No Place Like Home....s

Hey! I'm gonna blog.

Lots of things have happened since I blogged last. Here's a one sentence synopsis: We moved to a new house, had visitors for a month, visited America, then another visitor.

To get the ol' bloggin ball a rollin again, I thought I'd do a Britland vs "The States" list. See, there were a lot of things we were looking forward to in America. Space, fountain drinks, space, food, space, oh, and friends and family... Once we got there, though, I was looking forward to some of the Britishy things I'd left behind. So here they are, all organizationally layed out for you and whatnot!

God Bless American...

* fountain drinks * road space * Mexican food * mountains *

smoke-free beaches with sunshine * boating * junk food * hot dogs

* campfires * Old Navy * friends & family * country music *

exchange-rate making everything on sale for us people who are paid in pounds *

campfires * lack of inhibition * Slurpees and SnoCones *

Reeses anything * stores that stay open past 5:00 pm * SUVs and pickups *

weaponry (pocketknives, bb guns, etc) *

Good Old Britishy...

* roundabouts * cheese * chocolate * Indian food * public transportation *

accents * politeness * wellies * rain on the conservatory roof *

markets * healthy eating * spunky old ladies * friends *

international holiday destinations * history * villages * London

* Caramel Digestives * teapots * Lush bath ballistics * footpaths * countryside *

Primark * double-decker busses * the kids saying Britishy phrases *

overall Britishy-ness *

It looked all cute and in different fonts and sizes, but then it all went away, because sometimes blogger hates me. Enjoy anyway!

Protecting Freedom. You're Welcome.

This link (at the bottom of this post) explains the whole story, but let's just say a certain 5 (or is he 6 yet?) yr. old back in America is pretty sure we ended the Revolutionary War with our move here- in the roles of American peace-making ambassadors, of course. Give it a read, it'll make ya laugh! It also puts a lot of pressure on us, I mean, we're protecting the freedom of all Americans here! (and I thought we were just enjoying the accents and fabulous cheese!)

http://allez-oop.blogspot.com/2011/03/vive-la-revolution.html

Quiz Night, Expat Edition

Not the cool pub kind. Even cooler.

I thought it might be useful to have some Q & A from real-life expats living here in Britland. I'm hoping to make a set list of questions and post answers from a different expat each month.

I've got a lot of questions I remember staying up at night thinking about before our move, and I think I broke the internet with all my millions of Britishy searches. I'll add my own questions to the list, but also want to hear from you!

So, here's the pre-quiz quiz:

What have you potential expats been Googling in hopes of insider information? What worries about your move have been keeping you up at night? What do you need to know to help you make all those life-changing decisions about your future in a country you might not have even been to yet?

Leave your questions in the comments for this post, and I'll try to include them in the quiz. If no-one has any real questions, I'll try my best to make a Q & A list of actual, useful questions, but I can't promise it won't just end up as a random list of insanity. That's just how my brain works, people!

If The Queen Only Knew!

I bet she'd be pretty pissed at the people delivering the post in her good name. (At least those sending it overseas, our own postman is delightful...)

January 12th we finally got our end-o-the year DVDs sent on their way to US friends and family. We do a DVD instead of a letter every year. Well, ok, not every year, I mean- you've all seen just how consistent I am with communication. But still... all the more reason this was a special delivery! After a few weeks, we were worried that the "5 business days" had come and gone.. and come and gone again... with no deliveries. After another week, 2 of the DVDs (out of 11 total) arrived.... to ALASKA and HAWAII!! At least if things had to go wrong, it was hilariously wrong. Of course our friends in Alaska and Hawaii get theirs before anyone else! Over a month since sending them off into the unknown, we decided a lonely/creepy postal worker along the way must have decided to keep the DVDs (one for watching, 8 for backup), so we sent them again, but this time in the luggage of a co-worker who was a good enough sport to start carrying our mail. Yes, you guessed it, before he even made it home, everyone else got the originals.

I guess, if I am to be honest and impartial, this could have happened after the DVDs made it to America. They could have been sitting in a USPS office for a month. However, we all know what happens when you disgruntle a postal worker in the US, so we'll place the blame on the friendlier of the two varieties of Post Office employees.

Now, the point of this story is not to complain. It is to warn The Queen about the false promises being made right in her own Royal Mail service. Also, it is to give me a place to post the pictures of a very important present before I send it, in case this is the last I see of it. So, Agelsfy, here are the birds I made for your wedding cake toppers! We'll send them expedited and super-protected and whatever else we can, with tracking, and if you could just hang out in Alaska or Hawaii for a week or so, I'm sure you'll get them before your wedding. Here are a few pictures of what you're looking for:

feathery hairclip to match Agelsfy's

...aaand yes, that's an unpainted gnome behind them. Gnome not included.

drugged up and uterus free

Hey all! This is going to have to be a picture-free blog post, so let's all pull out our imaginations and dust them off. Good, good!

