Sump-pumpkin

I've just had a bit of an evening snooze. I crept under the covers on the pretext of giving the Boy a bedtime cuddle, but actually to try and sleep off the bottle of pumpkin ale I drank at a party this afternoon.

It's not that pumpkin ale is particularly strong (disappointingly it isn't particularly orange either, or even made from pumpkins). I'm just not much of a drinker.

Anyway, it was an enjoyable party, a gathering of the Man's fellow ex-pat colleagues and their partners. I knew some of them quite well already, but others I'd only ever met in passing, or at the dreaded office Christmas parties where you have to shout your small talk over the noise of a disco that no-one's dancing to. (Have I mentioned before that I have no sense of fun?)

We were a bit late arriving because we'd been house-hunting again. Still no joy, but by now we've seen examples of just about every type of house available: colonial, cape cod, contemporary, raised ranch... names that meant little to us at the start of this excercise but which now trip easily off our tongues along with other once-unfamiliar housing-related vocabulary: mud room, central air, half bath, sump pump. Prizes to readers in Britain who can suggest what any of those things might be.

License to play

For much of the day we enjoyed the company two little girls, friends of the Boy and Girl, while their parents (the_exile and Exile #2) went on a compulsory 5-hour driving theory course. The latter is a requirement, along with a written and a practical test, for anyone wanting a New York driver's license - a whole lot of fun that still awaits us.

All went well in the morning. The children only emerged from their fantasy world occasionally for refuelling purposes (except for the three-year-old who mostly just concentrated on eating, with occasional brief play-breaks).

There were a few frayed tempers after lunch (on the part of the younger hosts) but calm was soon restored, and by the time our guests' parents returned everyone was playing happily again in the warm late afternoon sunshine.

Whaddya mean, amazing fun guy in the yard?

We've all been swimming this evening and I'm tired, otherwise I'd be telling you about...

...school assembly this morning, and how the silly song we sang about apples and worms demonstrated that the words 'slurp' and 'burp' sound just so... so slurpy and burpy with an American accent; and how that same silly assembly song also somehow demonstrated very nicely what is great about this particular school.

...viewing an 80 year-old money-pit of a house that smelled of damp and reminded me of home so that of course I immediately fell in love with it. If I've any sense at all I'll leave it at unrequited love. The question is then, do I have any sense at all?

...the amazing fungi in our front yard.

Sign language

There's a church we drive past quite often that has a big sign outside. In gothic lettering it says: Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's land.

From the first time I saw it this struck me as an oddly specific choice of commandments to stick outside your place of worship. But a friend has recently explained to me that the church is in the middle of a dispute over the empty patch of land next door. The friend kindly assumed that the sign must be tongue in cheek, but I'm not so sure.

I'm similarly uncertain about the 'humour' of a sign in a front yard on the way into Troy: If you can read this sign...you're within range!

Well, I guess it's one way to avoid being bothered by trick-or-treaters come Hallowe'en...

Ordinary lives

This blog tends to be pretty lightweight, I know. I don’t aim to set down more than a collection of inconsequential ramblings, recording the day-to-day trivia of my ordinary life. Today, though, there’s something else I want to write about.

I’ve long followed events in Burma (Myanmar), a land I first visited in 1990, and where I subsequently worked for a short time as a teacher. I have many friends there – kind, funny, generous-hearted people living resiliently in difficult circumstances. I know they will be watching the current political protests in their country with a mixture of excitement and fear. Some, the most courageous, may be among the protesters – putting themselves at considerable personal risk.

The outcome of this stand against a brutal regime is uncertain. Recent history suggests it may only invite further oppression. But let’s hope, as my friends must fervently be hoping, that it is the turning point towards a better future for Burma.

Light a candle, say a prayer or what you will - but please take a moment to think of those many good people in a far off place, living in dangerous times, longing to lead ordinary lives.

Hudson River Ranter

Hi. This is the Man. Albaniana has nominated me as a guest contributor/imposter whilst she "Meets the Teachers".

