check out the height difference

Amazing what a few drops of testosterone will do when it starts dripping through your system. These photos were taken exactly one year apart.

Check out the difference in L's height.

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2008

2009

Tyre Service...round 2

You would think after my last little "tyre service" issue I would figure out exactly what to do, who to call, etc when I had a flat tire, but no. Never thought lightening would strike twice in one month. Yesterday L and I were driving back from his away basketball game, in the "other" car. We were on the Motorway in rush hour traffic. Suddenly a little light starts flashing and dinging really loud. I thought that something needed immediate attention! L was trying to find and read the manual about the indicator because at first, he and I didn't even know what it was. Could have been a "top up your engine oil" light for all we knew. It was the "runflat" indicator. I am absolutely floored that I have to deal with this again. In rush hour...on the motorway. Why don't these things happen in your neighborhood when you can pull over and walk home?
Anyway, the indicator was on, but I couldn't "feel" the flat tire yet. This little Mini Cooper is smart. It tells me when my tire is flat.
I had L call DA because it is illegal for a driver to talk on the phone, and I felt like I should have 2 hands on the wheel in case the tire made the car hard to control. DA told me to get off the motorway and onto a small road immediately. Ok, for any of you who have read my blog rantings, there are NO frontage roads in England. You are on the motorway, you exit to the next motorway and then you exit onto the 2 lane road into your village. NO extra, small roads. No exits at all!!!! No gas stations beside the road, no drive through restaurants, no little shops beside the road attracting customers. nothing. So I take the next exit hoping just to stop on the ramp, but unfortunately, there was no safe place to pull over, it was a curve and immediate entrance to another motorway and there wasn't an exit for 5 miles! Can you imagine driving along a busy section of LBJ in Dallas and there not being an exit of any type for 5 miles. crazy.
DA was telling me something about safety tires, but with L translating between us, it was a mess. Finally there was a set down place which is kinda like an extra lane where you can pull over. I couldn't open my door because it was too close to traffic. L got out and couldn't tell if either tire on his side was flat. I finally was able to read the manual myself about safety tires, and there is this little button you can push to balance the car so that you can drive home. How cool is that. It took a few tries to figure out how to do it, but finally the light went OFF and we drove the rest of the 5 miles, turned around and drove back 5 miles to our original road and got home without incident. whew. L thought he and I were going to have to change a tire ourselves.
DA must not have been too worried though, or else he felt like he had earned enough goody points for rescuing me last time because at the end of the phone conversation where he told us to pull over and deal with the safety tires, he said, "I think I'm going to run over to the British Museum after work and look at the Babylon exhibit." HELLO, your wife and child are panicking on the side of the road with the car dinging at them about a flat tire and you are going to go read about King Nebucanezer!!!!!!
After all that drama, I call the dealership this morning to figure out what to do today - and to get my tire fixed. Their response, "go put air in all of your tires and check to make sure there is even pressure between them all then reset the balance correct button and that's all you need to do." I have no idea about how these safety tires work, but that seems entirely too easy. They dont even need to examine the tire? makes me a little uneasy, but we'll give it a go.

Now I just need to figure out if any gas stations have air pumps.
Does the culture shock ever end?????

King James Bible

For all of you who grew up with the "thou shalt"s and "who goeth therefore"s of the King James Bible might find this article interesting. I know my first bible was a King James Version and I probably NEVER thought about who King James was or why it was called that. Interesting enough, he was an English king but the KJV is called by a different name in England.
I have done lots of reading about the Tudor era. Been to Hampton Court Palace numerous times and have contemplated the start of the Protestant religion and the split with the Roman Catholic church. Read about Guy Fawkes day (which I've also blogged about regarding the fire works in November and the plot to blow up Parliament - all in efforts to control the religion of the land). The KJV of the Holy Bible is related to all of that. This TIMES article sheds some light on how it came to be and why it came to be.
article from the London Times newspaper Saturday edition. Click on article address
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article5728368.ece
I find this statement interesting....
"The translators were under strict instructions. They were forbidden to add marginal notes. They were ordered to ensure that the translation conformed to Church of England doctrine and reflected traditional usage. For a King newly arrived from Scotland, himself no mean scholar, the work was to be his way of impressing on his new subjects his authority and his piety." ...
The article goes on to say how accurate the translation was. So was it made to conform to a specific CofE doctrine or is it accurate??????

Skiing in the Alps

Our family above the Alps!!!!

