probably look mostly the same from day to do as I will be wearing the same jeans, same shoes, and same jacket. Oh well. I'll have to go back later in life and wear skirts and blouses and trendy boots and stylish trench coats--and take loads of pictures of me looking all classy in Paris.

****

I am going to Paris tomorrow. I had to pack really light because I'll admit, I'm a little skeptical of the hostel situation and this way, if I don't feel comfortable leaving my stuff at the hostel while I'm out and about, I can just carry it with me. I'm leaving in a couple of hours and I'm going to go into London and explore a little bit and then stay the night with Ed and Christina at their flat. My train leaves at 6:30 tomorrow morning and I wouldn't be able to get a train from Virginia Water into London that early on a Saturday so this way, I'll already be in London and I can just get up at 5:15 (ouch), walk out the door, and catch the Tube to St. Pancras Station. By 9:47 tomorrow morning, I will be in Paris. I've planned to take a cooking class and probably two separate bike tours of the city. I wanted to plan activities where I would be hanging out with other people. I'll still leave time to explore on my own and shop and sit in a cafe or two and eat a baguette... It's going to be loads of fun.

****

I return to London early Monday morning and will have my computer turned on within a few minutes of me walking in the door so that I can show you all of my wonderful pictures.

****

I hope you have a fantastic weekend and I can't wait to tell you all about mine.

Cheers,

Steph

Dark and Drizzly.

I'm pretty sure the clouds actually knew the exact day that we turned the pages of our calendars. The first day of November was cold and wet and windy, yesterday was beautiful but cold and today it's just dark and rainy. I don't mind it though, but I really don't want to walk the dog today. I like being all cozy in the house with my tea and my book -- in case you haven't already figured this out... the reason I sometimes go a few days without anything interesting for you to read on my blog is because there just isn't anything INTERESTING going on! (though, I'll admit, I do post a lot of stuff that may be interesting only to me... so I suppose this is all a matter of opinion) I spend a lot of my days alone at the house with the dog just reading books and drinking tea and writing letters. Sometimes that's all I do during the week, but I like it. It's relaxing and peaceful.

I was busy yesterday though -- I made cookies AND cinnamon rolls, which, are pretty much amazing, if I may say so. And I've spent this morning working away as I am helping the family to find my replacement, to start the first of the year. I'm secretly really loving the process. I updated the family's profile on the au pair website and made a list of what they were looking for and drafted an e-mail to send out to potential au pairs and searched on the website and contacted 7 different girls from the US, New Zealand and Australia. I can't wait to hear back from them and answer all of their questions and tell them about my experience! It would have been so helpful to me to have an au pair to talk to while I was trying to figure things out. I had no idea what I was doing or what sorts of questions I should be asking or anything.

So, that's all for now... I think I'm going to take my book in the other room for a while so I can listen to the rain falling on the glass roof of the conservatory.

Lots of love!
Steph

Okay, so...

30 days hath September, April, June and NOVEMBER plus 8 days after that until Steven arrives equals 38 days plus 8 more days until I get to go home equals 46!!! How about that? It's going to go by super fast and I have so many more exciting things to do here but I'm not going to lie, it feels so good to be able to say

"See you next month!!!"

I can hardly wait : )

Trick-or-Treat!

(please notice my little black kitty cat Halloween earrings...

you can't really see them can you?

They're cute, I promise.)

****

Well! I didn't even think I was going to celebrate but this family really likes Halloween and they're pretty into it. We only just bought the pumpkin this afternoon at the grocery store and as soon as it started to get dark outside Curtis was saying "We have to get that pumpkin carved so people know we have candy!!" I figured pumpkin carving must fall under my job description so I rose to the challenge.

Not bad, huh? I worked real hard. I hadn't properly carved a pumpkin in ages and it was actually pretty fun. I was tempted to get real creative but knew that I didn't really have time for that and didn't want to disappoint myself. We popped a candle in and put him outside to greet out trick-or-treaters.

When we still hadn't had any trick-or-treaters at about 7pm Curtis was starting to sound very disappointed. We bought SO much candy at the store today and it was sitting and waiting in these cute little pumpkin buckets. Curtis had put out some decorative witches and even brought the gargoyles back out of the garage (I personally really like the gargoyles -- they're griffins. I think Kimberly must have hidden them in the garage before her parents came into town). But, finally, the cute little kids started ringing the door-bell. I think we've had about 30 come by. It's fun. They have cute costumes and they're all very polite and say thank you about 4 times before leaving.

****

In the first group of boys that came by one of them said "Are you American?" and I said "Yes, I am!" and he said "Everyone is! Why are they all American?" and his friend said "because it's an American holiday, stupid!" And it was really funny.

Lauren and her friend Anna went trick-or-treating a little bit ago (basically wearing their school uniforms and some 3-D classes with the lenses popped out) and they're currently off to Blockbuster. I have requested something NOT scary.

****

And I am sitting here enjoying some peppermint tea, letters from Steven and Paige and my new book -- October Sky. I'm really tempted to read it all tonight since when I wake up it will be November and the book is about October... We'll see what happens.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

Tree Stars.

Guess what movie I'm watching right now.... THE LAND BEFORE TIME!! I know. It's the best. How lucky am I that it just happens to be on TV right now? So lucky.

I know that I've already said this about a dozen times but the weather here has been really wonderful. I don't feel like it's even gotten very cold yet and the nice, mild, decently sunny days just make me so happy.

I really want to be outside enjoying the non-rainy weather as I expect the dreary weather will be coming soon but I've recently decided, no wait, I've know for a long time, that I don't love walking the dog. He stops so much and is always yanking on the leash and it's just not my favorite. So I'm seriously considering taking him for a walk through the neighborhood (after my movie is over of course) and then taking my ipod and going on my own walk around the lake.

