Nice surprises...

M bought some bathroom scales the other day because we've not had any for the 6 months that we've lived here.  I know I've put on weight by the simple, yet effective, test that I have had to use another notch on my belt.  I've been trying really hard to exercise and eat better (ignoring the pizza I had for dinner last night) and it is nice to try out the new scales and have lost half a stone since I saw the doctor 3 weeks ago.

Half down, many hlaves to go.

Legal Polka?

For some reason best known to my wife and her eclectic friends, tonight we have a cheese and wine type social for the opening of a new firm of lawyers (who hopefully will be handling our immigration) followed by a run out to Ballard and the "Tractor Tavern", to watch a "top Polka band".

Firstly, I have to admit I didn't know there was such a thing and secondly I'm not 100% clear that I wanted to know that there were such things, let alone watch one live.

Friday it is Basketball - Seattle Storm for some charity thing I've also been roped into.

Finally, there's our appartment's summer fun day on Saturday, afterwhich we're planning to play some Poker - if anybody around here is interested in other games, M is not up for Poker. 

10 Things About Living in the USA

Well, this week marks 6 months as residents of the USA, the longest stretch I've spent here in a single year and the point at which I officially become resident for Tax Purposes.  I've been pondering upon the things that make me go Hmmm?!? about living here and I wanted to share them.

This isn't meant to be a rant, honestly, it isn't.

1.  Milk that does not ever, ever go off. 
Ok, so that might be a slight exageration but I've yet to have milk go bad here.  The expiry date on the carton of "fresh" skimmed milk in the fridge at the moment has an expiry of 19 August and we bought that almost 2 weeks ago.

2.  Top Loading Washing Machines
They hold less clothes, they beat the clothes you do have to death and they don't clean things.  Not to mention the thing is at least 50% larger than my front loader at home.  What gives?

3. FOOD 
(a)  Cakes that look amazing and taste of nothing
The cake selections in the supermarkets are astonishing, amazing piles of sweet goodness.  They suck you in and you buy and find that they taste of nothing very much indeed.   
(b) BREAD - standard loaves of bread are tasteless, slightly sweet and relatively disgusting.  A decent bakery loaf will set you back around $4, which even at the current exchange rate is high
(c) CHEESE - oh, for the love of cheese.  My cheese consumption, in terms of eating the stuff for pleasure, has dropped to nearly nothing.  The reason?  I won't pay $7+ for 2oz of decent cheese.  "Sharp" Cheddar in the context of the bland slabs of yellow/orange lard is an oxy-moron
(d) SALT - there's far too much of it on the cooked food.


4.  Hersheys
I like BAD chocolate, I love Cadbury's Dairy Milk which probably isn't legally chocolate, but I cannot comprehend what Hershey's is pretending to be.  We were at a bonfire a few weeks ago and I finally found out what a Smore was.  They'd be nice with McVities digestives and decent chocolate but with Hersheys I had to go and find something to drink.  (It might be me, but there must be a reason why there's a market for the stuff)

5. Eating out for less than shopping
It just doesn't compute, it really doesn't.  It terrifies me when we decided to actually plan a weeks worth of meals and the shopping bill is more than if we'd just gone out every night.

6. Driving
The wrong side of the road is something I can deal with.  4-way stops, no lane discipline, bad intersections and a reality distortion field which appears to warp space so you can't see anything apart from your own car, I don't get.   I'll not mention American cars because (a) I don't own one and (b) its an easy target.

7.  Healthcare/Insurance
Ok, so I pay a large monthly co-payment out of my pay for my insurance.  My company pays more.  I have a very nice Doctor's offices complete with comfy chairs, indate magazines and a huge tropical fish tank.  Yet, to see a Doctor takes longer than my old NHS doctor in London who had a crappy set of offices in an Edwardian house.  At least there I would have my name called, see the Doctor and be on my way.  I would not first be pre-screen by a nurse who then leaves me another 20 minutes before the Doctor turns up.  And another thing,  I can't get a 3 month pescription because you have to pay a monthly co-pay, or get the drugs mail order.  I have to assume that should I have something bizzare and esorteric wrong with me that requires bionic replacements then I'll be better off than in the UK - because at the moment I'd seriously consider going home if I got sick.  The idea that this is so much better than what I left is just plain odd.

8. Mobile Phone Networks 
...who advertise on the USP that they are crap, but not as crap as the other ones.  WTF?  The GSM networks, which are actually all pretty shiny and new compared to the European ones advertise that they drop calls less than the others.  Drop calls?  Hello!!!  You shouldn't drop calls at all unless your network is monsterously overloaded which should be all the time.  SMS messages disapearing/taking hours to arrive - oh please!  Charging to recieve a call?  What is this 1993?

9. TV - I can't watch Live TV anymore, its bad enough using the PVR to timeshift.

10. Happy People.  Sometimes I'm grumpy, I was brought up in Britain in the 1970s, its only natural.  There are days when I can't fake it.  I can't have the "Hi! How are you today..." routine without occasionally saying, "really crap, the weathers bloody awful isn't it and would you look at these disgusting, tasteless cakes!"

I don't recomend item 10, you could get scowled at for it.