Now I have no wish to sound like a little Englander, but it strikes me sometimes that there are a lot of rules out here.

This thought was prompted when I took the kids swimming on Sunday. We had the large learner pool entirely to ourselves and our very own personal lifeguard. But when the Boy fetched himself a small square float from a bin by the pool, the lifeguard took it off him. Apparently only long sausage-shaped floats are allowed in the learner pool. You wonder what the lifeguard would make of all the floating toys and balls in the pools in Cambridge and Saffron Walden.

Sometimes there is a long list of rules, but some of them seem a mite obvious. Among the twenty odd rules at our hotel in Newark was "Do not wash soiled diapers in the pool".


Although temperatures have hit the 80s again, all outdoor pools and lakes are shut as we are past Labor Day. At the large lakeside beach we visited on the official last day of summer, there were a whole host of rules to take in, as shown. When we took our rowing boat out we all dutifully wore our life-jackets for the duration. It was only as we returned the boat that we saw that other rowers were only putting life jackets on when they were within sight of the hire hut. They knew they would lose their $20 deposit if they were seen without them.

Occasionally, rules seem rather prescriptive but make sense when they are explained to you. The wheelie bins here must be placed in a certain orientation and no more than two feet from the road. It turns out that this is because the bins are swept up and emptied by a robot arm from the garbage truck. This way the driver never has to leave the comfort of his cab.

Media interest

Congratulations to everyone who entered the Cow Caption Contest. What an exceptionally witty bunch you are. The winner, who made me laugh out loud, is Ninja Shoetrees Pop, closely followed by Andrew C. See their entries below.

First prize is a scenic train ride with the Girl... Nah, not really.

Apart from a very enjoyable lunch with my friend Exile #2 it has been an unremarkable day, so I'll write a few words in praise of National Public Radio.
This is the nearest thing here to BBC Radio 4, except that it is run on a budget of about a dollar a day. It consists of part local, part national and part international broadcasts. So, depending on what time you happen to tune in you might get the regular Albany phone-in on brewing (seriously - every Friday afternoon, all your brewing dilemmas resolved by a panel of experts); or the inimitable Garrison Keillor's 'Writer's Almanac'; or, at three in the morning (always my favourite hour), the BBC World Service. It is unashamedly liberal, educated broadcasting and it shines like a beacon of intelligence through the airwaves of dross (well, not so much the brewing phone-in, though it is surprisingly entertaining).


It was a grim discovery, the Americans had a cow that did Coca-cola on one side and Pepsi on the udder. Ninja
or
Call for immigrant milkmaids to be given extra training on cow identification. Andrew C

House about that?

Much of today was devoted to house-hunting. There's a system here of 'Open Houses', with many for-sale houses open to the public for a few hours over a weekend. You just show up and an agent welcomes you in. We visited five properties in a couple of districts, and I don't know that I'm much the wiser for the experience.

But you certainly get more for your money here than back home. For the friends in Linton (they know who they are) hankering after self-sufficiency, how does a farmhouse 30 minutes from central Albany with 17 acres of land, most of them forest, grab you? Yours for half what you'll get for the sale of your current home. C'mon, what's stopping you? You'll even have ready-made friends just down the road!

Later the Man took the children swimming at the YMCA and I checked out the fitness suite, where I walked fast uphill on the spot for 40 minutes, feeling faintly silly. It's a big room full of machines to stretch this and tone that, but I suspect you could achieve the same effect at infinitely smaller cost by doing some vigorous gardening or housework once in a while (not that I'm in a position to lecture anyone about housework).

Or you could walk to the shops, if the shops were anywhere nearby and you had pavements to walk there on - not generally the case around these parts. Some aspects of Linton life really are cheap at twice the price.

Chuffed

This afternoon we visited the Catskill Mountain Rail Road.


It was a beautiful day and we could enjoy scenery like this:


The Boy is, of course, always happy to travel by train. As for the Girl...

