Under the counter

I think the butcher fancies me. Every now and then he slips me the not-so-nice looking steaks or tail-end of the salmon in with my order, saying they don't look good enough to sell. Obviously this will put me in good stead should the Second World War break out again.

T, after spening the last 18 months tip-toeing across the ice, has passed her first grade ice-skating. She is the same level as I am, and is everso strict when it comes to her giving me a leson each time we go out. By forcing her to enjoy sport (sometimes physically, sometimes through crisps) I am hoping she will never have to experience the full unmitigated horror of being chosen last for the netball team.

The ice-skating has now finished for the summer, and I have replaced it by attending a personal trainer at the gym, courtesy of one of bridgjo's friends who can no longer use the lessons he paid for. The Swiss friend and I have started running around the lake again. The weather is beautiful and sparkley....though now and then a Minnesotan will sigh and murmur "It's not over yet, y'know".

A bloke said "Howdy!" to me today. I giggled.

Retail Therapy, A Case For

I have a bit of a problem at the moment, well, since I got here, in that I cannot use my American Visa card to purchase items on the Internet.

Each time I go to a web-site and have entered all the selections I want - colour, size, mailing address, billing address, card number, expiry date, those three little numbers on the back, orientation, religious preference - I sometimes get a box saying “This site is verified by Visa”, which then presents me with another set of boxes whereby I have to enter all sorts of extra data, as a further layer of security, which includes my Social Security Number.

Unfortunately, this means that the security is now so high that even I, as a lazy ex-pat spouse who does not have a SSN, cannot use my credit card over the Internet.

This screen has both the Wells Fargo (my bank) and the Visa symbols on there, indicating that it is with some sort of mutual agreement with those two institutions.

However, I have now spent:

1) 1 hr on the phone to Wells Fargo, who eventually said they couldn’t help me as I could neither recite the last 397 transactions verbatim, nor did I know my maternal great-grand-father’s favourite pig’s name.

2) 1 hr in Wells Fargo (with extra ID) who said “It’s to do with the people who are selling you stuff on the Internet, nothing to do with us”.

3) 30 mins talking to a nice lady called Eileen in the hamper shop in the UK, that she’d never heard that before love, and what time is it there, then?

4) 10 mins talking to Wells Fargo, who put me through to their Visa department….

5) Who put me back through to Wells Fargo….

6) Who put me through to Rita, the cleaning-lady, I think…

7) Who put me back to someone else at Wells Fargo who said “Really, I don’t know what you’re talking about, it’s definitely nothing to do with Wells Fargo, but I’ll put you through to the Visa department”;

8) 1 hr talking to the Visa department who got a bit huffy “You keep interrupting me Madam”, when I tried to explain to them that the credit card was not fit for purpose. She said that there was nothing I could do about it and her solution was that I could always phone up the company I was ordering from, but obviously not after 1pm if it’s in the UK due to the time difference, and I’m not sure whether I could actually be that bothered doing stuff over the phone when there are, allegedly, easier ways of purchasing an item.

Even if she made a note, she said, nobody would get back to me (because by this time she hated me).

She then put me through to Visa, who, after a rather jaunty Irish jig, cut me off.

9) I then sent a snippy e-mail to Visa, whose contact details (rather understandably) are extremely difficult to find on their web-site, who responded thus:

“When activating VbV or using a password to shop online, the cardholder is always interacting directly with his issuer, not Visa.

As many Visa card issuers have a Verified by Visa area on their website, you may wish to search for it. If you are not able to locate a Verified by Visa area on the website, please contact a Supervisor or Manager at the Verified by Visa Customer Service (a.k.a. EBusiness) Area at your Visa card issuer to request alternative options to the Social Security Number requirement. Your Visa card issuer contact information can be found on the back of your Visa card, on your Visa card statement or via their website. The local branch office will not be able to assist with this.”

Meaning that Wells Fargo, if they could just bring that careering carriage under control for just one instant, might be able to say “Hey, we are an international company. Any chance of an NI number instead?”

At which point I’d probably think “Bugger”.

I never met Hercules while he was shovelling out those stables, but know that I would have been hanging over the fence with a cup of tea saying “Oooh, I know, but listen to what happened to me….”.

And talking about visas, I didn't have to go to Canada after all to get T's visa transferred from her old passport to her new one. I just had to go to the Illegal Import of Vegetation and Small Mammals section at Humphrey terminal and a nice chap did it for me.

Fame at last

At last I get the fame I deserve....hmmmm, quite. Nevertheless, I scrape a mention here:

http://www.working-mum.co.uk/2010/03/mummy-bloggers-carnival/

I currently have a cold and am incapable of writing the HTML necessary to provide a direct link after the hot toddy (which naturally include rather more whiskey than honey, belying my Irish roots). Which reminds me, T needs to get a new green T-shirt in time for St Patrick's Day. French School. In the US. Yep, we celebrate Irish-ness here more than they actually do in Ireland...

