New England fall weekend

This was Columbus Day weekend in the United States. This is traditionally a weekend when the roads here are swamped with out-of-staters driving slowly 'leaf peeping'. As the weather was just stunningly gorgeous, with not a cloud in the sky and temperatures reaching the 70's we decided the heck with petrol prices - we'd head out in the car in search of fall foliage to photograph too! Although a lot of the colours seemed very muddy, and we didn't think the colour was necessarily at its peak, there were still some beautiful sights.


What's for sale? Not the lone pumpkin, or even the house! It's the dead corn stalks! Yes, really! I don't know what it is about dead cornstalks, but Americans (around here at least) like to decorate their porches and mailboxes with them in the fall.



We drove past the insanity that is Yankee Candle ("the scenter of the Universe"!) beginning in the fall all the way through to the New Year. You'd think they didn't sell candles in New York and New Jersey. Parking two deep on the grass! I don't need candles that badly! Nor do I need to visit their version of "Old World Europe where fairytale dreams come to life and every day is Christmas." Yuck! I suppose for many Americans it's very original and 'cute', but we moved on to some authentic New England scenery just a few miles down the road.


That's a real live (and very noisy) chicken in the front yard of this house!


A hitching post with burning bush.


Small town New England celebrating with a 'Fall Festival'. Games for the kids, lots of things to eat (fried dough with maple cream - yumm!), crafts being sold, music and dance performances (we missed the Morris dancers though - would have liked to see them), and lots of money being generated for local causes like Boy Scouts.


Every now and then a balloon escaped . . .


Despite the general muddiness (to my mind) of the colours, there were still some stunning trees!

Fall

I was hoping when I took this that you'd see the colours on the hillside in the background. I'm happy that the tomatoes and peppers have not succumbed to frost yet. The pot on the right had (dead/dying) nicotiana in it that I pulled out and replaced with the chrysanthemum today. I may try to overwinter the geraniums as they are doing so well but haven't figured out where in the house I'd put them. The pumpkins won't get carved until closer to Halloween - the temperatures are supposed to be back up in the 70's this week and carved pumpkins will rot much faster. Is it fall yet with temperatures like that?

In which I give in to temptation

Friday was relatively exhausting, but certainly not the worst day I've ever had. After I got home with the kids I sat and read my Handwoven magazine while the kids attempted to tidy the playroom. When DH got home he not only prepared dinner for the kids, but also made a cake for us to take to a friend's house for an Oktoberfest celebration on Saturday. So I'm not at all sure why I was feeling so stressed that I felt I needed to go downstairs to the basement and retrieve the 10 pound (yes, that's TEN pound) bar of Ghirardelli chocolate that I have been successfully ignoring for the last four or five years since I received it as a Christmas present. (Ironically, the magazine subscription was from the same relatives who bought me the chocolate!)

Fortunately, it is a solid block of chocolate and it's extremely difficult to break pieces off it! (You know me and chocolate!)


Yes, that's a 12 inch ruler on the chocolate bar!

6 things meme

Karen (aka CrunchieMummy) tagged me to do this meme.

Here are the rules:
1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write 6 random things about yourself.
4. Tag 6 people at the end of your post.
5. Let each person know he/she has been tagged.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

Six rules. Six things about myself.

1. I've worn glasses since the age of 7. I hated them and as soon as I heard about contact lenses decided that I would get some. At age 13 I was the first in my class to get them, which confused the teachers who were supposed to make sure I wore my glasses. They thought I was lying when I said I had contact lenses.

2. I'm terrified of deep water. Swimming pools are OK, but I hate lakes and rivers.

3. I somehow always knew I wouldn't marry a Brit, though I never imagined I'd marry an American. I thought my kids would be bilingual, but I suppose they are in a way.

4. I had a hampster as a child that died after eating a green crayon that my brother fed it. I'm sure the color was significant. Had it not been green, the hampster wouldn't have eaten it. (My brother was a toddler at the time, so I don't blame him!)

5. I've almost never used a PC. I'm very happy using my Macintosh computer.

6. I'm nickel sensitive like my maternal grandmother. This proved to be a problem when I didn't think to tell my Ob/gyn and she used staples instead of stitches when I had my first C-section. You can be sure I let her know the next time around!

Hmm - now I'm supposed to tag 6 people . . . I hate this part of it . . . so if you want to do it, go ahead - let me know and I'll put a link here!

Learn to speak English, why doncha?