Today I'm all drugged up, slightly dizzy and nauseous, and I am 100% more uterus-less than last time I posted. That's right- I'm one of those foreigners who has come to the UK and taken full advantage of the national health care system. Now we can go home! Not really. I was planning on having this done after moving back to the US, but life likes to shake things up a bit, so I went ahead and had surgery now. The good news is I will have several weeks of free-ish time to blog. The bad news is that I might be drugged up as I blog, so good luck making sense of anything I write.

I guess today we can tell you all about the differences in health care between the UK and the US. Now, you might think health care here is free. It is in that you don't pay any co-pays, and kids get free prescriptions. I feel like a thief every time I leave the pharmacy and they just hand over a bag of drugs and wave goodbye. Even though I know it's free, I have to force myself to just take the bag and leave without feeling like I'm doing something shifty.

It's not free, though, really. You pay enough taxes to cover costs that it makes one want to start dumping tea into the harbor. That being said, national health care is turning out to be a much better plan than I had thought it would be. I think some of that might have to do with the overall attitude of Britishy Folks, though. Here in Britland, the average Joe, or maybe average Dave since we're in Essex, thinks of health care like this: "Well, what a jolly good plan. We can't have people running about without a Doctor, can we? Let's all chip in, and everyone queue up at the Surgery. (doctor's office.)" In America people think national health care sounds great, but the average Joe thinks of the plan like this: "Heck yeah the government should be paying for health care! Psch! We demand doctors and hospitals, I mean c'mon, it's our right as human beings! Pay up, government! Now, outta my way, I'm ten times sicker than you, I get to go first in line." Yes, he is grammatically incorrect, but that's what he would say. So... yes the health care system here seems to be getting the job done, but it hasn't convinced me we should do the same thing in America.

Now, being the paranoid American that I am, we were glad to see basic private health insurance was part of our benefits plan. I was pretty sure without it we would all catch random diseases and die before we could get in to see a doctor. It doesn't quite work that way, though. As far as I can tell, private health insurance in the UK is like those FastPass Tickets at Disneyland. Without it we would still be able to get in to see a doctor for regular things like sinus infections and immunizations. We would still be able to get broken bones fixed or emergency procedures done. For non-life-threatening surgeries, though, you "jump the queue". I only needed 2 weeks notice for my surgery. If I didn't have private health care, I could have waited years from what people tell me.

There are other perks, too. When I asked the nurse at the pre-op appointment what the private health insurance did, she said, "It means you get a room of your own at hospital instead of sharing one with a crackhead." Pretty much summed it up right there, I guess.

So, kids, here's what we have learned in this drug-fog ramble of a post:

*National Health Care rocks in the UK, but would crash and burn among us demanding Americans

*I no longer have a uterus.

*Private Health Insurance in the UK is just your Disneyland FastPass

*Blogging on drugs might not be as good of a plan as I originally thought.

More to come! Anything you want a slightly loopy Phyllis to fill you in on in the next few weeks? Let me know!

Remember Us?

Yeah, that's okay. It's been a while. Life got busy, then busier, then there was too much to catch you all up on, and more busy, some more procrastinating, more procrastinating, and now this snowball of excuses that could have just been summed up by saying life happens. I've been blogging to you all in my mind. You didn't see those posts? Ah, well, moving on...

I can't catch you up completely, so let's review briefly some things we've learned.

Britishy Halloween

Britishy Halloween is not the same holiday as American Halloween.

In America, our brand new country with very little frightening history, Halloween is a time when kids dress up in costumes as princesses or superheroes and everyone gives them candy. Older kids go to "haunted houses" and get startled, we carve pumpkins, go on hay rides, and we all have good clean spooky fun.

In Britland, an ancient country with a past full of druids and churches and witchcraft and starving peasants, Halloween is a time to celebrate evil and real live scariness. Not for everyone, but it has a seriousness to it I have never even considered before. Here are some examples of our experiences with this:

Cap'n Jack, our 7 yr old, goes to a Church of England Primary school. During Religious Education class one day they asked the kids to tell them some activities we might do in a church. Jimmy D and I were frantically organizing the Halloween party (the American kind of Halloween) for our church at the time, so Cap'n Jack shot his hand up and said "Halloween parties!!". I think his teacher might have passed out. After regaining consciousness, eye twitching and gripping a crucifix, she shakily but firmly said, "No. We do NOT have Halloween parties at churches."

I was going to physio (physical therapy) in October. While stretching my leg all sorts of ways I don't think it was meant to go, my eccentric elderly therapist likes to chat. The week of Halloween she asked what I'd been up to. I told her I'd been busy organizing the Halloween party at my church and told her a bit about what we had planned. (Trick-or-treating to cars in the car park, games, pie bake-off, etc.)