Here in the UK we get a holiday called something like "mid winter break", which is not to be confused with the 2 week break in April. Gotta love that English schedule! anyway, we chose to go skiing in the Alps again this year, but in Les Arc, France in the Savoie region. wow. what a cute village and fun skiing. Three other families we knew were there at the same time, so the kids had a great time hanging out with friends. Les Arc has 4 different villages, all at different elevations. We stayed at the newest one called 1950 (as in 1950 meters). The village just above us at 2000 was part of the Albertville Olympics of 1992. It looked like a quickly built, Olympic dorm type place. Ours was more of a cute village - almost Disneyesque. Literally Ski in, ski out. perfect! The village has a ski run right through the town, no streets for cars or vehicles, only walking and skiing. B and Dad skiing through the village.The village is more like a little town built where there would normally be restaurant/lodge at the top of a mountain.

One run, Robert Blanc, was where the Olympic event took place. I, of course, never did that run myself, but my friend did. She said it was lots of fun. Entirely too steep for me.

The snow was powder all the time - all because it snowed almost 24/7 until our last day when the sun came out. In fact, one day the mountain was closed because of high winds. We took the opportunity to go sledding and also to look through the shops, but with stuff priced at 900 euro for jackets, etc, we didnt make ANY purchases other than our food and spent most of our free day sledding. They dont really sell any souvenirs anyway. A handful of postcards and about 3 magnets in the whole village. No shirts, fleeces or anything with Les Arc on it. Very different from other resorts we have been to.

L's sledding run. Notice the bus on the road at the end of the run!!! I would have NEVER let him do this, but as you can guess, dad did! DA insists that he stopped before the road.

B on the green sled. "Look out below!" I think she was on track to take out the photographer.

Gotta love that powder skiing though. DA got his kicks from skiing off piste into all the powder. It seemed that powder made a run out of everything, very few groomed pistes to follow.

The 3 shots above of DA going through the powder...and this is the result- ending upside down in the snow.
Me in my one moment of decent form. Had to post it for posterity sake.
L decided this was his "perfect form" shot, HA, except he's standing still!

The ski school there was so inexpensive that it seemed like everyone on the mountain took lessons. 6 half -days for 160 euro. I think that is about what 1 hour costs in Colorado.
B (on the left) and her friend going out to their lesson.

Les Arc is within view of Mont Blanc. We never got a great view of it though because even on our sunny day, it was covered in clouds!!! much to my frustration.

Mont Blanc is just over DA's shoulder, covered in a cloud.

DA and I took the gondola all the way to the top on the one sunny day to get some shots of the Alps. It was gorgeous. Some of these shots are looking out over the Italian part of the Alps. I didnt ski down from the tip top because they were all black runs from the top, and it was bitterly cold, colder than -20 C. I had frost bite on my feet by the time we got back down. I could hardly ski! We took the photos from the very top. You can barely see the top of the gondola lines, but that is where we were- at the top of that mountain.






Italy over my shoulder. I was so cold here. I smiled quickly and pulled the cover back over my face.




These 2 shots above show how much snow we had. These are the ski runs (piste). You can make out one of the lifts at the bottom of the photo.

One highlight of the trip was a dog sled ride. that was lots of fun. B was in love with those dogs! I think she would have done that everyday if it had been an option. Eight Siberian huskies pulled us through the snow. With all of the powder, we ended up looking like this!We are in the sled with our musher on back. We took turns so that we all got to stand. The dogs spoke French though, so we never gave the commands.

L helping get the dogs harnessed.

Her favorite dog, Echo. This photo shows when B and I were standing on the back. Notice how the dogs are looking toward the camera. The musher took this photo and they watched him whereever he went. I asked how he held their attention. The answer?? good food.

Since we were in France, you would normally expect the food to be fabulous. Well, for the most part it was, but I think lots of English people ski at this resort, so some of the food was a little geared towards them. One Mexican restaurant we went too was "curry everything". DA and I ordered beef fajitas and they came with curry rice, curry meat, NO Tortillas. That is NOT a fajita! The fondue place was really good except we had no idea about what we were ordering. We just ordered for the table and were going to share between us all. We ended up with this hot stone on which to cook our own beef and chicken (very tasty) and a huge chunk of cheese where they plugged in a heat lamp and as the cheese melted you scraped it off onto your plate, it was yummy. Somehow we ended up with 3 different types of potatoes at that meal. It was a carb fest. The tartiflette potatoes were so good - a local specialty to the Savoie region. Another restaurant was cooking tartiflette outside in a monster pan. Smelled so good as you skied by.

