Haunted by Transatlantica

Back in the fall of 1985, when I had only been in the United States a few weeks, I read a copy of Vanity Fair magazine that I'd found in the office I shared with several other grad students. One paragraph in the editorial in that particular magazine, written by Tina Brown, resonated enough with me even then that I photocopied it and kept it. I misplaced the photocopy at one point in one of my moves but I found it again today. Here are the words I wanted to keep:

In fact, once you've lived on both sides of the Atlantic, it's impossible to be content with either. One becomes haunted with the perfect place called Transatlantica, which is somewhere in between. Its population shares England's civility and America's energy, England's irony and America's optimism, England's coziness and America's breadth, England's sense of the past and America's belief in the future. Whichever side you settle, your sensibilities are forevermore on the frequent flier's program.

World citizen

My children have two passports - British and American. DD is quite impressed with that and feels very special because of it. Recently, she made friends with someone who has more passports than her. Her friend has three passports! American and two different European passports. DD is jealous. She now wants a third passport, and has decided that she would like a Chinese one.

The cost of BBC America

Years ago, when the kids were very little, I was trying to cut down on our expenses and I decided that one bill we could easily slash was for the cable TV. I called and canceled all but the most basic of cable service, which brought our bill down to something like $5/month. Years later when we finally decided to go with cable internet access instead of dial-up, the sales rep tried to talk me into a more expensive TV package. I said I really wasn't interested in paying so much more for so many channels I had no interest in watching when the only channels we didn't have that I knew we were interested in watching were the History Channel and BBC America. I was glad I'd mentioned the specific stations I was interested in as the rep immediately informed me that we didn't need to spend much more money to get a package that would include BBC America. The deal she offered was quite reasonable and that's the package we've had ever since.

A couple of years ago we got a message from the cable company that the package we subscribe to was no longer being offered, but we were 'grandfathered' in. In other words, we can keep the package we've got so long as we don't make any changes to it. Unfortunately, they didn't guarantee that they wouldn't make any changes from their end! Last month we got a letter informing us that BBC America would be being moved from the 'Digital Preferred' level of service to 'Digital Starter'. Of course I have no idea what channels are included with which packages so I had to look it up.

The way the packages are listed, it looks as though they are listed in order of expense:

• Limited Basic (that's the super cheap package we had for years - it's still only $7.28/month for 30 channels, though you won't find it listed on the cable company's website of course!)
• Expanded Basic (48 channels)
• Digital Economy (35 channels)
• Digital Starter (64 channels)
• Digital Preferred (90 channels)
• Digital Premium (46 channels - HBO, Starz, Cinema and the like)

So we have Limited Basic+Digital Preferred and I'm thinking having fewer channels doesn't bother me because we mostly just watch PBS and BBC America anyway. Limited Basic+Digital Starter will obviously be cheaper, and we'll still get BBC America. But of course (and I know you're way ahead of me here) - it doesn't work out like that. To get Digital Starter (the only package that includes BBCAmerica) you not only have to get Limited Basic but Expanded Basic too.

On looking closely at the list, I discovered that the Expanded Basic channels are, for the most part, the same ones you get with Digital Starter except they are not digital. So Expanded Basic+Digital Starter is not 48+64, but more like 7+64. To switch from the package we have to the one that has BBC America will mean going from 120 channels (124 of which I  rarely if ever watch) to 101 channels (96 of which I will rarely if ever watch).  I will lose Nat. Geo., BBCWorld, and a couple of other channels I like to watch occasionally, but I'll gain some other channels that  don't currently have that I'm sure will prove entertaining from time to time. So why I am still wittering on about this as though it's a huge issue? It's because the only change that the cable company has made that has even made me think about changing my subscription is to move BBC America to another tier. Had they moved almost any other channel I couldn't have cared less. And if there was no change in cost, or even a savings, I wouldn't be wittering, but there is a change in cost.

My current bill (including internet service) is just over $75/month. I know plenty of people who choose to pay more, but I don't. If I switch packages just to keep BBC America my monthly subscription will change to $120. That's a HUGE percentage increase. Is Graham Norton really worth $45/month?

Merry Christmas

No snow on the ground here, but there were just a few flakes in the air this morning - very pretty. The temperature is perfect for using the 'fridge' in the basement. In the summertime it would be nice to have a real fridge down there, but at this time of year the hatchway stairs work just fine!

Thanksgiving

In the words of one of my friends: 

It's just such a great holiday. It really is. It's four days long, you have enough time for family and friends. There is a huge meal, some drinking, some laughing, time with the kids, time without the kids, football, thoughtfulness, thankfulness, but not too serious. It's just such a great holiday.

Well, no football here, but I agree with the rest of it! 

Toast!

Toast seems to be more popular in the UK than here in the US. I remember Saturday lunches when I was growing up, or any lunches when I was at uni., would often be something on toast. Baked beans on toast. Poached egg on toast. Sardines on toast. Cheese on toast. This song about toast even did quite well in the charts!



