It's the pits.

They have started building next-door. It was a lovely copse of silver-birch, but now looks like a battered corpse (ooh, did you see what I did there?). It took one man a day-and-a-half to cut down all the trees and turn them into wood-chip. The heavy plant moved in the next day and has started digging out the basement. I am a little concerned as it looks ENORMOUS. I am going to guess it is 6-bedrooms, based on my extensive architectural knowledge (ie several episodes of Grand Designs. I will take to standing next to the plot and sighing into the middle-distance "I can't help thinking that..."). Almost had a falling out with the owner who decided to check up on progress by popping round at six o'clock on Saturday morning, standing on what will ultimately be our shared drive and telling his wife authoritatively (loudly) "And that is where the toilet will be". Naturally, I didn't say anything, being both English and in Minnesota, so just tutted and closed the window IN A FORCEFUL MANNER. That'll show 'im.

We have had to cave in to social mores and purchase our first net-curtains. It will give us something to twitch.

Interestingly they were not allowed to start earlier, as there is a city rule that heavy plant must be kept off the roads for a certain time after the last snows melt. Damn' - said the S word, and I'd promised myself I wouldn't.

I don't normally watch Reality TV, as it is a bit of a Voyeuristic Indulgence - particularly the program the other day about hoarders. Ten minutes into it, I decided to do out the garage, and then moved onto the guest-room. I even dropped the nine garbage bags, two chairs and a blanket off at the thrift store, it moved me so much.

Bean has made her first kill. We're very proud, but it's the person in charge of kitty litter (ie me) who has to dispose of the mangled remains.

We went to play crazy golf last weekend. It is an amazing place. The guy makes random pieces of sculpture and each year seems to add another hole (he is up to 13). It's wonderfully eccentric.

Just. Too. Hot.

Forty degrees today. I know. I'm never satisfied. T's ice-skating started up again this evening, and most of the town had turned up to watch, it seemed, sitting on the frigid bleachers in shorts and vests. Her classroom was so warm at school, that they had to have lessons in the cafeteria. Alas, like in Australian schools, there seems to be very little air-conditioning for what, when it's not minus forty, is plus.

I overheard this at the ice-rink: Child reading Malory Towers: "Mommy, what's a 'blazer'?". Mommy: "It's a kinda snow-mobile, honey".

I've been doing more running. One of my favourite tracks is to run along the railway-line, which is a common evening walk for a lot of people around here (the rails have a utility vehicle track along side, so are quite wide). The consensus is that it is 'most likely illegal', but the drivers wave to you, and the police just drive on by. For a state which seems to have quite a loose definition of 'gun-control', they probably think "Well, if you're daft enough to be walking along a track when a 120-carriage freight train is rolling-along, is there really anything we can do or say to help you?". And, yes, they are really 120 carriages long - this means (quick mental calculation) with each one 20m long, it can sometimes straddle several railway crossings at once; effectively cutting one side of the town from the other. I tried to run along side of one the other day as it was waiting for its green-light, but gave up and ate chocolate instead.

I have a problem, otherwise, on where to run. Memorial Day was last week (white heels - hurrah!), which means that everyone (else) has opened up their cabins, and cracked open the Glad-Wrap on their boats. As the roads here can be quite narrow, the boat-trailers quite wide and the road-kill plentiful, it means there's sometimes very little space for me (pavements are non-existent....everywhere requires a car, and today I treated myself both to the drive-through chemists, and the drive-through post-box).

And I'm not able to run cross-country at the moment because of the ticks. The ones you can see are OK...it's the ones the size of poppy-seeds which are the ones to scream hysterically at.

I took an executive decision last week (i..e spent a Lancashire man's money without asking him first), and bought some furniture for the 3-season porch. In the last house we were always being nibbled at by the voracious mosquitoes, but here, luckily, there is a balcony enclosed with screens - pretty handy on a swamp. It also has a ceiling fan and speakers for piped music, if only we could be bothered with trying to figure out how it works. Once or twice we have found ourselves sitted in there, Conversing.

