Spare Change Challenge

Not quite sure how they came up with the dollar amount as I thought I gave 'good ' answers to their questions except for the question about comparison shopping for insurance, but Quicken reckons I waste about $6/day:



Quicken Spare Change Challenge

A first

I voted all of once in the United Kingdom before I left. Then for many years I couldn't vote in the USA, and although technically I had (still have?) the right to vote in the UK it was not practical for a variety of reasons. Since becoming a US citizen, I have voted in every major election and probably only missed one local election.

I don't think I have ever given money to a political campaign before, so tonight was a first. We had just finished dinner when two very polite young gentlemen came to the house soliciting donations for their political party. One kindly entertained the children by juggling while I went to find my purse. (It was a small donation, made in cash, not with a credit card - a gesture, that's all, but a meaningful one for me.) DH agreed that if a little of our money could help towards the result we'd like to see, it was worth it even though it's not tax deductible.

Camping with a tent (Camping part four)

Despite our success camping without a tent, we decided this year that we would buy a new tent. A significant motivating factor was the fact that we were planning to visit a particular campsite that does not have any lean-tos. DH has a couple of very small tents, but for family camping they are just too small. (I snuck one of them into the car last year, but much to my surprise we didn't end up using it.)

I think the new tent is probably similar in size to the one we used in Europe when I was growing up. As DH and I put it up for the first time in our backyard, he kept muttering to himself about how huge it is. The advertising blurb claims that it sleeps 10. Hmm - not if you use it the way we planned to, it doesn't. It sleeps 10 with no room for anything else. We planned on using half the tent as a sleeping area, and the other half with a table and chairs and a kitchen setup would be more like a screenhouse.

We tried out the lilos (air mattresses) in the tent the first time we put it up. Two singles and a double fill one half of the tent. So much for there being room for 10 people! The lilos were wider than I remember the ones we had when I was growing up though.



In the end, the children slept in one half of the tent and DH and I slept in the other. We did set up a table in the tent the first night we were away as we ate dinner rather late and the mosquitoes were ferocious, but the rest of the time we used the wooden picnic table provided at the campsite. Even a tarp over the table couldn't keep it dry at night though. The dew was amazing! The stove was on the picnic table, and the other kitchen stuff was set up just beyond it (out of sight in this photo) on a table we'd brought with us.



DH is an Eagle Scout, which is a good thing. As we put the tent up the first night we managed to break one of the poles. He, of course, was prepared for such an eventuality with a roll of fiberglass-reinforced packing tape. We discovered when it rained on Day Three that perhaps we really did get what we paid for with such a cheap tent. Luckily, the bags of clothes absorbed most of the rain that got in through the leaky seams. The Eagle Scout was prepared for this too with a bottle of seam sealer. We don't know whether it did the trick or not though as it only rained the once . . . We will have to put the tent up in the backyard before we go camping again and spray it with the garden hose. Personally, I think the fact that the tent didn't look entirely taut had something to do with the leaks too.

I thought the liberal provision of trash cans implied no worries about wild critters on the campsite, only to be told after a few days that there was a momma and baby bear who regularly wandered through looking for food! At that point I realized that the dog I'd been looking for (and failing to find) that was shedding clumps of brown fur was, in fact, a bear. Fortunately, I never found it. Nor did she find us, or our food.

This was the site on (by far) the busiest night we were there:



It was a very peaceful place. Quite a contrast to Queechee, where we were serenaded by loud stereos from the surrounding campers and woken in the middle of the night by drunken yahoos. Here everyone was asleep early, and we woke to the sound of loons, seagulls, and lobster boats. I'm looking forward to going back next year!

Search engine stats

I was a little surprised looking at the stats for this blog tonight to find that almost a quarter of the people who got here via a search engine had been looking for information about Smarties and or M&Ms! I wrote that post 20 months ago! All those readers and no one has sent me any English Smarties yet to test my theory that the last tube I had was stale :-( Even more surprising is that it is not the page that has received the most hits. Despite 'mad cows' not seeming to show up as an often searched-for term, that page is the most often viewed after my home page!

