Star Trek phone

My family will be so excited to hear that Nokia is going to release a special Star Trek phone that even makes phaser noises. All of them watch Star Trek religiously. I always tell them that the plot is just a formula, and I can tell them what is going to happen but they don't care, they just keep watching. Here's some info about the phone and a YouTube video for them to watch just in case there's not a Star Trek re-run on TV just now:

Nokia has just revealed it will be releasing a special Star Trek edition of the popular touchscreen phone — which will be free on contract with Vodafone, Orange, T Mobile and O2 — featuring special Star Trek animated screen savers, three Star Trek wallpapers and eight exclusive Trek-themed ringtones. It also packs an exclusive phaser application but sadly, no teleporting capabilities. The 5800 Star Trek edition might not be able to beam you anywhere but all your Trekkie pals will surely be envious when you brandish it at the next Star Trek convention. Just make sure you sneak away to a corner when you use it to call your mom for a ride home.

An amusing reader anecdote

I enjoy getting cute stories from blog readers. Here's one that we can all identify with:

"Here I am at Starbucks, minding my own business, and along comes this woman who sits down with a baby two seats over.

So she immediately starts making baby noises at the sprog really LOUDLY. Is the baby hard of hearing??? After ten minutes of extremely loud "OOOOO LALALALA" with the kid, she shuts up and sticks a bottle in it, thankfully and the yelling stops.

THEN her friend comes along and now they are going ON and ON about various chick flicks LOUDLY:

GOD, Sarah Jessica Parker was AMAZING in that movie, you would have loved the scene where she was arguing with her boyfriend...

and then the other one sez: Oh it reminds me of that movie with uh, uh, Debra something from that show, uh, uh, uh, what was it?? Oh yeah, with Debra from Will and Grace.

the other: Oh YEAH, she is amazing! What's that movie called? Do you think I would
like it?? Sarah Jessica Parker is soooo amazing.

The reader ends her email with:

You have my permission to kill me and put me out of my misery if I ever end up like this.

Hiring dilemma

Nokia employees are supposed to learn about codes of conduct for our work life. Today we got this question in email. What is the right answer, do you think?

UK's prime minister to blame for everything

This blog post made me laugh. Our prime minister Gordon Brown in the UK is extremely unpopular. Everyone is sick of the corrupt Labour government - it's been around since 1997 and can't get much right anymore.

Now some have started to blame the prime minister for everything that goes wrong in the world. Taking it to an extreme is this blogger, who says Mexico was doomed after Gordon Brown shook hands with their leader. It made me laugh, though, because it's exactly how you feel when you are tired of a long-serving party being in power.

Last month innocent little President Felipe Calderon of Mexico led a full state visit to Britain. He happily shook hands with Jonah, he dined with Jonah, he spent time with Jonah unknowing of the fearsome risks. Inevitably within a month the curse hit Mexico hard. Plague has come in the form of Swine Flu, taking the lives of over a hundred Mexicans so far.

The prolonged proximity to the presbyterian pestilence has brought double tragedy for Calderon’s people. Already reeling from the swinish plague, Mexico has suffered an earthquake of magnitude 5.6 on the Richter scale.

“I’m scared,” Sarai Luna Pajas, a 22-year-old Mexico City resident, told the Associated Press news agency. “We Mexicans are not used to living with so much fear, but all that is happening - the economic crisis, the illnesses and now this - it feels like the Apocalypse.” Pity the undeserving victims of the accursed, one eyed son of the manse…

Ferns coming out for spring

I went out for a walk in the woods near the office during lunch. The sun is out today but tomorrow it's supposed to be dark, chilly and rainy so I know to make sure I get out while the getting's good.

Shortly after I turned on to the path in the woods, I saw all the reborn ferns coming out for spring. Soon these little tykes will be big lush plants and cover the woods.

Hectic life

Life and work is so hectic these days. I find I can barely keep things in my mind, there is so much going on.

Take yesterday, for example. Up at 6:30, drive my son to school then myself to office. A million things to do at work and meetings to attend. My friend Lisa was trying to get tickets to the Royal Opera House's upcoming production of La Traviata because she has friends coming over from New York to see their friend sing in it. When Lisa told me about her friends' friend coming to sing, I asked who it was, thinking it would be no one I'd ever heard of. Then she said it was Renee Fleming and I almost fell off my chair. Renee Fleming is one of the world's great singers, and I've listened to her sing on CDs and on TV many times.

I guess opera buffs in England love her too because Lisa was four hours trying to get tickets. The website was innudated with ticket requests and Lisa kept me updated on her progress. "I'm 966th in the queue," she would say. And an hour later, "I'm getting closer -- I'm 450 in the queue."

While the opera tickets drama was going on, office turmoil broke out with news of layoffs to come. It's getting closer and closer and we are all just hoping that not too many of us lose our jobs. It's hard to see everyone so worried but we are just trying to get through it.