Bridgjo had a good day's kayaking on the river, which is very high, due, of course, to the snow. He took T out on the lake, but she sat in the back, with her friend in front, and let her do all the work. Chip off the old block.

This is why I hate computers....

Intermittently I earn my keep by ploughing through all the piles of paper on my desk: pay the lawn chap, sort out turning on the reticulation, downloading claim forms for medical bills, organizing T's hectic social life and changing my address on my UK Bank account.

This last one is held at a Well Known British Banking Institution, and necessitates you typing into the phone key-pad card numbers, date of birth, security codes, best-friend's dog's icense number before you can even speak to an operator - who then REALLY grills you. Now my English bank account is there purely as Running Away Money (or, Dash Cash), which, admittedly isn't going to get me very far at the moment as it only contains $2.52. But it's there should my US cards ever get zapped, or I need an extra couple of bob to tide me over to the next Rapture. So I find it a bit annoying when I have to try and remember the exact last time I bought something ("Umm, Jackie magazine in 1986?"), or the number of direct debits, passwords for on-line banking which I never use, etc.

So, this was going to be an easy one.

I wanted to change my address.

So I call the UK, get through all of the above dialog and the lady says to me, "Ah, I see you do not have the necessary security layer set up," (there's more?), "So I will need to send you a form. To your new address. Could you spell it out for me please?".

And this is why I hate computers.

Drive-Thru Life

We went to Colorado last month for a weekend. I was extremely impressed by the drive-through cigarette shop, although the drive-through post-boxes here take some beating. Bridgjo found an original share certificate for the Isabella Gold-Mine, which was accepted as The Official Souvenir (in Disney, it was a plastic snow-globe of the Little Mermaid, so I am happy that T's tastes are improving). It was bitterly cold, and I was a bit grumpy that I had forgotten to bring my ski-jacket. On the Sunday I went out wearing every single item of clothing in my possession, including several pairs of knickers, one of which doubled-up as ear-warmers.

We'll be staying for another two years, it seems, so maybe I'll be unpacking some of those boxes soon. Unfortunately, not until we manage to ascend the K12 of paper-work which is Renewing Your Visa. It starts by forcing you to take at least 4 hours per application on-line (the system crashes more often than...than...ANYTHING! (apologies, but after that evening I found it quite difficult finding humour in anything for a quite a while), then making sure all the documentation has been completed correctly by the company (which still managed to spell bridgjo's name 3 different ways, and put on our Australian address where we haven't lived for the past 5 years). Then it's the gentle teasing and joshing that is Organising Your Interview. Yes you can go to Montreal...oops, no you can't...how about Quebec?...no, too late, you hovered too long over the mouse...Halifax then?

So Halifax it is...known for its slogan "Halifax...It's a Blast!" (no, not really), and for being next to the Estate Agents in Baxtergate.

T has just completed a week of exams. These are for the French Government - the American's are next year. She had four days of 4 French tests, and 4 maths. I'm not quite sure she completely Got It, but I'm certainly interested in how she is progressing. So the next blog will either be very braggy, or very fibby. ("So,yes, we are thinking she should be doing the Chinese immersion this summer....").

The picture shown at the top was done courtesy of Wordle - an extremely addictive application.

Flu in thru the window

I tried out the raw food restaurant a couple of weeks ago. It was interesting in the way that it is astounding that there are so many ways to present salad. I had a, well, salad on a sesame seed biscuit (of the sort found next to the Tunnocks tea-cakes at Hanley market). It was all very tasty, but, like Chinese food, not the sort of thing I want to rush home and try. It may be healthy, but there's far too much chopping and preparation involved to offer it to the family and for them to look down and say "Oh. Salad".

Rather handily, the restaurant also does colonic irrigations (presumably in a room away from the kitchen). Surprisingly, I found the next day that this is completely unnecessary.

Bean fell in the bath again. She gave out an enormous howl of indignation (we'd left it running, and she got rather over-excited at seeing the bubbles). She then immediately sought solace in the kitty litter. Bearing in mind it is design to be super-absorbent, she came out looking as if she had been bread-crumbed.