Less is more, more or less

Yesterday I called in at Slingerlands Price Chopper, which is a cut above our local one. I'd been told I'd find Marmite there, and yes! Nestled between Kosher and Cajun speciality food was a modest British section, featuring Bird's Custard Powder and those horrible chocolate covered marshmallow tea-cake things, and Typhoo Tea. I bought a small outrageously priced pot of Marmite for the Girl's sandwiches.

Next I spent a long time choosing products in the Organic food section (where I also found a reasonable selection of fair trade goods - that's where they've been hiding them). I used to be pretty ambivalent about organic foods. But here they are shelved under 'Natural Foods', which does beg an obvious question about all the other stuff on sale. And then when you start reading the labels on all that other stuff and realise how much added salt and corn syrup and hydrogenated whatever they contain, buying 'natural' does start feeling the right thing to do - paying a little more for a little less, as it were.

We're having to decide whether the same rules apply with house buying - pay more for less in the right area, or not? Our search has only just begun, it seems.

Not impressed with the meagre turn out for yesterday's caption competition. You should be udderly ashamed of yourselves... I'll give you until Monday to come up with something amooosing.

Moos Quiz

I've just come back from a party organised by the school's Parent Council. It was billed as a 'new parents' event, but everyone there seemed to know each other pretty well already. They were interesting and amusing, and perfectly kind and friendly, but small-talk only ever goes so far. Suddenly I felt a long way away from my own old friends. I drove home in the dark, blinking back the tears.

There were always going to be times like this.

Let's not dwell on such things. Instead, following on from the success of last week's mystery object competition, you are invited to supply a suitable caption for this photo:

Doctor, doctor...

The Girl and Boy had fun at the doctor's today, where they went for their obligatory (required by school) medical examination. The Girl revelled in the opportunity to share incriminating information about her brother's various foibles. The Boy got the giggles when the doctor kept 'hammering' him (testing his reflexes). It turns out he is unusually flexible and has potential as a gymnast - well I never.

Medical provision is different over here. You don't just turn up and expect to be seen for free by the nearest GP. The children have to go to a paediatric practice and the Man and I must enroll somewhere else entirely. Apparently we're supposed to draw up a list of potential doctors and then go and interview them for the job of treating us.

We're lucky, of course, because we have medical insurance and therefore have the option to be treated at all. I really don't know what you do if you can't afford insurance or doctors' bills. Get ill and stay ill I suppose. Or worse. Gloomy thought.

TV ads for medical products are a bit different too. The voice-over will extol the virtues of the product (as you'd expect). But then (I guess to avoid litigation) it raps out, machine-gun style, an arm-long list of caveats. There's a commercial like this for a sleeping pill which, quite seriously, ends with the warning: may cause drowsiness...

Purple pose

A repairman came and took away part of the furnace. With luck he'll be back in a couple of days to put it all back together again.


Fortunately my forebodings about the big freeze having set in were premature. It has been fine and sunny today and is set fair for the rest of the week. But just in case, I have devoted much of the day to finding the children suitable winter coats. The Girl now has a glorious lilac six-in-one number - it all takes apart with an ingenious system of zips and poppers so that you can wear it with or without sleeves and hood and inner or outer shell, and it is all fully reversible. It's a masterpiece of engineering - and looks darn cute, too. The Girl is now ready for whatever the local climate wants to chuck at her.

Not so the Boy. The next challenge is to find something that this small person who doesn't believe in outerwear will deign to put on at all.

Had a picnic lunch with a couple of friends, and also spent more time than I'd planned with my SatNav pal, the so-called 'Neverlost' (another example of American irony? See Sept 4th).

Linton, we have a problem...

We're all shivering tonight like Tom Hanks in the cockpit of Apollo 13. The furnace (boiler) doesn't work. The Man went down into the dingey basement to take a look and apparently we've got a main bus B undervolt.