After work, I had to rush to my son's school for parents' evening. I know all of you parents know the horror of hearing bad stuff about your kid's academic performance. You think it must be all your fault because you're a bad parent. I don't know what to do about it. You can only nag so much and the desire to do homework has to come from the student -- you can't force them. I feel nostalgic now for the time when my children were kids and more docile. Teens are hard work.

Jesus Florida license plate

Love the new Jesus Florida license plate. Wish I could get one over here for my car.

Mel Gibson's family values

I was interested by this article that appeared on Slate:

Why is it that these right-wing family-values guys are always the worst sinners? Newt Gingrich, Ted Haggard, Larry Craig and now Mel Gibson. Gibson was quoted in the Observer in 2000 as having said, "There is nothing more important than your family. If you ruin that part of your life, what’s left? Work? Money? Screwing around? I see a lot of people living like that tell themselves they’re having a good time, but if you look under the surface you see lots of corpses masquerading as human beings."

And speaking of corpses, Gibson has an odd view of who is going to heaven and who is not. His wife, for example, is not, in the Gospel according to Mel. He acknowledges that she is "a saint, she’s a much better person than I am," but rules are rules. She is, he notes, "like, Episcopalian, Church of England. She prays, she believes in God, knows Jesus, she believes in all that stuff, but that's not good enough. And it’s just not fair if she doesn't make it," laments Mel, "but that’s a pronouncement from the chair. I go with it."

In case you don’t get the reference, the chair is the throne of St. Peter. When popes issue their very rare infallible teachings, they are said to do so "ex cathedra," from the chair. Gibson falsely believes some pope infallibly declared that only Catholics go to heaven.

Now one can forgive Gibson for believing this discarded teaching. It has been around in various forms since Saint Cyprian, a third-century bishop, uttered the words "outside the church there is no salvation." The words have been repeated by popes throughout the centuries; however, each time they have been clarified to encompass more people who are not actually members of the church but who possess just enough faith or just enough desire to do good that we can treat them as if they were some part of virtual church. Almost no Catholics still literally believe no one is going to heaven but us.

It will be interesting to see what course of action Gibson takes regarding one of the most controversial matters of church law -- seeking an annulment. Gibson is opposed to divorce. He accepts the view that the sacrament of marriage is indissoluble. He and his wife may get a civil divorce, but Mel will still, in the eyes of the church, be married. Conservative or liberal, the only way a Catholic can remarry in the church and receive the sacraments is to seek an annulment. Most Catholics find the procedure demeaning and hypocritical. A local church marriage tribunal decides that impediments existed at the time of the marriage that made the union not a sacrament. The most common reason annulments are granted in the U.S. is that one or the other partner exhibited "a grave lack of discretion of judgment." Even if you were married for 28 years and had seven kids, like Gibson, tribunals can decide you were too immature when you got married and therefore it "didn’t take."

What will she be when she grows up?

Flu epidemic

I'm fascinated by the recent outbreak of flu, partly because I read John M. Barry's wonderful book about the flu epidemic of 1918 called The Great Influenza: The story of the deadliest pandemic in history a few years ago. It explains how it all happened, and why it was mostly young people who died (their immune systems were strong and went into overdrive to combat the flu and ended up killing them).

You should read it during this outbreak. You'll have loads of time to if we all end up being quarantined in our houses anyway....

In 1918, a plague swept across the world virtually without warning, killing healthy young adults as well as vulnerable infants and the elderly. Hospitals and morgues were quickly overwhelmed; in Philadelphia, 4,597 people died in one week alone and bodies piled up on the streets to be carted off to mass graves.

But this was not the dreaded Black Death-it was "only influenza." In this sweeping history, Barry (Rising Tide) explores how the deadly confluence of biology (a swiftly mutating flu virus that can pass between animals and humans) and politics (President Wilson's all-out war effort in WWI) created conditions in which the virus thrived, killing more than 50 million worldwide and perhaps as many as 100 million in just a year. Overcrowded military camps and wide-ranging troop deployments allowed the highly contagious flu to spread quickly; transport ships became "floating caskets."

Yet the U.S. government refused to shift priorities away from the war and, in effect, ignored the crisis. Shortages of doctors and nurses hurt military and civilian populations alike, and the ineptitude of public health officials exacerbated the death toll.

In Philadelphia, the hardest-hit municipality in the U.S., "the entire city government had done nothing" to either contain the disease or assist afflicted families. Instead, official lies and misinformation, Barry argues, created a climate of "fear... [that] threatened to break the society apart." Barry captures the sense of panic and despair that overwhelmed stricken communities and hits hard at those who failed to use their power to protect the public good. He also describes the work of the dedicated researchers who rushed to find the cause of the disease and create vaccines. Flu shots are widely available today because of their heroic efforts, yet we remain vulnerable to a virus that can mutate to a deadly strain without warning.

Society's ability to survive another devastating flu pandemic, Barry argues, is as much a political question as a medical one.

Photo psychic

I love reading trashy English magazines because of columns like 'Photo Psychic.' Readers send in photos for a psychic to look at then she predicts their future.

