Tonight's dinner conversation

Discussing the possibility of a trip at some point in the future to DisneyWorld, DH (who apparently does not find the idea of a trip to see The Rat and friends enticing) made the comment: "I think the only fun ride I've ever been on in Florida was Miss Michigan." For just a moment I thought he was referring to a trip he once made to Brownsville, Texas, when he ended up on a plane with all of the Miss America contestants. However, I know he sat next to Miss Idaho so my response was "Speak English, why doncha?" (My usual comment when he's failing to explain himself well.)

DS suddenly remembered a very important question he's been asking us about regularly for the last month or so: "Where did the first baby get born?" This question has been really bothering him as we have been unable to answer him. This time he continued without waiting for an answer: "All the scientists are trying to find the answer, but some of them know the answer. A long, long, time ago when I was three a scientist somewhere near Blue Planet told me but I forgot, and they might be wrong so all the scientists are still looking for the answer."

Need some Marmite?

I never had Marmite as a child and it's not something I can honestly say I like. However, I know that there are many British expats out there who miss their Marmite and who will be delighted to find out that you can buy Marmite from Amazon! It's $44.40 - but don't have a heart attack yet - that's for a CASE of TWELVE 4.4 ounce jars and the shipping is free! That'll see you on for a while, right?

I'd never thought of Amazon as a grocery import store, but they have some good stuff! They sell PG Tips tea in bulk. 640 tea bags for $30, and again no shipping charges. They list 3 kinds of chocolate digestives - unfortunately all out of stock though :-( Probably a good thing, as you have to buy them in bulk too and I could do serious damage to 6 packages of chocolate digestives! They even sell custard creams - but it's a brand I've never heard of so I'm not going to risk it given that they come in a 24-pack! I think that's about 8 pounds of biscuits! I have to check the price of Pataks sauces at our supermarket tomorrow and see if $20 for 4 jars at Amazon is cheaper than I can buy them locally.

There's no easy way to find the import goods at Amazon. You just have to do a search in their grocery store for items you'd like. There are several "British import stores" online that carry a wider range of goods and are more easily searchable but I've never ordered anything from any of them. When I first arrived in the US 23 years ago it was not easy to find certain British foods - custard, digestive biscuits, Ribena . . . Nowadays, though, we have a small import section at our local supermarket and a very good international 'market' nearby where I can usually find most English things I'm craving. They're not always cheap, but usually much cheaper than buying them online! Finding reasonably priced imported foods at Amazon was quite a surprise.

$8 a gallon

I live in an area of the US where petrol (gas) is relatively cheap, and I paid $3.36/gallon this morning for 'regular'. I think that's the first time I've paid over $40 to fill the tank. In California apparently it's up over $4/gallon already. There are currently lots of images like these doing the rounds:





Meanwhile, petrol in the UK is predicted to reach £5 a gallon soon. That works out to be $8.37 per US gallon. Well, I think so - maths was never my best subject! Far more expensive than here in the US anyway! Imagine the panic here in the US if petrol prices were that high! Of course, over the next few days people in the UK may be happy to get petrol at any price if the refinery workers' strike hits as hard as expected. I'm sure some Americans feel as though the prices are as high as in Europe already - it's all relative! It really doesn't feel that long since I was paying less than a dollar a gallon and it is hard to believe that we are now looking at prices that have quadrupled in ten years. The following cartoon dates back to 2004, when people surely thought petrol prices would not go any higher:



Sadly, petrol is NOT a luxury item in the US. Relatively few people live anywhere where there is public transportation. Even when people live within walking distance of the places they would like to go, it is often not practical to do so because there are no pavements (sidewalks). The road we live on is being widened, and closer to town part of the work last year included installing pavements. Unfortunately, there are no plans to bring them any further out. It would be nice if they did as it would then be possible to ride our bikes to town. There's no way I would consider that with my kids without a pavement to ride on - the drivers go too fast and they are too unused to seeing cyclists on the road.

Meanwhile, so many other prices are being affected by the price of petrol. Grain prices are going up not only because of increased production costs but also because of the increased demand for biodiesel. I was amazed to hear this week that Costco is limiting the amount of rice customers can purchase because there are shortages! (Note the touch of fearmongering in that article when the author makes a comment about there being no plans to "to limit food purchases" in general at Walmart stores!) The World Bank estimates that globally "food prices have risen by 83 percent in three years". I guess I just have to work a little harder to convince DH that we really DO need to dig up at least part of the lawn to grow some veggies!

