Things I knew about Chicago before today:

• It has the nickname ‘The Windy City‘
• The subway system (below) is known as the ‘L‘
• The Cubs play baseball as Wrigley stadium here
• It gets really cold in the winter
• It’s the name of a Broadway musical that I saw on stage, but never on film
• My mate Malcolm that I used to work with at the BBC in England got a job working here a few years back. Come to think of it, it might have been Boston. Bugger. No worries, ‘coz when I emailed him to see if he’d be in town I got an Out-of-Office reply back from him.

Anyway, the point is … those are all things that I learned about this place before coming here. So it’s off to indulge for a few days, and most likely expand on that list with a few personal experiences.

So it’s 365 days since I could last say “It’s my birthday”.

Birthdays are often the time to take stock of ones lot. And I like to look back on my birthday on the pluses and minuses of the last twelve months - and compile a little life balance sheet just to see whether I’m still making progress or not. So here’s a quick catch up on everything since August of 2007.

1. Lost: My flat in England. I came off the property ladder, and went back to the world of renting. Whereas the majority of my peers are well on their way to paying off their mortgage and I feel like I have been left behind.
2. Gained: The most healthy bank balance I’ve ever had in my life! [See '1'] - and it’s even better when I convert the pounds to dollars. Beers on me today then.
3. Lost: A wife. No, no, I didn’t misplace her. Instead she said “I’m ending it”, I cried and literally begged her not to, but she wasn’t having it.
4. Gained: Transport. Thus making me truly American - I can now drive about Charleston. It’s not without its tribulations though.
5. Gained: Too many friends at this place. It feels wonderful.
6. Gained: Confidence. Again, due to [5]. The blog post that I could write to explain the intricacies of my experiences since ‘doing’ improv would go on for so long, that you would seriously get bored as I attempted to explain just how much this means to me right now - and even then it would probably only really be coherent to me. Suffice to say it’s been more fun than I could ever have possibly envisaged when I first started doing it. And I love it.
7. Lost: A steady job, because I quit it. Hang on - fuck that - that’s a gain because I am now finally in a position to further my career and move in a positive direction, rather than being held back by a bunch of numpties.
8. Gained: Travel experiences. And more planned - there’s a lot the US of A out there that I ain’t seen yet!
9. Gained: Blond hair! Ok, blond-ish. Yes - I coloured my hair this week again, would you like a picture? And better yet, there are no readily visible grey ones from a distance either. (Although if you get in close up to me, you might me able to see one or two strands…) Not bad for a thirty-six year old.

I can’t think of a tenth thing - I couldn’t last year either - Well nothing that seems that important anyway. But so far my 37th year alive is shaping up to be one of the best yet, and I am thoroughly looking forward to the next twelve months. And I couldn’t say that last year.

Happy Birthday to me.

Previous years: [ Winning and Losing 2007 ] [Winning and Losing 2006 ] [ Birthday Boy 2005 ] [ Idea stolen from here ]

Let’s see how many I can spot in a 12 hour period.

(All times local)

4.54pm - At airport. I don’t see any. Most disappointing. Total = 0

6.14pm - Taxi to hotel. Pass two! Must go back to take photos. Total = 2

7.23pm - Am at the Space Needle. The coffee bar at the top is the ‘Sky Cafe’ and is NOT serving Starbucks coffee. Again, more disappointment. Total = 2

7.54pm - Found one! Exiting the Seattle Monorail and walking down Pine Street towards the market. Total = 3

8.01pm - Woooah! Check it out … it’s the mecca of all Starbucks. It’s the original store by the market at Pike Place with the original wooden counters. And interesting, they only do coffee, and no food items. There is a little ‘history’ corner of the company with photos and literature, and I take two minutes read the book on the counter about the history of their expansion over the years. I try to recall the first time I had a Starby’s in England, I think it was in 2001.

8.19pm - I go and sit in Victor Steinbrueck park drinking my latte and watching the sunset. A sign advertising the lunchtime music festival taking place all this month is sponsored by Starbucks.

8.32pm - It’s getting dark now, and all the SBUXS I find now are closed. I find four in quick succession, within 250 metres and 60 seconds walk of each other - all centered around Union Street and 2nd Avenue area. Total = 8

8.43pm - There are a lot of homeless people begging on the streets of Seattle. I’ve just passed one that’s using an empty Starbucks cup to ask for change.