This was a good one, about a woman's rabbit:

Is she OK?
Q:
We'd had Misty, our rabbit, for just over a year, when she got ill. The vet said she had lumps in her tummy and she died that night. Is she OK now?

A:
Misty is very glad you took her to the vet and wants you to know you did exactly the right thing. She was very happy living with you and was grateful to you for taking her in. Above all, she wants you to stop worrying about her now. She says you should get another rabbit.

Shopping according to your culture

London's West End has drawn up a strategy to pull in an extra 3 billion from overseas shoppers by focusing on their specific cultural needs.

Retailers are being given detailed guidance on the customs and visiting habits of different nationalities.

More than 100,000 store staff will also be put through the West End Knowledge - a course focusing on facts about the district as well as greetings and phrases in more than 30 languages.

The move comes as spending by Britons remains depressed but foreign shoppers are flooding to the capital because of the weak pound.

Stores are planning to open late in the lead-up to Ramadan in August to capitalise on the surge in Middle Eastern visitors who prefer evening shopping.

Here are the tips they are going to give sales people in England:

Arab nations: eg Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait
In Muslim cultures, women tend to shop in groups, but men are the decision-makers
-Thumbs-up obscene. Raised eyebrows is "No"
-Sales staff should not ask whom a gift is for
-Won't shop in daylight hours during Ramadan
-High spenders, expecting VIP treatment. They want instant gratification and dislike waiting

Singapore, Hong Kong and china
-Shoppers like to buy branded and luxury goods, some of which are cheaper than at home
-In Hong Kong the family name is said first eg Wong Man Ying would be addressed as Mr Wong
-Chinese tend to travel with partners, not children

United States
-Expect a high level of service
-They like to buy gifts not available in the US
-They compare prices, are big internet shoppers
-Like to see price in dollars as well as pounds

Russia
-They travel in tour groups or with friends
-Luxury buyers often young businessmen. West End considered very fashionable.
-Look out for peak number of customers around International Women's Day (8 March).

India
-Prefer verbal reassurance and face-to-face interaction in addition to printed information
-Like to buy gifts only available in the UK

Obituaries

I enjoyed reading this observation on obituaries on the net today:

...obituaries aren’t interesting because of what they say about death. They’re interesting because of the funny and pathetic way they purport to deal with the unfathomable. Obituaries are little fairytales we tell ourselves, while imagining our own lives as one day complete enough to write about. An obituary, any obituary, transforms lives into stories, with interesting characters, a cohesive plot, and most importantly, a good ending. This is what we’ve got as humans — not the ability to understand or be at one with death, but the ability to generate lots of stupid crap to fill in the empty space of the unknown. Obituaries can do that as much as anything, and maybe we can think of them both in the Franklinian and Aristotelian sense: They might not complete life nor make it eternal, but they can make us feel better about living in the constant and terrifying presence of death.

What happens in the coffee shop stays in the coffee shop

Coffee with the girls on Saturday morning. I'm supposed to be on a diet, but I had a vanilla latte and almond croissant. I figured I could start dieting in the afternoon....

Anyway, coffee with the girls is relaxing. We meet at a coffee shop at 10:00 and for the next couple of hours we say anything we want in the comfort of our friendship, knowing that what we say is taken lightly and no notes are being taken.

So, for example, perhaps (hypothetically) I am feeling tired after a long vacation with my husband and kids, and I say what I really need now is a holiday by myself. Or perhaps I put it more strongly than that....anyway....

My friends know I am just letting off steam, and when we part, they don't give it another thought. They too feel free to say whatever they like, and we leave the coffee shop feeling refreshed, like someone has really listened to us.

I guess, too, part of the deal is what happens in the coffee shop, stays in the coffee shop.

Mississippi girls never lose their manners

I loved this article that I found on a friend's Facebook page. It is so true about Mississippi girls. I find that I will put any other person's needs, however trivial, before my own at most times in my life. I hate myself later for doing it and vow to stop. I'm not sure that even I, however, would make tea for someone after I'd been shot though so maybe I'm not as bad as I think.

(Note the officer on the case attributing the woman's survival to a miracle from God. Some things never change in Mississippi.)

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – A Mississippi woman who was shot in the head not only survived but made herself tea and offered an astonished deputy something to drink, authorities said Friday. Tammy Sexton, 47, remained hospitalized three days after being wounded by her husband, who killed himself after he shot his wife. A bullet struck her squarely in the forehead, passed through her skull and exited through the back of her head, authorities said. She is expected to fully recover.

"There's no way she should be alive other than a miracle from God," said Sheriff Mike Byrd of Jackson County, Miss.

Byrd said deputies were looking for Sexton's husband, Donald Ray Sexton, earlier in the week to give him a document ordering him to stay away from his wife. Court records show he was put on probation for six months on April 9 for domestic violence.

He showed up at their home in rural Jackson County in Southeast Mississippi about 12:10 a.m. Tuesday and confronted his wife as a relative ran next door to call police, the sheriff said.