If NASA can't fix it I guess we'll just have to get the letting agent on the case. Meanwhile, extra blankets all round - frost is forecast.

I don't know if a faulty furnace is a common sight in American basements or not, but now that we've started house-hunting we're discovering that a 'wet-bar' (bar-with-a-sink) is. Why? So that you can invite all your friends round for a party, we are told. Well, a) we can't imagine wanting to invite friends into our basement just so that we can spend an evening pretending to work in a pub; and b) err... we don't have any friends.


Here's the ice dispenser on our freezer. Won't be needing that for the next nine months...

All going skimmingly

We went swimming this morning and in the afternoon visited Myosotis Lake at Rensselaerville, about an hour from home.

Although both children complained bitterly, as they do, at the prospect of an outdoor expedition, the Girl at least managed to throw herself into the adventure once we got there. She was soon running on ahead laying twig arrows for others in the party to follow, and generally acting like a member of the Famous Five. She even developed a secret call, like an owl. The Boy answered this with a high-pitched squeal, like a tapir (well, that's what he told me).

After a woodland trek we emerged onto a pebbly lakeside beach, where we skimmed stones and scrambled on rocks and generally enjoyed having the place to ourselves. You really have to hunt hard to find a crowd in these parts (should you want one), and places of natural beauty tend to be pretty much deserted.


On the way back to the car we passed by an impressive waterfall. Unfortunately the Boy picked up a tiny splinter on the last leg of the hike. He let us know about it loudly all the way home - or was he just imitating a tapir in distress? Hard to tell. He has since got over the disaster, though others of us are still nursing headaches.

Falling into another festival?

There's been a definite drop in temperature today. Time to dig out jackets and jumpers - autumn is on its way in.

Perfect timing, then, for the Fall Festival at the nearby Five Rivers nature reserve which we took in this afternoon. There were lots of things to do of a naturey nature, like an insect safari, meeting reptiles and trail-walking. A live band played folksy music which seemed to suit the event.

By chance I found myself chatting with the festival organiser. Could it have been my 'Community Events R Me' T-shirt that drew her my way? (Surely not, it was under my sweater.) Anyway, before I'd even mentioned Linton Children's Book Festival, she happened to ask if I had any ideas for future Fall festivals. Once she'd asked me I found that yes, I did have one or two. She suggested I send her an email. Who knows? I may just find myself getting involved next year.


While we were there we found this dainty pixie hiding in a flowerbed, looking for its hairbrush (I wish!).

Why U?

Kids went to school, Man went to work. Not such an exciting day really.

Unless you count driving the wrong way down the freeway...

SCREEECH of metaphorical breaks. Whaaaaat?

Oh yes. Well, it was going to happen sooner or later. Why else would they have all those STOP! and WRONG WAY signs just too late after intersection turnings?

Anyway, so I'm driving along, heading up the traffic coming off one freeway and waiting to turn left onto another. There's no traffic to my immediate left so I make the turn and...

Oops. Suddenly there's loads of traffic, coming straight at me.

I may have sworn just a little. And for a second I did that rabbit-in-the-headlights thing. Then I see a man in the 4X4 which has braked in front of me doing a twisty sign with his hand. Turn around.

Yes! Good plan! I'll do that!

I do a Uey and suddenly the world is spinning normally on its axis again.

Me oh my. And then when I get home and switch on the telly to calm myself down I discover there's a Traffic Channel, and everything that happens on any road at any given time is recorded. (That's all they show - traffic driving along freeways in real time. I can't imagine who actually watches it.) What if someone gets hold of the footage of my little escapade? They could syndicate it and play it repeatedly all over the country on a show called Don't Foreigners do the Dumbest Things?!

Nah, that's just my paranoia. There's no such show (as far as I know, I haven't got through all the channels yet).

It's OK. No-one was hurt, no damage was caused, and it will never, EVER happen again. Just don't tell the Man, eh.


To put everyone in a calmer frame of mind, here is a picture of Hancock Shaker village which we visited last week. The round building was the cow barn and milking parlour. Lovely - and not a car in sight.