Gurning

Canoez asked about gurning:


HRH isn't very good at it apparently ;-)

Ferretting around

From the November 1992 Harper's:

Mr. Reg Mellor, the "king of the ferret-leggers," paced across his tiny Yorkshire miner's cottage as he explained the rules of the English sport that he has come to dominate rather late in life. "Ay, lad," said the seventy-two-year-old champion, "no jockstraps allowed. No underpants-- nothin` whatsoever. And it's no good with tight trousers, mind ye. Little bah-stards have to be able to move around inside there from ankle to ankle."

Basically, ferret-legging involves the tying of a competitor's trousers at the ankles and the insertion into those trousers of a couple of peculiarly vicious fur-coated, foot-long carnivores called ferrets. The brave contestant's belt is then pulled tight, and he proceeds to stand there in front of the judges as long as he can, while animals with claws like hypodermic needles and teeth like number 16 carpet tacks try their damnedest to get out.

From a dark and obscure past, the sport has made an astonishing comeback in recent years. When I first heard about ferret-legging, in 1972, the world record stood at forty painful seconds of "keepin' 'em down," as they say in ferret-legging circles. A few years later the dreaded one-minute mark was finally surpassed. The current record-- implausible as it may seem--now stands at an awesome five hours and twenty-six minutes, a mark reached last year by the gaudily tattooed little Yorkshireman with the waxed military mustache who now stood two feet away from me explaining the technicalities of this burgeoning sport.

"The ferrets must have a full mouth o' teeth," Reg Mellor said as he fiddled with his belt., "No filing of the teeth; no clipping. No dope for you or the ferrets. You must be sober, and the ferrets must be hungry-- though any ferret'll eat yer eyes out even if he isn't hungry. So then, lad. Any more questions 'fore I poot a few down for ye?"

"Yes, Reg."

"Ay, whoot then?"

"Well, Reg," I said. "I think people in America will want to know. Well -- since you don't wear any protection -- and, well, I've heard a ferret can bite your thumb off. Do they ever -- you know?"

Reg's stiff mustache arched toward the ceiling under a sly grin. "You really want to know what they get up to down there, eh?" Reg said, looking for all the world like some workingman's Long John Silver. "Well, take a good look." Then Reg Mellor let his trousers fall around his ankles.

[ . . .]

Loyal to nothing that lives, the ferret has only one characteristic that might be deemed positive -- a tenacious, single-minded belief in finishing whatever it starts. That usually entails biting off whatever it bites.

[ . . .]

Reg Mellor, a man who has been more intimate with ferrets than many men have been with their wives, calls ferrets "cannibals, things that live only to kill, that'll eat your eyes out to get at your brain" at their worst and "untrustworthy" at their very best.

Reg says he observed with wonder the growing popularity of ferret-legging throughout the '70s. He had been hunting with ferrets in the verdant moors and dales outside of Barnsley for much of a century. Since a cold and wet ferret exterminates with a little less enthusiasm than a dry one, Reg used to keep his ferrets in his pants for hours when he hunted in the rain -- and it always rained where he hunted.

"The world record was sixty seconds. Sixty seconds! I can stick a ferret up me ass for longer than that."

As DH said after reading this: "Ow, ow, ow!" The ferrets' tenacity does explain why Danny wished he'd brought his ferrets on our field trip when we found the rabbit warren. I'm trying to think of any strange American 'sports' that are as weird as this, but can't right now.

Wordless Wednesday

The value of the peerage

I suppose a penguin is no weirder as a military mascot than a goat, but I think it says a lot about the value of the peerage when a penguin (albeit one who's a military mascot) can be knighted! What kind of honor would it be to receive a knighthood, when you know that animals have been made peers of the realm too? Admittedly, despite living in Scotland all his life, the penguin is not a British peer but a Norwegian one.