"She was at her bed, and he shot her right in the head," Byrd said. "Then he went out on the back porch and shot himself."

A deputy was greeted by the woman when he arrived minutes after she was shot with the slug from a .380-caliber handgun.

"When the officer got there she said, `What's going on?' She was holding a rag on her head and talking. She was conscious, but she was confused about what had happened," he said. "She had made herself some tea and offered the officer something to drink."

Byrd said the bullet apparently passed through the lobes of the woman's brain without causing major damage. She was rushed to a Mobile hospital by a helicopter.

Renewing your sense of horror

I was amused by a book review I was reading about a new bio of Helen Gurley Brown, former editor of Cosmo magazine. She was from a little town in the Ozarks in Arkansas, and once she got out of that town, she never looked back. Maybe she would get nostalgic for her former home once in a while but then she would remember her favorite quote from Carson McCuller:

“I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror.”


All of Carson McCullers's fiction, from ''The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter'' (1940) through ''The Member of the Wedding'' (1946), ''The Ballad of the Sad Cafe'' (1951) and ''Clock Without Hands'' (1961), is concerned, at heart, with a single theme: the loneliness of isolated individuals and their painful yearning to connect.
McCullers's compassion for her disenfranchised characters -- an awkward teenage girl, a deaf-mute, a crossed-eyed recluse -- had roots in her own short, painful life. Rheumatic fever and a series of strokes left her a virtual invalid in her early 30's, and her two marriages to Reeves McCullers, a failed writer who shared her taste for alcohol, would devolve into spectacular acrimony and dysfunction.

What Miss McCullers's heroes hunger for most of all is love, which has the power to heal and redeem. Love for them is something incalculable and wild, frequently bearing little relationship to the nature of the beloved. It tends to arrive unexpectedly and violently, but it also tends to skitter away just as precipitously, leaving them hurt, damaged and often bitter. — Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

My son is a crime victim again

It's only been a couple of years since my son was attacked by a gang on the way home from school. They had knives and roughed him up. That was really hard to get through.

This time, though, he was the target of an attempted robbery while walking home from school. The guy verbally abused him, threatened to beat him up repeatedly, phoned his mates to come and beat Mikey up, and tried to get his Ipod. Mikey handled it so well though. As soon as he saw an adult on the street, he said to him, "This guy is trying to rob me. Can you call the police?" So the guy did, and the attacker fled. Then the good samaritan walked Mikey home.

I didn't know any of this until I got home from work. Mikey is fine about it all. The police came promptly to interview Mikey and get descriptions/write statements, etc. Later I wondered why it had taken days for someone to come out when Mikey had been assaulted before, but they got to our house within hours for this incident. Robbery, they said, is classed as a more serious crime than assault.

Anyway, everything is fine. Mikey is adamant he is unaffected by the event, and the police are on the case. The police were wonderful, and the policewoman fell in love with our foster cat. I told her all about the program of fostering cats, and she's given me her details to give to the cat charity because she wants her own foster cat ASAP.

Here's a pic of them:

St. George's Day

I don't know what I'm supposed to do on St. George's Day other than eat the special cupcakes in the office deli that have the English flag iced on them. As an American living in England, St. George's Day doesn't mean much to me. Here's my post on it from last year:

Today is St. George's Day in England. He's their patron saint, and on my way home from the office, I saw English flags flying all over the place. Some people want this day to be a national holiday. There are also articles in the paper about how we must save England from the clutches of the European Union, who want to take away British sterling and replace it with Euros, and also stop the English from doing things like printing pounds and ounces on food items (must use the metric system). It's all very interesting for an expat like me to observe the nationalism of another country (not the USA).

Here's info on George from the BBC website:

"Very little is known about the real St George. He is thought to have been born into a noble Christian family in the late third century in Cappadocia, an area which is now in Turkey. He followed his father's profession of soldier and became part of the retinue of the Emperor Diocletian. The emperor ordered the systematic persecution of Christians and George refused to take part. In 303, he was himself tortured and executed in Palestine, becoming an early Christian martyr.

The legend of George slaying a dragon and rescuing an innocent maiden from death is medieval. St George's Day is celebrated in England on 23 April, reputed to be the day of George's martyrdom in 303."

Can't talk, I'm on the phone

Interesting article in the Times about people talking on the phone while ignoring the live human beings they are with. "Jabbering away on your mobile while in company is not just bad manners but a symptom of wider malaise," the article says.

Here's the link: Can't talk, I'm on the phone

My favorite part of the article was the last few paragraphs. Try to read this and not laugh:

"So many people have complained about such behaviour that Debrett’s has added a guide to mobiles in its A-Z of Modern Manners. It includes the rule: 'People in the flesh deserve more attention than a gadget.'

No chance. It is a losing battle. Even in buttoned-up Britain, people seem to have become oblivious to embarrassment about their mobile conversations.

The editor of Reader’s Digest magazine reported last week that she had overheard a middle-class man on a train apparently talking to his mother-in-law.

