Shock contest win

I am almost infamous for entering contests and never winning, but much to my surprise today, my fortunes appear to be turning. I have won a contest over at “Smitten by Britain,” a blog written by an American Anglophile with a history (and child!) from her time here in Blighty. (Note, I know that I need to add a category to my popular “Expat blogs” page with anglophiles in the US and vice versa… will do soon, work permitting, I promise!) Visit Smitten’s blog or follow her on twitter at @smittnbybritain–she has the same affliction as I do, as “on twitter notfrmroundhere” instead of NotFromAroundHere”– in that we are not allowed our full names due to character restrictions and thus have to delete vowels. Regardless, I now have to provide a list of crackers (savory snack biscuits, not anything else) that I want to have shipped over from the states as part of the winning entry for this contest. My obvious choices are anything in the Cheez-it family and Wheat Thins and Triscuits. Better Cheddars would do, as would just about anything in the cracker family. But I will think long and hard before I compile the final list since it’s such a blessing to get food from home. Bisquick, anyone?

I like to be in America

It’s amazing that I have been here more than a week and a half already, and have been through three main stages of the trip. Part of the nature of my whirlwind start to this trip was due to the fact that I was traveling with a junior colleague. I wanted to show her an awesome and multi-faceted technical experience as well as a bit of my country, as long as we were here. So after working solidly all weekend, Tuesday was the day for a bit of fun, and we went to pay tribute to a few of my favorites in the Nation’s capital. Almost first was Einstein, but I was so busy taking photos of my colleague in his lap that I forgot to take a photo myself. On to Lincoln.

Washington.

And my personal favorite, Jefferson.

Inspiring stuff. I was never quite so patriotic before I moved to England.

From there it was over to Georgetown for lunch and shopping on M street. I think I showed my colleague a nice day in DC, and for me it was nostalgic to be back in my old haunts.

Queues and Kids

I know that some wonderful stores have a single queue, usually snaking back and forth a few times, and then many registers that call the next person forward by register number. WH Smith, Boots, and the bank branch near my flat all seem to follow this very fair system of queueing. (I can’t believe spell checker is not flagging those five vowels in a row, U-E-U-E-I!) However, not all stores have this sort of arrangement, including grocery stores (except the express line) and a few others. So the experience I’m about to relate has to be considered unique to stores with individual check-out lines.

I had my basket of goods and was looking at the three open check-out lanes to try and optimize my store-exit strategy. Lurking behind one of the lines was a woman with a baby in one of those car seat-carriers stuck in a cart and there was also a little girl running around her. It was actually not clear that she was in line, but I still avoided that one and got into another line. Suddenly I hear this voice behind me, “Ma’am, Excuse me but I was already waiting for the next available cashier.” I turned around, I’m guessing that my jaw was dropped in shock and that I gave her one of those “You’ve got to be kidding me!” looks. She said, “Give me a break, I have an infant and a two-year old here.”

I let her go. I was not really in the mood for a fight, but now I’m sorta peeved with myself for allowing this obnoxious woman to redefine the queue structure from individual lanes into she-moves-around-and-gets-whatever-comes-up-next. I might have felt differently had she said, in a polite tone of voice, “I’m sorry but is there any way possible I could take the next lane?” but she did not actually ask me. And her tone of voice was neither sweet nor polite, and it only got worse with the comment about the kids, as though she was somehow entitled to special treatment by virtue of being a mother.

I admit it, I do not have children (nor do I intend to, but that’s a different story). So I don’t know if I’m somehow violating a universally-acknowledged right of motherhood by feeling ornery about this particular altercation. But admittedly I do get a bit stroppy when someone tries to get special treatment. I kinda feel like most of us have difficult lives, and are tired, and overworked, and so I don’t see some sort of totally non-level playing field based on to be or not to be a mother. Of course, my cashier in the queue in which I landed was very speedy and I was actually out of the store before the Holy Mother, so I did not have to look at her again, which was probably a good thing. But I’m interested in opinions here, was this particularly brash or am I being sensitive? Should this type of attitude be justifiable solely on the grounds of being out in public with small children?