Another night, we went to a French Brasserie and I was enquiring about the fresh seafood laid out in the window. I only wanted some shrimp. I ended up not ordering the seafood because there were only 2 shrimp per a plate along with other things I wasn't interested in, namely raw oysters and welks and winkles. I didnt want to pay that much for 2 shrimp. The server thought I should try them anyway, and she brought me a complimentary plate with some of the choices. Much to DA's surprise, I actually ate the welks and winkles (I think these are Englishs words for escargot) and loved it. So good. No butter sauce though. More of a mayo dipping sauce. I deliberately did not think about the snails who eat up all my flowers at the house. The little ones (welks) look like the ones you see on the street after it rains, tiny little snails about the size of a nickel. My friend took a photo of the plate as evidence of my gastronomy adventure, I will post it when I get it from her.

No one got hurt on the trip and smiles were all around. Our one major bummer was that on the last evening when we went to return the kids' rentals and clean out our ski locker, we realized that our locker had been broken into and DA's boots had been stolen. He had been commenting all week on how happy he was with his boots and what great boots they were, then for them to get stolen. ugh. what a bummer. The hotel called today and said they found some locks inside a chimney and that the police were working on it. We have travel insurance, so I think we will somehow be able to replace the boots, but he is just disappointed because he liked THOSE boots. Regardless of the boot theft, we had a really fun time.

I wished several times during the week that my extended family could be there since we have always had so much fun skiing together. I could see them in my mind having fun around the slopes. Kept wondering who was going to be "sweeper" as the dads skied past me, but I knew my dad would get frustrated with some of the slow lifts. check out this lift line though. Cant beat that!

One funny effect of skiing in France is that we couldnt pronounce any of the runs or lift names. Made it very difficult to meet up with people. We couldn't match up their pronounciation with the written words on our maps, nor could we ask for help because we couldnt remember the pitiful pronounciation of the place we were hunting for. We BUTCHERED the French language. Best to stick together rather than have to meet up.

Snow Day

On Monday we awoke to a blanket of 12" of snow!!!! That is the most snow I have ever had fall upon my house - anywhere - except maybe in the Rocky Mountains on a ski trip.

The kids walking down the main road in our area. Tons of folks were out and about walking around.

I think the house looks pretty in the snow.

B making snow angels with her buddies.

No plows in the town, streets are chock full of snow. It may take a long time to thaw if they cant plow anything.

This sounded like a good idea until he tried the one knee, no hands slide down the sledding hill. Note that it is a trash bag covered boogie board that 0ne would normally use on the waves in the ocean.

The kids were so excited to see so much snow. The entire day was spent outside playing. L announced it was too deep to make a snowman. An occurrence we have never come across before.

B receives a huge push from L down the sledding hill.

DA worked from home. The tube lines basically were shut down. Only the Victoria line had good service and Central line had severe delays. All other lines were closed in the morning, so DA couldn't get into work - not to mention if he could even drive out of our neighborhood!! I made a valiant effort to dig out our cars using a -----rake. No shovels here! Admittedly after an hour I hadn't made much progress, so I abandoned that effort.

For any of you "Holiday" movie lovers, this is the one week where it might look like that - snow everywhere. I think this little lane right in front of our garden looks just like the movie. This is real Surrey covered in snow.

Today (Tuesday) is also a snow day. More fun. We walked down to the village for a little outing. No bread at the grocery store, but most of the stores opened today for reduced hours. The trains were running limited service so DA went into the city late in the morning. He made a rookie mistake - wore his dress shoes and suit and had to trek across 12" deep snow at the train car park. We are such Texans that we don't even know what businessmen wear to trudge through the snow to work. I'm sure folks are chuckling at him. He made it fine, but said it was very slippery. I wont be taking the Mini out, that is for sure. I think it only has a 6" clearance to the ground and the snow is deeper than that. Might have to be rescued again if I tried that. I'll be walking everywhere I need to go!

Just got word, another school snow day on Wednesday --- running out of things to do!!!!!!!

My knight in shining armor

One of my favorite things about living in England is getting the opportunity to buy English pottery - or Staffordshire pottery as many people call it - so called because it's made in Staffordshire county. The January sales at the Stoke-on-Trent potteries are awesome. They make it well worth the 2.5 hour drive.

