You Can't Make Old Friends

A wise man once said "You can make new friends, but you can't make old friends"... or something like that. He may not have been that wise, but he certainly made a good point. In March, A&K came to stay with us. One of the things we miss the most being out here is the easy company of long-standing friends. This is underlined quite dramatically when they come and stay. We had a fantastic time, often doing little more than standing around gawping at things... like some of the scenery around Tahoe (where there was still quite a lot of snow on the ground)

Also, a friend of Becky's Mom got us tickets on one of the paddle boats that cruise across Lake Tahoe, and we got to lounge around and sample the fanastic scenery. Lucy was spending the afternoon with her grandma, so it was an unmissable opportunity to stand around on the deck, talk nonsense, and ponder about stuff that was either irrelevant or ridiculous.

Despite the cold, I managed to get a little sunburn.

Dormant Blogosphere

Apparently a significant proportion of the Blogosphere is dormant (although, while this appears to be part of the Blogging zeitgeist, I actually had difficulty getting any kind of reference about real statistics... I'd be grateful for any comments otherwise). Rest assured that finding good TV, listening to the radio (recently superceded by a rash of rather good podcasts), potty training, and watching the ocean crash on the beach, are still significant parts of our lives. Watch this space. Ian

January on the Beach

It may have been 20th January, but we were still on the beach, in our coats, and determined to enjoy it. Santa Cruz was also quite foggy that day.

Snowy Catch-Up

We spent December up at Tahoe, and Lucy loved the snow (helped, in no small part, by her snow suit):

...and, of course, the building of uncannily realistic snowmen is an adult necessity: Inevitably, it fell over within a few hours.

TV Culture

A lot of aspects of TV culture are quite different here... it takes some getting used to. In the UK, I was used to (and expected) short-run series (6 episodes) and mini dramas. Every week I looked through the TV magazine (TV and Satellite Week was our choice) to see what was new coming up that week. There was always something noteworthy starting (or occurring) on any given week. TV over here seems very different in the way series are structured. Here, there are very few network TV series starting or finishing on any given week. Most of the network TV schedules are taken up with long-running "safe" TV shows which have proven their worth (ratings) over the last few seasons. Nobody is taking any risks. This leads to a very stale, very consistent week-by-week TV schedule. One of the consequences is that for newcomers like us, it is difficult to engage with new TV shows... because there aren't many. The other consequence (for newcomers and long term Americans alike) is that the incumbent shows find it more and more difficult to retain viewers, because the shows naturally run out of plot (most TV shows obviously have a natural life in terms of plot development, and American TV seems to keep shows alive waaay beyond this). For example, Desperate Housewives would appear to now be embroiled in some kind of hostage situation. This is a show which is about housewives in American suburbia (the clue is in the name). It is not an action series. They are clearly running out of plot lines. Whoever is responsible for this show should have been focusing their energies on something new by now. We were lucky enough to arrive just as "Heroes" was starting on NBC. This is a fantastic series that you really should watch. It clearly has a single season plot (much like "24", I suppose), but it wouldn't surprise me if they manufactured something beyond that (much like "24", I suppose). Also "Hammered" that I previously blogged about I think would do enormously well on British TV (like Discovery Real Time). But other than those, there is little of the week-by-week diversity that I'm used to on BBC, ITV and channels 4 and 5. This is a real shame. Whatever happened here to create this situation, I really hope doesn't occur in the UK. Grrr...

