"Good morning! Thank you for waking me."
"I'd like cheese in my sandwiches and an apple please"
"Yes, I've done all my homework and I packed my bag last night so I'm ready to go"

A peck on the cheek for mum, and it's off to school for my young scholars. As if.

My addiction

I might have said "hobbies" but that's so Valerie Singleton, don't you think? I have recently weaned myself off genealogy but I'm afraid it might be only a temporary weaning... I can feel the pull already and it's hard to resist going back. The truth is I haven't found a substitute for it yet and it's all oh so interesting and important. I have been forced to look at my surroundings today for the first time in a long time and I realise that we need to get some home improvements done - especially the paintwork. However I'm probably not going to start on this today, but I'm thinking May might be a good month for painting. I wonder how much I can get done in a month.

However, my addiction is still beckoning... When it comes to "hobbies" I'm an all-or-nothing person. I took up art because I was inspired to create a single painting but it escalated to the point where I had a one-woman show of some 25 paintings in a bookshop two years later. But then I was burned out and in the four years since then I've painted next to nothing. Genealogy was what took over, and I devoted hundreds of hours and hundreds of dollars to discovering my ancestors. Twice I tried to give it up and twice I was lured back in. It's a bit unhealthy to spend so much time getting excited about the past when I have a young family in the present so reluctantly I've put it away again but if I manage to live into my 60s I'll be able to work on it again without neglecting the family who will all by that time have gone on their merry way.

Apart from realising that my house is in need of redecoration and restoration, I'm currently in search of a replacement hobby. I'm spending altogether too much time on the computer and my hands and fingers are uncomfortable or in mild pain almost all the time due to clicking and typing. (Mostly because I'm using a laptop with a touch pad, and an iPod touch, so there's a lot of finger-dragging.) I honestly can't get excited about cleaning and maintaining the home - the endless laundry, vacuuming, cleaning and such, so I must find something else to get excited about. I've tried various crafts on and off and usually I complete a project (or not) and then lose interest and try to find something else to do or make. I have a number of unfinished projects around too, which isn't helpful. Maybe I should have a grand clear-out of all the hobby stuff. If only I could make money with my hobbies the way I spend it!

I'm listening to music on my iPod at the moment. I don't have anywhere near my entire record collection on it yet (in fact I don't even have CDs of most of my LPs) but I have just enough to get a reasonable variety of music to listen to. I like the Genius feature very much. I selected Green Day's Boulevard of Broken Dreams and let the Genuis take it from there. Predictably it has played tracks by Linkin Park, Coldplay and Nickelback, but it also selected Lady Gaga's Just Dance, Tom Jones, and now Bridge Over Troubled Water and all the songs are flowing in and out very nicely. I suppose it also helps to recognise just what one's preferred style of music really is. Trés cool.

I've been following Stephen Fry on Twitter recently - it feels more like stalking, especially when you end up reading the Tweets of other celebrity Twitterers. DD2 is receiving Ryan Seacrest's Tweets on her cellphone, and today I almost got involved in the lives of Jonathan Ross and Alan Davies, but thought better of it. It really is none of my concern what they are doing and they sure aren't interested in me. It would be much nicer if I could get a few more of my friends back home to start Tweeting but I guess they're too busy living their lives than singing about them. (Memo to self: Must get a life.)

Well the second bathroom beckons - it's supposed to be DD1's job to clean it, but she doesn't bother so I must get the job done myself. Only three more hours of solitude left....

A Thousand Words

A Wordle word cloud of a thousand words of my blog written in February. The bigger the word, the more frequently it was used. Interesting. Click to see it bigger.

Feeling excluded

With the increased sophistication of individual websites, and improved technology I now actually have less access to some webpages than I did eight or nine years ago.

When I was an internet virgin, back in about 1999, I was only just beginning to learn how to send email. It was late in 2000 when we got 'proper' unlimited internet access via cable and I was finally able to search and find things on the internet in which I was interested. I started with the BBC (I guessed at the url) and immediately found a long wished-for window to my home and all that was familiar - or had been when I left eight years earlier. To my delight, with the installation of a "Real"player I was able to watch snippets of loved telelvision programmes, bits of the BBC news and even watch the Queen's Speech once again on Christmas Day.

The more I found I could do and see on the internet, the more copyright and licence holders wanted to protect their property. So it was that one day my beloved BBC denied me access to snippets and full episodes of their wonderful programmes simply because I lived outside the United Kingdom and didn't possess a television licence. I even wrote to thm and said I would wilingly pay for the privilege of watching programmes online, but they stood firm and continue to guard their property jealously.

Ironically, in more recent years I've discovered more about what British people are watching by way of entertainment, through the [possibly] illegal uploadings of comedy snippets to YouTube. By this means I have learned to love Catherine Tate's "Lauren", Armstrong and Miller and enjoyed some of the better adverts. It's unfortunate though, that the BBC likes to exclude people from outside the country. Once when I wanted to order something from the BBC shop, I was directed to the BBC America shop. What's the good of that? BBC America isn't worthy of its name - read their schedule if you don't believe me. It's easy enough to find.