A citation from King Harald the Fifth of Norway was read out, which described Nils as a penguin "in every way qualified to receive the honour and dignity of knighthood".

AP photo by David Cheskin

Baby bunnies

Of course, where there are rabbits, there are baby rabbits! Just why the mother rabbit thought right next to my children's playstructure would be a safe spot for her babies, I don't know, but there they are in a very shallow hole covered in grass cuttings.

I had wondered about why the rabbits around here don't seem to have a rabbit warren, and the answer is that they are not that kind of rabbit as they are 'cottontails'. Wikipedia says:

Many rabbits dig burrows, but cottontails and hispid hares do not. The European rabbit constructs the most extensive burrow systems, called warrens. Nonburrowing rabbits make surface nests called forms, generally under dense protective cover.

I remember seeing an enormous rabbit warren on a hillside in the Yorkshire Dales. I was chaperoning a school field trip. One of the boys was very excited when he saw the warren and shouted, "Oooh, miss! I wish I'd brought me ferrets - we could'a had rabbit for dinner!"

Quechee (Camping part three)

After last year's successful camping trip, we decided to return to Vermont for another long weekend. This time we stayed at Quechee State Park.

It was, of course, a very different experience. The weather was significantly warmer than last year, which was nice. No one woke in the early hours desperate for a pee because their bladder was so cold. However, it was also significantly wetter. Actually last year, we had no rain at all. This year we had lots.

Although we have recently purchased a family sized tent, (more about that in another post later this month,) we decided not to take it with us because we would once again be staying in a lean-to. The State Park listed the lean-to we booked as a 'prime' lean-to. In my opinion, there were no 'prime' lean-tos at Quechee, but perhaps that's just because my prior experience with lean-tos is limited. The one at Allis was great. This one was adequate. We knew it was not going to have the stunning view the last site had, so that was not a surprise. It had been repainted inside much less recently than the one at Allis, so it looked dirtier.



For some reason, it had far fewer of the handy nails for hanging and or tying things to than last year's lean-to had. The site it was on was certainly not big enough for our tent (had we brought it) even though the description said it would be. It also lacked the privacy we had last year - the road through the campsite was right opposite us. This made lowering the tarp at night a necessity, not simply an option, for privacy reasons.

This made for a dilemma as we wanted to leave the tarp up to keep the picnic table dry overnight. In the end we decided to pull the table in as close to the lean to as we could so it was at least partly under the overhang, and then drop the tarp. That way we kept one bench dry and we put a second tarp on the other one in the morning when we sat down for breakfast.



The campground itself was much busier than Allis - not surprisingly as it is much closer to tourist attractions. One of them - Quechee Gorge was only a short walk from the campground itself.



The Friday and Saturday nights were therefore quite noisy simply because of the number or people there. (We were still much better spaced out on the site than we would have been on a European campsite though!) There was one rowdy group who arrived late and didn't observe quiet hours on Friday night, and after someone else yelled at them to shut up there was a small round of applause from the others camping near them. On Saturday night I was woken by a woman yelling very loudly and angrily at someone about how there was no way he was going to Get Lucky with her that night. (She didn't use quite that phrase!) On Sunday the camp emptied out and it was much quieter.

We brought a different stove this year, one that I felt more comfortable using as it was more like the one we had when we went camping when I was a kid. It doesn't have a grill ('broiler') like the one I remember from childhood camping trips, but for this year DH bought a gadget that allowed us to make toast/grill bread.



We also had lilos (air mattresses) this year instead of thermarest pads to sleep on. Although they wouldn't be any good for cold weather camping, they are very nice in summer temperatures. Both the kids and I preferred them to the thermarests.

Changes to make for the next trip include me remembering to pack fleece sweaters instead of cotton sweatshirts as they will dry much more quickly if they get wet, and having DH drive so I can do the mapreading instead of him! (Is it just me, or does it not make sense to look at the map well before one gets to the crucial intersection?!)