Home from home

The children had a day off school for Jewish New Year today. We spent the whole day with English friends, members of the_exile's family, and it was exactly like being back home except that the fish fingers were called fish sticks. Thank you, Exile#2, for your hospitality.

And now, the moment you've all been waiting for: Monday's Mystery Object revealed!


Ta-daa!

The choice of only-in-America snack food goes to the_exile, who cryptically provided the correct answer (and no complaints from abroad, please - he was only working with the same clues as the rest of you). Congratulations! I will arrange a suitable awards ceremony at, say, the Palace Theatre.

As to why we shipped it: the Boy says, 'I love it!'; the Girl says, 'It's like an old member of the family'; Albaniana says, 'It's mine, and I wasn't allowed to bring my stuffed coypu, so...'; and the Man says, 'Yeah, whatever'.

Talking turkey

Due to technical difficulties I am not yet able to bring you the answer to Monday's Mystery Object Competition. Tune in tomorrow for the big reveal! Meanwhile, if you haven't already, take a look at some of the entertaining suggested answers (click on Comments).

I glanced out of the kitchen window early this morning while preparing packed lunches and was startled to see a flock of wild turkeys racing down the garden slope.

It was an impressive sight. They're not as huge as fattened up farm turkeys, but still massively out of scale with your average garden sparrow. I'm told the males can weigh up to 8 pounds. They hung around all day, and in the evening we watched one of them seeing off a domestic cat.

I helped out in the school library for a bit today, shelving books. The librarian introduced me to a children's picture book which is currently top of America's most banned literature list: And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson. It's the true tale of two male penguins at the Central Park Zoo who became a couple. After failing to hatch a stone, they were given an egg to sit on and in due course became the proud fathers of a penguin chick. It's a very sweet book, but I'm sure you can guess why it has been banned in schools and libraries in various parts of the States - and if you can't, read some of the one-star reviews on Amazon. As the Man points out, under Section 28 it would, until 2003, have been banned in the UK too. How very silly. Request it from your local library today!

What with them travelling by bus now, the school day being so long and the toys having arrived from England, I feel a bit surplus to the children's requirements. Well, that's not strictly true. I have to feed them occasionally. And, perhaps even more importantly, last night I was called on to comfort a tired and weepy little Boy. After a cuddle and a few consoling words (and a bowl of mini-wheats) he was back to his usual cheery self, but it's true for us all that no matter how much fun we're having here (and we are) we still miss our friends back home.

Ticket to ride

Except you don't even need a ticket to ride this kind of bus, you just have to register. The Girl and Boy proudly took their places aboard the school bus at 8 o'clock this morning (the Girl so determined not to miss it that she'd got up at half past six in readiness). It felt such a quintessentially American experience, waving them off.

And that's the last I saw of them until the bus dropped them back on the front lawn at 4.30pm. Everything seemed to have gone without a hitch, and they waved a cheery 'See ya tomorrow!' to the friendly bus driver.

Dropping the Man off at work we ran into another of the English WAGs out here and she and I and her small incredibly well-behaved baby went out for a coffee. She's been in Albany for a few months, so it was useful to get her perspective on things.

Later I called in on Ten Thousand Villages, a fair-trade craft shop, to buy a packet of coffee. Fair-trade goods don't seem to have the same high profile here as they do back in England, and I chatted for a while about this with the young woman behind the counter.

We then moved on to more general topics, such as the weather. It was pouring with rain, and she warned that there'll be lots more rain in the next couple of months. With admirable positivity, she was not down-hearted by this prospect but looked forward to cosy times indoors making bread and soup for friends. If the weather in England is still as bad as when we left I imagine you're all a bit fed up of soup by now.

It's not too late to enter yesterday's quiz - but hurry! I've a feeling someone's about to sniff out the answer.

