New Christmas traditions

We decided not to bother with one of our Christmas traditions this year - I'm sure it's one we share with lots of other people. It's the one where you're up till the small hours of Christmas morning wrapping presents. Not this year. I have a couple of things to wrap for DH tomorrow, and the kids have presents to wrap for each other, but basically we're done :-) Yay! So on Christmas Eve we can pack the kids off to bed and then sit and relax with a glass of wine and snuggle. A much more enjoyable tradition I think. It will not only make Christmas Eve much pleasanter but Christmas morning too as we won't be too exhausted to enjoy being woken up at the crack of dawn . . . A couple of years ago when we were in England for Christmas, Father Christmas told the kids they weren't to wake up until 8 a.m. on Christmas Day and to our amazement they didn't! We even had to wake the littlest one up at about 8:30! That's a tradition I'd like to see continue!

Hannukamas

I picked the Littlest American up from daycare today and as we were leaving we had the following conversation:

- Can we have a menorah?
- Why, sweetie?
- Eli has one.
- Well Eli is Jewish and we're not. [I had just spoken with Eli's dad about the family Hannukah party they're going to tomorrow.]
- No, he's not!
- How do you know that?
- Well, . . . he . .. umm . . . doesn't TALK Jewish! So can we have a menorah?
- Do you know why people have a menorah in their house?
- It's for Hannukah.
- What do you know about Hannukah?
- It lasts 8 days and you light a candle every day, and you get a present every day, but there's one extra candle on the menorah. So we need a menorah for Hannukah!
- You do know Hannukah already started?
- Oh, no and we didn't get our Christmas tree yet!
- Christmas tree?
- Yes. You HAVE to have a Christmas tree for Hannukah!

Hannukahmas indeed, or is it Chrismukkah? Happy Holidays, anyway to one and all!

Quel produit révolutionnaire!

It's even Mac compatible they say. . .

The British version would dispense beer. The American one, Coca-Cola.

Seven passports between the four of us

My kids and I all have dual nationality, US and British. Contrary to what many Americans believe, it is perfectly legal to be American and have another nationality too. The Department of State explains on their website that "U.S. law does not mention dual nationality or require a person to choose one citizenship or another." Legally, we must use our American passports to enter and leave the United States, and our British ones to enter and leave the UK. UntiI I renew it in a year or so, my British passport still has my maiden name on it so, because my plane tickets are always booked in my married name, I am always unsure as to whether I should show my US passport as I leave the UK or not. My last few flights have been connecting ones - via Iceland, the Netherlands, or Belgium, so I have compromised by showing the British passport at Heathrow and then pulling the US one out at the next airport. So far so good, no one has questioned it.

Having spent thousands of dollars getting a 'green card' (which was actually pink), I thought it would be nice if my kids did not have to jump through the same kind of legal hoops if ever they decide to study or work in Europe. Apparently many other people have been thinking the same way. This evening I heard a report on National Public Radio about Israelis who have been applying for European passports - Israelis whose families left Poland for example, now applying for Polish nationality. In many cases it is not with the intent of moving to that country. One young woman who was interviewed explained that she was applying for a foreign passport so that she would not have any visa problems should she decide to work or study in London for a couple of years. A passport from one European country opens the doors to many others nowadays, and in an increasingly global society it makes sense to me to hold all the passports one is entitled to!

I've heard of Irish-Americans applying for Irish passports too. Again, the intent is not necessarily to return to the 'homeland' but to open up European possibilities. Although I have no doubt that many Americans would disapprove, I don't see this as a bad thing. I think it is important to have connections and loyalties, but that it is not only possible but probably a good thing to have a feeling of belonging to two places. I think one of the advantages of the ease of modern travel is that we can see that other places while different are places to which we might want to belong, and that people from other places can be our friends and family.

Unfortunately, while dual nationals (UK-US) such as myself are tolerated on both a personal and official level, I think there is much suspicion of people who come from other cultures/language backgrounds such as the Iraq or Iran or even Mexico. I see amazing prejudice on a regular basis against people who have not been in the US for long enough to learn English well and wonder if people really would have made the same comments about me when I had only been here a few years. I know they would not. For all the comments folks make about my accent and about the fact that I am a 'foreigner' (despite the fact that I've lived in the US now longer than I lived in the UK) the truth is I am accepted far more quickly and better than someone who does not speak English as their first language. For all the gripes I may have about Being American, I am happy to be here - but I am always happy to be back home in the UK too. Having an American passport doesn't make me any less British - but the fact that I have not renounced my British citizenship does not dilute my commitment to my adopted homeland. Unless you've lived in two countries and loved both, I'm not sure that you'll understand.