No ice cream here

And why would one expect ice cream at a winery? Well, the ice cream store is right next to this door, and the door leads to the winery which is actually upstairs. Obviously, they have had many people head into the winery thinking that they were going into the ice cream store.

Allis without a tent (Camping part two)

Last summer we decided that we would take a family camping vacation. I had been camping with DH before - with a tent, but without access to facilities like toilets. Not a particularly fun experience, mostly because answering the call of nature in the woods inevitably meant mosquito bites in unmentionable areas So you can perhaps understand why I was doubtful about taking a family camping vacation, especially when DH said we would rent a 'lean-to', and that we would not need a tent. I had no idea what a 'lean-to' was but it sounded primitive and not particularly fun.

We stayed at Allis State Park in Vermont. Turning off the main road (relative term) to get to it, you get the distinct impression that, despite the signpost, you must have made a wrong turn because you drive through what is very clearly a farmyard. Allis is at the top of a mountain, at the end of a dirt road. The park is almost 500 acres of land and the campsite is a very small portion of it. There are only 26 campsites altogether, so if the camp was full there might be as many as 100 people there. There weren't. I think there were two or three other families there the whole time we were there. One night we were the only guests. Given the size of the bathroom facilities, I was very glad there weren't more people there. In the women's room there were two toilets, two sinks (with a sign above reminding people NOT to wash dishes in them), and one coin-operated shower. No dish-washing or clothes-washing sinks, as at the campsites in France!

As it turned out, I was quite impressed by the lean-to and ended up not needing the tent that I had secretly packed in the car. A lean-to is a far more solid structure than its name implies. It's like a very large, extremely solidly constructed, garden shed that is open on one side. The site we rented also included a large wooden picnic table and benches, and a fire-pit.


There was also a beautiful view, included at no extra charge.




We set up a tarpaulin as a canopy over the picnic table which we had moved right in front of the lean-to. At night we dropped the tarpaulin down to add a slight degree of privacy. The front of our lean-to faced away from the rest of the campsite though, so even if it had been fuller, there was plenty of privacy even without the tarp. (The grassy area in the photo below was all part of 'our' site, and the rocks in the photo above were behind me in this one.) Previous visitors over the years had banged nails into the structure at convenient spots and we used those. We strung a rope across the front of the lean-to and used that to hang towels on so they could dry.



The weather was rather cool, especially being at the top of a mountain, so it was quite chilly at night. It did mean there were no bugs though, hence no need at all for the tent I had packed.

Despite the name of the location - Bear Mountain - we saw no bears, or evidence of them. We were awakened every morning, however, by the squirrels trying to get into our cooler and the kitchen box. Vermin! We had to clean their pee and poop off the picnic table before we could have breakfast! (Never had that problem in France, where the table was always inside the tent all night. Occasionally in France we had the kitchen set up outside, but we didn't leave food out there, so no problems with animals trying to eat it.)

Every evening before we went to bed at Allis, we made a ritual walk to the dumpsters to throw all our trash out. DH taught us that it was a good idea to kick the side of the dumpster before throwing anything into it - he said it was better than surprising a critter like a raccoon who would then not be very friendly!

So despite my reservations about going camping without a tent with the man who likes camping in the snow, I enjoyed it and (more importantly) the kids did too. DH may camp without a tent but it's not the primitive camping I imagined it would be. (You still won't catch me going camping in New England in January though, with or without a tent!)

Happy birthday to me!

DH gave me a very thoughtful birthday present tonight - two Lexan wine glasses to take camping with us! The stem detaches to make it easier to pack them, and they should last us many years as they are supposedly "nearly indestructible".

Note to self: remember the corkscrew when packing!

The nature of fear

Is this a scary picture?

Believe it or not, for a long time as a child, I was scared of daffodils!


DD sat and watched two episodes of Dr Who with me last night . I remember watching Dr Who as a child and being terrified by it. She watched cybermen, Daleks and disappearing children and loved it. On the other hand, every time the ads came on for the next show - Robin Hood - she put her hands over her eyes and refused to watch. Apparently men in tights with archery equipment are much scarier than aliens.