Degrees in selling beds

Twenty odd years ago when I first came to the United States, one of the reasons Europeans considered the American university system a joke was that you could take classes like basket-weaving for academic credit. Now the British education system is moving in the same direction with McDonalds offering A-levels and now Dreams bed company offering a foundation degree in partnership with one of the new universities.

Although the concept of a qualification in bed-selling might seem laughable at first, it actually makes a lot of sense. There are plenty of people who do not do particularly well academically who are quite capable of learning more than they do in school, and they often don't realize that until they get out into the world of work. Options that allow people to go back to school while still at work and learn the theory behind what they are applying on a daily basis seem to me to be a good thing. I particularly like the idea that a foundation degree, like the HND in the UK or an associate's degree here in the US, can be a stepping stone towards a traditional college degree qualification whilst still being vocational at heart. It certainly makes more sense than trying to increase the numbers of people getting traditional, academically focused, degrees.

One of England's newest universities is offering tailor-made degrees in the management of selling beds. Buckinghamshire New University in High Wycombe is offering a retail management foundation degree developed in partnership with bed company Dreams. This is the kind of collaboration between industry and higher education the government wants to encourage. Most of the sector's expansion is through such two-year courses mixing academic and work-based learning.

Tagged

British Daffodilly tagged me with this meme a few days ago, and I've finally managed to find some time to follow up on it. It's the first time I've been tagged. I suspect it's like junk mail - interesting the first couple of times, but annoying eventually if you get memes you're really not interested in! I liked this one though.

1. What was I doing 10 years ago?
I was relatively newly married and childless - but seeing as DH and I lived a two hour drive away from each other and only saw each other on average every other weekend, the childless thing is not surprising! To tell the truth, I wasn't exactly childless as I was 'mommy' to some 20 teenage girls at a boarding school! This time ten years ago I had in fact just got a job offer that meant that come the end of the school year I was going to be able to move 'home' to live with DH. I was very happy - not to mention the fact that the job came with a 5% raise and significantly shorter hours! (My immigration lawyer refused to write down the hours I really worked on my green card application - she said it was too many and knocked about 15 hours off on my job description!) Little did I realize that eventually I was to return to the role of mommy - but this time without being paid for it and without another mommy to be on duty with the kids every other night! Oh, the bliss of being able to ignore the knocking on my door, knowing that there were two other adults whose turn it was to be on duty and I could pretend not to be there! Everyone said I would be well-prepared for having my own children but looking after 20 kids who are not really yours is in many ways MUCH easier than a mere 2 of your own!

2. 5 snacks I enjoy:
Dark chocolate, Cadbury's Creme eggs, chocolate-covered blueberries, chocolate digestives, Nutrigrain bars (but not chocolate ones - tried those in the UK and thought they were disgusting!)

3.Things I would do if I was a billionaire:
Pay off the mortgages of everyone in the family, do the additions/alterations to our house and garden that we talk about but never have the money to do, quit worrying about how to pay for the kids' college tuition. Set up a trust for charitable donations to a variety of causes. Give regularly to NPR and PBS. Travel abroad more. Volunteer more. Read more. Learn to quilt. Oh yes, and quit my job!

4. 5 jobs I've had:
Assistant in a bookshop
Cleaning lady
Waitress
Hotel receptionist
Teacher

5. 3 bad habits:
Biting my nails
Eating too much chocolate
Red wine

6. 5 places I've lived:


7. 5 people I want to know more about:
Hmm - looking for people who haven't already been tagged with this one . . . sorry if I've goofed and someone already tagged you!
CrazyBrits
Only Crook in Town
AliBlahBlah
Bloody Brilliant
Sablonneuse

Flying penguins

The BBC had a rather nice April Fools video about flying penguins. They are now using it as an ad for their video player service on their website. However, I was really frustrated when I went to watch it on April 1st to find that iPlayer did not work for me as I am outside the UK :-( Happily, that particular video is available from other sources (including this blog post.) The CGI is wonderful, and they got the 'David Attenborough' tone just right.

Be nice to America

I guess that's a threat, not a promise?