Christmas already

I suppose it should have been no surprise to see Christmas decorations up outside people's houses last weekend (before Thanksgiving) given that I had seen them in the stores in the middle of October. The Little Americans in our household were heard muttering in disgust yesterday that it was still far too early for Christmas decorations to be up because it's still "a long time" until Christmas. It might seem like a long time to them, but actually doesn't seem that far off to me. The year just seems to accelerate from the middle of October. I barely have time to turn around, take a few breaths, and figure out where the Christmas presents are that I've been buying all year and hiding around the house, when suddenly the day is upon us and, despite all my good intentions, I still end up till the wee hours on Christmas Eve wrapping presents.

We'll get our tree in a couple of weeks. As we always have a real one, (usually from my father-in-law's backyard), we don't like to get it too early. The lights will go up on the outside of our house the same weekend. I realized as I was looking at our electricity bills for the Riot for Austerity that the lights make a significant difference to the electricity bill, so much as I like them, until we finally invest in some LED lights, I will be trying to minimize the number of days we have them on.

Almost American

Stinking Billy asked why the name Almost American. Very easy really - I was born in the UK, lived in Turkey for a couple of years, and France for another year, but moved to the USA in 1985 thinking I would be here for 2 or 3 years and then I'd return to England. Somehow I ended up staying. I have now lived in the USA for longer than I have lived anywhere else. I have an American passport as well as British one (which is perfectly legal, in case you're wondering.) Having not been raised here, there are still some cultural things I just don't get. I still think of England as 'home', (though of course the US is home too.) I am taken aback when people here make comments about my foreignness, or my accent. I don't feel like a foreigner, and forget my accent is different (though I sound very American when I'm in England!) So although I am An American, and am happy to be one, I'm not entirely American and never will be, and I'm happy about that too.

How hard is this to read?

Hmm - I tried this test on some of the blogs that I read and most are apparently written at an elementary school reading level, with a few at the junior high level. I did finally find one though that the test said is written at the 'Genius' level and one at the University level. Perhaps that explains why I haven't read either of them in several weeks - I'm too lazy to expend that much reading effort. They both happen to be academic blogs, so the reading level is appropriate. I guess I have to wonder if the writing (reading) level of my blog is appropriate to the subject matter? If I'm not writing something academic, should it be written at an easier reading level? Can I make myself write like that? Would I want to? And as for my reading, 'should' I be reading more sites that are 'harder' to read? (Not that I'm sure how they've determined the readability anyway.)

I'm not going to obsess over it. I'm going to keep reading the blogs I find interesting, and writing what I feel like talking about.

Not so addicted

55%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Clearly from the infrequncy of my posts, I'm not so addicted. Been doing a lot of reading of blogs recently though, but that's not blogging, it's reading. Reading blogs is one of my selfish pleasures - taking a little time out of the day to do something that is just for me - but I find it a little depressing too. I used to think I was a decent writer. I even taught writing when I was working my way through a Master's degree. I knew I wasn't 'A Writer' like some of the other teaching assistants in the Freshman Writing Program who were doing degrees in Creative Writing. I did think I was a good writer though, who could teach the undergraduates in my classes how to write better essays. I suppose I was good at writing academic essays. I scored in the 99th percentile when I had to take the state's literacy test to become a certified teacher. I really am not very talented at creative writing though. Never have been. I see some of the beautiful turns of phrase other bloggers seem to produce so effortlessly, and I despair of ever creating anything worth reading.

The only good pieces of creative writing I did in school were more my mother's writing than mine. No, she didn't actually write them for me, but by the time she was done inspiring me, they really were more hers than mine. Looking back, my mother was the only one who ever took the time to teach me how to write. Real cut-and-paste, with scissors and sellotape! What little I learned about good writing, I certainly didn't learn in school. I specifically remember my English teacher when I was 12 who only read the first and last paragraphs of anything I wrote and always gave me 9 out of 10. I proved he didn't read the middles by writing some outrageous things in the middle of one piece. He corrected an error in the first paragraph (which my mother, also an English teacher, had already told me was NOT an error) and gave me 9/10 as usual.