My DH turns his nose up at 'something on toast' as a meal, as do the children. It was a nice quick, and cheap lunch and I still enjoy it from time to time - though usually when I'm on my own!

Still, I was never so cheap as to make a toast sandwich - something Mrs Beeton apparently included in her famous cookbook! I'm not quite sure why the Royal Society of Chemistry decided to revive the toast sandwich and tout it as the UK's cheapest meal.  A slice of toast between two slices of bread - never mind if it's cheap, it hardly sounds nutritious, does it? If I'm going to have an unhealthy meal of carbs with my carbs, a chip butty or a crisp sarnie (or maybe even a conny onny sarnie) would be much more to my taste!


(Sheffield United anthem - "You fill up my senses like . . . a greasy chip butty")

Halloween Take 2

I can't imagine Guy Fawkes' night being postponed. The whole point is that it's on the 5th of November. The same with the 4th of July - the whole point is the date. But Halloween - apparently that can easily be rescheduled to a more convenient date.

We had a grand total of 3 trick-or-treaters last Monday after the snow storm. Our neighborhood was dark, but there were no power lines down as where we live they are actually all underground. We thought it might be fun to go trick-or-treating when it was so dark outside! However, it seemed that most people in our neighborhood had fled to places that still had heat and light and trick-or-treating was delayed townwide to November 5th. So here we are ready for Halloween all over again. After all, there is SOME candy left from last week - I haven't eaten it all yet (only the good stuff) and I might as well give the last of it away (as it's all the candies I don't like anyway) ;-)  Note to self: next year only buy candy you DON'T like!!

The Halloween snowmen have all melted, but the pumpkins and other decorations are still looking good. 

Snowstorm shopping

I still haven't figured out why every time there's a big snowstorm, this happens in the supermarket:

We joke about all the people who are going to make French toast because bread, milk and eggs seem to sell well before a storm, but chips and salsa?

Oh, and for Mother Hen, who has never seen a pumpkin covered in snow, here's a snowman with a pumpkin for a head!

Happy snow-olleen!

WOW - they really weren't kidding when they predicted widespread power outages! We got about 12 inches of heavy wet snow. The branches in the first photo aren't usually that low - they were weighed down by the snow. (Everything below the word Trick  would normally not be there!)

Note the tree that's lying down on the left in the photo above - here it is again a few hours later:

We got off pretty lightly. The power was only out for 49 hours - there are thousands of homes that still don't have their power back yet - and the temperature in the house only dipped to 52˚F. We have city water rather than a well, so we did not lose our water too. We have a camping stove so we had hot food and drink. We have a chainsaw, so we did not have to wait for the city to come and remove the trees that had fallen and blocked the end of our road. About the only thing we don't have that would have been nice is smartphones. The reporting on the radio was useless in terms of letting us know what the situation was in the wider world and some internet access would have been nice!

I spent most of Sunday hand sewing DS's Halloween costume that I had been planning on finishing on the sewing machine. Then tonight we found out that trick-or-treating is postponed until next Saturday! In many neighborhoods it would not have been safe to go out trick-or-treating tonight because there are still downed powerlines. Even where there aren't, there are tree branches down all over the place. Most people seem to have cleared their driveways, but not necessarily the sidewalk.

It certainly has been a memorable Halloween!

Happy Snow-tober

Never mind a White Christmas - we're having a White Halloween this year! We're used to snow in the northeastern USA, but not this much this early!

With so many leaves still on the trees, this heavy wet snow is going to bring a lot of trees and therefore power lines down. At least it's the weekend, so we don't have to use a school 'snow day' so early in the year!

Score one for the US medical system

UK expats often have a lot to say about the differences between the National Health Service and the lack of a national health service here in the US. Although there are many criticisms to make of the NHS, at least you know you won't go bankrupt in the UK because you need medical treatment. I'm lucky in that my husband's employers are Europeans and they have made it a priority to make sure their employees have decent health insurance.

I discovered recently that the American system has a small advantage over the NHS, that I have never heard anyone mention before. It is the idea that a patient's medical records belong to the patient and that the patient is entitled to copies of them. I've had a couple of MRIs done recently (actually four) and the staff at the MRI center are quite happy to give me a copy of the MRI CD as soon as the notes regarding the findings have been transcribed - so I can actually know what was found (or not) BEFORE my appointment with my doctor to discuss the results. My sister commented in a recent email to me "in the UK doctors are really secretive about results of tests - they seem to think that a little knowledge can be very dangerous."

I recently asked for a referral to a specialist, and he asked for copies of my records from the other doctors I had already seen, including my opthalmologist, to be faxed or fedexed to him before he would even make an appointment with me. I assumed the other doctors would send the notes directly to the specialist, but in almost every case their office staff told me I could pick the records up myself. One of the doctors I've seen recently said that he always writes his patient notes with the expectation that at some point the patient will see them. One specialist sent me a copy of the report that he sent to my primary care physician/GP without me even asking for it. Another dictated the notes before I left the room "so you'll know what I'm telling your primary care doc. and you have a chance to correct me if I make a mistake."