And now I have no flies

I am so very happy with the portable fly-screens that I got last week:

I have now solved a problem that is over two years old by finding appropriately sturdy, removable and effective fly blockers for my flat. With the actual summer weather we have been having here in the UK, this became a necessity, not a desire, as there was something odd about the light in my main/living room that seemed to attract a large group of the annoying, buzzing insects, who liked to fly around the room in circles. Hooray for (rather primitive) technology, as for approximately £50 I got three screens for the old-school sash windows in my living room, and can now enjoy the summer breezes without losing my sanity or needing to continually spray toxic poisons around my living space. Good for expat life? You betcha.

Ice, ice, baby!

My new fridge came today! It is still an under-the-counter ‘dorm’ fridge (I tried, I really did, but could not convince the landlord to knock out the counter for a full sized one) but at least it has a freezer that works, so this happy woman can have beverages with ice. The thing came with a single ice tray, the cutest little ice tray I’ve ever seen:

Eight tiny ice cubes can be mine any time I wish! Actually, I ran out to the store tonight and bought a full-sized ice tray–which just about takes up the whole freezer–although I also managed to squeeze in some frozen baby peas (my favorite!) and a box of fish fingers. I know. It’s crazy. I just never ate fish sticks as a child and now I love them! Off to enjoy a cold beverage…

What a Croc!

I am really, really enamoured of my new shoes. And slightly embarassed to admit the are Crocs. One of my very good friends lives near Boulder where they are made. She absolutely hates the things. I was mortified to confess to her when I got my first pair, but I had the excuse that they were a gift so I was not to be blamed. I did tell her how ridiculously comfortable they were, and what perfect beach shoes they were. But now I’ve done the indefensible thing of buying not one, but two new pairs of Crocs. But again, in my defense they are really cute and low profile, they don’t actually scream “plastic shoes!” and although I got these to wear around the house (note the matching pajama pants, and no Brits I simply cannot say pajama trousers, not only do you lose the alliteration but it sounds dumb–what on earth would you call them?) I’m now contemplating a black pair for work. Again, in my defense, I have arthritis in my feet after a childhood spent ballet dancing (badly! I was never the most graceful or coordinated kid!) so comfortable shoes are a necessity. So watch out England, I am entirely likely to soon be walking your streets in cheap plastic shoes! How very American of me!!!

Books meme

This morning, after reading about the new Kindle (which is sort of a US only product at the moment) I decided to download an eBook reader for the iPhone/iPod touch, and to download some classics from the Gutenburg Project which are thus freely available. I currently have waaaaay too many books in my British flat; they are threatening to take over the room, so it seemed a good idea.

I then remembered the “100 Books” meme and decided this was a good way to try and pick some things to download; I’m posting this more as a note to myself than anything else, however I’d also love suggestions of other classics that are not on this list but that are highly recommended by someone who reads this blog. I also note that there are several versions of this list floating around and I don’t know which one this is. Today I downloaded “Ethan Frome,” and “Portrait of a Lady” which are two classics I’ve never gotten around to but which are not on this list.

Meme Instructions:

1. Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
2. Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3. Star (*) those you plan on reading.

Note, spelling errors on the list are not mine; I copied it off another blog and tried to correct the obvious ones but I probably did not catch them all!

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen x+
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien x
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte *
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (never plan to read–sorry!)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee x
6. The Bible x (well, large chunks of it)
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte *
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell x
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens x
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott x
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare x (again, a large chunk of it)
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien x
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger x
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell x+++ (still my fave of all time)
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald x
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy x
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky x
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck x
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll x
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame x
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy x++
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens x
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis x
34. Emma – Jane Austen x+
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen x+
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis x
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden x+
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne x
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell x
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery x+
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding x
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen x+
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens x
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez x
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck x
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov x+
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Aleandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding x+
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker x
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett x+
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson x
75. Ulysses – James Joyce x
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens x
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White x
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle x (large chunks of it)
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery x
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare x
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl x+
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