Earth Hour

Fry the Planet

Wordless Wednesday - daily meds

Beer and pubs

When my parents first came to visit me in the US back in the early 90s we did some travelling around the northeastern United States. Everywhere we went, my dad asked what the local beer was. He was often greeted with a blank look. The only beer anyone ever seemed to suggest was Sam Adams. He was rather disappointed.

Last summer when they came to visit he had much more choice. There are far more microbrews available now - we have not one but THREE brewpubs practically within spitting distance. (Well, within a reasonably short drive anyway.) The Beer Advocate says:

Brewery and brewpub-wise, rough numbers show that ...

- Connecticut has 5 breweries and 12 brewpubs
- Maine has 14 breweries and 16 brewpubs
- Massachusetts has 18 breweries and 18 brewpubs
- New Hampshire has 6 breweries and 9 brewpubs
- Rhode Island has 3 breweries and 4 brewpubs
- Vermont has 14 breweries and 11 brewpubs

What's really cool is that these 130 breweries and brewpubs (give or take) in New England are making upwards of 2,000 different beers, within roughly 90 different styles of beer!

DH loves the fact that I do all the driving when we go to the UK. Having one beer with lunch and driving is not usually a problem for him - but when driving on the 'wrong' side of the road it would not be a good idea. He buys the latest version of the Good Pub Guide and spends a lot of time planning our itinerary around where he would like to have lunch and dinner. There was a wonderful place we had lunch the very first time he came to the UK with me. I was the one who had researched it that time as back then he didn't even know that such a thing as the Good Pub Guide existed. Sadly, we will probably never manage to find it again. He was convinced I was nuts as we drove what appeared to be miles out of our way to a tiny village that didn't look as though it could possibly support a decent pub, only to have an extremely enjoyable lunch. (Come to think about it, it was one of those pubs where children are absolutely not welcome, so it'll be years before we could go there again anyway!)

On our last trip we had dinner at The Mole and Chicken in Buckinghamshire which was a lot easier to find, even in the dark. They had fairly recently won the Buckinghamshire Dining Pub of the Year award, and we were not disappointed. The menu was excellent, the beers good, the attention to detail outstanding, and they were definitely a child-friendly place early on a quiet Sunday evening. Although obviously the designation of "Dining Pub of the Year" is likely to ensure that a pub is very busy, it's one that we will look for on our next trip to the UK.

Sugar shack

This one is on my drive to and from work. A real sugar shack! The first picture doesn't show the classic sugar house roofline very well, though you can see the chimney. Even when there's no steam hiding it, the roof's not particularly obvious. It was only when they started boiling that I realized that it wasn't just another run-down farm building. It's clearer in the second, taken from the other side of the farm. I'd never actually noticed the wrecked vehicle until I stopped to take these pics.

Making maple syrup on YouTube

Not for those of you with slow internet connections I'm afraid as these are quite long videos . . . YouTube has more information than you ever needed or wanted to know about maple syrup.
This is from Wisconsin - some slight differences to the way I see farmers doing this in New England, (I've never seen plastic bags for collecting the syrup) but not that different overall. There are other videos at YouTube of more amateur setups. (Although I said don't do this in your kitchen at home, apparently some people do - though perhaps their kitchens were not that wonderful in the first place . . . ?)

Wordless Wednesday - trees on life support?

Maple syrup and sugar houses

I'd been living in the US for years before I went to a sugar house. I'd vaguely heard of them, but didn't really know what they were. Finally, I was visiting a friend in northern Vermont and she took me to a sugar house near her home. Some sugar houses are not open to visitors, but many encourage them, indeed depending on them for much of their business. The one I visited in Vermont had a store attached where you could buy all kinds of Vermont souvenirs, especially ones that were maple syrup related. Others have restaurants where you can buy pancakes or waffles served with, of course, real maple syrup. Some have both. The one we visited last week had a restaurant, and they sell jugs of syrup. The one we visited this week has a restaurant, and a store. They were offering (ok, charging extra for) rides on a horse-drawn wagon and they have a small petting zoo of farm animals. In the summer they sell homemade ice cream. I doubt if anyone makes a living producing maple syrup alone.