8.57pm - I think I’ve found one more up on 5th avenue, before realising that it’s one of the ones that I saw from the taxi earlier on the way in. But then, across the street from it around the corner and within direct line of sight I see one that I definitely did not see earlier! Taking my total to 9 for the night. At which point I call it a day.

Seattle has bendy buses like London. And trams like Amsterdam. The airport also smells of cinnamon which doesn’t remind me of any other city that I’ve been to before.

More Starbucks based reading (For the pure JavaHeads)

• Maximum Starbucks Density - There are 43 in a 5 mile radius in New York
• How many Starbucks is too many? Discuss!
• Starbucks inside of Starbucks - Would they go that far?
• Say NO to Starbucks - A Minnesota town resists
• The End of The Universe Starbucks style

In the field video is a lot harder to edit than the luxury of having a proper ’studio’ suite to put something together.

So with apologies for the rough feel of the cut, here’s a little four minute adventure of my trip onto the Mendenhall Glacier today. Flirting with the tour guide is not obligatory, but I couldn’t help myself. It was though, absolutely stunning … I hope it comes across.

The joke at the end the tour guide makes is in reference to a moraine. Don’t worry, I didn’t know what one was either until I’d looked it up.

I’ve just been for a walk on this glacier.

Photo taken from a helicopter, shortly before we landed on it. Video to follow.

It is raining. It is wonderful.

Some of my nicest weather days in Charleston has been where it’s rained a little - not a massive thunderstorm, but a pleasant warm rain that cools the air down, removes the humidity and allows you to breath again without this feeling that a sackful of pollen was clogging up your lungs somewhere.

Stepping out of my cheap (but clean, and functional) motel this morning, a bizarre smell hits my nose. It’s air - clean air! Clean, crisp, fresh and rainy air that is wonderful to consume. So I stop, happy to get wet for a moment and breath it all in. Sunshine is seriously overrated sometimes, y’know?

I head downtown. I’m having a lazy day of just checking out the local facilities and don’t feel like doing any 10 mile treks today. I’ve even scaled back on my geocache hunt. I just want to see what it would be like to be an arriving tourist on a cruise ship in town.

Juneau thrives on its tourists. Between April and October, the cruise ships all stop off here dumping off several hundred people sometimes just for a few hours, sometimes overnight, and the local businesses thrive because of it. There are three ocean liners docked today - but what the hell do they do during the winter months when nobody stops by?

The small 31,000 population must get a little claustrophobic. Juneau is road-locked. You can only get here by sea or air. I’ve already driven as far west as you can go and as far east as you can go. It took about ninety minutes from one end to another.

People apparently drop out of school early here. People want to get out and escape to the rest of the world. The city built a new high school recently, except they’ve now got no students to fill it with.

Commercialisation has crept in - slowly. Walmart only arrived here a year ago. The two McDonald’s are a recent addition too. Unlike other liberal minded people, there was apparently a sense of relief to get a McDonalds because it made them feel ‘more like’ the rest of the USA, and on opening day there was a queue of people to get in. Woah! That sounds more like the USSR then the USS of A.

I pop into McD’s to use a bit of of their Wi-Fi (trouble with the ‘net connection in my hotel). Lots of SUV’s pull up, choking gas at almost five bucks a gallon (AK has the highest gas prices in the land, along with Hawaii), and bearded blokes with hats and raincoats come in and order two Big Macs at a time.

A few minutes later, four big-bearded-fishermen types across the table from me start to pray. They’re saying Grace - in a McDonalds. It’s a little surreal.

I step back outside into the moist cool fresh air, and head off for the historic downtown district. I pass plenty of gift shops. A T-Shirt in a window catches my eye - “A quaint little drinking town with a fishing problem”. If you’re not employed in local government matters here, you either work in a restaurant or you’re a fisherman.

I loop round the whole downtown - it doesn’t take long, and find myself back where the boats come in. There are seaplanes here too - taking off and landing on a fairly regular basis. And the low cloud & mist rolls in making for a spectacular backdrop.

This is a nice - but different - kinda town.

Greetings from Juneau, Alaska.

Monday - Resign from job, by giving two weeks notice. Tuesday - Walk out of job after being told I can leave immediately. Wednesday - Have a hard day sunning myself for too many hours at the beach. Thursday - Travel for 19 hours via Philadelphia and Seattle to get to the capital of the 49th state of America. It’s been a busy week.