Boxing Day

And lo, four wise-cracking men from Schenectady came bearing... well, not so much gifts. More like 200 boxes of old tat you wouldn't look at twice at a car-boot (yard) sale.

Why oh why oh why?

As each box and piece of furniture was carried in, in random order, we had to tick off its number from a seven page list. The foreman kept asking, 'Do we have Bingo yet?'. Finally, after two hours, we did.

It's interesting that humans find themselves unconsciously mimicking each other's speech patterns. By the end of the excercise the Man and I were calling out, 'Fordy-six? Yeah, that'll be in the ga-rahge', while the foreman, whose New York accent was so strong we could barely understand him at first, signed off with an almost Bertie Woosterish 'Okey-dokey! That's about it then!'

Curious.

We're only unwrapping the minimum amount of stuff, as we'll be moving house again at the end of the year. Needless to say the Boy is exceedingly happy to be reunited with his train set. I'm looking forward to finding my kitchen knives and non-stick pans. But some items may well remain in their boxes for our entire stay, if not for eternity.


Because it was an overseas shipment, everything had to be bubble-wrapped against damage and damp. We've ended up with some rather odd looking packages. So, dear readers, can any of you guess what this mystery object might be? Answers via Comments, please. I will award the winner their choice of a portion of cheese-covered fries, a slice of deep-fried cheesecake or a Domino's Dessert Pizza (winner must come to Albany to collect). Double portions to anyone who can tell us why the heck we decided to ship it at all - we must be barking.

A pizza cake

Today a reminder of the life we have left, as it rained pretty well continuously all day.

This was a pity because the plan was to be part of a team painting the outside of the school building. Instead we ended up doing indoor jobs there such as cleaning windows. Our children were very thorough with the squirting part of the operation and some windows managed to get cleaned several times. If a job's worth doing...


Continuing yesterday's theme of outsize snacking, we later on went to a cafe where the Girl ordered a cinnamon roll as big as her own face. Remarkably she managed to eat it all, and this evening I had to let her trousers out half an inch.

Speaking of excess, I saw a commercial last night for a Domino's Dessert Pizza. It was a large pizza base thickly covered with crumbled Oreo cookies (a sort of cookie sandwich featuring very dark biscuit and very white cream paste). It was the most stomach-turning thing I've seen since those cheese-covered fries at the outdoor pool (Aug 24).

When you're in a new town...

Today we signed up at our local YMCA. Disappointingly we'll never find out if it's fun to stay there - it's just a sports centre. Still at least it is staffed by people dressed as Red Indians and construction workers.

It isn't really.

But it is a really nice sports centre. Two pools, lots of fitness equipment, gym, indoor running track (we'll no doubt understand why, come winter) and a full-sized ice-rink. Fantastic!

Friends probably know that I have an eye for quilts. In the afternoon we set off once again to Altamont, this time for a quilt show I'd seen advertised. Unfortunately it had rained heavily there an hour before we arrived, and since it was an outdoor show all the quilts had been packed up and taken away. Disappointing. Still, we bought a ball of ultra-soft 'Oh My!' wool at the specialist wool shop, and some sweetcorn and strawberries from the farmer's market which is there every Saturday. To my surprise and pleasure in this land famous for fast food, there are little farmers' market-stalls all over the place selling excellent fruit and veg.


Freshly squeezed lemonade is another often available treat. As you can see here, it comes in buckets slightly bigger than a Boy's head (lucky we didn't order a Large!). We bought this one at last week's Scottish Games. It doesn't send the kids wild like a certain fizzy orange drink, but you do quickly get to know where all the loos (restrooms) are.

Our day's adventures ended in a mall where I bought a mobile (cell) phone. To keep the children amused during the transaction the salesperson let them play with a drawer full of ex-shop-model phones. They were even allowed to keep one each, and so were able to spend the journey home making urgent calls to the Fat the Controller and all his engines.

Troy Story

The air-con was set so high at Price Chopper today that by the time I came out my be-sandalled toes were blue. Mental note to self, remember to put on socks before attempting supermarket shopping, even when the outside temperature is 94 degrees.

