What Our Days Are Like...

Here is an idea of what our days have been like since the family’s arrival in the UK.

Wednesday – They arrive about 8:30am. Our first shipment from IKEA arrives at about 9:30am. H puts together our bed, which is the first bed with an actual headboard that we have ever had in our eighteen years of marriage. Some things have just never seemed important. We walk to our High Street (town centre) which is a little over a mile away to get food and back. With jet lag this does them in so most of the rest of the day is sleeping.

Thursday I go into work for a quick meeting. When I get back they are finally moving due to their schedules being severely out of whack. We take the tube to IKEA and we spend over three hours in a store. H and I have NEVER been shopping for that long. We are all completely wiped out by the time it is over. If you have never been to IKEA before, you get to walk through all the pretty showrooms and write down what you want to buy but THEN you have to go pick it all out of the warehouse and put it on trolleys. It was a good thing there was three of us because that’s how many trolleys we had full of flat-packed boxes of furniture. Most of the furniture requires assembly so as we were stacking things up I was thinking about the number of projects H just bought for himself.

We went and got them library cards Friday morning and used the internet and then we went to Hemel Hempstead on the bus in the afternoon. Without a car we are getting a lot of (needed) exercise getting to public transportation. Here we look at televisions and walk around some stores pricing various items. Now that we are all here we need to stop converting everything in U.S. dollars because it just scares us!

I recently read this book called Longitude by Dava Sobel and since we have no television or internet, H read it after me. After reading this book we were both interested in seeing the clocks that were created to solve the longitude problem. They are housed at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich which is also the prime meridian point. So Saturday we went there. While this should have been a nice outing, it wasn’t. At some point each of us was in a bad mood, never at the same time thank goodness. I can’t speak for the others but I just feel exhausted. While I felt a bit settled into English life, setting up house has made me feel like a foreigner once again. More about the Royal Observatory later...

Sunday we needed the internet. Since the library was closed I suggested we go to Starbucks which I thought offered free internet. Well, they don’t and the prices were ridiculous. As we walked down the street we noticed a local coffee shop did, but after we made our purchases, we found out that it was down this particular day. We traveled to my office instead so A could email her “best-ies” as she calls them, and we could shop for a television and internet package. We also did some internet grocery shopping. With a £4.75 delivery charge (a little over $9.00), this is a good deal for us since getting a taxi back from the store would be a lot more expensive. We also don’t have the impulse purchase temptation.

So it’s now Monday and it’s 6:30am. Our purchases from our Thursday IKEA trip will arrive today along with our groceries. We have a list of other things to do today. I can’t wait until we are a little more settled.

Their Arrival

H and A arrived Wednesday morning and I was so happy to see them. So far they love the house. They got upgraded to business class on the way over so they could sit together. A told me that her best friend said before she left, “I can’t believe you’re leaving me for your mom”.

Our neighbor dropped by last night and brought us a cake and a welcome card. In all of our moving around over the years, that has never happened before!

Last Night in the B&B

I still can’t believe that I lived in a Bed and Breakfast for ten months! Tuesday night was my last night there. There was only one other guest, a young Frenchman who checked in and immediately said he was headed to London and wouldn’t be back for two nights, so was is nice and quiet here.

L and I took some of my home purchases to our new house Monday night. I walked in the door and it is such a weird feeling when you are getting used to a new place, and realizing in a few weeks, it will feel like home. I wondered what changes will occur in our lives in this home.

She's a Teenager

A's thirteenth birthday is rapidly approaching. As I was preparing for the family’s arrival, I emailed her to find out what kind of bed she wanted. I sent her some links to several and she picked one requesting the black brown finish. She was also picking out some new tennis shoes and what did she pick, black Converse All-Stars with red trim. Then I called on another day and asked her what color sheets she wanted. Her answer – black or red. I guess we are moving into the dark phase…

Nesting

Beds will be delivered tomorrow, tea kettle has been purchased, and H & A are on their way to O’Hare International Airport in Chicago after a very stressful slapdash visit to the British Embassy downtown. They will arrive at 7:00am my time and a very large taxi will be waiting to transport them and their very large suitcases to our new home!

Some fun facts about moving overseas – The U.S. Postal Service will not let you forward mail to an overseas address. After calling British Telecom yesterday and finding out that the phone line is all ready and actually working in the house, I found out it would take eleven days for it to be ours. Maybe I misunderstood, but that seems like an awfully long time to transfer a phone account.

Sex and the City is Big Here Too

In an attempt to stay awake after a redeye flight back, I went to see the Sex and the City movie yesterday. I was afraid that a dark movie theatre would put me to sleep. The film had the opposite affect on me. It’s the second weekend for the movie here and the theatre was packed with only a few men here and there. I think me and the woman sitting next to me might have been the only women who didn’t come with at least three of her closest friends.

iPod Wars

Part of my trip to Utah this week was to celebrate the go live of a big project. We had a really nice dinner and then afterwards we gathered at one of the out of towners’ hotels which had an iHome. This prompted all of us business travelers to break out our iPods to play our favorite songs which my pal D called “the iPod Wars”. You see a whole other side of your colleagues when delving into their playlists.