Okay, impatient Internets, here, at long last, is a sneak peek of our apartment:

Just kidding! This is the Jelly Belly bull on the ground floor of Selfridge’s at the Bullring shopping center. You can buy one just like him for £20,000. He lives next to the Krispy Kreme and the Lucky Charms you can buy for £7.49 per box.

You can click here to check out our apartment.

I’ve really been missing my beloved New Seasons. Ginger candy and chocolate soy milk and Bragg’s liquid aminos…mmm. I do hear that there is a Whole Foods or two in London, but that’s a little impractical. Instead we get to do our grocery shopping at places called Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrison’s, and, oh yes, ASDA, but don’t tell anyone. It’s just for the jalapeno-stuffed green olives!

Tesco and ASDA are both open 24 hours; ASDA has a giant sign rivaling its store sign advertising this fact. So imagine our surprise when we arrived one Sunday at 4:30 and it was closed. Turns out that “24 hours” means “24 hours every day except Sunday, when we really mean 6.” Apparently shops larger than 280 square meters can only be open for 6 continuous hours between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. on Sundays, and not at all on Easter Sunday.

Which is fine; go ahead and turn away my business, just don’t expect me to fall for the old “24 hour” bit again!

And I would appreciate it if you would start stocking Rainier cherries and Reese’s Pieces. It’s nearing Best Cancelled Roadtrip Ever 2008 time, which means lots of the aforementioned bite-size snacks. (Little tip, Internets: Reese’s Pieces don’t melt in the car, they just get sweaty; and if you live in the Pacific Northwest you should probably go eat some Rainier cherries right this second.)

And I will give you this, UK grocery stores: not only do you entertain me with your Heinz-brand ham and cheese spread in a can, but also with your customers who I overhear talking about the people “at me birfday party.” I guess I will continue to patronize you.

People are generally very good at picking up that we are not from Around Here. They start by asking what we’re doing here (husband’s job) and where we’re from (Oregon, just north of California).

The next question, invariably, is why would you want to live here?

At first we didn’t really understand this: to us it’s an adventure! It’s like a totally different country over here! We don’t care which part we’re in!

Then I was talking to a tram conductor the other day who was telling me about how he has family in Ohio and how one of his cousins lives in Cleveland proper.

And I couldn’t help thinking why would anyone want to live there?

I mean, no offense, Ohio in general and Cleveland specifically: I know nothing about you and I have never visited you except for maybe passing through on the train that one time, but I have no desire to ever do so.

I’m sure it’s a lovely place, but, with the possible exception of the Corn Palace, I really have no use for most of the Midwest. This probably means that I’m a horrible person, but at least I can identify with the bafflement of the English.

Several years ago, I learned to read. I was 4 at the time, so when I was 5 and it was time to start kindergarten, my reading skillz propelled me straight into first grade.

In second grade, I finished my math workbook a few weeks before the end of the school year, so they gave me a third-grade workbook. And so my math skillz propelled me into being a year ahead in math through the end of high school, culminating in a three-student calculus class in which my friend Amy regularly ate her lunch, lay on the floor, and/or proclaimed our collective lack of conceptual understanding to be at least half of the teacher’s fault.

But before that, I was 12, and Mrs. Shearer’s eighth-grade English class inspired my illustrious ‘95-’96 literary career.

Mrs. Shearer made us do things like read books and study foreign Christmas traditions and complete Winston Grammar worksheets, the very bane of our existence. And she also made us write stories, all the time, which made this class the best I’ve ever taken (even better than that college grammar class).

The stories were usually themed, like “use 10 of these ‘jungle’ words in a story,” but no matter the theme, my cast of characters revolved around one man: Bob Crotchit.

Bob had a wife named Frieda, and they lived in Zimbabwe with a teal-striped dancing flamingo whose name escapes me. Bob’s favorite colors were orange and mint green. Bob had a friend named Mr. Woody, who worked at the tire factory, and a friend named Herman J. Herman, who lived in Wisconsin and owned three chickens named Hen, Henny, and Henrietta and a rooster named Jerry (he made cheese for a living, but info re: his source of milk is strangely lacking). Bob’s friend Al featured prominently in an epic adventure called “Al’s Plane and the Dangers of Orange Juice.”