This week, 3 of my friends joined me during the early morning hours to make the trek. As we set out for out journey, going around the roundabout to enter the M25 during rush hour traffic, I realized that I had a flat tire. NOOOO> we've got all the kids sorted for the day, the husbands on call and Stoke on Trent in our eyes. I knew I shouldn't drive on the rim, but there is honestly no where to stop except just in the middle of traffic. I bit the bullet, drove on the rim and went on around and pulled to the side on the slip road. There aren't any frontage roads in England, so the places to pull over are far and few between. This is just not something I've had to deal with yet while living in England. Car repair, yes, but car breakdown, NO. I had no idea what number to call, who could help, etc. My mobile phone had spotty service and since I have a pay as you go phone, I thought my low balance would run out as I figured it out.

Very, very lucky for us, DA had delayed going into work in order to help me out by getting the kids to school. He was still at the house. We called another dad to go to my friends house to get her other car key, he took the key to DA and DA drove her car to meet us. We were very grateful as DA, my knight in shining armor arrived. He graciously offered to stay with the car so that we could continue our journey to Stoke in my friend's car.

Our pottery trip was very successful with the flat tire a faint nightmare. Imagine all of Burleigh 30% off (my favorite), Spode on clearance and Portmerion 40% off. I'm trying to find places to stash it. Not too easy when storage comes at a premium around here. Now all need is some company so I can serve dinner on my new plates. Do I hear you calling British Airlines????

PS. the tire service repair guy found DA within the hour and put the spare on very quickly. DA was glad we were able to get someone there because DA said he had never seen the locking wheel lug nuts like we have, and he could not have gotten them off without lots of effort - not something he was willing to deal with while wearing his business suit on the side of the motorway. Yeah for tyre service!!! ( the service people didnt understand me when I said I had a flat tire. They just said I needed tyre service.)

Boys trip to Ireland

(photos to come - havent had time to sort through them yet)

L and I spent last weekend in Dublin, Ireland. It was a father/son weekend. This was our first trip to the land of leprechauns and it did not disappoint. We had a great weekend, saw some beautiful countryside, and had time to talk about all the things that 13 year old boys are interested in - girls, video games, and basketball.
We flew out Thursday night so we could spend all day Friday exploring the Irish bogs, mountains, hills, glens and dews. I realized when we arrived that my maps, travel book, driving route and paperwork was NOT in my bag. I had been tight on time leaving work, so I had to unexpectedly meet Bridget and L at the airport right after work, which meant she had to finish packing my bag. She "accidentally" left out some very important stuff and then she was off for a girls outing with B and was NOT answering her mobile phone. It made for some interesting times until she got home later that night and was able to scan and email me all my paperwork.

L and I finally made it to our destination just south of Dublin in the Wicklow Mountains. The mountains are not very tall but still had a nice snow covering on top. The roads in Ireland make the English roads look like wide; if you have read many of Bridget's previous blogs you will understand this means they are made for only one car going one way. It was actually nice because it made you feel like you were a long ways from civilization.

We saw the tallest waterfall in Ireland - spectacular; we visited an incredible medieval town/monastery, drove over the top of one of the mountains, and visited one of the few remaining weaving factories. We bought Bridget and B a few things just so they would know we thought of them at least once on the trip.
The main thing that I learned that day was that L is over his bout of Mono. I know this because his appetite was fully restored. I have always told L that I will buy him food as long as he eats it. He not only orders off of the adult menu, but he eats a starter, a main and expects desert. By the time we got to the next town we would have to stop for a snack and hot chocolate. The trip costs me about twice what I had budgeted because of all the food L ate. I’m guessing his food alone cost 200 Euro!!!!
On Saturday we drove into Dublin where we spent the rest of the day and Sunday touring the city. The interactive Viking museum was good, St. Patrick Cathedral was very impressive, and the Library (the Long Hall) at Trinity College was a site to see. The town has a great vibe, and everyone was very nice and seemed to be enjoying themselves.
We stayed in the Temple Bar area at a totally cheap hotel (one we would never take the Bridget and B to), but the location was perfect. Temple Bar is the main drag for pubs and restaurants. There are lots of pubs. In Dublin there are 600 churches and 1000 pubs. Guinness Beer is brewed in Dublin and is really what the whole city is built around. There are 4 million people living in Ireland. Guinness brews 8 millions pints of beer a day. Of that 8 million pints - they export 6 million. Doing the math that means the 4 million Ireland residents consume 2 millions pints of beer a day. Needless to say, your visions of Ireland on St. Patrick's Day are not that different than any day of the year in Ireland.
It was a great weekend. L hasn't reached the point where hanging with Dad isn't cool, so I am trying to get as much in while I can.


Postscript: By the end of day Tuesday L and I were grounded because L didn't get his homework completed over the weekend. Gifts from the weavers didn't count as bonus points toward the homework snafu, oops.

- DA