It makes sense though. The thing I was most frightened by in Dr Who was the daffodils. There were what were probably aliens looking like rotund, jolly men selling daffodils. When people got the daffodils home and went to sniff them, the daffodils sprayed plastic on their face. It stopped them from breathing and they died. I was terrified of daffodils for years afterwards. The aliens, the Daleks, the cybermen, were clearly not real, and therefore not scary. The daffodils and the men in tights with bows and arrows are real, and therefore much more threatening.

Are Time Lords British?

The article Are Time Lords British? on the BBC site today is more about accents than the question of whether Time Lords are really British.

Accents clearly matter to the way we see people because we think they tell us something about their upbringing and influences. Geographical accident of birth seems less influential than the values and social background we interpret from the way they speak.

The author is surprised that John Barrowman's American accent disappears when he is talking to his parents, to be replaced by the Glaswegian accent of his childhood. DH wouldn't be at all surprised by that as he's often heard my accent change. The author comments:

We all do it a bit, I suspect. Chameleon-like, we change our tone slightly to fit in with our surroundings.

Of course, if your British accent is changing to another British accent and you're still in the UK, it's not particularly noticeable. Change your accent to a 'foreign' accent, and it stands out like a sore thumb.

as Barrowman's voice changed to broad Glaswegian, I couldn't help myself seeing the actor in a different way. Even though he describes himself quite correctly as a British actor, his Illinois intonation is perplexing. Despite the illogicality of the argument, something inside me suggests he can't be properly "British" with a voice like that.

By that standard, despite their British passports, I doubt anyone in the UK will ever consider my children 'properly' British. I don't think I am anymore either . . .


POSTSCRIPT
Commenter Emjay mentioned Jeremy Clarkson's article from today's Sunday Times on exactly this topic of accents.

According to the scholars, you can zigzag across America for a year and encounter only four different accents (I find that a bit hard to believe, but whatever). In Britain you can drive for just one day and each time you stop for petrol, the cashier will sound different. It’s Punjabi in the morning, Hindi at lunchtime and Tamil in the evening.

He's far more entertaining than I am on the subject!

. . . when the world finally realises French, German and, yes, even Mandarin Chinese have no place in a modern English-speaking world, we can continue to have our national, and indeed regional, differences highlighted every time we open our mouths to order a McDonald’s.

Camping (part one)

When I was growing up, we regularly went camping on our summer holidays. I'm sure my parents would have quite liked to stay in hotels, but with three children and long summer holidays because they were both teachers, camping was the affordable option. It allowed us to spend 5 weeks at a time in continental Europe. Most summers we spent the whole five weeks in France. One summer we started out in the Netherlands, traveled across Europe to northern Italy, and back to Belgium.

DH (an avid camper and Eagle Scout) had a hard time understanding at first when I tried to explain about the camping we did in Europe. He's the kind of guy who goes camping when there's several feet of snow on the ground and WITHOUT a tent just for the fun of it!

My descriptions of our camping trips seemed to leave him confused. A tent with a bedroom, a kitchen inside it and room for a table?

1 Bedroom 2 Kitchen Area 3 Bedroom 4 Bedroom 5 Living Area

Campsites with hot showers? Campsites where fresh bread was delivered every morning? Camping in vineyards or the grounds of a château? Evening meals that took several hours to prepare and just as long to eat?

We had a large frame tent, with an inner tent that was the bedroom area. The outer tent area had room for a stove, a table and stools, and storage for things that didn't fit in the inner tent. There were large windows with curtains, and the entire front of the tent could be opened up in the daytime. It was mostly very civilized, especially when we went camping with our friends.