The view out of my cheap motel window this morning almost looks like this:

I say almost, because what I can actually see is a parking lot and the grocery store across the street … but if I walk 30 seconds down the road, then THAT IS what I can see. It’s called the Mendenhall Glacier, and is rather awesome. I think I’m going to like it here.

10 facts about Juneau/Alaska:

• There are 260 miles of hiking trails, but only 40 miles of road in Juneau
• Alaska as a whole has one mile of road for every 42 square miles of land, compared to 1:1 for the rest of the USA
• Juneau is actually based in the Tongass National Forest, classified as a temperate rainforest, the largest in North America
• There are Sitka spruce trees everywhere
• The Tlingit people are the native inhabitants of the land
• Juneau exploded in growth in the 1870’s when gold was discovered here, and a rush started
• Juneau only became the capital of the state in 1959
• There are according to the latest figures just 31,452 residents here
• The government employs over half of those
• I’m here for a weeks vacation. To take in the views, take hundreds of photos, mountain bike around a lot, and go geocache crazy!

So it’s my birthday in a few weeks time.

And to make myself feel not-so-old as I’m going to be, I thought I’d get recorded fact of people stating the thing that they always seem to say … “Oh but you only look X years old!”, where X is a usually at least a couple, but sometimes many years less than I actually am - which is nice.

So when put on the spot - and with a video camera pointed at their face - how old would people say I looked or am going to be on my birthday next month?

Answer at the end of the video …

An iPod fan I may be, but a Mac convert I still am not.

Despite this, the opening of South Carolinas first Apple store in my adopted hometown would have piqued my interest as it was - but when I got the chance to go and make a video for it for work, then I was always going to enjoy doing this.

Welcome to the new Apple Store on King St. Charleston.

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The national association for birds that take laxatives to relieve constipation issues held its annual conference in a tree above where I parked my car in downtown Charleston on Friday night.

I had to drive around in it - including going to a funeral on Saturday - before I got a chance to clean it. And the photo doesn’t really do it justice … it looked much worse in person, and it was splattered all down the offside of the car as well … yuk.

You may have seen this already if you’re a facebook friend of mine, as I uploaded it there last week, but I figured there was no harm in putting it up on my blog too.

This was actually shot back in June of last year (2007), when as part of a local art exhibit, a colleague of mine (Dan), recorded me doing this - cycling round fiber-glassed turtles in Charleston.

Back then, he was on a deadline for to get the thing recorded and produced in the space of a day. Dan did a great job, but in the back of mind I always fancied doing a ‘directors cut‘ version, and doing various tweaks to it: Namely: Making it 16:9, adding music, adding maps to plot my progress and a couple of other cool little video tweaks that I’ve learned in the last year.

So it’s with no disrespect to Dans original cut, I just always fancied having a go at it myself.

I was going back through some old blog posts this past week, doing some admin and tidying up when I stumbled across this.

A post about something that I wrote practically four years ago this week, in June 2005. It was a quick, quirky, multi-topic post. Totally unlike what you’re about to read below.

I’d got terribly exciting about the finale of the new season of Doctor Who. ‘New Who’ as it soon became dubbed was back on our TV screens with its non-wobbly sets, CGI graphics, and some beautifully written story lines (thank you Steven Moffat, but more of him below) that led us to the Doctor and Rose battling against the Daleks, and the realisation that the ‘Bad Wolf’ story arc had been slowly woven in over the previous twelve weeks.

The sight of Eccleston on the BB red chair with the phrase ‘Doctor in the House’ still makes me chuckle. I’m guessing there’s fair percentage of people out there that never got, and still don’t get the Coldcut reference.

Now it’s 2008. And I’m back again to waiting a whole week to see how it pans out with the Doctor and Rose batting against the Daleks. And it’s making me realise that I have to confess something : I love this programme. Big time.

How can it be that a 65 minute special that’s going to be on this Saturday evening is the sole focus of my week. How could it be that a programme which I enjoyed as a kid (Tom Baker, in case you’re wondering) is still getting me excited today. Me … and countless others. Spanning a broad range from young children, teenagers, and thirty-five year old expats in America who surely ought to know better. Shouldn’t they?

I’m worried I may be compared to someone decades younger than me. This [left] is the grinning face of Henry, who’s twelve years old and once contributed towards an iPod of mine. Now this surely is what a Who-obessive should be like, right? Someone who has posters on their bedroom wall, someone spends hours on jumpcut making new montages of old and new Doctors together and creating his own DW comic books on the official site. Isn’t that its target audience really? Or am I just a twelve year old in disguise?