Then again, I'd probably be just as happy to sit around here and check things off my to-do list and read my book, which I'm really enjoying, and write some letters -- except that the postal workers are on strike so I don't know if it would do any good to make the extra effort to get my letters out today anyhow.

Happy Friday! I hope it's a good one. I don't have anything planned for the weekend... I'm hoping we get some trick-or-treaters here tomorrow because that would be fun but I left my red thing at home so I don't have a costume this year : ) Since all of my good costumes in recent years have involved the red thing. If you do something fun for Halloween, I want to see pictures!!

Sparkley Water and a Waffle.

Lauren and I shopped around London for about five hours today and that's all that either of us purchased -- one very large glass bottle of sparkling mineral water and one waffle each. We hopped on the train at 10:19 this morning, took the tube to Oxford Circus and spent the entire day walking through the shops of London.

We stopped in French Connection (it's just been this past week that I figured out that FCUK stands for French Connection U.K. Took me a while, huh?), and Banana Republic, walked through Selfridges and then walked into a store called Liberty. They have everything there: Bedding, clothes, fragrances, fabrics, yarn, dishes, shoes, Christmas decorations... you name it. The store is in a really cool looking building too (first two photos: 1) flowers outside of Liberty -- have you ever seen a dark purple calla lily? 2) the many floors of Liberty).

I decided it might be really fun to go find Hamleys -- the gigantic toy store. Bad idea. Considering that it's half-term and all the kids are out of school, we just should've known better... there were so many people in there we couldn't even move!! We took the escalators up a few floors but finally just decided we had to leave. It was super hot in there and we were getting overwhelmed. It seemed like all of the employees where just playing with the toys : )

****

We also found the brand new Anthropologie store on Regent St. It was fantastic and it made me feel at home. Like I was on 5th and Pine or in U Village or something : ) except that since the store is brand new it means they don't have a clearance section, and I absolutely cannot afford to buy anything in that store unless it comes from the clearance section.

On our way down Oxford St. headed to Hyde Park, we were enticed by the smell of waffles and had to stop. It was lunch time anyway. Milk chocolate for Lauren and dark chocolate for me! It was a little messy -- I don't even really know how the fork was supposed to help. I was a bit intimidated by it and maybe a little embarrassed to eat it so I carried it around for about ten or fifteen minutes before attempting to conquer it. I prevailed.

Lauren had absolutely no intention of doing as much walking as we ended up doing but she was a trooper and I really appreciated it as it saved me money... on our way to Hyde Park we found this magnificently huge horse. Of course, I needed my picture with it. The horse is part of a war memorial. There are war memorials everywhere here but this particular one was built to honor the animals that were lost in the wars. Poor animals. That tends to be my least favorite part of war movies. Steven can attest to that as I tend to ask "are the horses going to get hurt?" whenever we watch something that seems to have that sort of potential.

Hyde Park was absolutely lovely today. The sun came out and made the leaves all look bright and pretty. It was so nice being in the park after walking through the crazy busy city. There were paddle boats and rowboats out on the lake and people out walking and it was just so pleasant.

We were just going to walk through the park until we got near to Harrods but... neither of us knew where exactly Harrods was so we ended up walking a little further than we meant to. We didn't realize how far into the park we had gone until we came across the Princess Diana memorial fountain. There were lots of little kids playing in the water and it was fun watching them. It was a bit cold for me otherwise I might have joined in.

Lauren also lets me take loads of pictures! This wasn't the only time that she decided to find a place to sit for a minute while I took pictures of everything I could see.

****

When we left the fountain area, I pulled out my super cool tourist map -- the one from the Big Bus tour that has very few street names and lots of pictures of all of the touristy places -- and then decided that I needed to use the real map that Kimberly let us borrow for the day. We finally found Harrods. It's amazing. I really enjoyed it and am looking forward to spending a bit more time in there. I probably can't buy anything there either but it's so much fun! We looked at the Valentino dresses. Wow. You wouldn't believe the price tags. Well, maybe you would. They have lots of Wizard of Oz decorations all over the store including a collection of very modern looking ruby slippers created by some high end designers. The food halls at Harrods were fantastic. They had similar ones at Selfridges. The food halls are full of, um, food! It's kind of hard to describe actually but they just have all sorts of amazingly fancy food and then different stations where they serve various types of foods and a fancy little bar area where kids were sitting with these amazing looking gelato sundae type things. Lauren and I each bought some sparkley water (that's what Caitie Anderson used to call it when she was little and I babysat for her) and continued on our way. That was my big Harrods purchase -- a $1 bottle of water. It is a pretty bottle though AND now I have a bag that says Harrods. I suppose I'll have to save that for my scrapbook!

By the end of the day we were very tired and hungry and ready to be back at the house. The train back seemed slow and we had to walk back to the house in the dark but I certainly enjoyed myself and thought it was well worth it. I was so thankful to have Lauren's company. We pretty much talked all day and while she might not think I'm the coolest 22 year-old she's ever met, she doesn't exactly seem embarrassed by me either.

You may consider this my Christmas card to you.

****

Love,

Steph

Wait. What?

Okay, so we just changed our clocks here last night -- woohoo!! Extra hour of sleep! -- but then I talked to Mom today and we had a slight disagreement on what time it was. Each of us was trying to tell the other that it was an hour earlier or later than it really was. Turns out you guys don't change your clocks until NEXT weekend. Who knew? So, I'm only 7 hours in the future as apposed to the usual 8.... just thought you'd like to know.