The Girl and Boy have successfully completed their first two days at school, and seem pretty happy with everything. They are making friends and already having good new experiences which we hear about in snatches. The school day is longer here than they are used to, and both days they have come home tired and rather cantakerous, but I'm hoping they'll get into the rhythm of things with time.

After dropping them off this morning the Man and I went to Troy, over the Hudson River from Albany, so that he could sit in the dismal Social Security office (why are government offices the world over so dreary?) while I scoped out the area.

Troy used to be an industrial centre but has fallen on hard times. It's clear that there's local pride, and there are ongoing attempts to turn the place's fortunes around. There are a few tarted up streets, and some fine college and municipal buildings, but move a few blocks over and there are streets of boarded up shops and a generally down-at-heel air. But it's the most interesting commercial/residential area I've visited here, with far more character than the soulless malls that predominate elsewhere. Plus it has a really excellent independent bookshop. I think I'll be back.

The Girl made up a joke on the way home this afternoon:

Q: What do you get if you cross a bottom with a hippo?

A: A hippobottomous.

Well, it made me laugh.

Home alone - at last!

And so the great day arrived, and the Girl and Boy started at their new school. A few tears had to be blinked back, and not so much by the children. Somehow it felt that we were handing them not just into the hands of others but into a whole new culture. We wait with interest to see how this experience will shape them.

I then had to deal with that cut-loose-kite feeling that comes when the kids are finally out of your hair and suddenly you can't think of a single one of those many things you couldn't wait to get the chance to do. I'm sure the list will come back to me over the next few days.

Life is a little complicated at the moment as we have just the one hire car between us, and this ain't a one-car country. The kids and the Man all need dropping off and collecting at various mutually inconvenient times of day. Fortunately we should be able to alleviate this problem if we can get the children booked onto a school bus, a fabulous system here which offers door-to-door collection and delivery. More of this, I hope, anon.

Of course, once we have a social security number (any day now!) we'll also be able to buy our own cars - though that's a whole new area of anxiety to us as we are completely decision-phobic ('You don't say!' scoff friends and relations who watched us agonise over this move to the States).

Shaker it all about

We spent the day at the beautiful Hancock Shaker village, an hour away just over the State border in Massachusetts. It's a collection of dwellings, work buildings and meeting houses previously occupied by Shakers but now preserved as a museum dedicated to the history of that small but influential sect.

The one thing widely known about the Shakers (apart from their name being synonymous with a style of furniture) is that they embraced celibacy. Not just the ministers, the whole lot of them. It is therefore not hugely surprising that they have more-or-less died out, though there are still a handful up in Maine.

I'm afraid we have no pictures of the idyllic setting because technology has failed us again (or we've failed it). Our children, who'd been hoping to go swimming, were reluctant visitors at first, but were won over eventually - the Boy by some farm animals and a sudden desire to see inside every single building even though none of them was a train station; and the Girl by a weaving loom in the activity centre. She sat down, learnt the basics quickly and proceeded to spend the next three hours weaving a rather nice herringbone pattern and giving free demonstrations to other Hancock visitors. We practically had to drag her out off her Shaker chair when the time came to leave the village.

A central tenet of Shakerism is simplicity. Our own recently simplified and uncluttered lifestyle is soon to come to an end: we've had word that the container full of our British junk has made it across the Atlantic (damn!) and through customs (double damn!) and will be delivered to us in a few days. The children are delighted at the prospect of seeing their toys again, but the Man and I are frankly dreading it.

Rice one, son

Ok, I want to put to rest the popular British misconception that Americans have no sense of irony. We found this on some food packaging, and I'm quoting verbatim:

'You'll have so much fun munching on these delicious, crunchy Plain Rice Cakes that you'll forget that they're good for you!'

And then there's an endorsement by TV chef Gordon Ramsay.

No, there isn't.