Our big project for the year was to write and illustrate a book. I made a pop-up book called Breakfast at Vinnie’s Various Vegi-Sausages. Bob is here relegated to a genial fairy godfather-esque role, and his godson, Flin, is instead embroiled in a tangled web of intrigue involving the aforementioned teal-striped dancing flamingo, blackmail, tiddlywinks, Love Potion No. 9, and two villains named Stanley “The Squid” Snodgrass and Percival “The Prune” Peabody, who wore matching hot-pink Elvis belts, whatever those are.

The only line I can actually remember: “Twin candy cigarettes dangled like participles from thin lips.” I’m pretty sure they were also drinking virgin margaritas.

In a later, semi-related story, a folder of Winston Grammar is used to fend off some attackers, inciting Bob to shout, “Not the Winston Grammar! I don’t want to live my life not knowing what a predicate nominative is!”

I was very strange child.

One of the nice things about our ridiculously inefficient washing machine is that if you’re washing overnight, you can delay the cycle so it’s done at approximately the time you wake up so that you can pull the clothes out whilst they’re still hot and thus reduce your ironing time. Of course, it never actually has any effect on the ironing time, but it’s fun to pretend.

There is also lots of complicated math involved: hour(s) to delay cycle = hour at which clothes need to be done - (washing time (dependent on temperature and cycle speed) + drying time of my choice (also affected by cycle speed)), bearing in mind the wacky 2400 time that my brain is now using approximately 38% of the time just to keep things interesting.

(Incidentally, this is about the same percentage of time that my brain uses the British “dd/mm/yyyy” format, which means I have given up on trying to keep track of whether a given date is dd/mm or mm/dd and instead default to using the actual name of the month or figuring it out from context.)

One much nicer thing that never fails to make me laugh: The apparel of Monkey, a sock monkey featured in PG Tips commercials, who in one such commercial sports a tank top (singlet? vest?) reading “I facebooked your mum.”

And somehow infinitely funnier than facebooking someone’s mom.

So I have this husband who moved me halfway around the world and then left me here whilst he went home for 3 weeks for an MBA class. (I know, right?) While he was gone, I attempted to pass the time by purchasing a jigsaw puzzle. I did not know at the time of purchase that it was the Worst Puzzle Of All Time.

It looked innocent enough, a National Geographic photo with two Buddhist monks and some temple ruins and some overgrown tree roots. Except the only contrast in the entire puzzle is between the very small patches of bright orange robes and the flat gray of the entire rest of the puzzle.

Apparently, my puzzle solving philosophy is really more of a “here, I’ll work on these stripy fish, and you can work on that vast expanse of water and/or sky.” Which is a difficult philosophy to maintain when there is no one else around for 3 weeks.

I did not finish my puzzle. Stephan did not finish the puzzle when he returned, even though I selflessly left it out on our table so he would be able to if so inclined. Half of our Very First UK Guests did not finish the puzzle, although I had very high hopes for her and her near-professional puzzle-working status. We ended up putting it all back in the box, unsolved, which I hate doing.

Stupid puzzle.

But if it makes you feel any better, we recently passed a truck belonging to a company called SOL Construction. Would not be my first choice.

So we had our first very welcome visitors last weekend. Not only do we get to see and/or meet Stephan’s cousin Alison and her friend Melissa, but we actually went out and did stuff. Like this:

Went to Warwick Castle, where there were peacocks and a birds of prey show and a wax figure of Queen Elizabeth, among others, and a ghost tour and a fake joust.

Stopped by Stratford-upon-Avon, where we saw the outside of the house in which Shakespeare was born and the outside of the building in which whatever is left of him is kept. Also a stretch SUV full of wee witches and wizards who alighted at the magic shop.

Drove up to the Lake Windermere, where most of us had cream scones and one of us had a hot buttered rum scone and almost knocked over a waitress with his or her elaborate arm gestures.

Continued driving to Keswick, where a very nice lady gave us her parking spot and her parking stub and we had a delicious vegetarian meal at a restaurant attached to a bike shop, in spite of them erasing their specials one by one from the specials board just as soon as we tried to order them.

Drove around Derwent Water, which was beautiful and made our Lake District trip totally worth it, though the jury is still on the 1.5 hours of 10-mph creeping down the M6 when we got stuck behind all the people returning from their half-term holidays at Blackpool.

