Family of Five

10 Things That Make Me Happy (Right Now)

Taking a cue from my dear friend NatDawg, and listing 10 Things That Make Me Happy (Right Now). If nothing else, it seems like a good exercise. I could much more easily list 20 Things That Bug the Shit Out of Me, but I am resolved to be more sunny and optimistic and I WON’T.

1.    My camera. I love it in a way that I have never loved any other inanimate object since Cuddles, a teddy bear with a rattle in his tail that I slept with until he pretty much fell apart. If I get into bed at night, and I can’t see in my mind's eye exactly where I put my my camera, I have to get up and find it before I can go back to sleep.

2.    The internets. It’s sad, but at the moment my entire social life outside my immediate family is online. I have flickr-friends, blogging friends (and new ones here, and here), and twitter friends, some of whom are also my friends in real actual animated life. You know who you are.

3.    My chickens. They are loud and high-maintenance; they make me crazy, but they are also my greatest and most reliable source of joy.

4.    My man. He’s hot. He’s the rock that I grab onto when the current threatens to sweep me away and pull me under. We have been married 9 years today.

5.    My laptop. Oh Mac, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways: so silvery, so quiet, so useful. The instrument that manifests my creative endeavors; where I write, play artist, and communicate.

6.    Harry Potter. I’m enjoying the mania. I left HP world after Book V, but have been happily dragged back in with this latest and final release. No spoilers, please, our Bloomsbury copy of Deathly Hallows is calling me from the back of the couch where it has lain, forlorn, since we brought it home from the release party. Just as soon as I finish The Half-Blood Prince.

7.    My new green amber ring that Rod bought me in New Orleans.

8.    Our new house. It’s spacious, bright, and comfortable, and the garden is beautiful. The view from our kitchen window is nothing but green treetops. In London. I can’t wait for our things to arrive so that I can make a home here.

9.    British Accents. They are infinitely varied, and oh-so-pleasant to my ears. They have given me a whole new appreciation for the English language, which I was pretty taken with even before I moved here. There’s something about hearing all different kinds of people talk the same, but not the way I’m used to hearing it, that reinforces the fact that we share this human experience.

10.    Change. I’m really enjoying the fact that everything around me is suddenly different than it used to be. It’s exciting, invigorating, energizing. I’m looking forward to gaining a more intimate understanding of the world by living in a different place, to eating different food, seeing castles and meeting new people. It’s like starting over, but starting over knowing all I’ve learned so far. It feels, in my best moments, like I might be making the most of my life.

Arrival

The Book, originally uploaded by texasgurl.

We arrived in London on Wednesday (? I think, it's a bit of a blur), and stayed two nights in a Travelodge before moving over to our new apartment on Friday. The hotel was clean and serviceable, but no luxuries whatsoever. As in, no phone in the room, and we had to ask for more than one towel. And sit around in the lobby for um,  three hours because we had eight bags and they had no storage room to stash them for us until check in. But it was clean, so I will not complain. Any more.

We ferried a few things over to our new house (like a town house) over the next couple days, and met our landlords, who were just unbelievably lovely people. They are a family of four, and they are moving to the States for at least a couple of years, so it was interesting to compare notes. Fiona was the one we dealt with mostly, and she gave the me the skinny on where to buy children’s shoes and shop online for groceries, and introduced us to several neighbors and parents at her son's school. While I sat in her living room picking her brain about all sorts of miscellania, Babe-ish did something clever (I forget what it was), and Fiona said, "My, you are a just bright button, aren't you?" She was terribly terribly charming.

We had a school interview for Girlish on Thursday at the local non-sectarian primary school, which has achieved an "outstanding" rating this past year. That is, apparently, a very rare occurrence, and so we were concerned that we might not be able to get her placed there. As it turns out, though, they have a place for her in Year 3, which was really exciting and a big relief for me (us). The only hitch is that the school where Fiona's son attends, a Church of England school, has all of Fiona's friends and neighbors and they all seem to really want us to come there. It's not as highly-rated a school, but obviously the parental involvement and community there is very good. A sidenote: many public schools in London are religiously affiliated. The CoE school was rated as an "outstanding" school about 10 years ago, but hasn't been so again since. And there's the religious issue, which concerns me since I don't go in for religion much, but the parents I met there assured me that it was very low-key.