She was spayed yesterday. She gave me a FURIOUS look when I left her. She is now wearing The Cone of Shame and pinging off the furniture. We are supposed to leave it on for 2 weeks, and I also have to give her a syringe full of medicine twice a day. What japes!

I never pass up an opportunity to make an American to feel slightly inferior, especially T's English teacher whose note home last week had to be sent back corrected. So I was trying to teach T the phrase "Dulce et decorum est pro patria amori". Unfortunately, she's convinced it's "dolce di latte for Patrick Moore"...so she's not quite ready for the Oxford entrance exams just yet.

She may also not be ready for The Art Academy. I thought it might be nice, instead of sport-y activities, to go to the local art centre and draw, paint, and basically make the sort of mess the mother of a single child can't be doing with in her own home. Except, it's rather more serious than that. Firstly, you have to commit (ie pay) to a year. And then have an interview. And THEN present your portfolio. Yes, even if you are seven. What? Really? Does the portfolio have to have a zip? Does she need to talk about light, perspective and the importance of putting the lids back on the paints afterwards? Or am I being paranoid and it just requires an ability not to poke yourself in the eye with a pencil?

We've also been tackling plurals. In Spanish, for instance, they use the word "Hobby", as in the English, but very sensibly just bung an "s" on the end. Like everything, the rules take some explanation, but I threw in the word "ox" as I was feeling particularly waggish. She looked at me very seriously and said "Mummy, when am I ever go to come across more than one ox?".

We've all had flu. It was nice and mild, but made us feel very tired indeed. As T said "I'm feeling so much better that I think I'll break the speed limit on the road to recovery".

Please send food parcels

We were talking adjectives and adjectival nouns in Spanish on Tuesday. The teacher was having to explain what "pedantic" meant, and seeing my face (confused rabbit in a Large Hadron Collider expression) said that it wasn't a word that Americans seemed to use as he was always having to explain it, although Europeans seemed to have no problems. "Ah," I said, "Maybe they are just more pedantic in England than they are in America, so we need a word for it". "And are there more pedantics do you think in England?" he asked. "No," I said from the lofty heights of my B grade at o-level, "Just pedants". Gosh, how we laughed!

I missed out on a Brit get-together on Monday, because of the snow that now seems to causing havoc elsewhere. Note that I have used the word Brit. I have only ever heard it used between ex-pats, usually in a mocking way comparing our ability to spell with the rest of the world and the fact that "flavorful" is probably not actually a word. Without exception, if you were to ask any one of them, they would admit to being born in England, and never from Britain. I'm certain it is only (English) politicians which use the expression...you can be pretty sure that the Welsh, Scots and Irish always describe themselves as such.

Last night, I made lavender biscuits on the assumption that if they didn't work out, I could always use them to lace my knicker-drawer.

Brrrr!

Right, UK. Listen up there at the back, and try and man up a bit will you?:

Minus 33 degrees C last night - it was the talk of the school coffee morning. There was some confusion about whether we were discussing the temperature in Celsius or Fahrenheit - I had to explain that, being English, minus temperatures are always discussed in Centigrade, and hot weather in Fahrenheit.

When we woke up there was ice on the inside of the windows, and a thick crust of frost around the edges of the front-door.

Not having TV (we're soooo hippy-dippy), we're never too sure of the weather, and went out last weekend to go tubing at Elm Creek. It was excellent fun, although bitterly cold. Sensible Minnesotan mothers had tucked their kids in front of improving Mandarin Chinese DVDs; we decided to fling ourselves down icy mountains in rubber dinghies. It was excellent fun though - more so as no-one else was there.

The cat fell in the bath last night. She had a bit of a swim about and didn't seem at all put out. She also likes sitting in the sink playing with the drips, so she's trying very hard to be the Turkish Van I wanted, but couldn't afford (although a quarter of the size). She seemed slightly bothered that we laughed at her so long about it, however.