The Strangers in the Night

Here are some of the things we find strange so far:

~ The way they can't decipher a word unless you say it EXACTLY the way they want to hear it - eg pitta bread. It MUST be pronounced peeta!

~ The pavement is the road. "walk on the pavement please" means go play on the road!

~ Their obsession with weight and calories! Even beer is advertised with the calorie content!

~ Moralistic sitcoms. I want to laugh at a sitcom, not be told how to raise a family and deal with conflict. Suppose this is why we love Buffy!!

~ The lack of mop buckets!! And HobBrite (TM) - mother!! Bring some over!!

~ The way the snow plough will plough all the snow off the road - ONTO THE SIDEWALK!! Completely restricting pedestrian access! Bastards!

~ The apparent frequent power cuts and water supply cuts during summer. Where are we living again??

By all means - we are not moaning! In fact, we are totally loving it out here - 2 weeks today! People are so lovely - Sof went out for dinner with the spouses association on Thur eve which was a success. They are mainly much older women, but it was a laugh. They were real friendly and invited her to various events. Paul has managed to find a semi lift share, and with that comes a new friend who has invited us to dinner already!

Our stuff is still in the UK - so not best pleased! Especially when the Embassy asked for the stuff they lent us back! Thank goodness they agreed to an extension until our stuff arrives....Paul had a whip round at his work place, so we have a few extra essentials in case they do take our bits back.

We are currently in a 'severe weather warning/state of emergency' here. Predicted 26" snow. It is pretty amazing out there really - snowing since 10am and still going. We had to drop the hire car off one day early as we probably wouldn't have been able to get there tomorrow! That meant a trudge back from the Metro (via picking up tickets to see Kevin Smith in April - an evening with...) which took about 45 minutes. This was in bad weather, so really hoping we can cut this down to 30 minutes in good weather! Else our visitors will have a few problems.

We ordered pizza tonight - thru the Internet and had it delivered. We are so living it up! Paul is hoping to still be able to get to Florida on Sunday, we'll have to keep an eye out on the airport/weather status.

The cats are still really wanting to chase them darn squirrels! I can just see it - calling the fire brigade to get Chaos out of the trees! Considering the amount of trees and squirrels, I reckon they'll be coming out every hour! We've been looking at toilet training the cats too - using the toilet. You can get some expensive kits, or you can homemake things! So we are in the process of changing to flushable litter and then the training will begin. After that, we were thinking of teaching them to speak.....I'll keep you all updated!

xx