Took the tram into Birmingham for a delicious dinner, after which we missed the last tram that went all the way to our stop, requiring us to disembark sooner than planned and complete the trip by bus at midnight or so.

Of course it was not all fun and games. In a retrospectively foolish moment, we drove right past the Cumberland Pencil Museum in Keswick. Although our touristy brochure did indicate that a) the museum houses the world’s largest pencil, and b) the pencil was invented in or around Keswick, other pencil questions remained unanswered.

Did the first pencil actually contain lead? Or: does lead even transfer marks like the pencils of today?
Did the pencil inventor envision what a runaway success the humble utensil would be?
Did said inventor die of lead poisoning, not unlike Madame Curie succumbing to radiation?
Did he (it’s always a he) really invent the pencil, or had it secretly been invented thousands of years earlier in China and hushed up?

After several grueling minutes of Internet research, I discovered that, no, the first pencils were made with graphite from a large deposit discovered in Cumbria in the 1600s. Since it was before chemistry had really hit its stride, they just called it lead, and the locals used it to mark their sheep. When it was discovered that the graphite could be used to line cannonball molds, the deposit became the property of the crown, and the graphite had to be smuggled out for writing purposes. And it was the Italians who came up with the encasing it in wood part. So now you know, and you don’t have to go to the pencil museum after all.

And all of this reminds me of how Stephan told me that no one person could actually make a pencil. Someone cuts and shapes the wood, someone makes the lead, someone makes the glue, someone makes the paint, someone makes the little metal bit that holds the eraser on, someone harvests the latex and/or makes the rubber, and finally someone else puts it all together. And then there’s all of the business about manufacturing and maintaining all of the machines and vehicles involved in the manufacturing and transportation.

Pencils: they really make you think.

So we live in a brand new building on a complex that so far includes one giant square courtyard along the length of our building and a renovated girls school down another side (photos when Stephan gives my camera back). We think that another building similar to ours will be going in across the courtyard from us, but we also think this will probably be long after we’re gone.

This is because I work from home and so accidentally monitor the construction crew still working on the site. On any give day, there are between 3 and 8 workers who seem to do a lot of standing around or sitting idly in backhoes that aren’t moving during the approximately 4 hours they’re actually onsite. I don’t know anything about construction, but 3 weeks to pave along one side of a courtyard doesn’t seem very efficient.

Today the eight of them set something on fire and watched it burn. Many of them were wearing shorts, surprising in a country that requires 4 days of training to drive a forklift.

You know how when you’re reading one of those books intent on preserving dialect and people say things like “git” and “sez”? Exactly how I’ve been pronouncing those words my entire life?

Turns out that people here actually pronounce “says” the way it looks like it should be pronounced (”say” with an “s” on the end), which I had never in my life heard before this one time I watched Gordon Brown on C-SPAN.

This almost makes up for “lefftenant.”

1. Lemonade. First, there is “traditional lemonade,” like regular-type US lemonade. Then there is “lemonade,” the generic term for lemon-lime soda, which is what one typically requests if one wants Sprite or 7-Up. Then there is the “lemonade” made by Schweppes, which actually says “lemonade” on the label, but is sparkling and lemon flavored and tastes a bit like Alka-Seltzer, rendering it disgusting; if one is ordering in a restaurant where, say, they serve Coke in the bottle, chances are they will also serve the Schweppes lemonade, so one must be careful.

2. Whilst Stephan has health insurance through his work, I am left to take full advantage of socialized health care, and so am trying to register with a GP (general practitioner, who I believe works out of a surgery. I still have to figure out who gets called “doctor” and who doesn’t). I had this telephone conversation yesterday:
“Hi, I’d like to register as a patient.”
“I’m sorry; you’ll have to come down and fill out some forms.”
“Okay, great. Can you tell me where you’re located?”
“Sorry…I’m not really familiar with the area….”
“…[!!]…Okay, well, can you tell me what street you’re on?”
“We’re on Prouds Lane, by the police station.”

I’m sorry: what? How is it that you don’t know where your place of employment is located? I assume that you don’t actually live in the same building and would therefore have to travel to said location frequently. And since this is the kind of business where every one of your customers will have to appear in person at some point, shouldn’t it maybe be policy to have some kind of directional advice onhand? Also, the police station is on an entirely different street.

I tell you, it’s like an entirely different country over here.