Stinking Billy was asking about the point of blogging and I really don't know what it is for me. I'm definitely not one of those bloggers who's looking for a book contract! I'm not even sure who I'm blogging for or why. DH blogs for a small, select, by-invitation-only, audience which seems to make sense. I've read some excellent blogs recently from mums with autistic kids - well-written, entertaining, and thought-provoking, that set my issues with the Little Americans in perspective. There is much I can learn from the blogs I read. Maybe if I read enough of them, I'll even learn how to write better! The good thing is that even if I don't, people like Maddy, Jude and Sandy, amongst so many others, will all enrich my life.

What Halloween's about

When I was growing up in the UK, for the couple of weeks before the 5th of November, Guy Fawkes' (or Bonfire) Night", you could be fairly sure if that if there was a knock on the door in the early evening it would be kids dragging a scarecrow-like figure around with them and asking for a "penny for the Guy." Not 'guy' as in 'bloke' or 'man', but Guy Fawkes, the man who is infamous for being one of those who tried to blow up the houses of Parliament in the year 1605. The 'pennies' the kids were asking for were usually to buy fireworks for Bonfire Night. My siblings and I were never allowed to participate in this ritual. My parents bought the fireworks and certainly would not have approved of us begging for money in that way.

Over the years, because of safety concerns retailers have stopped selling individual fireworks and age restrictions have been introduced so that children can no longer buy them. The tradition of asking for money seems therefore to have carried over to the 'new' tradition in the UK of trick-or-treating. I've written here before about how in the 20+ years since I left the UK, Halloween has claimed a place in British culture and I bemoaned the homogenization of cultures. But wait - it seems the British have added their own small twist to the tradition of trick-or-treating. I had heard my mother mention it, but was not sure whether to believe her. Today I read on the BBC site about how

On Halloween in 1986, the House of Lords debated the "recently imported trick-or-treat custom of demanding money on threat of playing a nasty trick, now being used by youths to obtain money from old people and others.
Their lordships saw trick or treating not as a tradition, but as American for begging.

I get the impression that there are many who go out trick-or-treating in the UK prepared to 'trick' - throw eggs at cars or commit other acts of vandalism. I have never seen that happen here in the US. In some communities I've seen 'TP Night' celebrated the night before Halloween, when kids throw large quantities of toilet paper at trees, but I've never seen any really damaging vandalism. This year the kids here were particularly polite. Although some of the kids had pillow cases for their candy, none were particularly greedy, and almost all asked if we were offering them one candy or more than one. Even the older kids, though noisy as they moved from one house to the next, were unfailingly polite and had made an effort to dress up.

On National Public Radio this morning there was a report about how Halloween is the 4th most commercial 'holiday' in the US nowadays (the others being Christmas, the SuperBowl, and New Year!) It seems that one way or another, it's all about the money.

Candy stash

We dug out the plastic pumpkins last night for tonight's trick-or-treating, only to discover that they still contained candy from last year! I think the little ones had been eating their stash whenever they felt like it (i.e. right before meals, how dare they?!) so I had hidden the pumpkins away high on a shelf in the basement, fully intending to dole the candy out in small doses at what I considered to be appropriate times. Apparently there are no appropriate times for children to have candy in this house as, once I put the pumpkins away, I forgot that there was candy in them! (Not at all like me to forget that there's candy in the house though - wonder if I have some kind of memory problem?)

The Halloween candy survived the year well and is still edible. (DH and I snarfed some of it last night on the premise that we had to check if it was OK and we were doing the kids a favor by letting them have the fresh stuff tonight!) On reflection, I'm sure there must also be a bag somewhere that has some of last Easter's treats in it. Cadbury's creme eggs go mouldy over time* so I hope there aren't any of those hiding in the basement - that would be a serious waste :-(

* I know this because I have been known to hide them around the house so that I have a secret supply. Once I forgot I had hidden some in a particular cupboard. When I finally rediscovered them I was sorely disappointed (after my initial excitement) because, although the chocolate was fine, the filling had gone mouldy. Even before they reach that stage, the filling can get rather dry and is not so yummy. Moral - eat your treats sooner rather than later!

Accident-prone

The little people in the house claim to be accident-prone today. This morning they were "accidentally" watching TV. This afternoon the larger one bit the smaller one "By accident!" Huh?

Well, at least the littler one has finally learned to say "By accident" instead of "On accident". Now we just have to work on the definition of 'accidental'!

I may 'accidentally' have the TV on tomorrow evening when today's rugby game is finally shown on a TV channel I can get without having to pay any extra for.

Autumn. Season of mists and . . .

