Reporting in from London here ...

Lots of things are different from last year. We tried a new restaurant in Soho for lunch. Arbutus is not far from the West End Theater district. Set lunch for 15.50 pounds. Thumbs up!

Our favorite pub owner in Wimbledon has bolted for greener pastures. Fortunately, the new owners seem to run a congenial pub. The fish and chips are different yet tasty. Thank heavens for that bit of luck! Business was slow, though. Buzz (the former owner) is, shall we say, larger than life.

Wimbledon is in the middle of its rebuilding on Centre Court. Evidently the building cranes were only removed a week ago Monday. There's still a lot of fit and finish work to be completed this week. This year, no roof over part of the stadium seating as in years past. A new, retractable roof will be installed for the 2008 Championships. There's room for six more rows of seats at the top of Centre Court. I'm not sure if those will be installed by Monday or not until next year. Ladies towels are hot pink and purple colour scheme this year. Better than last year, when they were hot pink and lime green. I requested the aqua and medium purple colour scheme be adopted sometime very soon. My current set are fading from lots of use, and they won't appreciate having their logo towels look less than sharp in my bathroom. New big-screen scoreboards are in place (presumably to see replays) inside the court. We managed to get Jimmy Connors' autograph for one of the UK friends. Roger Federer was practicing and greeted our group as he was leaving. Very nice guy. Justin Gimblestob, from Center Court in Chatham, NJ, was there. We visited with him briefly. Hope he has a good run in the Championships this year!

Hotel sounds like there's an old dot-matrix printer underneath the sink. It likes to go off at 6 am. Interesting "attribute". I'll speak to the front desk when we leave this morning.

Cheers, Anne