Radio Gaga

Well, I admit that there is a certain inevitability to the frequency of blog entries dropping off. I think this is a natural consequence of us feeling more settled here, so I don't feel too guilty about it. What I do realise, though, is that anyone who is manually checking the blog for new entries will have probably become somewhat bored by now. Those people who are making use of the RSS feed (you know who you are) will now either feel slightly smug, or slightly patronised. So anyway... What do we miss? Well, I'm still feeling pretty nostalgic for the BBC. I've tried to find a radio station that makes me laugh like Chris Moyles did in the morning. Radio Alice is almost there with Sarah and No Name in the morning, but the main problem is that they're coming from a "Shock Jock" culture where being shouty and offensive is funny (and gets ratings). It's a real shame, because Sarah sounds like she's intelligent and hits some genuinely funny ironic/sarcastic/observation humor right on the button. No Name, on the other hand, seems to derive his humor from being loud and offensive. It's neither funny nor clever. On the up side, I've installed Alien BBC on our Squeezebox streaming music system in the house, which means we can listen to live BBC radio, and all of their archived recordings through our hi-fi. This makes things a lot more tolerable, and had Becky listening to Gardeners' Question Time earlier in the week. I still need a solution for listening to time-shifted Chris Moyles on my way to work, but I'm tempted to install Replay A/V which can schedule recordings of streaming media, so I can whack the mp3's on a CD and listen to them in the car on the way to work. Sirius Satellite Radio actually carries BBC Radio 1 (and hence Chris Moyles), but is only time-shifted by 5 hours (for the East Coast... and being a satellite radio system, there's not a lot they can do about that)... which is a shame. Missing Chris Moyles... who'd have thought it.

The Ocean

We had a bit of a seaside weekend. On Saturday we went to Monterey, which is about an hour and a quarter's drive away down the Pacific coast. We thought it would be nice to do some shopping and have something to eat at Cannery Row (made famous by John Steinbeck's 1945 novel of the same name... apparently). Cannery Row is in the middle of being redeveloped, so it turned out to be a bit of a mix of old industrial buildings, new boutique style shops and construction work. Although a lot of the shops were selling pleasingly cheap but tasteful souvenirs (I believe the official term is 'tat'). Feeling both hungry and adventurous, we had a look around all the places to eat - and there were quite a lot of nice looking seafood places - but succumbing to safety in the familiar, and a new-found fondnest for Forrest Gump, we ended up at the Monterey's branch of what appears to be a chain of Bubba Gump restaurants. Not so much film trivia this time, but an excellent view over the ocean, good food (shrimp, obviously) and fun for Lucy. We watched the movie on Saturday night. I think we've got it out of our system now. After lunch we went to the excellent Monterey Bay Aquarium. There was a 45 minute queue to get in, but the handy (but expensive) trick of buying an annual membership got us immediately into the members side door, and lets us get in for free all year, complete with two transferrable guest passes (which actually turns out to be quite a bargain, given the price of the regular tickets, and the likelyhood of us going again several times). It's a large aquarium with some fantastic tanks. They filmed the aquarium scenes for the movie "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" here in 1986, with some special effects to make the rock pools outside the back of the aquarium look like an enclosure large enough to house a couple of whales. Lucy loved it all, and joyfully pointed out all the big fish... and there were some very big fish. The highlight for me was a Sun Fish - Fascinating. On Sunday we went to Half Moon Bay which is only about 40 minutes away on the Pacific coast up the Peninsula. It's quite small with an old-town feel to the town center, and it was nice to walk around and stop for a coffee and a cake. Afterwards we went to the beach, where the waves were just spectacular. This was the first time Lucy had been on a beach, too. She was a little wary of the sea at first, but she quickly started to get excited by the big breakers. This is somewhere we're definitely going to go more often.

Grrrowl...

Becky got out a box of face-paints and a face-painting instruction book today. Getting this picture sent to me on my mobile phone when I was in the middle of an extended and frustrating technical discussion at work really made my day. Marvelous.