Quite a reasonable rate

We went to a birthday party today. I'm not completely sure, but I think it's quite an ex-pat thing to stay at the children's party and hang-out with other parents, surreptitiously swigging gin whilst their kids quietly throw up over the cat. In Perth, however, I heard of a friend throwing a party for their seven year-old where the parents not only dropped-off their invited child, but also additional siblings (leaving her to run down the street after the retreating 4WD with a child under each arm).

I was asked to do the face-painting. One child, possessed by an old lady, as 6-year olds generally are, observed very seriously "Goodness, you can paint birds *and* draw butterflies on faces. Gosh". Luckily, they are still only 6 or 7, so even when I painted a butterfly wing which actually resembled more of a small dog poo, but in pink, it was quite all right as long as I put glitter on afterwards. Small girls can be very forgiving in their criticism as long as there are sparkles involved.

We saw a small patch of grass today for the first time in five months. The Minnesotan equivalent of hearing the first cuckoo.

And I have just put a chicken carcass out on the garden, and already a grey fox has come down and helped me out with my recycling.

Wheeeeeee!

I went ski skating today. Like skating, but with skis and more down-hills. Bridgjo said I didn't look too fliddy, meaning, I assume, that my bum wasn't sticking out too much. At this stage in my life it's with relief I can get off a horse/take off my skates/return the hired skis/get up in the morning and think "Phew! Still alive, then...".

One of the girls from book-club was giving a group of us a lesson, and it was really nice to be out on the track in the blazing sun (ONE DEGREE CENTIGRADE!!!). I think I'll have another go next week, whilst the tracks are still open, but might try the cross-country instead.

T did the cross-country, with her skis firmly wedged between the ski-width tracks which are cut into the path for this specific purpose, and I did skate-skiing (or ski-skating, I've forgotten). This involved attempting to skate in, well, skis on a quite frozen polished surface this late in the season, with no edges. Slightly less graceful than "Dancing on Ice".

T wants to "louper l'ecole" next week and go again, though at the rate the snow is melting, we'll have to see, although I am always up for a bit of constructive skiving.

Ah yes - "home schooling" - how to have fun yet still satisfy the school inspectors....

I went to the doc's last week as I thought I had a fungus under my nail. He said it was actually psoriasis, and looked very smug when I said said that I had had psoriasis (thanks Spell Checker) before. Obviously a bit of a House moment for him.

While I was in the waiting room, there was an elderly lady who'd been dropped off by presumably her daughter, who then dropped a pen on the floor. "Oh crap" she said, in the loudest voice. She wasn't even wearing purple.

Where have all the flowers gone?

I was talking to an Australian friend the other day and she was moaning about the relentless heat they were experiencing back in Perth. She also commented, genuinely perplexed, on the fact that we didn't usually go to the beach in the evening any more. "At least the snow will be gone soon, hey?" she asked. Umm, no actually. Although we probably only get three good snow-falls or so, it all just hangs around in the sub-zero temperatures and melts in one big cascade at the end of April. Whilst everyone in the UK is smugly busy writing poetry about yellow flowers, we are struggling to remember where we last put the lawn.

T jumped into a snow-drift in the front garden on Monday, and I temporarily lost her.

We did a bit of a mini tour around Downtown and St Paul today, for the stagiaire, taking in Punch Pizza and the Truffle shop (the latter owned by a man from Leicester. We also popped into the State Capitol buildings. There was, surprisingly, no security, so we ambled around at our own pace. I was especially impressed as much with the Senate's titles, as I was with the decor. I imagine the Sergeant-at-Arms at one point actually did have a gun (or probably, even still does), but I could only assume that the Engrossing Secretary maybe was furnished with a plentiful supply of lipstick and the odd flirtatious remark.

Pay attention at the back

As if I didn't learn my lesson (hah!) last week, I was called out of retirement on Tuesday for another bout of Helping Out ie "We need a temp but can't be bothered with spending money". This time I was to lead the class (although there is a perfectly capable assistant teacher in operation who could have taken over), and to also take them in English and maths ("because Mlle X isn't very 'mathy'"....whatdya mean the assistant isn't very 'mathy'....she's a teacher. How tricky is first grade math(s)?).

Unfortunately, in the English part the original teacher was working on "rhyming with 'AN'". Yep, quite easy until you ask an American child "Spell 'fan'". "What?". "Fan". "Uh?". "Fan". "Nope, still don't get it...". " Fen?". "Oh...F-A-N?". So yep - had to put on an extremely unconvincing American accent for 3 days.

I was struck by the huge difference between their abilities - a couple could read 'daughter', 'caught' and 'draught', others struggled on 'Please put the pecan in the pan'. But more I was struck by the difference in behaviour. Some kids would just sit there and do the work and ask for more (how can I not have favourites?), whereas others, in an obvious parody of their principle caregivers, would throw their arms in the air and yell "Why the hell should I want to do that?". Hmmmm - not quite what I remember from Miss Keyes' class in Infant 1 (but then again I remember that it also involved a jam spoon).

I realised towards the end the one big lesson of being in front of 6 year-olds.

Don't show fear.