• road repairs
  Why one of the towns I commute through leaves their road repairs until the fall, I do not know, but it seems to be a regular thing. Last year they resurfaced a long section of road and only just got done before the first snow, and they appear to be doing the same thing this year. On Thursday the road was like an obstacle course as they had started raising all the drain covers to the new road height and it was impossible to drive in any kind of straight line down the road. Because they had surrounded all of them with large orange barrels, at times the only way to avoid the raised structures was to drive on the wrong side of the road. That made me very nervous as I set off on Friday's commute to work as we had some very seasonable, and very thick, fog. Fortunately, they had removed all the orange barrels, so it was actually possible to remain on the correct side of the road.
  
  
• rising smoke
  Usually at this time of year there is smoke rising from many chimneys when I drive to work in the morning as people are starting to heat their houses again with their wood stoves. Not so many this year, yet, as the weather has been unseasonably warm - into the 70's Fahrenheit (over 21 Celsius) several days this week. I miss the wood stove we had at the last house. It was good to know we had an alternative source of heat, especially as we have a friend with acres of woods who's happy to give us wood in exchange for helping him cut, split and stack enough for him and us.
  
  
• household jobs
  like taking all the window screens out and getting the snow blower tuned up for the winter. I took the window screens out last weekend, and then regretted it as the temperatures stayed so warm! Raking leaves used to be the bane of our existence in the fall, but that was at the old house. Although we have trees near the house now, the prevailing winds and the openness of the housing development means that the leaves blow right on into the neighbour's yard and we don't have to rake them :-)
  
  
• bear tracking
  The local university tracks the bears around here, but for some reason we only ever seem to see their bear tracking vehicle (an SUV bristling with radio antennae) in October. The Littlest American was asking this week why we haven't had any bears in our yard this year. I'll have to stop and ask the bear tracker next time I see the van if the bears have changed their wandering habits this year. It may be that we simply haven't seen them, though they do sometimes leave evidence behind. Sometimes they empty out the compost bins, sometimes they leave other 'evidence' behind. I was ready once to accuse a neighbour of letting one of her dogs c**p on our lawn, when I realized that her dogs don't eat birdseed! The bears aren't the daintiest of eaters, so when they go for the bird feeders they usually destroy them - more evidence!
  
  
• color
  Of course New England in the fall is beautiful. This week the colors around here finally started to look good - such gorgeous shades of orange, yellow, and red, that even when they were muted by the morning fog they were still stunning. I need to get some chysanthemums for the front step, though the geraniums are colorful as they are still flowering. We have a couple of little pumpkins that the kids got at school, but need to get a couple of large ones that we can carve for Halloween. It's time to buy another seasonal item too:
  
  
• unicorn bits
  (and other kinds of candy too, as we can't give out unwrapped candy to the trick-or-treaters.)
  
  
• Christmas decorations
  in the stores already, well before Halloween!
  

0.2%

I'm in that tiny percentage of the population that has familial hypercholesterolemia. My cholesterol was over 350 the first time it was tested and it had next to nothing to do with my diet or lifestyle. (That's over 9 using the units they use in Europe, and it's actually low compared to some people in my family!) I was in my 20's and I had to BEG my doctor for the blood test. He was convinced I didn't need it. When we got the results back, he didn't seem to know what to do. Rather than give me any advice, he asked what my brother and sister (3,000 miles away!) had been told to do! I knew what my first move should be - I switched doctors!

Today I watched a kid eat a "lunchable" for her lunch. Holy cow! If I'm going to eat that much fat in one meal, I'd rather it was something yummy like Ben & Jerry's icecream! I save my fat calories for good stuff! I sometimes have to remind myself though when I'm getting all self-righteous about it, that people like me are only 0.2% of the population and most people's bodies can handle fat much better than mine can. I've had to learn that what I like is not always what I should be eating - and that, somewhat like a diabetic, my life may depend on it. The difference is that a diabetic's body reacts quickly to the wrong foods. Mine reacts slowly, but over many years the wrong food will still kill me. Many people don't ever get the chance to learn that, because they don't find out until too late that their cholesterol is high.

People thought I was odd to have my kids' cholesterol tested before they were even teenagers. With an inherited condition like this, the chances were 50/50 that I had passed it on and I figured it was better to know sooner rather than later. Fortunately, we have an excellent pediatrician who agreed that an early test was a good idea and who then sent us to the appropriate expert when indeed one of the children turned out to have high cholesterol. It was a long drive for a short appointment, but well worth it! Now it is being recommended in the UK that all children have their cholesterol tested at age 15 months because so many adults don't even know what their cholesterol is. What a change from 20 years ago when my doctor thought I didn't need to have my cholesterol tested because I wasn't even 30 yet, female and a non-smoker!