Basically, the sugar house is where they boil the sap they have tapped from maple trees, and boil it, and boil it (hence the steam) . . . until it turns into maple syrup. The evaporators are often (but not always) powered by a wood fire, so there is smoke coming out of the chimney as well as steam. I have now learned to tell if our local sugar houses are boiling or not by looking to see if there is smoke as well as steam. Most people just look for the steam, but sometimes the sugar house will run out of sap if the temperatures are not right for the sap to run well, and then the touristy places will just boil water so it looks as though they are boiling sap. Part of the pleasure for me is walking into the evaporator room and being able to smell the syrup in the air, so I am always disappointed if they are just boiling water!



On my first visit to a sugar house, I really didn't know what to expect and was really surprised to find that they were serving small cups of warm maple syrup right from the evaporator!



I had had syrup on pancakes before, and just didn't find the idea of drinking that sticky stuff terribly appealing. I failed to factor in a couple of things though:

• Firstly, I don't think I had ever actually had REAL maple syrup before. It is NOT the same as the maple syrup flavoured brown sticky stuff that many places serve with pancakes. Most brands of 'pancake syrup' contain precisely 0% maple syrup. Some might contain as much as 2%! You'll know if it's the real thing though - it will (of course) say so on the bottle, and the price will make you wonder whether it's worth it. If you're still wondering, don't. Just buy it! It is worth it!
  
• Secondly, the stuff they were serving was warm and runny, not thick and sticky as I had imagined it would be. Fortunately my friend persuaded me to try it - MMMM, was it good!!!!! Somehow, it was slightly buttery and definitely moreish. We circled the evaporator a couple of times and persuaded my friend's DH to take a couple of cups of syrup that he didn't really want so we could have more! This weekend I set a good example to the kids and we only had one sample each.
  

I have learned a lot about maple syrup since then. There are different grades of syrup. The so-called 'best' syrup is quite light in color and has the lightest flavor. Sometimes I prefer the darker, stronger flavored syrups. They happen to be slightly cheaper too. If you see 'cheap' maple syrup at a warehouse store like BJs or Costco, check the quality - it's probably a darker syrup than you would see at the supermarket. Well, either that, or it's not 100% maple syrup. (See above.)

The native Americans were tapping maple trees and making syrup before the Europeans got here. Their methods were much more intensive though. Rather than boiling the sap, the native Americans dropped hot rocks into the sap to get rid of some of the water! Given that it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup, I would guess it either took them a really long time, or what they ended up with was very different from today's maple syrup.



After the Europeans learned the technique from the native Americans, they switched to using wooden buckets.



Later they switched to metal buckets and taps as the wooden ones tended to leak. (The buckets usually have lids on them to keep debris out, but the lid had blown off the one in the photo below.)



The metal buckets are obviously very labor-intensive to empty, so there is now a more modern way of collecting sap from the trees. In an area where there are lots of trees, there are often trees that look as though they're hooked up to life-support with a series of tubes coming out of them. The tubing runs from one tree to the next, carrying the sap downhill to a collection tank, often situated next to the road.



The farmer then pumps the sap from the collection tanks into a larger container on the back of his truck to get it back to the sugar house. The buckets still feature prominently near many sugar houses though as a form of advertising, and on smaller properties where it's not worth running the tubing. Some people who have a bunch of maple trees on their property will have a farmer tap them, and in return they get a portion of the syrup that is generated from the sap from their trees. That would be cool - to have enough maple trees of our own that we could have someone make syrup for us!



Making maple syrup is not something you want to try at home. People I know who have tried it had to redecorate afterwards. By definition, it requires the production of large quantities of steam, and turning your house into a sauna when it was not designed to be one is really Not A Good Thing! (Note the large vents in the roofs of the sugar houses - they are there for a practical reason!)

The photos are all links to Flickr, where they are posted with more comments.

On the wrong continent again

Once again, a blogthings survey result says I'm living on the wrong continent.

You Belong in London

A little old fashioned, and a little modern. A little traditional, and a little bit punk rock. A unique soul like you needs a city that offers everything. No wonder you and London will get along so well.

What City Do You Belong In?

Coming soon

Well, next weekend sometime anyway: an explanation of what a sugar house is, and more about maple syrup than you probably ever wanted to know.

Spring - season of rising steam

The only flowers in bloom around here are the cut daffodils on my kitchen table that were imported from Ireland, but nonetheless it is feeling like spring at last. I see sap buckets on maple trees, and steam rising from sugar houses on my commute to work, and DS and I had breakfast at a sugar house this morning. I'm thinking we may do it again next weekend - hoping DD will have learned from her experience this morning and will get herself ready on time to come with us! (There's no point in turning up at a sugar house too late, as you just end up having to wait forever for a table.) DS requested a trip to a different sugar house as there is one that has a small collection of farm animals that the kids can visit. I think the pancakes at this morning's location were bigger though!