“You love your daughter; I love her. But she’s got to know that she’s out of order,” he said.

“She made a very personal comment about my private parts, right in front of the children: ‘Your dad’s got a tiny knob - his [presumably a former boyfriend’s] was much bigger.’ In front of the children!”

That is what happens when your mobile begins to take over your life. You lose all sense of proportion."

When good plants grow bad

Religious timeline

A reader sent in an amusing graphic that shows a timeline for the Young Earth view of the world. I couldn't get the graphic to upload properly so am going to put a link to the original post so you can see the picture.

Young Earth creationists versus Reality

My new daughter

My daughter Katie left us to go back to university after the Easter holidays -- luckily a new daughter moved in with us that very same day.

OK, so my new daughter isn't human -- at least she never gives me any lip. This is Mattie, our latest foster cat.

I was sad that our vacation being over, and Katie was gone, but when Mattie jumped onto my bed and started giving me cat kisses on my face, I felt better.

She was a stray and lived outside near a woman's house. The woman didn't mind her presence until one day she went to check on her baby daughter taking a nap and found Mattie the cat sleeping in the crib with the baby. She freaked out then and called the animal rescue to take Mattie away.

Stuck at Rowan Oak

I made one of my mother's staple recipes recently, Salmon Cakes. They are easy, delicious and nutritious. My family fights over them -- they are that tasty. Here's how to make them:

Can of salmon, drained, and thrown into a mixing bowl.
Add bread crumbs or crackers in a zip lock bag that you've whacked with a rolling pin so they are crumbly. Add an egg to bind it together, worcestershire sauce, salt & pepper and any other spices -- I put paprika or anything with a zippy flavor. Mix them up with your hands and shallow fry in a pan. Delish.

Now I know that my friend Brenda would say to add some mashed-up potato to this mix because William Faulkner's nephew told her to do that. But I say keep it pure.

My friend and I went to Faulkner's home Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi, one November day a few years ago for a nostalgia tour. It was there in 1979 that we first visited, and her car got stuck in the mud. I mean hopelessly stuck. We went asking people at Rowan Oak for help -- among them Shelby Foote and other Faulkner scholars who were there for a reception. Did they help? No. They left us to die out there while they drank mint juleps and talked about books.


So we went back to Rowan Oak in 2000 to remember those days. We went into the house, and surprisingly there was William Faulkner's nephew, Jim, and he was telling visitors interesting little-known facts about his uncle. (Jimmy Faulkner wrote a book about his uncle called Across the Creek .)

Anyway, I don't know how the subject got on to salmon cakes but Jimmy said William F loved them with potato in them, but I'm sure my mother's way is superior. Faulkner might have been a Nobel-Prize winning author but I'm sure my mother knew best about salmon.

Things I must ask my doctor about & LA's idea of bad weather

Things I must ask my doctor about
One of the first things I noticed on being back in the USA was the advertising for pharmaceutical drugs on TV.

Do your eyelids hurt? This could be a symptom of Eyelid Dysfunction. Ask your doctor about eyelidstat.

Restless legs keeping you awake at night? You could have RLS. Ask your doctor about....

The announcers sounded so sure I might have some of these problems. I said to my daughter, I must keep a list of all these things I should ask my doctor about.

Advertising pharmaceutical drugs is illegal in the UK so when you go back to the US, these ads seem shocking. You go to your doctor with a problem in England, and he/she recommends a solution. If you go in there asking for a specific drug because you've seen an advertisement on TV suggesting you have a certain condition, well, you won't get very far.

LA's idea of bad weather
We had come to Los Angeles after going through a very bad winter in England. We watched weather reports where the LA weatherman said the weather was going to get bad a couple of days after we arrived. We braced ourselves for the worst, but all that happened was that a dark cloud passed overhead. There was no rain, cloudiness or horrible weather. There was just a few dark clouds passing through.

We watched the weather reports every night and would hear again that bad weather was coming and still nothing would happen but maybe a dark cloud or two passed overhead. We finally concluded that bad weather to a resident of LA is totally different to what bad weather is to an English person.

Don't fear difficult moments

Did you all see this? What a wonderful story.

ROME – Rita Levi Montalcini, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, said Saturday that even though she is about to turn 100, her mind is sharper than it was she when she was 20.

Levi Montalcini, who also serves as a senator for life in Italy, celebrates her 100th birthday on Wednesday, and she spoke at a ceremony held in her honor by the European Brain Research Institute.

She shared the 1986 Nobel Prize for Medicine with American Stanley Cohen for discovering mechanisms that regulate the growth of cells and organs.

"At 100, I have a mind that is superior — thanks to experience — than when I was 2," she told the party, complete with a large cake for her.

The Turin-born Levi Montalcini recounted how the anti-Jewish laws of the 1930s under Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime forced her to quit university and do research in an improvised laboratory in her bedroom at home.

"Above all, don't fear difficult moments," she said. "The best comes from them."

"I should thank Mussolini for having declared me to be of an inferior race. This led me to the joy of working, not any more unfortunately, in university institutes but in a bedroom," the scientist said.