Statetris

Can you name all the states of the United States? Do you know where they all are on the map? How about the British counties? How many counties are there, anyway? Try Statetris and see how you do. Here's the British version, and this is the one for the USA. Oh, and there's one for the French regions too.

Even if you don't know where the state/county/region should go, you can guess pretty effectively. I'm better, nonetheless, at placing the American states in the right place than the UK counties :-( Of course it helps that I used to have to teach international students here in the USA some US geography including the names, abbreviations for, and locations of, all the states. I'm not sure that I EVER knew exactly where all the counties are. If someone tells me that they come from say, Suffolk, I nod as though I know exactly where it is, but quite frankly I'm not always 100% sure where it is in relation to where I used to live. It's easier for me to tell where US states are in relation to where I live now. (Of course, given that most of them are to the West and or south, that's cheating really - a bit like saying I know where the counties all are in relation to Cornwall!) Of course, it didn't help that the names and boundaries of the counties changed as I was growing up. North Humberside should still be Yorkshire as far as I'm concerned, and at least they've moved part of the Wirral back into Cheshire where it belongs instead of Merseyside! Oops - checks Wikipedia and discovers that North Humberside returned to the East Riding of Yorkshire some 11 years ago! Apparently I didn't notice the change in address on the occasional correspondance I receive from Hull Uni.! How am I supposed to know where all the counties are if they keep changing them? I wonder when the last time was that they changed the names or borders of any of the US states? Longer ago than 1996, I'm sure.

Riot for austerity

So, the Riot for Austerity challenge is to use one tenth of what the average American uses. A pretty extreme challenge, but they're not dogmatic about it as they say:

"the goal is to reach a 90% reduction (or the best each of us can do) *AND KEEP IT THERE* after 1 year."

I don't think we'll ever get to the goal they've set, but we're doing better than 'average' in some respects. They say that the average American household uses 900 kwh of electricity per month. So far this calendar year, we've averaged about 750 kwh per month, even though we've had the central AC on for the last three months. The next couple of months are usually fairly low ones for our electric bills, so that should bring the average down. We've already replaced almost all the lightbulbs with CF ones. My next move to reduce our electricity use will be to buy another indoor drying rack and get a washing line set up to dry laundry outdoors.

Apparently "the average American generates about 4.5 lbs of garbage PER PERSON, PER DAY." I weighed our trash before going to the dump this weekend. I don't usually weigh the trash bag, but I could tell as I lifted the bag that it was a lighter than average trash week. We had 2.5 pounds of trash TOTAL for the four of us for the week. We also had 7.5 pounds of paper recycling, and about 9.5 pounds of plastic and glass recycling. (I forgot to subtract the weight of the container for the glass and plastic so it was probably a little less than 9.5 pounds.) There was some other glass and plastic that was not included because they were returnable bottles with deposits on them. Any food waste that we could put in the compost bin we did, and I didn't weigh that. I'm not sure if it counts as trash anyway, but I suspect the other recycling does because many communities still don't offer recycling opportunities. So I took less than 20 pounds of stuff to the dump/recycling center - about 16% of the 126 pounds of trash the 'average' family of four creates.

There are many areas of our lives that we could make less wasteful, but it looks as though we're off to an OK start.

What a funny-looking donkey!

Several years ago, dear husband and I were driving to see some friends in northern Vermont when I saw an animal at the side of the road. There was a couple who had gotten out of their car who were quite close to it, taking photos. I said, (to my eternal embarrassment), "What a funny-looking donkey!" No, it was NOT a donkey - it was a female moose.



I was confused because I was not that close to the animal but it was standing fairly near to the people who were photographing it and looked pretty tame. So now it's a family joke that I can't identify animals, and even when we see animals like giraffes someone will say: "Ooh, look at the funny-looking donkey!" I can in fact now identify a moose (and a giraffe) quite easily, but I do occasionally have difficulty with other animals. The first time I saw a coyote, I was sure it was a long-legged fox. I knew that coyotes live around here, (I've even heard them howling at night,) but it still seemed wrong that they should. The word 'coyote' always sounds, well, foreign and exotic to me and evokes an image of animals silhouetted on a ridge at sunset somewhere in the wilderness. Maybe I'm just confusing them with wolves. I'm sure (I think) that we don't have any of those around here!

(BTW, the picture above is NOT the moose I saw that day.)