Mind you, I do know one person who actually does seem to enjoy rice cakes, and that's a little fellow who lives in this house (no, not the Man).



That same little chap woke the Man and me up yesterday by snuggling in between us, clutching his smelly blanket as always, and sighing happily 'This is the life!'

Life has got even sweeter for him this evening since he discovered an internet website supplying Thomasabilia. Behold the rapture on his face!

Crazy last days of summer

Mum, Dad are you sitting down for this one?

I played crazy golf today.

Those that know me well will be aware that I am appallingly competitive and also have no sense of fun. This is a bad combination, especially applied to crazy golf. I know there may be people out there who suppose me to be a calm, collected type of person, but that's because they have never seen me trying to putt. I last picked up a club in anger (and I use that phrase advisedly) in about 1985, embarrassed myself considerably and vowed never to have anything more to do with golf.

But we learn from our children, and what I learnt today was - cheat! It's much less hassle and you get to finish the course in under ten minutes so that you can go off and enjoy the rest of your day.

And what a fine day it was: Labor Day, and officially the last day of summer pursuits. We spent it at Grafton Lakes which boasts a sandy beach, hiking trails, boats for hire and aforementioned crazy golf course. Between us we did a bit of everything, including swimming in the lake.


My favourite part was the trail, two and a half miles right round the lake along a fairly demanding forest path. Amazingly the children managed the whole route without whingeing (packing a bottomless sack of Dora the Explorer animal crackers certainly paid off). No sooner was the hike over than we jumped aboard a rowing boat to view the lake from yet another angle.

The Girl and Boy are full of ideas for what they'd like to try next: kayaking, pony trekking, cross-country skiing... We haven't seen this sense of adventure in them before. It's great to be in America!

Och aye, Noo York style

Albaniana health update: although I sound like I've been chain-smoking for the last thirty years, I'm actually feeling much better now.


Today we attended the 26th Annual Scottish Games up at Altamont Fairground. Astonishing numbers of Americans in kilts playing bagpipes (and playing them well, at that). It was most surprising. There was caber tossing and sword dancing, highland cattle and quite a few folk bands such as you might find at an Andy Stewart Hogmanay.



Any number of stalls were laid out selling celtic-themed goodies, tartans and clan souvenirs. One even had a range of British delicacies on sale including Irnbru, tinned macaroni cheese and Marmite (for a moment there I genuinely mistook it for a tombolla).

It didn't feel an entirely authentic Scottish occasion, for the forested hills of Thatcher State Park that formed the backdrop don't have the austere beauty of Scottish mountains, and the weather wasn't remotely dricht. But the place was brimming with gaelic ancestral pride.

Having happened to start life in East Kilbride, I may have been the closest thing there to a first-generation Scot. So with my new easygoing American confidence I asked the guy at the entrance if there was a discount for people born in Scotland. 'Nope' he said, dourly.

Maybe he models himself on Gordon Brown?

Hold the front page!

My spies tell me that after years of ever more desperate and extravagant efforts to get on the front page of Linton News, a member of my family has finally made it - but only after we've packed up and left the village. *Sigh*

I'm struggling with what I'm forced to admit must be tonsillitis. This is a particularly annoying time to get ill since we haven't yet signed up with a doctor (we still don't have those elusive existence-affirming social security numbers) and now it's a bank holiday weekend to boot. I'll just have to keep gargling with aspirin - British aspirin, made not so much with passion (see Aug 30) as with indifference bordering on resentment.


Today's challenge was to buy school stationery. Kids provide their own here, and we have been presented with a page-long list of required items. A very mystifying list. Is a twin pocket portfolio with fasteners the same as a poly-portfolio with prongs? And if so, is that also the same thing as a folder with pockets, or a pocket folder with tabs? How big is a composition notebook, and why will the Boy be needing an index card box? It's all very baffling. We were not alone on our mission in Walmart, and it seemed to me that the other parents jostling down the aisles with their puzzling lists and whining children were having just as much fun as we were.