It was interesting to see what gets included in the reports.There were entertaining comments such as:

"Denies recent illness. Denies sore throat, cough or nasal congestion."
"well developed and nourished; appropriately groomed; in no apparent distress."
"Communicates appropriately for age"  

Then there's all the detail about my health of course, most of it understandable, but I did have to look some words up: apparently I have no diploplia, dysdiadochokinesia, ataxia or dysmetria - and that's a good thing! If it sounds like I've had a lot of doctor's appointments recently, yes, I have and there are more to come. Despite the way it may sound, I do not have a life-threatening condition and am not even feeling ill. I do have an immense gratitude to my husband's employer for not going with a high deductible health insurance plan, and I have a cool new photo I can use for my Facebook profile for Halloween!

Mixed Britannia

I had never heard of this before - British subjects, living in Britain, required to give up their nationality simply because they married a foreigner. Nor did I know that in the 1940s, the children born to white women and black GIs stationed in Britain were described as "war casualties" in the UK and, in America, one congressman called them "the offspring of the scum of the British Isles". There's a series about Britain's mixed-race communities going to be broadcast on BBC2 starting on Thursday 6 October that I'd watch if I could, but iPlayer won't work here in the US :-(  There's a clip from it here and an article from the presenter of the series here.

Britain vs the rest of the world

My DH forwarded this image to me recently. I think he remembered me telling him about  NFAH's comments on the topic!

 

What time is lunch?

I'm trying to remember what time lunch (dinner) was served when I was in school. I'm pretty sure it was 12 noon. My secondary school had 4 different dining rooms, so there were no separate sittings - everyone had the same lunch period/dinner time, though sometimes it did feel as though we spent much of it queuing! I'm pretty sure we had at least an hour for lunch too, maybe a little longer. Some kids went home to eat, and others to the local chippy. When I was in 6th form we persuaded one of the PE teachers to give up some of his lunch break one day a week to open the swimming pool for us. We must have had at least 20 minutes in the pool to make it worthwhile.

School lunch hours over here are much shorter - certainly nowhere near an hour. Both my kids complain that they don't have enough time to eat all their lunch, though I know part of that is because they spend too much time talking! Still, I was shocked to look at DD's schedule today and realize that her lunch hour is only 24 minutes long. Not only that, but she has 'first lunch' - which starts at 10:48 a.m. Not even time for elevenses and she's having lunch?!

They put WHAT in the chocolate chip cookies?

A couple of years ago, I wrote about the local asparagus ice cream.This week I had another interesting culinary experience. Chocolate chip cookies laced with . . . no, nothing illegal, but definitely strange. Take a look at the photo below and see if you can figure out what it is. I'm still trying to think why anyone ever thought this was a good idea. They weren't bad, but I don't think I'd order them again. Looking online, I was surprised to find quite a few recipes for chocolate chip cookies that include this extra ingredient.

Not an English garden

DH just got home from the local Farmers' Market. The kind, sweet, man that he is, he brought me a couple of gifts. Well, they are to share really, but I will still think of them as gifts. The first was a bottle of wine from our local winery, which just this year has got permission to sell at the Farmers' Market. The second was a beautiful plant for the garden.

How pretty!

What's that you say?
It looks like a weed? It's a thistle?
Well, yes, it is a thistle.

DH is hoping that the deer will find it inedible. I'm thinking I may have to change my policy on weeds in the garden. If it grows well and flowers and the deer don't eat it, it's not a weed! I wonder if we can find some purple thistles too?

Righteous mold month

I get more spam comments than real ones at this blog. That's OK - Blogger filters them out very effectively and it takes no time to hit the delete button. Some of them are quite entertaining though because the English is so bad. I'm not sure if they are the result of someone using machine translation or not using a bi-lingual dictionary very well. Either way, they are very funny. They still don't get me to click on the link though!

"Righteous mold month I was stuck in a jammed elevator and boy was I tickled pink to beget my trusty LED flashlight so I didn't bleed for so scared."

Personalized license plates

Personalized license plates are more of a big deal here in the USA than in the UK I think. Years ago, when I was in grad school, I had a Turkish friend who had the license plate "NAME". Everyone thought it was very funny - him included. He had chosen that word for his license plate because that was his wife's name. Yes, her name was Name - pronounced Nah-may.

I sometimes wonder what people are thinking when they choose a vanity plate though. There's one I used to see regularly that reads "AIRHED". I suppose maybe she is, if she chooses to advertise it that way! On the other hand, if this one wasn't already taken, I might actually consider it given that DD says I'm the meanest mom in the world because I asked her to tidy her room:

(Source: Great Vanity License Plates.)

This morning DH saw a personalized plate that you would never see in the UK though. At least I hope not. He wasn't quick enough with his camera to get a photo of it: "SHAG 1"

John and Björn

Advertising seems to be getting more and more subtle. Can you guess what this ad is for?

Memorial Day attire