Her white hair elegantly coifed and wearing a smart navy blue suit, she raised a glass of sparkling wine in a toast to her long life.

Bossnap

A new word is entering our lexicon.

Bossnap

To hold your manager hostage over a work grievance. There have been two cases in France this month -- one boss was barricaded into an office by staff complaining about poor layoff packages.

Example of use:

"A 50 dollar payoff is the best I can offer them. If they don't like it, I'll probably get killed or at the very least, bossnapped."

Don't you feel like bossnapping sometimes? Sometimes I see the stationery closet at work and think that would be a good place to put my boss until he decides to agree with something I've said.

Guess who this person is?

I bought my son some Cracker Jacks when we were in America -- he didn't even know what they were. I was appalled that he was missing such an important cultural experience. He loved them once he tried them, of course. I opened the Surprise Inside, and it's a little mystery. I'll type it out here, and you guess who it is:

Can you guess who I grew up to be?

The island of Nevis in the West Indies is where I was born. Unfortunately, I didn't have a very happy childhood. My brother and I were abandoned by our father when I was eight, and my mother died when I was eleven, leaving us homeless and penniless.

Before she died, however, my mother had taught me the value of determination and perseverance. These traits, along with my education in commerce, law and politics, would serve me well after I came to America.

WHO AM I?

Back to reality

Our vacation to California that we just finished was the first time I'd been able to go somewhere in the US without also going to Tennessee to see my mother in her nursing home. She died last year and the sudden freedom to be able to go wherever I want was an odd feeling. I felt sort of rootless.

Then we fell in love with California, and I thought that could be my new home someday. I could put down new roots there. I don't have to stay in Reading when the kids are finished in school. It's a tantalizing thought. I will have to see where the kids look like they are headed too but I want to go somewhere that's warm at some point in my life.

Back to regular programming
Tons of unpacking today and washing clothes, putting stuff up -- my least favorite part of the vacation. I keep saying to the kids that I'm just going out to the pool or to the beach and soak up some sun but it's all in jest as there is no pool, no beach and no sun.

We had to get up for a family dental appointment, then I had to have an emergency hair appointment. My hair was such a frizzed-out mess that the hairdresser took a 'before' picture of me then dyed my hair and cut it and blow-dried it into one of those Hollywood looks and took an 'after' picture. The hair looked great but it was my face I objected to so I'm not going to take a photo to show you the hair.

I was just reading a new fabulous book I got in LA named The Teapot Dome Scandal by Laton McCartney but I fell into a jet-lag nap and my daughter stole it to read herself. (It's about Warren Harding's corrupt administration and the role of the big oil companies -- it is such a good read.) I dreamed about the Teapot Dome Scandal only to wake up to my husband enquiring when I planned to make some dinner. ("I'll do it right now," I said, then went on the pc to check my blog. Now he's ended up doing all the prep work himself. "I'll make dinner in one second," I said an hour ago. I'm making fajitas because I got some great Mexican spices in Los Angeles -- a fab lime salt and an orange butter seasoned salt.)

We don't want to leave!!

We've had a great time in California and Nevada, and don't want to go home. After a long winter in England, the lightness and brashness of the west was sort of shock, especially to the kids. But I told them that you just have to accept the different culture and people you meet there and realize that they won't conform to your ideas of what is usual/normal. I could see the kids were nonplussed by some of the people they met or things they experienced but it was good learning for them.

Also I didn't want them to be limited by thinking things like, I would never go to a particular place or I don't like a certain type of person, because when you think that way, you cut yourself off from the surprising things that can happen in life.

Thanks California and Nevada for a wonderful time and to my friends who helped me so much during the trip.

Leaving Las Vegas

We loved Las Vegas just as we have loved everywhere we've been this trip. We were sorry to leave Nevada behind so stopped to take a photo at the famous Las Vegas sign on our way out.

I drove two hours of the trip back to Los Angeles but it was an absolute pleasure. First I drove through the desert, then the mountains began to rise. The beauty of it and the vastness of the west made me happy.

When Mel took over the driving, I read Katie's copy of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. I enjoyed reading passages like this description of a character:

A tall man stood in the doorway...he moved with a majesty only achieved by royalty and a master craftsman...There was a gravity in his manner and a quiet so profound that all talk stopped when he spoke...His hatchet face was ageless. He might have been thirty five or fifty. His ear heard more than was said to him, and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought.

It's an incredible story and is so fast to read. I was done by the time we hit the Los Angeles city limits.

My husband's worst nightmare

The largest gift shop in the world! My husband's idea of hell. And I made him go there. Ha -- I had such fun in there.