As evidenced by my blogroll, I love to read about other people's ex-pat experiences. I have a lot of ex-pat Brits listed here, but that's mostly only because I followed links from one to the next, to the next . . . However, most of the ex-pats I encounter in my 'real' life are not Brits. In fact, most of them do not speak English as their first language. Some speak almost no English at all. I remember being in that situation when I was in Asia - the foreigner who doesn't speak the language. The grownup who is treated as a child. The college-educated adult who is treated like an idiot. It's frustrating, and it's not a situation you can remedy quickly. It takes time (and a lot of effort) to learn a language, and some languages are harder to learn than others. Even when I lived in France and spoke the language well, I was always an outsider.

When I think of what new immigrants with children have to deal with in terms of language - specifically communications from their kids' schools - it makes me really angry when I hear people complaining "Why don't they learn English?" "Why should we have to provide interpreters and translations?" "They should just go home if they don't want to learn English!" These are all legal immigrants, and the United States government did not require a language test of them. They are hard-working members of society and the reality is that many of the parents are so busy working in menial jobs that people born here won't do that they have no time now to take English classes.

I met a teacher last year who has been in the US as long as I have - over 20 years. Originally from Germany, her English is excellent. (In fact, she teaches English to new immigrants.) Yet even she - a fluent English speaker, familiar with the public school system - said she felt discombobulated trying to navigate the system trying to get support for her special needs child. The people who are complaining that parents in our school system should make more effort to learn English clearly have no experience themselves of having to navigate real daily life (not just tourist life) in a second language and culture. I'd love to drop some of those complainers off somewhere like China or Russia for a year and see how they fare! Sadly, the experience would probably do nothing for them except to 'prove' to their blinkered satisfaction that the United States is the best place in the world to live.

Community organizer vs. governor

Seen on another blog:

JESUS WAS A COMMUNITY ORGANIZER;
PONTIUS PILATE WAS A GOVERNOR.

Hmm - but didn't Pontius Pilate have Jesus killed?

That Obma!

Even elementary school children around here are discussing the upcoming presidential election. The children are clearly influenced in their political views by their parents. One 9 year-old of my acquaintance (not one of my own kids!) walked up to me today and announced unprompted: “That Obma [sic] better win the election.”
“Really, why do you want him to win?”
“Cuz when they kill him, then the president won’t be a woman.”
“And why would any one kill him? You know he’ll have lots of body guards?”
“Yeah, but he’s a bl . . . brow . . . umm . . . black man and my dad says people don’t want a black man to be president.”

I wonder who her father would have voted for if Hillary Clinton had been the Democratic candidate for Vice-president?!

Racism is alive and well even in the liberal northeastern United States :-(

Wordless Wednesday

Same Old Email Scam

Yet another email scam asking for money, but this one's gone viral - you may have seen it on other blogs already:

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gramm, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson

Henry Merritt "Hank" Paulson Jr. is the United States Treasury Secretary and member of the International Monetary Fund Board of Governors. He previously served as the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Goldman Sachs.

Chuck E. Cheese

I was very cruel to my husband today. DS had a birthday party to go to and I suggested to DH that he might like to take DS. He knew that the party was at Chuck E. Cheese's, but apparently what that involved was unclear to him so he said yes. I've never been there myself, but I've heard enough about it that it was the last place I wanted to spend my Saturday afternoon!

Several hours after he returned home, and three beers later, he was still shaking his head in amazement.

"An onslaught to the senses."

"No wonder people don't like America if they think that's a typical American experience."

"It was so awful!"

"Hell on earth!"

"Chuck E. Cheese would make a lot more money if they sold alcohol to anesthetize the parents, but they probably couldn't sell it fast enough!"

Apparently the parents of the birthday boy were stunned too. "It wasn't like this 20 years ago!"

DS, on the other hand, had a blast and wants to know if he can have his next birthday party there.



That would be a resounding "NO!" from both parents.

Apparently I now owe DH big time!

Chain letter - forward it if you like

I usually just delete chain emails that have been sent to me and dozens of the sender's closest friends. The one I got today was a little different. If you've read my blog recently you know what my political leanings are, so you won't be surprised by the fact that I thought the suggestion I received via email today seemed like a pretty good idea. Good enough that I thought I'd pass it on. If it's not to your taste, feel free to ignore it. Most importantly though, whether you agree with me or not, whether you follow through on the suggestion in the letter or not, if you have the right to vote on November 4th, DO IT!

Dear Friends:

We may have thought we wanted a woman on a national political ticket, but the joke has really been on us, hasn't it?