At The Source

Yesterday I went to the WebGuild 2006 Conference. This involved me dipping my feet in the water of Industry Conferences - it was a relatively inexpensive one-day conference about the current state and future direction of the World Wide Web. I enjoyed it immensely, despite one or two of the presentations being a bit dull. It really struck me what I was involved in while I was sat amongst about 200 Silicon Valley web professionals listening to Marissa Mayer talk about the history and design philosophy behind the Google homepage. Not some wannabe Internet company, but Google! She has been personally involved in setting the standard for web searching for most of the planet for the last 7 years. This was followed by a panel discussion which included a founder member of OddPost, who now power the excellent new AJAX-based Yahoo mail client (currently in Beta). You simply don't get these people anywhere else. I appreciate that for many of the people reading this, I just said "blah blah blah Google! blah blah blah blah"... but it's seriously inspiring to be continuously coming across people and companies that I'd only previously read about. Next week there is a free seminar at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View celebrating 30 years of Public Key Cryptography (calm down now). This is all very well and good, but two of the speakers are Dr. Whitfield Diffie and Dr. Martin Hellman! (I can see you're getting over-excited... take a few deep relaxing breaths before continuing...). These are the guys who discovered (invented?) one of the most fundamental algorithms in modern cryptrographic communication protocols - it's the stuff that keeps your credit card details safe over the Internet. (we'll gloss over the fact that it was actually developed at GCHQ in the UK... Hollywood will probably soon produce a movie that sets the record straight). OK, so this is deeply nerdy stuff. But it's the kind of nerdy stuff that I keep tripping over. It's fantastic.

Plastic Fantastic

I finally got my California Drivers License. It's surprising how much difference this makes to how I feel. I now feel like I have a legitimacy here that I didn't feel before. I'm no longer carrying around anything from Britain - credit cards, ATM card, ID... It's very odd. I think this is the last piece of bureaucratic "plugging in" to be done here. It's a bit of a milestone.

8/7c WTF?

Maybe I'm mathematically challenged, but I can't make head or tail of the timezone information given in US TV schedules. The one we see the most involves times like 8/7c, pronounced "Eight, Seven Central", which I think means that a TV show is on at 8pm unless you're in the Central timezone, in which case it will be on at 7pm. This is definitely weird, because North America (let's exclude Alaska for now) has four timezones: Pacific (PST) = GMT-8 Mountain (MST) = GMT-7 Central (CST) = GMT-6 Eastern (EST) = GMT-5 ...and they all have their equivalent 'Daylight Savings Time' versions, one hour ahead of those with a 'D' in the acronym rather than an 'S'. So a timing of 8/7c would make sense to be advertised in the Eastern timezone, because 8pm Eastern is the same as 7pm Central. This would surely mean that a programme was being shown at the same physical time - which happened to be 8pm Eastern and 7pm Central. So why do we get these same times specified in California where we're on Pacific time? When they say 8/7c, do they mean that the whole country gets the TV show at 8pm local time unless you're in the Central timezone, in which case they show it at 7pm local time? This is just bizarre. It would be like the UK having TV times of 8/7(Rutland) where you'd see an episode of The Bill at 8pm unless you live in Thorpe By Water, in which case you'd see it at 7pm. This is probably a boon to people in the Alabama, though, because they get everything an hour before the rest of the country. Maybe they need the extra time to digest the content - perhaps it's a social service. And living in California, why do I care what time they'll be seeing the show in the Central timezone? Just to add confusion, there's also "E/P", which appears to mean "Eastern/Pacific", which I can only assume means it's shown at the same time (local time) throughout the country. Fox has examples of this in their 2006/2007 schedule, along with the more understandable "7:30pm ET/4:30pm PT" which clearly means that something is being shown at the same physical time across the whole country (live sports events, for instance). Be thankful if you live in a country with only one timezone (you know who you are).