Karen does slots

My college friend Karen Schmidt Hanner lives in Las Vegas and she picked us up for dinner last night. She drove us through Las Vegas, giving us all the juicy details of real estate deals gone wrong, personal travails of casino owners about to go bust, and even showed us where OJ Simpson got busted. It was like having your own personal tour guide. She's one of those people who knows everything and that's a good sort of friend to have. Here she is showing us how to win at slots after dinner:


We were so amused by all the wheeling and dealing Karen and her husband Randy do to make sure they don't pay more than they have to for anything. Apparently in Las Vegas, you never just hand over money for the asking price for something but you always have a 2-for-1 coupon, some comp points (loyalty points for playing in a casino) and other vouchers. Also, she taught us to never pay what they want but to ask, "Can you do better?"

I'm so naive. I pay whatever people want and don't ask questions. Perhaps that's why I'm always getting swindled.

Here we are at the Red Rock Casino last night. I wish you could have seen these lights that were like hanging curtains of crystals.

Then we went to the top of the casino and looked at the lights of the Strip below.

Income tax time

Did you get your income taxes done on time? Expats don't have to file until June, but efficient Mel did ours early and mailed them from LA. We also have to file in England too so we have double the tax headache each year.

I saw this man on the street yesterday and asked him to come closer for a photo as we drove past.

I tried to get a pic of another interesting subject -- the drug dealers we went past but my college friend Karen, who was driving through Naked City (the drugs and prostitute area behind our hotel), advised me not to unless I didn't mind a little knife or gun injury in addition to my picture.

Hotels in Las Vegas

This is our hotel in Las Vegas. I went to the swimming pool and it was so sunny and warm. I was so happy to be able to bask in the sun and listen to cool music on the radio and have people ask me if I want a drink. We went up to the top of the tower today, and the kids did a scary ride, where you hang outside of the tower by a thread and get thrown around. Katie loves scary rides and even she said she thought she might faint from fear.

Here's a pic from the pool.

Blog commenter Lisa, who has relatives in Las Vegas, told me the Stratosphere is a dump and after I went to check out the other hotels, I could see why. It's a fine hotel for us but it doesn't have any of the magnificence of the others.

Check out the Venetian.

Don't you just think you are in Venice looking at this picture? And this is in the *inside* of the hotel:

This is one of those guys who stands totally still and you keep staring at him to see if he's real or a statue then he comes to life when you give him money to stand next to him to take a photo.

Le Reve

My friend Karen in Las Vegas got us discount tickets to one of the hottest shows in town, Le Reve. It's like an aquatic circus -- hard to describe but it was unlike anything we've ever seen. Dancers dive from the top of the building into a little pool below -- you don't even think they can make it but they do. Then lots of acrobatic feats in the air -- it was wonderful.

We got there early and sat in the plush theatre, drinking in the atmosphere. There was a single bed in stage full of water. They were playing the theme to Life is Beautiful. That was all fabulous except that they played the little theme over and over for more than 30 minutes. We thought we would freak if we heard it for one more time.

You should see this show if you are anywhere near Las Vegas. I can give you Karen's phone number for discount tickets (just kidding, but she said she'd been getting loads of friends tickets to this show and was worried she'd reached her quota.)

LE RÊVE, presented exclusively at Wynn Las Vegas, offers breathtaking performances in an intimate aqua theater-in-the-round. The show features aerial acrobatics, provocative choreography and artistic athleticism.

The cast of 85 captures the imagination with their outrageous antics and daring feats of strength and agility. Live music and elaborate special effects immerse the audience into a world of fantasy, adventure and intrigue.

If you want to share the same experience we had, play this YouTube video 30 times while sitting in a darkened room.

We finally get to Las Vegas

The traffic out of Los Angeles was terrible yesterday but we kept on with our quest to get to Las Vegas. The car was crammed with stuff -- I said to Derry's husband that we looked like a family out of a Steinbeck novel with all the crap everywhere, coats, shirts, bags from the mall all over the kids, smashed up into the windows, etc., but he laughed and said that Steinbeck's characters usually didn't migrate west in Cadillacs.

We were enthralled by the changing scenery as we drove out of LA and into the mountains. Then the earth flattened into desert and it was like being on another planet. Then out of nowhere came the bright lights of Las Vegas, like a dream.

The dream turned into a nightmare when I realized that I had been completely overcharged for the room over the Internet and I had numerous phone calls with the company arguing that I asked for two rooms and only got one, etc. Then Mel and I had a knock-down dragout argument in the lobby over what I did -- just a typical vacation scene -- THEN while we were walking to the hotel room, someone charged $392 to our card fraudulently.

Now I have to stop this post as Katie has done an enormous poo and Mikey has taken my phone to get a picture of it. Kids are so gross.....Apparently he wants to put it on a website called Rate My Poo (www.ratemypoo.com).

Where was this photo taken?

Doesn't it look like Michaelangelo was just here? Where was this picture taken?

Last Day in LA -- leaving for Las Vegas

I'm falling behind with the blog. Yesterday we spent half a day in LA hanging out with my college roommate. Here we are having breakfast at our hotel:

Then we went to a cool car museum. The guys wanted to do an aviation museum but that would have killed me with boredom so we compromised on this automotive museum. It was good because it had all the settings for the cars.