Their dad was a professional chef. During the day as we were sight-seeing, we would check out the menus posted outside the restaurants and he would tell us which dishes he could prepare on the 4 gas burners and two grills ('broilers') we had between us. Then we'd go food shopping. After a cup of tea and perhaps a slice of fruit cake on our return to the campsite in the late afternoon, he would start work preparing dinner. He cooked most of the evening meals on condition that we were his commis-chefs doing any prep-work he asked us to and he NEVER did any dishes. I remember many an evening staggering off to the toilet block to do the dishes long after the lights on the campsite were out, relying on the moonlight to find our way there and back. Over the course of a five week trip we would eventually break several of the real wine glasses we had brought with us and (horror of horrors) resort to drinking wine out of plastic 'glasses'. (Looking at the few photos I have and realizing that sometimes we bought wine in plastic bottles, I don't think drinking such cheap plonk out of plastic could have been particularly detrimental!) Eventually we discovered Arcoroc tumblers at a French hypermarket. They are made of glass, but they seem to bounce most of the time when they hit the ground! I think eventually we graduated to a slightly better class of vin de table too.

It was not exactly 'camping sauvage', we weren't roughing it, but it wasn't the lap of luxury either. We didn't have a fridge, as the rental tents in France do nowadays. Back then, I don't remember a single site that we stayed at ever having a washing machine and dryer, although I do remember one where there was an iron you could use. There were usually several sets of sinks though - shallow sinks for washing dishes, very deep sinks with built-in washboards for washing clothes, and sinks for washing people. The last were usually indoors, the others outdoors. Depending on the location, there was sometimes a sink designated for gutting fish.

We often stayed at sites where hot water cost extra. In that case, we would heat water on the stove for doing dishes. There was one site in the Netherlands where there was no hot water at all, not even for showers. We stayed there for several days, and I vividly remember the searing headache I got when I finally gave in and washed my hair in the seemingly ice-cold water.

Thinking of 'bathrooms' as Americans call them, many campsites had the 'squat' ('Turkish') toilets. They should have been really easy to keep clean with a high-pressure hose. Unfortunately, we found that when there were lots of people at the site who were unused to them, they were often disgusting. They were usually at their cleanest when we were the only foreigners on the entire campsite.

Although our vacations were not entirely stress-free, certainly not for my parents who did so much of the work and particularly during our teenage years when we were being obnoxious, I have wonderful memories of them. I hope my kids will have good memories of camping with us, but camping with DH is a little different. Remember, he likes camping in the snow with no tent . . .

How not to sound American

The BBC has an article today on how to sound American. Apparently I've been doing it all wrong for the last 23 years. People in the UK seem to be fooled though as they always think I'm American, even when I'm doing my best to sound English again. Americans aren't so sure, as they often ask me if I'm from Australia or New Zealand. I suppose, given my job, I really should work at perfecting my American accent - teaching newcomers to the United States how to speak English! (Of course, I always joke that they had to hire a Brit to teach 'proper' English!)

In the comments on the BBC article, someone noted that English people trying to do an American accent often put on a Southern American accent. For some reason my Dear Daughter often sounds like a Southerner. I have never particularly noticed her sounding English in the first place though - after all, she was born here and has spent relatively little time in the UK. Maybe the Southern accent is her overcompensating in trying to make sure she sounds really American? Is she imitating my accent?

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland   "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
Philadelphia
The South
The West
The Inland North
Boston
The Northeast
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

No, apparently not, so she's probably just imitating some character on TV!

Simon's Cat - TV dinner

DH likes the Simon's Cat videos - he thinks the cat is cute. I like the Simon's Cat videos too. I think they show the true nature of the feline species.

This blog is rated . . .

Back in February, my blog was rated family friendly:


Now apparently my blog is rated PG:

Why? Mostly because of this article about roadworks, but also because I wrote about getting sick from eating at KFC in Taipei! (Offending words: crack and torture.)

I guess that's why ratings systems are only guides. My kids are still terrified by some G rated Disney-type movies, but for some reason find Torchwood fascinating and will hide outside the room while we're watching it so they can watch it too!

Time For Some Campaignin'

I had this blogpost scheduled to post tonight and then found that Gaby of Bloody Brilliant had beaten me to it. I do like JibJab!