Since Palin gave her speech accepting the Republican nomination for the Vice Presidency, Barack Obama's campaign has raised over $10 million dollars. Some of you may already be supporting the Obama campaign financially; others of you may still be recovering from the primaries. None of you, however, can be happy with Palin's selection, especially on her positions on women's issues. So, if you'd like to make your opinion known, may I suggest the following fiendishly brilliant idea?

Make a $5 minimum donation to Planned Parenthood. In Sarah Palin's name. A Planned Parenthood donation is tax deductible.

And here's the good part: when you make a donation to PP in her name, they'll send her a card telling her that the donation has been made in her honor.

Here's the link to the Planned Parenthood website.

You'll need to fill in the address to let PP know where to send the 'in Sarah Palin's honor' card. Use the address for the McCain campaign headquarters:

McCain for President/Sarah Palin
1235 S. Clark Street, 1st Floor
Arlington, VA 22202

Feel free to send this along to all your women friends as well as your men friends and urge them to do the same.

Thanks.

The idea of fund-raising for Planned Parenthood in this way was first suggested in 2001 by an LA Times journalist. Back then it raised over $1,000,000 for Planned Parenthood.

I'm not dumb

I know these online tests of 'intelligence' are really very silly, but I still like it when I do well!



Just wondering though, who on earth would post a score like this on their blog?


Especially when with just a little savvy you can change it to one like this:


And which one was my real score? I'll let you figure that out!

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!

Chocolate for blood

Well, yes, I may indeed have chocolate for blood given my love for chocolate, but I'm talking bribes here . . .

The Red Cross is offering chocolate in exchange for blood donations. No, I don't know how much chocolate they're offering, or even what quality. (It's not that I'm not interested because my blood is mostly chocolate in the first place, but because, irritatingly, they won't take blood from Mad Cows like me!) Would it be worth donating blood if I could just for a couple of ounces of milk chocolate of inferior quality? Yes, of course! Not because any chocolate is better than none, but because it is simply A Good Thing To Do! I do hope this works and brings them lots of new volunteers who become regulars once they realize how easy it is to do!

The photo is courtesy of DH who saw the sign on his way to work and thought of me!

Curved grades

I am grateful that my entire degree result depended on the exams I did at the end of my final year when I 'd finally figured out that being a student was a full-time job and I needed to work at it. Had I been an undergraduate in the United States, my all-important grade-point-average (GPA) would have been so far in the toilet by the end of my second year, I probably would have dropped out. Or maybe not.

An average passing grade in a university class at the time in the UK was between 50 and 60%. When I arrived in the United States and started teaching undergraduate classes here, I frightened my first class by awarding what I thought were OK grades for their first assignment. Then I was told by my department head that my class average should be 80%. I was stunned - I thought 70 was an excellent grade! Many of my students asked me when they got less than 80% if I would 'curve' my grades.

I guess that was pretty common in maths and science classes where sometimes the class average was 40%. Rather than berate the students for not having studied, the teacher would assume that the test had been too hard and adjust the average. I'm not entirely sure how they did that - I think some teachers had a rather more complicated approach than "The average is 60, so I'll add 20 to everyone's score." My students sometimes accused me of being unfair because I didn't 'curve'. Some didn't want to accept my concept of "You get what you get." Once I got used to the inflated grading standards, I found I really didn't have to do that anyway. The average in my classes almost always hovered around 80% with no jiggery-pokery on my part. There would be a few A's, a few D's or F's, but the average would almost always be in the range of 79 to 81 - a B minus. I'm not quite sure how I did that, but it just happened.

My last teaching job (before this one) I didn't have to give grades at all. I did for one project and it was amazing how freaked out the students were. They had no idea whether I was a 'tough' or 'easy' grader or what they had to do to please me. Umm - follow the (four pages of step-by-step) directions! They didn't believe me when I said it was perfectly possible, but extremely unlikely, for everyone to get an A.

Does my butt . . .

DH walked into the room and asked, "Does my butt look flat in these jeans?"

Crack sealing

I had never realized before this week that they do so much of this that they need special signs for it, as opposed to signs that just say "Road work ahead"!

Bunnies

Torn between the delight of watching the wild rabbits in the garden and the annoyance of seeing said wild rabbits eating my plants, I realize I need a new camera with a better telephoto lens!