I’ve bought both Bronte books for my e-reader and should get started on them shortly. I have another bout of back-to-back European travel coming up (Eindhoven then Scotland then Switzerland again) so I plan to make good use of all that spare time. But seriously, all other recommendations welcome. Some of my own favorite classics are not on this list, like Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, anything by Solzhenitsyn (yes I love Russian Literature, it’s true) and the Master and Margarita by Bulgakov (still one of the best books I’ve ever read, and re-read, etc.)

Never easy: cell phone edition

I was abroad twice last week, Belgium with my sis and Switzerland for work. Both times I experienced serious mobile phone failure, which is silly since I have been the most ridiculous mobile consumer: one US phone (on monthly contract), one UK phone (on pay as you go) and one UK smartphone (on work contract). I decided this was all silly and that I needed to consolidate. The simple truth is that enough trips to interesting places had led me to believe that I needed at least two mobile phones to guarantee that one would work wherever I was. My UK pay-as-you-go phone had not worked in Singapore and I was roaming on my US phone. My work Blackberry had miraculously shut off its reception in Belgium and I was roaming on my UK pay-as-you-go phone. I was tired of having so many digits and so many options. So I broke down yesterday and assumed a full Mac-geek status by buying an iPhone. The thing is not yet fully functional for many reasons: I am trying to get my UK pay-as-you-go number transferred, and I assume this will take more time. So far the “activation” process has been hampered by (1) my living in the UK less than 3 years, requiring me to pay a £200 deposit to get the thing, and (2) some snafu at O2 that I still don’t get but when I stopped by there this morning, they were much aware of, compounded by (3) Barclaycard’s fraud department getting suspicious that I had charged both a £200 deposit and £99 for the phone in the same day. After two times dealing with Barclaycard, including realizing that for some strange reason they had my birthday “in their system” off by two full years, the phone went live about noon today, but the number is random and not the one that I had so handily put in the PAC code transfer request for. I had yet another call from their Fraud department today, at which point I just pretended that my birth month and year were what I had been told was erroneously in the system. It’s all a mystery to me. Hopefully soon the new phone will be active, and I–as a 2.5 year resident in the UK–will finally close the door on my US cell phone account, which I have kept to this point in the case that I would wind up there again and wish for the number. Perhaps I’m settling in in the UK after all.

Re-imported

I was washing my dishes this morning when something caught my eye on the bottom of a pasta bowl. The brand name was “Churchill” and the logo also said “Made in Staffordshire, England.” It only took one try on Google to find the company, the lion logo is the same as on my bowls. What amused me about all of this is the provenance of those dishes: I’m pretty sure they were purchased at the Pier 1 in Maple Grove, MN. Google maps tells me that I am only about 120 miles from Staffordshire now. Which means those dishes, which cost a few dollars each, have travelled over 8,000 miles in their lifetime, on a roundtrip journey from England to Minnesota and back again.

Shameless plug

This is mostly for people in America, although it is possible to benefit otherwise–see note below on the evils of UK customs.

I have one of those “hadn’t spoken in years until facebook” people in my life who turns out to be quite creative. I ordered a few interesting things from her website — cool screen-printed t-shirts and kitchen towels. I love the hand-made stuff, and I love it even more when someone is brave enough to put their stuff out there to sell. I did it exactly once–I did a photographic exhibition that netted me no money and perhaps negative pride, but I’m foolish enough to have done it once so I’ll probably do it again. In the meantime, let me speak most highly of the little gifts (for self and others) that I got through this site/old friend, although I do confess that UK customs held my things ransom until I paid a five pound import tax so I recommend this as best for shipping within the US! Maybe some day I will again try to sell my wares, crocheted, photographed, or otherwise. For now I have too much job on my plate to contemplate such things but here’s to hoping for the future. And in the meantime, support the local creative types who do have the guts to put it all out there!