Maybe I should know better. But I also know that when Journey’s End finishes screening on Saturday evening, I’ll be left feeling a little empty, and realising more than ever than it’s been an intimate part of my life over the last four years. It’ll also reinforce (as I watch it online, over the internet and not on a live terrestrial signal) that in the same way that I can recall a time, a memory, and a moment from a particular song that was a hit at a time, I can do the same with Doctor Who episodes now too.

I can remember quite quite clearly and and where I was and who I was with (hello Sam), the first time we were treated to a Christmas special. And how all our fears over whether Tennant would be a worthy successor or not, and by god - yes he was.

I can remember how I slowly realised that there were different writers for different episodes and thus some were better than others. Declaring the genius that is Moffat and that the episodes that are the most clever (Girl in the Fireplace, Blink and Silence in the Library) are his. And the double parter written by Paul Cornell of ‘Human Nature/Family of Blood’ is guaranteed to being a tear to my eye every time I watch it.

That’s right. Doctor Who can bring a tear to my eye and I’m admitting it here in public. Sometimes, if I’m in the mood, all go back to the specific episodes and the specific parts that I know will do it to me and watch them through. I’m even slightly addicted to watching old clips, trailers and the ‘Coming Next’s’ from certain episodes, because it makes the hairs on my arm stand up and puts goosepimples down my back with ease, and I really like that.

And yet it’s just a TV programme. Isn’t it. Isn’t it?

Of course it is. Just like the spin off’s are ‘just’ TV shows too. Did you get caught up in them too? I know I did. And I can remember having some of the best sex of my life after a particularly lesbian themed horny episode of Torchwood had just screened. Shame that was never repeated. The sex that is, not the episode.

So I watch old episodes a lot. They’re all on my iPod too. I spend far too much time on www.doctorwhoforum.com checking out speculations of spoilers and theories. I Google for other Doctor Who blogs (like this one) to see what people are writing. I have a toy TARDIS on my desk at home. I have a Doctor Who calendar on my desk at work. I have a poster of Tennant & Piper up in the studio at work. I have a mini-dalek key ring that spins and flashes whenever my cell phone is about to ring.

I bought both soundtracks (on download, not CD). The Doomsday music still puts a chill down my spine when I hear it. And I bet that no one else out there has ever imagined that the ‘Madame de Pompadour’ music would be a good tear-fest for your own funeral soundtrack. What do you mean you’ve never discussed what music you’d have at your funeral? It’s the best High Fidelity Top 5 game ever.

DW introduced me to some new favourite songs as well. Every week when Confidential is on TV, they use a lot of modern music. I discovered Feeder’s “Tender” this way and love this song to this day. Hello to whoever you are in the BBC Wales production crew who decided to use that piece of music - that made so sad, and so happy, all at the same time. Genius.

It’s been hard to convey my love of this programme to Americans. Only one person (and he was a complete uber-geek by anyone’s definition) had ever heard of it, everyone else I’ve had to slowly introduce it to. I introduced it to Leigh of course, and to this day she still emails me asking if I’ve downloaded the latest episode yet so that she can watch it (Clearly she has a crush on Rose and is awaiting her return). A girl called Anne at work, saw my DW poster on my wall one day, asked me what it was and ever since I’ve been feeding her DivX copies burnt onto CD/DVD for her.

Someone at my improv group the other day turned to me and said “So how was it?”. “How was what?”. “The latest Doctor Who!”. “Oh, did I tell you about that then?”. “Tell us about it? Geoff you went on and on about it, we knew it must be important to you”. “Oh.” So apparently I tend to talk about it as well.

My mum watches it. We have conversations about it via email every week. It’s a programme that entertains all generations. And I love that.

So I love this programme. With a passion. There, I said it. To a point where an outsider might think it strange for someone of my age to be quite so hooked on it, but yet I don’t care … because I really suspect that I’m not alone, even though I might be the only one brave enough to spill it all out onto their blog.

So Saturday is coming. A ‘Fan-Wank-Fest‘ of epic proportions apparently, as it bows out for another season, and we all start looking for something to fill the void left on a Saturday evening, and start counting down the days to the Christmas special.

It is - after all - only a TV programme. Right?