Oh, and our checked bags—the other 8 of them—were delayed in Cincinnati on the way over, so Rod had to taxi to the airport to pick them up Friday morning. It rained an absolute gully-washer that morning, and his taxi got stuck in a flood and we almost didn't make our hotel checkout. A bit of drama. Finally, we got everything over to the new place, where Fiona was frantic with last-minute packing and errands, and then we cleared out until 7:30p.m., when she was planning to leave. When we returned we got to meet our new neighbors, who have 3 children: two boys, 9 & 7, and a girl, 5. All six kids hit it off famously, and after forcing Fiona to stop her frantic packing and have a cuppa tea, we hung out with Karen while she finished up. Karen’s going to be a great neighbor, I can tell. She has a northern England accent, which sounds almost Irish to me, and she’s as sweet as the ginger cake she served with our tea. Around 8:00 we moved back over to "our" house, and it was bliss, bliss, to just be in a place that was a space all our own. We put a few things away, made the beds, and popped some champagne.

Fiona had also given us, because she is so terribly unbelievably lovely, her ticket to claim the newly-released and final edition of Harry Potter, which became available at midnight Friday in the local bookstore. So Girlish and I headed out to the High Street (the main street in town with all the shops) around 11:30, and queued up with all the neighbors to claim the book. It was no problem staying up for it, as we are still jet-lagged in the late-night direction from our travels. People were in costume, and the bookstore owners walked up and down the queue, handing out cookies and punch, and wine for the grown-ups. Some of the parents I'd met earlier in the afternoon happened to line up right behind us, and so we chatted as we waited, and the whole the thing was an absolute blast.

Yesterday we went to the store and bought groceries, which was also a bit of an adventure, the whole family hiking down the High Street with the stroller, bags and backpack for the groceries, with Babe-ish on my back. We stopped in a fruit & veg store, and also a butcher shop, and then on to a big grocery store for staples. I roasted a fresh chicken and some potatoes and red peppers for dinner, and I used some rosemary, sage, and oregano from Fiona's (our!) garden.  The butcher-shop chicken was fresh—as in, I opened the plastic and gasped out loud because the drumsticks had feathers clinging to their heels. I took a deep breath and plucked them out. If I'm gonna eat chicken I might as well remember that it used to have feathers, I guess. It was worth getting over my squeamishness, though. I cooked it at 500 degrees for 50 minutes, rubbing its skin with salt and olive oil and stuffing its little body cavity with lemon, garlic, onion and Fiona's fresh garden herbs. Little chicken, you did not give your life in vain; we thoroughly enjoyed you.

So, we are well and happy, feeling so grateful to be just the slightest bit settled, and as soon as we get the phone up and running we will start calling all you friends and family that are waiting to hear from us.

P.S. Girlish is already trying on her British accent. "Mommy, can I have some wat-ah?" and, "Ouch! That huhts!" She kills me.

This Is How I Feel About It

I am just so sick and tired of the Democrats' spinelessness! Why will no one in America stand up and fight for what we’ve lost—what we continue to lose day by day?

• Habeas—that’s your right to come before the courts when they haul your ass to prison, people. Do you understand what it means to toss that particular right out the window without a peep of protest? That’s the right that stands between you and a prison of undisclosed location, which we have now, for the first time in the history of our country, sidelined.
• Torture—that’s the thing that we do now, but we used to not do because we’re supposed to be a civilized country with respect for human life and dignity.
• Privacy—that’s what we you used to have before the government claimed the need to eavesdrop on our phone conversations in the name of “safety.”
• Choice—that’s the right our Senate ceded to the states in that bit of political theater called Alito’s confirmation hearings.

Where is our outrage? Why aren’t we marching in the streets, demanding the impeachment of this moron? King George has set us back hundreds of years, economically, culturally and socially, and yet we just sit idly by and watch it happen. And you know, I’m not out there marching, either, and I honestly don’t understand it, except to say that it just feels like, what’s the use of marching alone? And yet most Americans I know feel much like me. Angry. Angry, scared, and dismayed.

Today, when I heard Al Gore on the radio talking around the fact that he thinks King George’s pants are on fire, and Jimmy Carter on MSNBC backing down from the fact that he possessed the balls—if only for a moment—to say that this Administration was “the worst in history,” I thought, maybe that’s it. Maybe if any of our leaders had the cojones to stand up and speak out, then maybe the people would begin to understand that our country is in crisis. Maybe if our leaders had the courage to take to the streets the people would follow. But the Democratic leadership is too polite for its own good, which is bad enough, but they’re too polite for the good of the country, and I believe we are in need of some good old fashioned bad manners. Everybody keeps acting like what’s going on is reasonable and it’s NOT. It’s simply insane, but we’re all trapped in some bizarre media charade where everyone has their part to play, and no one wants to ruin the show.

Will somebody besides Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert stand the fuck up, please?