That actually brings me to iTunes. I am a fan of all things Apple and Mac so it annoys me that this is an issue which I can't seem to resolve. Being British and having spent my first 35 years in Britain, on receipt of my first iPod and on first opening my iTunes account, I eagerly sought all those songs of my youth which I no longer heard on the radio because they were not played in America. But what? iTunes didn't have a lot of them. iTunes UK had them but every time I tried even to look, I was redirected back to iTunes USA. When I had the audacity to try to buy a song in the UK, I was told I could only buy from iTunes USA. Would this happen if I was in the UK with my laptop I wonder? So according to iTunes USA, Status Quo hasn't recorded any songs since about 1969 so I can't buy one single Quo song from the 70s and 80s. Admittedly, their listings have vastly increased over the past couple of years so I am able to get hold of a few relatively obscure song titles from Europe now, but still no Quo! What's a girl to do?

I hate feeling far from home (even after 16 years, marriage and three children, England is still home to me) but even more, I hate being excluded in this way. There ought to be a way around this that's better than pirated clips on YouTube and flying to the UK to buy CDs.

More on clothes

I've been going to Weight Watchers for a few months and have successfully lost about 28lbs. This brings me far from my ideal weight or my ultimate goal (which is actually a good bit more than the "ideal") but it's enough to make me feel and look better than I have in quite a long time. My clothes have been falling off me so it's time for some replacements.

It's one thing to wear baggy tops when the weather is still chilly, but it's really uncomfortable to wear baggy flappy trousers. I can't imagine how those young chaps go around with their pants hanging down to their knees - they've probably forgotten how comfortable it is to wear clothes that fit! I've been thinking about moving out of trousers, but that's a big step for me. No I'm not a transvestite or seeking gender reassignment; it's just that I haven't worn a skirt or dress in years because I find that they are too uncomfortable to deal with and I can never find shoes to look good with them. It's really the stuff you have to wear underneath that's horrible. If you are a woman with lumps and bumps and are forced to wear not one or two, but three or four waistbands (eg skirt, slip, tights and possibly underwear) and then a bra and shirt above, it's not that comfortable. Waistbands and bras cause bulges in the middle (unless you want to wear some other foundation garment to squash it all up to your boobs or down to your thighs!). We've all seen the doughnuts that some people carry above their low-rise pants but in my case there are at least four of them and it's really not a pretty sight. So a dress might help.... if not for the stupid undergarments.

Gripe 1. Why are slips/petticoats made of clingy sticky nylon? If they aren't nylon, they're something else which sticks to the fabric of the skirt or dress and impedes free movement of the wearer and the dress.
Gripe 2. Why don't they make more bra-slips of assorted sizes?
Gripe 3. Why is there no viable alternative to nylon tights (aka panty-hose)?
Gripe 4. Why do American women tolerate the ill-fitting tights that seem to be all that are available over here? Perhaps they've never had the pleasure of a comfy pair from Marks and Sparks.

Anyway. I prefer to wear natural fibres all over when possible, but it's very hard to find stylish, well-fitting undergarments in anything but man-made materials. I can't be alone in finding many man-made fabrics hot and uncomfortable, can I?

For now I'm sticking to trousers - long thick ones in the winter and thin cropped ones in the summer. My days of wearing shorts were limited to a few brief years in the early 1990s when I felt slim enough to wear them and before my legs started to resemble English road maps. I am seriously never going to expose my legs ever again but it would be nice to be able to wear something long and light in the way of a cotton skirt in the summer without the need for nylon to hide my modesty.

Perhaps this is all too much information for the faint-hearted reader, but hopefully someone will be able to relate to it and maybe someone out there will know of a place where I can buy what I'm looking for. But getting back to trousers for a moment... as I mentioned the other day, I tend to shop in Target for the sake of cost and convenience. I won't spend a lot on clothes when I'm heavy because I want my 'heaviness' to be temporary and therefore an investment in 'good' clothes would be a waste. So on Saturday I invested a princely $15 (about £10) in a pair of black chinos. They were two and a half sizes smaller than the ones I was wearing before and I thought they would be fine. They felt fine when I tried them on so I ripped off the paper labels and wore them for a day. BUT cotton being cotton, the trousers 'relaxed' in the wearing and loosened up to the extent that by the end of the day they were feeling distinctly too big and flappier than in the morning. Now instead of gaining a pair of nicely fitting trousers to get me through the rest of the winter, I have another pair of baggy pants to annoy me.

The only solution is to lose a few more pounds and try again in April, before I go to England. Watch this space....

Another snow day in New England

View from the back. 7:19am



View from the side. 7:22am



View of front window. 7:25am


It's now 8:45 am on Monday morning and a time at which I would normally be getting ready for work but today is another "snow day" so the whole family is home and another day is added to the end of the school year. There isn't the same excitement in March as there is when the first snowfall of winter comes and even that doesn't compare to people's reaction in my homeland to a few flakes of snow. At this point we are all thinking about Spring, especially after the milder weather we've had recently.

The Reader

I've just been to see "The Reader" which was a trly excellent film. There was as much not in the film as was in it, which made it both entertaining and thought-provoking. I feared seeing it, having recently seen "Defiance" and not wanting to come home depressed or disturbed, but this film was neither of those things. It moved along gently and quietly - it could have evoked a great deal more emotion than it did - but I don't know that we always want to experience intense emotion at every film. Sometimes it's enough to remain on the sidelines as an observer, rather than become one with the characters.

I think the direction and the acting were spot on and Kate Winslet absolutely deserved her Oscar. I was also impressed by the actor David Kross who played the part of the young Michael Berg and I am surprised not to have heard even his name mentioned anywhere - ot that I read much about films - I just get a glimpse of this and that on tv. Did Kate Winslet mention him in her Oscar speech I wonder?

I highly recommend this film.