She looked very grim and said, "I hate Halloween." (bending my leg farther) "I think it's horrid to see the children running up to my door. It all goes back to the time when people didn't know if they were going to survive the winter, you see." (yanking my leg behind my head and over my shoulder) "They would go door to door looking for food to get them through. I don't agree with children celebrating a holiday about who's going to survive and who will die." (now ripping my leg off and throwing it out the window) "But... I buy a bag of Mars bars and just hand those out instead of telling them all this. It's just easier that way."

Ahhh, Halloween. I'll never look at you the same again. But I'll still dress up and get candy all the same, and hang on to my innocent, naive way of celebrating.

*******

Look at that face! Is that the face of pure evil or what!?

Evil clown, Scary Fairy, and under his sweatshirt is a skeleton. We had to scary up the costumes to make them Britishy Halloween costumes.

Me painting faces at the controversial church Halloween party. Admittedly, most of the boys asked for bloody scars, but still...

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Parental Visit!!

My parents came to visit during the last 2 weeks of November! Yay! It went by so fast! We went in to London a few times, hit the Portobello Road Market, road tripped to Bath and Wales, had Thanksgiving, went to Leeds Castle, and let my Dad try driving on the left side of the road from the right side of the car. It was pretty freezing while they were here, and there's not much daylight this time of year to sight see by, but it was fun anyway! The kids had fun seeing Granny V and Grampa T. They hadn't seen Sunshine in almost a year, so she was a whole new person for them to meet. She kept calling my dad Grama. He didn't seem to mind.

My Dad liked seeing England through the lives of residents, instead of just a tourist in hotels. He might have been saying this to make us feel better about the lack of sightseeing they got to do, but I guess it's true. They didn't just hit tourist spots, they went to an assembly at a Britishy school, grocery shopped at Aldi, chatted with the fishmonger at the market, and ate cheese and crackers while we watched Gavin and Stacey episodes.

Our next guests are Jimmy D's parents and 2 of his sisters in May, so our Guest Suite is available for bookings until then! Come get an authentic taste of life in the Britishy countryside. Our kids may run in to use your toilet at 6 am, but it's all part of the experience.

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Granny V and Grampa T freezing at Stonehenge

My motley crew at Leeds Castle

Stinker's not too sure about that goose... it has shifty eyes...

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Thanksgiving In The Motherland

If you happen to be having Thanksgiving in Britland, make friends with someone in the US Armed Forces so you can get a turkey. Either that or be willing to pay enough for it that you won't want to eat it, because it's too valuable. This is fair enough, I guess, since turkey dinner only seems to roll out for Christmas over here, but still. Cut a foreign girl some slack! Also, you can find tinned (canned) pumpkin at Waitrose.

We filled our house with our family, 2 other American families, the missionaries from our church, my parents, and 2 Britishy families. I have 2 Britishy friends who had called their spot for Thanksgiving back in July. I don't blame them, it's the best holiday ever. You think of all the things you are thankful for, eat a ton of food, sleep, eat more food, play games or veg on the couch, and eat pie. Really, what more could you want from a holiday? They loved it!

*******

Food! Glorious food!

Elder Morrison is wondering if we're going to make him sit at the kiddie table.

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I'll fill you in on Christmas next post. It won't be in April either, I promise!

APC to the rescue!

What's APC? Read on.

I have a bloggy story for ya, but since I don't have pictures, I drew some for ya. Enjoy.

A week-ish or so ago, I went outside to clean the car out. JimmyD was inside with the kids, and I was in a hurry so I could get done before leaving for Book and Pudding Club. (Which is awesome, by the way.) After a few minutes, JimmyD came outside with a jar of calamine cream.

"How much was in here?" he asked.

I looked inside.

"More than that," I said. "Why?"

"I think Sunshine may have eaten a bunch. I found her with this, and she had it all over her hands and face."

He then went inside to Google the effects of eating calamine cream and get the number for Britishy Poison Control. I finished the car, then went in to see how things were going. JimmyD had gotten Sunshine drinking fluids, and called the poison number he had found online.

It didn't work, so he tried another....

( Several minutes later....... )

(Lots more minutes and lots more attempted numbers later.....)

(That's his phone....)

I went into his office to see if I could find any other numbers to call online. The webpage on the screen was one JimmyD had found about what happens if you eat calamine cream. At the bottom of the page, a phone number caught my eye.

AMERICAN POISON CONTROL!!!!!

Of course! I picked up the phone on the desk that calls America for free. (Voice-over IP phone for JimmyD to call American co-workers... and for us to call family.. and poison control)

"Hello, Poison Control..."

30 seconds later, I was speeding off to Book Club, secure with the knowlegde that the worst danger to come from Sunshine's snack was a few explosive diapers.

THE END

**Just so you all know, I guess you call NHS Direct for poisonings. Or America.