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"We all come in from the cold.... We come down from the wire...."

As I type, there is a massive thunderstorm raging outside. We just got back from a day-trip to a national monument not far away - Battleship Cove. It was great! They have got some retired US Navy ships and you can walk around them, see what it was like to be on board and generally just explore. We spent the most part of the day there and then headed through Newport, stopping for a little while at the beach. The temperatures here today have been in the high 80's early 90's which definitely explains the thuderstorm that's now lashing us. It was really hot down inside the ships sometimes and I can only begin to imagine what it was like living and working down there during wartime! The battleship (USS Massachusetts) was huge, 3 decks of pipelines, dials, valves, and hatches. A lot of the ship was closed off to the public but it still took us long enough to walk all the way around her and explore. I got some pictures of all of the ships we saw and some helicopters and a few other bits and pieces... they are all in the photo gallery.

I don't actually have any work to do now before i leave for England on Wednesday - unless we have a delivery from FedEx tomorrow which isn't looking likely - so all that is left for me to do is to pack and look forward to coming home. It's strange but this was one of my shortest trips (a little more than 3 weeks away) but for some reason it feels like the longest...

"I need to be myself, I can't be no-one else"

Greetings! It's 1:30pm on Sunday and I woke up half an hour ago... We worked last night until 5am and I only had 4 hours sleep in the last 24 thanks to the flying between Vancouver and Providence. Not feeling too bad today though. We're leaving for Providence shortly, to go sightsee and have a bit of lunch before going to work later on. Good times!

Yesterday I hit the shopping malls again and found a gem of a shop where I was able to get my little brother some pretty cool birthday presents: A pair of K-Swiss trainers, and some Timberland boots! I just hope I've got the right sizes.

Made another purchase myself as well - something I've been wanting to get for ages - a "Sumo" bean-bag from Sumolounge which looks cool and should be good for all the lounging around watching DVDs and playing video games that I do when I am at home :)

Finally the football season started again yesterday and Liverpool started with a win 2-1 away against Aston Villa. Nice one. I was able to find a web-feed of the game that ran ok - nobody here had it on TV which was annoying. Stevie-G came up with the goods again and hammered in a free kick from 25 yards to win the game. Superb...!

Paul found a cool gadget for all you Windows Vista users out there - the "UK Radio Station Gadget" - it lets you stream various radio stations over the internet. Right now I'm listening to Virgin Classic Rock and it's pretty good.

"Freezin'.... Rests his head on a pillow made of concrete"

Well - a month since last updates and what a month it has been. I'm currently back in Vancouver for a few days. Got here last Wednesday, and should be leaving Friday back to Providence, Rhode Island, where I'll stay until flying home August 16th!

So, what has happened since the start of July? Well, I went out to Vancouver for a couple days for meetings and to do some maintenance. Other than that I was in the office at Malvern and not much was happening - we are doing some cool stuff with wireless PDAs but other than that hmm... yeah....

The weather was of course somewhat interesting with St John's getting cut off from the rest of Worcester which I guess you could say was exciting. We had Chris and Lucy's wedding on Saturday 21st and it was a great day despite Mother Nature's attempts to wreck everything. I'll put the pictures up on the photo gallery at some point.

On the Sunday after the wedding I flew out to Providence, Rhode Island via Boston. It's fair to say Providence and Warwick (where i am staying) are a lot different to Vancouver. The airport is a lot smaller, but it's a nice area and the people are very friendly. The hotel is really nice too. Providence is about an hour south of Boston and about 2-3 hours north of New York, so there was great scope to go visit one of these cities....

At the end of the first week, we decided that we would go visit New York for a weekend (after doing some pretty horrendous long hours during the week). We booked a hotel near Times Square and set off on the train on Friday afternoon. We stayed in New York until Sunday afternoon and there is only one phrase I can use to describe it - "An Experience". New York was everything I thought it would be - really busy, vibrant, hot, smelly, just incredible really. It was always an ambition of mine to visit and I am lucky I got the chance to do so. We did all the normal tourist things like visit the Statue of Liberty, and go to the top of the Empire State Building. We also managed to visit Central Park (and John Lennon's Strawberry Fields memorial garden), Grand Central Station, Times Square (by day and night) and the Chrysler building. We also went to Ground Zero (now a building site) and Bloomingdales (for shopping!). On the Saturday night, we did a dinner cruise around Lower Manhattan up to the Brooklyn Bridge by night which was amazing but my photos from that didn't come out too good :(

All the pictures from New York are in my photo gallery.

So - after New York it was back to Providence, but then an unexpected trip to Vancouver came up and I've been here since last Weds. Managed to catch up with some of the guys while I've been here. We did a couple of movie trips - saw Transformers the other day which was cool but I thought the robots were a bit too "comedy". Last night we watched "The Simpsons" and it was great! I'm hoping to find time to catch the new Bourne film before I fly back to the USA...

It's my little brother's 2nd birthday today. It's not nice to miss it but I spoke to him on the phone and he said he was having a nice day :) I don't think he knew what i meant but it was nice to talk to him anyway and I'll have to buy him a nice big present when I get back.

Anyway - enough for now - hand cramps from too much typing....!