More signs of spring: The potholes are still getting bigger, and the DPW is finally getting started on roadwork projects that were abandoned for the winter (but not, of course, the potholes.) The kids played outside in glorious sunshine this afternoon, even riding their bikes for a while. Admittedly, after an hour they were ready to come in, but we got outside and away from the television! The clocks changed last night, and this afternoon I finally got all the paperwork ready for the accountant to do our taxes. Yay! Spring is truly almost here!

Caught short?

It's been a long time since I was a newcomer in the US, but I vaguely remember a time when I felt awkward going into an establishment where I had no intention of buying anything simply in search of the toilets. In the UK, the toilets are only for the use of the customers. With the demise of the public convenience, this is becoming a problem which some local authorities are well aware of as people (mostly men I am sure) choose to urinate in the street. Westminster City Council estimates that thousands of gallons of urine a year are peed onto its streets and alleyways! Apparently, in Twickenham places like KFC are being offered 600 quid a year to put a sign in their window announcing that their toilets are open to non-customers, and last November, Westminster City Council launched the "SatLav" mobile phone service which alerts people to the nearest public toilets. Texting the word "toilet" to the number 80097 prompts a quick-response text with details of the nearest facilities and their opening times. (This is telling of another cultural difference - cell phone users in the UK are far more likely to use their phones for texting than American cell phone users. )

So what kind of places would you go into to find the toilets, with no intention of buying anything? A fast-food restaurant? A pub? A restaurant? Would you go into a city building - city hall?

Pass at own risk!

Since the weekend, I've come to the conclusion it's not really the snow I dislike so much about winter. When it snows, I simply stay home until the storm is over and the roads have been ploughed. What I really don't like is the ice, and the HUGE potholes that form in the roads. We have signs on the main road that we have to drive along to get to our house that say "Potholes ahead. Proceed at own risk." These are not temporary signs. They have been there for, as far as I know, at least the last eleven years - since we bought a house in this town! You'd think that at some point in eleven years they could have fixed the potholes, but no! They do some temporary patching, but they know it's not going to last so they don't take the signs down.

Currently there are some sections of road where it is absolutely impossible to avoid the potholes because they spread across the entire width of the road. (Not one pothole that wide, but a series of them arranged in such a way that it is impossible to avoid them.) Some are very wide and only an inch or two deep at this point, but others are already ten or twelve inches deep! This despite the fact that they've already done one round of patching this winter. They haven't done anything recently though, as patching a twelve inch deep hole that's full of slush doesn't work. Because of the amount of water on the roads from the melting snow, it is difficult to tell how deep most of the potholes are, so you have to assume the worst as you're driving - that they will swallow your tires and cause serious damage to your vehicle. When the water freezes, it evens out the road a little - but, of course, it also makes the potholes bigger in the long run!

In the town's defense, they have plans to widen the road and that will of course involve resurfacing the whole thing, so it seems like a waste to repair the potholes too thoroughly. The only thing is, the plan to widen the road has been in place for over eleven years (i.e. since BEFORE we bought our house!) This week there have finally been surveyors out at this end of the road, close to the line with the next town, so it looks as though the work will actually begin this year. They've even put up signs on the side roads leading to the main road:

(Photo taken from a side road, looking towards the main road, which runs left-right across the photo.)
All the trees on the other side of the main road within 6 feet of the road have orange marks on them (not just the few you can see in the photo.) This is the first stage of the road widening - all those trees will be felled. With luck, this will bring more sunlight in to the end of our road. Currently there is a layer of ice across the end of the road - just visible in the photo, but not in all its glory. It is several inches thick, and there are ruts in in it several inches deep. Without anti-lock brakes, or driving EXTREMELY slowly (as in barely moving), stopping at the end of the road is next to impossible right now.

When the weather improves* and they do eventually get started, there is no way we will be able to get anywhere once the work starts without having to navigate the roadworks. Sadly, even the thaw I'm looking forward to will bring no relief in terms of driving around here!

*Apparently no time soon, as there's 4 to 8 inches of snow forecast for Friday night!