Bears in the yard

I've been meaning to blog about our bears for a while, but reading this post about a bear in Colorado prompted me to get started on it.

The first time I ever saw a bear near our house it was in the late afternoon when a fairly young bear was wandering down the middle of the road. A car came by and when the driver stopped to get a better look at the bear it climbed a tree in fright. It didn't stay there long though. It seemed to figure out that the car and driver were no immediate threat, and it climbed down again and ran off into the woods.

We've seen them quite a few times since, some occasions more memorable than others. There was the time a bear climbed up on the basement hatchway to get at the bird feeder on the kitchen window. We'd removed all the other bird feeders from the yard a couple of weeks earlier after a bear bent the metal poles they were hanging on through 90 degrees. We foolishly figured that if the bear had left the one on the kitchen window alone, then it wouldn't come that close to the house. Wrong! We should have remembered the story (not apocryphal) about a family in town who had left the kitchen door open and a bear wandered right into the house and started ransacking the cupboards! My husband almost had a heart attack. He was standing at the kitchen sink, when suddenly there was a bear right outside the window only a couple of feet in front of him grabbing at the bird feeder. It pulled the feeder off the window, shook out the contents and ate most of them. (Given that it had earned itself little more than a snack I was surprised the bear left so much seed on the ground.) Once it was done emptying the feeder, it seemed to consider coming up on to the deck before wandering off to the neighbor's yard.

(Yes, although black bears are really not very agressive, I was safely inside the house when I took this picture.) We thought the bear had gone, but a few hours later when my husband went to take something out to the compost bin, he surprised the bear coming out from under the deck! It was making itself altogether too much at home for my liking! We never saw it under the deck again, but who knows?

A couple of times since we've been living here, the kids at one of the local elementary schools have had to stay inside the school at recess because there was a bear wandering the grounds. Many of the bears wear radio collars so that the state department of wildlife can track them. One of the kids, seeing the collar wanted to know who the bear belonged to!

The thing is, these bears are not way out in the countryside. Our house is only a couple of miles from the center of town. I've seen a mother bear and cub scampering down a densely populated residential street even closer to the center of town. Apparently, despite the fact that humans have been taking more and more of the bears' habitat for development every year, the black bear population is still growing - from about 100 in the entire state in the 1970's to somewhere around 3,000 now! An orchard where we used to see them when we first lived here is now a housing development. It's sad to think that, despite that, the bears are doing so well that it is actually legal to hunt them and dozens are killed every year for 'sport'. Although I seem to have terrified my brother-in-law in the UK with the thought that we have bears walking through our yard, they are rarely a real nuisance. (There was that one bear though that got drunk in a local orchard on fermented apples and wouldn't leave for a couple of days, but it wasn't in our yard, so I found that entertaining rather than a nuisance!)

Proms for 7 year-olds?

Last year I was surprised to hear of graduation ceremonies in the UK for 4 year-olds, so I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised to read this about a prom in South Wales for seven-year olds. At least they changed the cultural context a little for the prom in Rhondda by having a tea party before the disco! What really surprised me was that many of the kids arrived in limos! (At least the photo reveals that they had parents in tow!)

Limos were banned as transportation to the prom at one of the private schools I worked at here in the US because it created a very clear distinction between those who could afford them and those who could not. Instead, the students were offered a choice of restaurants to go to and the school arranged the transportation. Not so 'classy', but for many of these kids a limo was nothing special anyway. In the context of the UK state school system where something like 85% of schools have uniforms that were always supposed to promote a degree of equity, it seems downright wrong to have a prom that encourages people to spend large amounts of money on limos and on prom outfits that will never be worn again. What about the kids on free lunches? I know some of the families were very proud that they 'only' spent £20, but it was an outfit that will probably never be worn again (except for dress-up.) A 'leavers' do', or 'moving up' party would have been just as much fun for the kids I'm sure.

Riot for austerity

I'm contemplating joining the 'Riot for Austerity'. Not sure how far I'll get, but the goals are worthy ones . . .

More immigration confusion

My parents recently paid us a visit from the UK. The immigration official at the airport told my father that he had a 'problem' because his fingerprint did not match the fingerprint they took when he entered the US last September. After sending him to another official, they decided that they had simply 'confused' my father's fingerprint with my mother's. He was actually expecting to have more of a problem with the fact that they never took his departure card when he left last year, so technically there is no record of him ever having left the country before returning last month . . . They didn't mention that.

And I was SO hoping that the INS' record-keeping had improved since I last had to deal with them :-(