Best Foot Forward

On Saturday we joined the Walk For Hope in San Francisco, which is a 5km walk to raise funds for Breast Cancer as part of the National Breast Cancer Awareness Month (also in the UK). Becky's mom and brother had joined us, and it was to be an early start, so we drove to the The Embarcadero Center for 8am. There were various tents and stalls set up for people who wanted to register on the day, and to pick up t-shirts... and all the sponsors were there. The atmosphere was excellent.We persuaded a passing stranger to take our photo, for which we unwittingly stood in height order. The walk took us down the waterfront to AT&T Park, around the stadium and back again - it was great to see that part of San Francisco by foot, which is something we might not otherwise have done. Lucy was happy to watch the world go by (although you wouldn't believe it from the photo above). There was a fantastic atmosphere back at the Embarcadero Center as everyone was arriving from finishing the walk. After a 5km walk, we all felt like we'd earnt a beer and something deep-fried, so we went to Pier 39 for an early lunch - because there are lots of family-friendly mid-priced restaurants there (OK, so they're probably not the best restaurants in San Francisco, but we're still enjoying hanging around the touristy areas, and Lucy loves the Carousel). We ended up at Bubba Gump - which is a restaurant chain that somehow managed to get the rights to have a Forrest Gump theme. I've never been in a restaurant where an incredibly enthusiastic waitress asks film trivia questions while taking my order. It sounds slightly tacky (and probably was), but it was a lot of fun. And they had Anchor Steam on tap, and the food was actually very good. And there was a Tom Hanks look-alike in full Forrest Gump atire sat on a bench outside the restaurant as we left. You can't make this stuff up. It was a day of contrasts.

Make The Grade

We had our driving tests on Friday. As it happens, our next door neighbor is a driving instructor, and he very kindly offered to take us both out for a quick refresher on Wednesday - it was really useful, because Becky and I both picked up a few good pointers on things to look out for. The visit to the DMV office to take the tests involved more waiting than driving, and it was 2½ hours before we'd both taken our 10 minute tests. We both passed. Becky came away with a completely clean slate, but I managed to get three minor marks against me (you're allowed 15 minor marks before you fail)... which I put down to nerves and trying too hard not to mess up (for instance, one of my minor marks was for driving 5mph below the speed limit on El Camino Real... go figure). A second explanation could be that Becky is simply a better driver than I am. The third theory is that Becky got a lenient examiner, and I got a more pernickety examiner. I favor the third theory. In fact, our neighbor just came round to talk about how things went, and he confirmed that the examiner I had was the most stringent examiner at that DMV office. I'm not bothered. No, really.

Hammered

If you're at all interested in DIY (even from a wanabe amateur-but-useless standpoint like me), then you have to watch Hammered, with John and Jimmy DiResta (doesn't look like it's actually on UK TV yet, though). My all-time favourite DIY TV Show (and consequently, DIY personality) was the New Yankee Workshop with Norm Abram (on Discovery Real Time in the UK) - who can build anything, effortlessly, with a workshop bigger than our house, containing tools that a DIY enthusiast could only dream of. Hammered is the same thing, only with less conservative projects (that is, more fun), and an East-Coast humour and attitude that's laugh-out-loud funny. The two hosts are brothers: Jimmy DiResta is a ludicrously talented craftsman, and John DiResta is a professional stand-up comedian. Whoever thought it would be a good idea to put these two together on TV was a genius.

Left Hand, Right Hand

We spent this weekend up at Tahoe. It's something we want to be doing more regularly, but we haven't quite got into a weekly/monthly routine yet (too much change and disruption on a week-by-week basis so far to be able to get into a routine). But at least we managed to get up there this weekend, and we had a really nice visit with Becky's immediate family. Becky's mom is being incredibly generous by letting us borrow her car during the winter months. It's a two-wheel drive car, and is consequently unsuitable for driving around Tahoe when it is freezing/snowing (you really need a genuine 4x4), so usually sits out the winter in the comfort of Becky's mom's garage. The snows could come any day now, so we came back in a mini-convoy of the Montero (built and bought to cope with a Tahoe winter) and Becky's mom's VW Beetle (built to be stylish - and successfully so). I was the happy driver who got to drive the Beetle back to the Bay Area - a 4 hour drive, which is a nice long time to get to know and love the car. On the trip, we made a stop at Davis where we saw a man being restrained by police from 4 separate patrol cars in the car park outside the Burger King where we stopped. According to a passer-by that Becky spoke to, he was a homeless man who was on drugs. It was sobering to see my burger-buying safety being ensured by this man's face coming into contact with the tarmac. So anyway... Driving a manual (stick shift) car after a couple of months with an automatic was a complete revelation. For the first time since we've been here, I actually felt like I was fully in control of the car. It was great. I'm convinced now that if we buy another car (when Spring comes and the snow melts, and the Beetle can once again grace the roads of South Lake Tahoe), it has to be manual. I know that this will make it more difficult to sell on, but it'll be worth it. The only problem, really, is that I was changing gear with the wrong hand. My left hand constantly wanted a piece of the gear-changing action. It's odd that it's so easy to drive on the opposite side of the road, but more difficult to be changing gear with my right hand. It'll learn, though... and it's a small price to pay.