The Post American World and the Future of Freedom

I have a book on hold at the local library - The Post American World and the Future of Freedom by Fareed Zakaria. I'm not holding my breath, as it appears 27 other people have put the book on hold too! If the author's talk at the Commonwealth Club of California is anything to go by, it will be a very interesting read. He speaks of Americans' lack of awareness of what is going on outside their borders, and of how the balance of economic power has shifted over the past few years. He is extremely articulate and to summarize his talk here would not do him justice. Here's an extract from his book:

Look around. The world's tallest building is in Taipei, and will soon be in Dubai. Its largest publicly traded company is in Beijing. Its biggest refinery is being constructed in India. Its largest passenger airplane is built in Europe. The largest investment fund on the planet is in Abu Dhabi; the biggest movie industry is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Once quintessentially American icons have been usurped by the natives. The largest Ferris wheel is in Singapore. The largest casino is in Macao, which overtook Las Vegas in gambling revenues last year. America no longer dominates even its favorite sport, shopping. The Mall of America in Minnesota once boasted that it was the largest shopping mall in the world. Today it wouldn't make the top ten. In the most recent rankings, only two of the world's ten richest people are American. These lists are arbitrary and a bit silly, but consider that only ten years ago, the United States would have serenely topped almost every one of these categories.

These factoids reflect a seismic shift in power and attitudes. It is one that I sense when I travel around the world. In America, we are still debating the nature and extent of anti-Americanism. One side says that the problem is real and worrying and that we must woo the world back. The other says this is the inevitable price of power and that many of these countries are envious—and vaguely French—so we can safely ignore their griping. But while we argue over why they hate us, "they" have moved on, and are now far more interested in other, more dynamic parts of the globe. The world has shifted from anti-Americanism to post-Americanism.

If the topic is at all interesting to you, you can buy or borrow his book, read an excerpt online or download the free podcast of his talk at the Commonwealth Club here.

Apparently Zakaria has a show on CNN on Sundays and I think I might make the effort to watch it.

A degree of inflation

When I was an undergraduate (back in the early 1980's) a First Class degree was nigh on impossible to get. It was somewhat easier in the sciences or maths, but in a language - forget about it! How did the joke go? Something along the lines of, only truly outstanding students would ever earn over 70%, the professor who wrote the exam might be able to score 80%, but only God could get over 90%. In my department, an average on your finals of 60% or above earned you an upper second class degree, over 70% was a First. If you scored over 70% (or it may have been 80% - I no longer remember) on the final oral exam, it was noted in your degree result that you passed the oral exam "With Distinction."

No one in my department had earned a First in seven years, but we knew that Mike would get one. He was absolutely brilliant! His year-abroad dissertation read more like a Master's thesis. If anyone was going to get a First, Mike would. He didn't. We were given times for our oral exam, and told to report half an hour BEFORE the exam in order to prepare. Mike arrived early, only to find that in fact he had left himself only 15 minutes to prepare. Even he couldn't do himself justice. Although I'm sure his average on the written papers was easily a First, he was not awarded one because he did not pass the oral exam "With Distinction". In talking to the professors after the results were announced, one of them made the comment that it didn't really matter if Mike got a First or not - he was very clearly headed for a doctorate and once he had that no one would ever ask what his undergraduate degree result was.

Sure enough, Mike went on to earn his doctorate, become a published academic, and teach at the university level. Several years ago though, he quit academia. I remember that somewhere amongst his reasons, was the dumbing down of the curriculum, so it did not surprise me to read today:

The number of students achieving a first class degree at UK universities has more than doubled since the mid-1990s.

Among last year's university leavers, 61% achieved a first class or upper second class degree.

An upper second used to mean that your performance was above average! How can 61% of university leavers be above average? Twelve years ago, only 45% of university leavers had an upper second or a first. The sad thing is that this appears to be happening because Universities want students to like them. They think that if they become known for giving good grades, more students will want to go there. I was very happy with my undergraduate education. The fact that I earned an upper second class honours degree with Distinction in the oral exam, does not change my degree of satisfaction with the university. (Yes, on paper I did better than Mike, but I will always be honest about the fact that he was a FAR better student than I was.) Believe it or not, the fact that I was given a Dean's Warning (A Bad Thing!) at the end of both my first and second years, is what makes me happy with the education I received. After the second one I was asked to consider whether I really thought I was 'degree material'. I was not simply allowed to pass because I'd got in to uni. in the first place. It was made extremely clear to me that if I wanted a degree, let alone a decent one, I was going to have to work for it. That was probably the most valuable lesson I learned in my undergraduate years, and is one I have applied to many situations since then. Of course nowadays, no one ever asks me even at a job interview what my degree result was, but I am proud of the degree I earned and I am saddened at the thought that today's students are being denied the chance to earn something of value.