In England!

Oh man... how do I squeeze a weeks worth of activity into one post? Well I guess I am just going to have to go in broad terms and then talk about specific events later on in the week. I got to England last Saturday at around ten in the morning. I then forced myself and the family to stay awake until around 10pm. So I had roughly NO sleep in 40 hours. I would have slept on the plane except for the fact that my seat reclined roughly a quarter of an inch and everytime I closed my eyes the air waitresses would start another beverage service. I mean really, how many apple cranberry juices can one person drink during an 8 hour flight? The kids slept pretty well during the flight with KiKi leaning her head on my arm and stretching one way across the seats and LaLa laying against her dad and stretching across the seats in the opposite direction. Heathrow Airport? Oy! That place is a mess. Apparently, in the UK, trash bins are totally optional outside. I have never seen so much litter on the side of the road. My friend, D*, tells me that they have some sort of clean up crew that comes by every so often to pick up the sides of the road, but when people finish a drink or something, they just throw it out of their car windows. This is completely foreign to me because in the States, this would be a huge fine if you got caught by a police officer.

For the record I did not help myself in my no sleep department by consuming a couple of pints of cider that night around a bonfire in my my friend's backyard. Cider is however some yummy stuff. I like the brand Strongbow the best (I had 3 different types to sample from that night thanks to my new English friend, N**.)

By this point I was sick of hotels so we decided to stay the night at my friends house. The next morning we started getting settled into our new hotel room. This room isn't nearly as bad as the room we had at the last base. This hotel room has 2 bedrooms, one with a queen sized bed and the other has two twin beds in it. It also has a fairly large kitchen and living area. It also has a washer and dryer (English sized...that is another post there!) and a dishwasher. The only problem we have had here so far is that the water temp was lukewarm for about 3 days until we got the maintenance men up here to fix it. Now we are getting to shower with hot water again.New room

Thankfully we won't have to stay here for very long because we have already found a house that we want to rent. We are just waiting for the OK from the landlord to have pets. It is a cute little detached house (to Americans that is a single family house), with 4 bedrooms, 1 1/2 bathrooms, and a detached garage that had been turned into a play room by the previous family. The Man is going to use the garage for his "Man Cave", in other words a place for him to go play guitar and be a man. Why do I all of a sudden hear that Home Improvement guy Tim Allen?

My new love is also Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate bars. Someone will have to try to pry on of these suckers out of my cold dead PMSing hands. Hershey ain't got nothing on Cadbury chocolate. Whitmans, kiss my hiney. Mars...pfft. Cadbury is where it is at. Maybe I should have a contest for a chocolate bar...I need to think about this one.

This week was also marked by the 24 hour stomach virus from hell. First KiKi got a little diarhea and the next thing we know, The Man is laid up in bed for the next day and a half going at both ends, KiKi starts puking her guts up and then D's family all get it. Thankfully Me, LaLa and D were all spared from the virus. D felt a little queasy on Friday, but never actually got sick and I felt a little queasy this morning. When The Man and KiKi were sick I was feverishly Lysoling the bathroom and kitchen repeating the mantra "I will not get sick, I will not get sick, I will not get sick" I think it worked. Mind over matter, right people?

Umm..WTF the steering wheel is on the wrong side.

Anyhoo other than the stomach virus, I think we had a pretty good first week. We found a house, we met some really nice people, went to a birthday party***, got a lot of our inprocessing done, learned to drive a car on a different side of the road****, and got lost in the middle of the countryside with D while we went to pick Elizabeth up from quarantine. Did I mention that we also got a dusting of snow this morning?

*Need to think of a nickname for best friend D
** Don't know enough about new English friend,N, to make a nickname for him yet.
*** For another post
**** see above.