Tickover

It occurred to me that it's been a while since I wrote a blog entry. The superficial reason for this is that nothing 'blogworthy' has really happened. That's not strictly true, though... what has actually happened is that we're beginning to settle into a comfortable routine where fewer things are in any way exceptional. A lot of small stuff has happened, though, which all forms part of the comforting humdrum of everyday life. My subscription to TV Guide has finally kicked in, and so when I've finished writing this I'm going to read through the current issue and highlight things I think we might be interested in watching next week, and set them up to record on the DVR - this is what I used to do with the TV Magazine back in the UK to set up Sky+. The licence plates for our car finally arrived (it had Illinois plates when we bought it, and had to be registered in California). Now we've got all the official documentation for the car, and we're just waiting for our appointments for the driving tests (coming up on 13th October) before we're fully signed-up with the DMV. We managed to successfully apply for another credit card, so now we have one each (spreads the administrative load in keeping track of them). That particular application was a bit hairy for a while, though - Citibank Mastercard U.S. want a banking reference before they'll set up an account, which is fair enough. For some reason Citibank UK charge £20 for the privilege of sending a banking reference, even if it is to somewhere else in the Citibank organisation. But I swallowed this because I wanted something that they had. To complete the picture of a joined-up institution, Citibank Mastercard U.S. then refused to take the Citibank UK reference, saying that it had insufficient information, and the information was in the wrong form (not converted to U.S. Dollars, for example). My sense of humor remained intact, and I was actually quite impressed by this level of ineptitude. Anyway, the application all got sorted out quite quickly when I e-mailed my Citibank relocation consultant (they have people employed to deal with trouble-makers like me) and compared Citibank to HSBC - whose card I'd been happily using for the previous two weeks. The cards arrived a few days later by overnight courier. That's more like it. I've set up the computers that we need (using 'need' in one of its looser senses), and also taken the opportunity to buy some more kit on various lame excuses. I was happily surprised to find that the only thing that wasn't already compatible with the 110v power here was one of the PC power supplies. That was fixed easily enough with a quick trip to Fry's (as so much in life is). Unfortunately, the hard drive in one of the computers died catastrophically a short while after I turned it on (weakened by sea-sickness, presumably). The main down side of this is that I've lost the save-game from 'Half-Life' that I'd been working on for the last few months. My feeble progress through an outdated (but good) game is now history, and it's time for me to drag my game-playing into the 21st Century and start playing the (now 3-year old) Half Life 2. We've also splashed out on some technology that will hopefully pay off in the long term, and bought a cordless Skype handset (the LinkSys CIT200, for those interested), so we can use Skype without having to be surgically connected to a PC. You'd be surprised how much more we used Skype now that it feels like using a normal phone. As well as the savings on international calls, Skype calls to U.S. landlines are free until the end of the year, so hopefully that $100 will pay for itself quite quickly. The continuing unpacking of our boxes is suffering from the 80-20 rule. The remaining 20% of unpacking is progressing at the expected slow rate. To prevent us coming to a complete halt and living amongst a handful of boxes and small piles of random belongings for the rest of our stay here, the rule is that every day must contain a small but distinct amount of 'unpacking'. The study/office now has more than 50% of the carpet visible. This is definite progress. I also managed to unpack a lot of the garage boxes in a hunt for the 12v air-pump that I wanted to use to inflate my bike tires. As fate would have it, it turned up at the bottom fo the last box that I looked in. And why are the sizes for screw-in light-bulb fittings different over here? We have a standing lamp that we rather like, and we want to simply put 110v bulbs in it (nothing complex about the electrics - this should just work). But bulbs here come in two fitting sizes: too large, and too small. Luckily, ebay came up trumps with some adapters which turn the 'too small' bulbs to 'just right'. Good old ebay. We're beginning to get tuned in to the prices of everyday things. Petrol is strange in the amount that it varies from place to place. In the UK we were used to a few pence per litre variation, but here there can be up to 50¢/gallon difference between two gas stations on the same street. Well worth shopping around. Bread is very expensive, too. Between $4 and $5 for a small loaf of half-decent bread. Odd, that. So not much to say, really.

It Says Watt?

Some of the electrical things we brought with us from the UK will work here. Others won't. Quite why we brought things that we knew wouldn't work is a complex question. The answer mostly revolves around the amount of effort that would have been required to identify and dispose of things that won't work here, compared to the amount of effort required to ignore the problem and have the shipping company pack everything regardless. A lot of small electronic items run off separate power adaptors, and cheap replacements can be bought here (our ADSL modem/router is running like that right now, for instance). Other items already have dual 110/240 volt power supplies and can be used with just a plug adaptor or a new power cable (the portable disk drive that we brought all our personal data across on is working like that). Other low-power items can use a small, cheap voltage converter (like my electric toothbrush charger). Other things are too much bother to get working, and cheap to replace (hairdryers, for instance). There are a small number of major electrical items that need more care and forethought. Our TV, for instance, can take an NTSC signal (as used in the USA) from a DVD player or set-top box (like our new cable TV box). However, it only runs on the UK's 240V power, so can't be easily plugged in over here. The answer is a big transformer which can be bought at Fry's (is there anything they don't sell?!) which converts between 110v and 240v and can handle enough power for something as significant as a TV (compared to a toothbrush). The secret is to know how much power you need... which is handily printed on the back of most appliances and electrical equipment. The TV said it was 150W (Watts, like a lightbulb), so I thought the 500W transformer should do the job admirably. Quite why the fuse often blew in the transformer when I turned the TV on or off is a mystery (answers on a postcard, please). However, with a "bigger is better" frame of mind, the 1000W version seems to do the job. And it makes a satisfying 'clunk' noise when you turn it on, followed by a faint humming... as if there was some kind of big electromagnet inside or something. Funny, that. So now we get to watch 11-year old episodes of 'Whose Line Is It Anyway' (still funny after all this time) on BBC America with our UK TV.

The Storm Before The Calm

Our stuff arrived on Monday. At 9:00am a 40' sea container, which we'd last seen on the back of a lorry outside our house in the UK on 2nd August, arrived outside our rental house here. It was slightly odd to think that the same container had been floating across the Atlantic, through the Panama Canal, up the Pacific coast, and into the Port of Oakland. We watched as they broke the seal which had been installed in the UK. For the next half hour, I marked numbers off a tick-list as the 246 individually numbered and itemised cardboard boxes and other oddly shaped items were unloaded from the container onto our driveway (it's a good job it wasn't raining... but then, this is California). Then there was 3 hours of hard work, as the 6 people in the unpacking crew started unwrapping the furniture, bringing it into the house and (where necessary) rebuilding it. Before we knew it, legs were back on tables, feet were back on sofas, and two beds and a cot had been rebuilt from their temporary 'flat pack' existence. Becky and I pitched in where we could, but a lot of our effort was taken up looking after Lucy, and directing boxes and pieces of furniture into appropriate rooms. More than once, a question of 'Where shall I put this?' from the unpacking crew was greeted with a shrug and 'Wherever looks good to you.' from one of us. They thought this was funny. After a lunch break, boxes of what can only be described as 'stuff' started coming in, and the relative calm of a mostly empty house became a mini maze of a few clear walkways through piles of half organised collections of familiar things. By the end of Monday, everything had been unpacked - although almost nothing had been put away - and all the major pieces of furniture were in the right rooms, and mostly in their final positions. It's good to see a lot of our stuff again. Becky's mum and brother arrived later on Monday to help out. Throughout Tuesday, they've been hard at work making sense of the explosion of random belongings that had been cluttering every flat surface. When I got home from work this afternoon the house was unrecognisable from the mess that I'd left in the morning, but much more recognisable as our home. There's something very comforting in being surrounded by familiar things. It's amazing how much progress they made in so little time. Fantastic. So, in two days we've been rapidly transported from a feeling of temporary accommodation, to a genuine sense of being at home. It's quite a relief.

Wibble Wobble Side To Side

We've put on weight since we've been here, but that's not what this is about. Lucy is starting to categorize things as belonging to various people. It's a muddy set of concepts for her at the moment, but she is laying claim to some of our more major items. It started innocently enough when we first bought the new car and didn't know whether to refer to it as "Mummy's car" or "Daddy's car", which were concepts she was used to in the UK when we had two cars which a particular one of us generally tended to drive. So the 4x4 is "Lucy's Car". And a lot of what we listen to when we're in it is "Lucy's Music". The latter is actually only partially inaccurate. She has a limited but eclectic music taste. What she sometimes means by "Lucy's Music" is the CD-Single of "Monster" by "The Automatic" (I'm not quite sure how that became a favourite). This is not entirely appropriate for a 2-year old (I think the song has a relatively grown-up theme), but she seems to enjoy the repetitive chorus... and indearingly pronounces it "Ma'ha" rather than "Monster". She's not quite mastered T's yet - she refers to water as "wa'ha", too. What she usually means by "Lucy's Music" is a CD of Children's Songs, which includes gems like "She'll Be Coming Round The Mountain" and "One Man Went To Mow". One of my favourites is sung to the tune of Glory Glory Hallelujah, and contains some philosophical verses including:

Shakey, shakey, shakey shakey up and down. Shakey, shakey, shakey shakey up and down. Shakey, shakey, shakey shakey up and down. Clap your hands together, 1, 2, 3. Wibble, wobble, wibble wobble side to side. Wibble, wobble, wibble wobble side to side. Wibble, wobble, wibble wobble side to side. Clap your hands together, 1, 2, 3.

Deep stuff. Catchy, though.

Wide Open Spaces

Our household belongings have been picked up from the Port of Oakland. We had word from the shipping company that they picked up our container on Thursday. Their first slot for delivery is Monday, so we prepared ourselves for two days of camping and left our furnished apartment yesterday (Saturday). One of the aspects of apartment living that we really wouldn't get along with in the long term is the distance between the front door of the apartment and the car. The apartment was set in some quite lush surroundings with heavy planting, and the main living areas faced onto courtyards and walkways with trees and shrubs. Very nice... except when you have to carry a car-load of shopping from the allocated parking space behind the building. After six weeks, Becky was getting annoyed by this. So, the three full carloads that it took to get all of our stuff from the apartment to the house was a labor of love. We're getting less tolerant of inconvenience and difficulty... which I think is because we can see the end of it on the horizon. Still, by the end of Saturday, we'd moved everything from the apartment to the house, and drove away from the apartment complex for the last time. The immediate emotions on leaving the apartment were neither sadness nor relief. Of course, it's a step along the way, but the immediate concerns of moving ourselves from one place to another were the focus. We're sleeping on an airbed that Becky's mum bought for when she visited the apartment; Lucy has her travel cot - which she's always been very happy in; we've got a 13" portable TV which we bought for $80 so the Comcast engineer would have something to plug the cable TV equipment into, and Becky borrowed some kitchen equipment, cutlery and crockery from her grandma. So, we're all set. Today we did a bit of shopping for bits and bobs that we're going to need (like some two-pin to three-pin grounding adapters so that we can plug grounded equipment into some of the sockets. eek!), but other than that, we're just waiting for the container to arrive at 9:00am tomorrow. The main thing we're missing at the moment is a set of remote-control cars to race around the wide-open spaces that will soon fill with our furniture and clutter. Vroom!