I liked this exhibit. Here's the state trooper waiting with his motorcycle behind a billboard, ready to swoop out if he sees anyone speeding:


This was another good one -- apparently there used to be shops set up in buildings that looked like animals to attract people driving by in their cars to get them to stop.

They had an old State Farm insurance company set up to look like it did in the 1940s. I sent my daughter in there to get some quotes for us:

After the museum, my roommate and her husband took us to The Stinking Rose, a restaurant where every dish is made with garlic, even the ice cream. I was going to give you their 40-cloves-of-garlic chicken recipe, one of their most popular dishes but the laptop is hanging with the slow hotel wifi connection so maybe another time.

God doesn't intevene; pilot unaware

"A pilot accused of praying when he should have been taking emergency measures to avoid a crash in which 16 people died has been sentenced to 10 years in jail by an Italian court.

Captain Chafik Gharby was at the controls of a plane belonging to the Tunisian charter airline Tuninter that crashed in the sea off the coast of Sicily four years ago. The pilot was heard calling for the help of "Allah and Muhammed his prophet," in recordings. His lawyer said: "Faced with danger, he invoked is god, as would any of us."

If the pilot had been reading my blog, he would have known that God doesn't intervene, as explained by the Archbishop of Canterbury earlier this week. Or maybe Allah does intervene, just not in this particular case.

Watching the Angels

We went to see the LA Angels play the Boston Red Sox at the Angels' stadium in Anaheim last night. One of their pitchers had pitched a wonderful game on Wednesday night then been killed by a drunk driver later that night so the fans were sad. There was a impromptu memorial for him outside the stadium, and they carved his uniform number into the pitchers' mound, and players held up one of his shirts before the game started. It just illustrates how fragile life can be. He was only 22, had just broken into the majors, pitched his first good game, and now he is gone.

We had so much fun at the game. The kids had never seen baseball before as they play cricket in England (a game I still don't understand, even though the rules have been explained to me time and time again).

In between innings, fun stuff happened like everyone in the stadium danced to 'Fill Me up Buttercup' so we could stretch a bit, and there was 'Kiss Cam' -- when the camera landed on two people, they had to kiss as we all watched on the big screen. The Angels beat the Sox which was OK with me, but Mel and the kids were rooting for Boston so they weren't happy.

Seeing my college roommate after 30 years

My college roommate, Drew Templeton and her husband Todd, drove more than 6 hours from Phoenix to LA to see us today. I haven't seen her for 30 years. Drew (I call her Derry) even made me a lovely piece of jewellery -- I'm pointing at it in the pic below:

Derry and Todd took us to a Southern roadhouse to eat -- they had catfish and all the Southern things I love to eat.

The restaurant was called Johnny Reb's, and I was in heaven with the food and atmosphere. (I did notice that Johnny Reb's displayed the uncontentious aspects of Southern life so there were no confederate flags inside, for example.)

Here is the whole group:

After a delicious meal and catching up on thirty years' worth of news, we got to Manhattan Beach just in time to catch the sunset:

Trying to drink in LA

They don't make it easy. When I tried to buy a couple of beers at the Angel's stadium last night to enjoy with my nachos, they said I had to have photo ID on me before they'd sell it to me. I whined a bit but they said no ID, no beer. Then I said to the guy: "Take a close look at my face. Can't you see I am an old bag? Sell me the beer." He laughed and took my money.

In Target (pronounced Tar-jay), they have to call the supervisor over when you want to buy a bottle of wine. Today Mel tried to buy a bottle of wine and they refused to sell it to him because he didn't have an American driver's license. He had his American social security card, his European driver's license, his passport, etc., but they wouldn't sell it to him. I said, "I'm American!" and showed them my US passport but they refused to sell it to me because I don't have a state driving license. "How can I have a driving license for a state in the US when I live in England?" I asked. It's impossible.

I don't know what we would do if we were alcoholics and had to have that wine. As it is now, we are just buying water. They need to put a big sign up that says, WINE FOR SALE ONLY TO AMERICANS.

A little shopping and a lot of eating

My daughter Katie needed some new Converses so we went to the mall for an hour. Ran into this guy who was out shopping with his dog, who of course was wearing a hat and shades. These Californians...so cool.

We went to lunch at a seafood place on Redondo Beach:

Breakfast at the Shade Hotel
This morning, an actress from LA named Kath Gallagher whisked us off to breakfast at a boutique hotel in Manhattan Beach. I went to college with her but we didn't know each other. She's a friend of my college roommate's, and she generously decided to take us out. Like I said in an earlier post, Americans can be so wonderful and giving even if they don't know you.

Getty Museum

We went to the Getty art museum outside Los Angeles yesterday. It is a massive complex of pure white buildings high up in the hills and is stunning.

Look at the beautiful gardens outside the museum:




Here's Katie playing around near a statue:


Lunch at a hilltop restaurant at the museum. My drink was a fresh lemonade with 'muddled' strawberries and Tanqueray gin.

My favorite exhibit was a floor of photography, including this photograph: