Coventry Farmers Market & Muster

Last Sunday we took a little trip down the road to Coventry Farmers Market which is held every Sunday over the summer.

 

It was pretty cute, lots of homegrown vegetables, fruit, plants, flowers, crafts, baked goods etc. Each week has a theme and the theme was ‘colonial’, so the oldest paper in the country had a stand (the Hartford Courant) and I got a subscription for $19 for a year so that’s fun. They also had different food vans and a band. The parking was crazy but we got there dead on 11 when it opened so there was no problem. All the churchies came late and had to queue… haha.

 

The market is held at Nathaniel Hale’s house who was a spy in the revolutionary war so to carry on that theme they had a ‘muster’.

 

“I have a stupid question” said Kim, “so the revolutionary war… was Ireland invented by then?” Kim thinks she’s Irish… I think otherwise.

 

Different hobby historical recreational groups played their instruments and had a march about. All the groups were just from Connecticut state and there were tons! I couldn’t believe there were that many people who were interested in that, although marching bands are a school extracurricular here so I guess maybe this is what they do afterwards? The had guns and small cannons that fired blanks.

 

There was only one guy dressed as an English soldier so I took a photo with him and asked him was a good pose would be. “I usually just hold my gun he said”, I said no that wouldn’t do and he had to look menacing with me… perhaps this is why England lost? Not menacing enough.

 

Kimmy got a nice potted sunflower and planted it in our garden whilst Miss Bunny the cat supervised.

Settling In To Coventry

My first week in the USA has come and gone and I’ve been settling in nicely. It’s alternated between boiling hot and rainy so that’s made it pretty humid. Kim bought us a house at Coventry by the lake and we’re lucky because there are no main roads near by so the cats are safe roaming about. Also there are no pavements – now you might think this is a bad thing but in the winter by law you have to shovel your driveway and pavements (or sidewalks) within a certain time so we get out of doing that.

The houses are all different looking compared to the UK where usually the houses are built in clusters so they tend to match their neighbours and there isn’t a lot of brick like in the UK, it’s mostly vinyl siding. We’re 3 minutes walk from Coventry Lake and you can see it from the end of our garden (or yard).

The area is really green and there’s small bits of forest either side of our little neighbourhood. As a teenager I used to have a job at a tropical garden center in Norfolk which I absolutely loved (actually I think if the pay was better I’d still be working there!), a lot of the plants that are popular here I recognise from the garden center. There are lots of hostas and we have some of these already in our garden.

There are also orange day lilies absolutely everywhere (also in our garden)

Kim’s working as usual and I’m waiting to take an awful exam which I do not feel confident about at all and am pretty sure I’ll need to retake but until then I’m without a job and not searching until I know if I’ve passed or failed so I’ve been watching a LOT of TV which I don’t usually do. In fact my friends in England liked to make fun of me because for the last few years in England I didn’t actually bother having a TV. Kim is addicted to terrible TV shows so we had to have one here but luckily she owns a smart TV and we got the Amazon Fire TV with Alexa and it works great. People in the USA pay a lot for their cable TV (think $200+ a month) which I wasn’t happy about so instead we’ve set up Hulu and Netflix and it costs a fraction of the price. There’s also some live TV apps which work great and I can connect the TV to my laptop so we’re saving a lot of money that way, also I get to annoy Alexa.

So I haven’t been too bored whilst Kim works, also when it’s nice out I’ve enjoyed walking around the neighbourhood and seeing all the wildlife. The other day I almost walked into this lovely deer in sight of our driveway then to my horror realised my iPhone had decided to turn itself off when I went to take a photo of her. Luckily she was very polite and waited for my iPhone to restart itself so I could take my photo then tripped prettily off into the woods.

I also saw a groundhog on the neighbours lawn the first morning I was here. We have a bird feeder that’s attracted a lot of blue jays, sparrows and cardinals – I think it would attract more if it wasn’t for our resident squirrels who are very sweet but figured out how to open the bird feeder faster than I did then they proceed to dump all the bird seed and meal worms out onto the floor so they can sort through to get their favourite bits. So we need to invest in a squirrel proof bird feeder which we haven’t got round to yet.

In the mean time we have a lot of our own wildlife though, the house has a lot of little cubbyholes and viewing points that the cats love.

I got my social security number through in the mail which is the equivalent to the national insurance number in the UK. I got treated to a trip to the DMV (like the DVLA) where there was a very long wait but I got told I can use my international drivers permit for a year which is great as I’ll have to retake my driving test and I don’t really want to just yet!

I did buy a little car with the money I’d saved up from my job in England, most people seem to buy their cars on finance here but as I don’t exist on credit reports here and I’m not working yet that wouldn’t be an option so I needed to look for something outright. This was made all the more difficult as the Americans favour very large cars, very very large! And I just wanted a small European car, so I found a few I liked online and settled on a little red Fiat 500 2012 which I bought from a dodgy car dealer guy from Kosovo who did not stop talking. Still, I like it and it drives great. I had to buy it in Kim’s name because I have no Connecticut state ID or drivers licence or insurance. Although, strangely Kim added the car to her insurance and her insurance went down. That would never happen in England, you might expect a discount for a multi car policy but she’s actually paying less insurance now with my car added to her policy than she was for her own which I think is mad. To continue the theme of Goldie my previous car we’ve called this one Ruby.  I had to get a satnav (GPS) though or else I won’t know where anything is! Funnily enough my sister Bronte leases a Fiat 500 in blue so we are car sisters, much like in life her model is younger and better looking than mine haha. Fuel is ridiculously cheap compared to England, to fill up my car with petrol from almost empty cost $23, which is about £17.60 which wouldn’t even give me half a tank in England!

Our neighbours have been very friendly so far, there are a few differences though, everyone here is completely obsessed with the American flag and have it plastered all over their gardens, houses, cars etc. It’s actually illegal to burn a flag here, which is fair enough I suppose but if you’ve gone to the trouble of buying a flag to burn surely you’re just burning your own flag that you’ve bought which is your own problem isn’t it? The previous owners of our house left an American flag on our shed (see the middle photo) which so far I’ve kept up there because it makes me laugh.

Another difference is that no one has a letterbox fixed into their front doors, they have mailboxes. Ours is across the street (outside our neighbour Darlene’s house, Darlene is very friendly and enjoys walking about in her nightdress and going on the trampoline with kittens… yes really) and you collect your mail from it, if you want to post a letter you don’t need to find a mailbox, you just stick your letter in the mailbox and put the little flag up and the mail carrier picks it up for you – which I think is very convenient. The United States Postal Service has proved to be every bit as incompetent as Royal Mail though when it managed to deliver 2 of the new address postcards we sent out back to ourselves… great. But I do like the mailboxes and lots of people decorate them. We got a decal sticker with our last name on it which I put on the box a bit wonky but I think the effort is still there. This is also a frequent occurrence in people’s front gardens… I just find it weird though.

So all in all it’s gone fine. Everything is still a bit of a novelty like going to the grocery store. Kim’s been helpful as always to me adjusting by pointing out little tips (“That’s margarine, it’s like butter”… err yeah… thanks for that).

We usually try and do something on Kim’s days off, we went blueberry picking the other day which was fun. Blueberries are widely grown in New England so that was tasty.

But when it’s hot we try not to over do it.

Kim’s Auntie Debbie came to visit us out in the boonies (Auntie Debbie taught me that word, it’s what UK people would say is ‘out in the sticks’, it’s USA war slang for boondocks from when they fought the Philippines) and bought us a nice ice cream cake. I haven’t tried ice cream cake before so that was exciting (as all cake is). All in all a good start.

The Big Move

Finally the day came that was the day of the big move from the UK to Connecticut! My dear chum Crissy insisted on driving me to Gatwick which was very kind of her after many proclamations of “I will not let my friend take that bloody coach to the airport!”. We had a jolly good road trip on the way up, it was Sunday so it was all 80s on one of the radio shows which was great for car kareoke but also not great because I had ‘we built this city’ by Starship in my head until I got Connecticut.

So we got there in one piece and I checked in, the guy at the desk let me check my small suitcase I was going to take as carry on which was great as I then had less to carry until afterwards I realised I had over $1,000 in the case completely unlocked… still it all came back ok so no harm done. Then I called my Mum, my brother Charles, Bronte my sister and my Great Auntie Lily to say bye, went through security and then I browsed duty free. I’d been looking for a certain type of perfume, do you ever do that creepy thing where a stranger walks past you and you smell their perfume and it’s really nice so you ask them what fragrance they’re wearing? Well I’d done that a couple of weeks before so I spent a good half hour trying out all the Marc Jacobs perfumes to find the exact one. For some reason Marc Jacobs has chosen to revenge himself against normal people by making all his bottles look roughly the same with flowers on them and picking almost exactly the same names for all the different scents which are completely different. For gods sake Marc Jacobs, sort your life out.

Meanwhile my buddy Joy had decided she’d have one of my sofas for her new house and I got sent this photo of them stuck… so it did my heart good to know that they were having fun haha.

Finally my gate got announced but there was a massive massive queue, it wasn’t so bad because I made a buddy in the line to chat to who was from Sturbridge (you might remember it from the historical village we visited last Christmas) and had been going to a wedding in Berlin so that passed the time.

I assured my new found buddy that I wasn’t looking forward to the flight because Norwegian Air was utterly useless last time I flew with them to JFK and besides I always got sat next to a screaming baby. And my prophecy was correct, the moment I sat down a screaming baby promptly arrived to sit in the seat behind me… I swear there is some sort of tracking beacon on me when I fly. It screamed… and screamed. And we waited on the tarmac for 2 hours because they wanted to check something in the cargo and then they had to fill out paperwork and then they had to refuel because they’d spent so much time fucking around so we were really late leaving.

All the movies were either bad or I’d seen them before so I rewatched a couple, amused myself by finding Coventry on the little airplane map by zooming in a million times, huffed at the mother of the screaming baby, listened to music, slept on and off where I assume I snored at my seat companions, feasted on my banquet of tastiness I bought in duty free. The plane ticket I’d bought was part of Norwegian Air’s new budget flights for long haul, think Easyjet – you pay for luggage, a meal, to pick your seat etc all extra. I wasn’t about to pay 30 quid for airplane food no matter how much I enjoy it.

We finally got into Boston airport and then because we’d left so late they didn’t have a gate for us to park the plane at so we waited again for about 40 minutes, suspiciously exiting the plane just 20 minutes before the time that the airline would have had to pay us compensation for the delay… I was meant to land at 7pm local time, I didn’t get off the plane until about 10pm. After that there was a long line to reach border control, everyone else just had their ESTA visas but I had a large sealed envelope for an immigration CR1 visa. As I moved closer in the queue you could see all the border control agents view the envelope with trepidation, they all went super slow to try not to get me, one guy went on his break, another pretended to take a phone call, all waiting to try not to get me. In the end I was waved over to the only agent smiling, the others all looked miserable as sin, I told him he was the only person there who looked cheerful “Oh I get that a lot” he said chuckling. It reminded me a lot of one of my favourite dystopian games Papers, Please but luckily there weren’t any issues and I was through.

Kimmy girl picked me up, I had insisted that she make me a sign to collect me or else I wouldn’t go with her and I wasn’t disappointed. When I got in the kitties were please to see me, my boy cat Barclay did a double take as though he couldn’t quite believe it was me then proceeded to climb my head with love. I think Kim’s girl cat was quite pleased too because the whole time she’s been back in America she’s refused any treats but as soon as I gave them to her she quite happily tucked in, little madam. All the luggage made it unharmed except my laptop that used to be Kim’s laptop has a very large dent in it… it seems to still work though so… easy come easy go?

The next day we took a trip to Kim’s hospital where she works to sort out my health insurance, only we didn’t sort it because they were really confused by the concept of the NHS. The house Kim bought is in Coventry which is a lake town so about 3 minutes down our street is this beautiful lake, the part of it we live next to has a little dock and a closed off swimming area so we paddled a bit.

Also we got some Hello Fresh to make some fun recipes whilst I settle in – this has been good to learn where Kim keeps all the kitchen stuff.

Today we were about the discover the joys of the social security office when the alert for Kim’s tyre pressure popped up, we went to inflate them (which Kim had no idea how to do!) and got greeted with this mad medieval looking device. I am not used to these air machines, in England they have a little digital display and you just enter in what pressure you want and the machine beeps when it’s done. This looked like it was used to inflate the wheels on penny farthings! Fred Flintstone probably stopped off to use this on the way to Bedrock. We went to two separate gas stations and they both had the same. It’s like a time warp.

 

Afterwards we went to the social security office where we waited for about an hour and I incited a rebellion. I made some buddies at the social security office (I always make a buddy) waiting in the line and we got chatting about how it wasn’t very confidential because people were going up to the window and you could hear all their business so they all said they were going to complain. I said I wasn’t going to complain because I was a foreigner and didn’t want to rock the boat. A girl there who looked about my age asked if Kim was my daughter, so I said I hope not as I married her… seriously, Kim is 26… I’d have to be about 45 for her to be my kid… do I look 45??? I’m not even 30 yet. Not amused. The girl looked like she wanted to be swallowed up into a hole in the ground and I would have pushed her. Pft. Had to explain Kim is just a midget.

 

Packing Up And Lord Mayor’s Procession

So I’ve been pretty busy the last couple weeks or so packing up the rest of my house into 2 suitcases and selling everything. Selling things was the most annoying, I sold bigger items online on Gumtree and Facebook Marketplace and every single thing I sold there was hassle. People wanted more money off, wanted to collect things at really odd times, turned up late, they wanted things delivered when I’d put collection only, they couldn’t find my house, they couldn’t find my house even when I sent them maps with a place marker on. Don’t people get taught to read maps anymore? It was endlessly annoying to sort out between my last few shifts at work. The only painless transaction was selling my beloved car Goldie, a couple turned up to buy it who looked like Del boy and his wife, a real geezer. I opened the door and he said “Alright darlin?” after he went for a quick test drive he got out of Goldie, gave her a reassuring pat and said “pay the lady!” to his wife and they were off. Look at my suitcase…

It took about a good half an hour to get the zips shut to here… I found my first grey hair the other day and I am convinced this is why.

So finally everything was pretty much sorted, you might remember I had texted my Dad to see if he wanted to see me before I went. My Dad and I don’t really talk very often although we used to get on like a house on fire, I was a real daddys girl as a child and it was kind of a shame that we hadn’t seen each other for about 12 years. Anyway so he never got back to me with a date so I had given up, I texted him in the last week before I went (mainly to tell him off actually for not getting back to me) and to my surprise we did organise to meet up for lunch and it was so nice. I thought he’d have aged since I last saw him but he looked exactly the same and we got on like we’d never been apart. We went for lunch at a nice Portuguese restaurant and stayed so late chatting it was about 4pm when we left and my Dad got a parking ticket! Oops! So I was so glad we did that and hopefully we can talk a little more often now and have more of a relationship like we used to.

That night my lovely chum Sarah came to collect me and all my crap, the house was still full of stuff which I begged her to take (please Sarah, take my shoe rack, you know you want a shoe rack!). And she kindly dropped me off at my buddy Nancy’s house in Norwich. I also foisted my unwanted goods on Nancy, such as fridge scrabble where I left a special message for her boyfriend Tim (who is also our friend Joy’s brother) concerning her vegetarianism.

 The next day Nancy, Sarah, Joy and I took a trip into Norwich city because it was the Lord Mayor’s Procession.

So there was quite a lot of things on… I’m not sure why there was an octopus but whatever.

So we got a good spot to watch, but my god we had to wait, the procession was late because of some sort of running marathon thing so we had to watch these runners go back and forth for about half an hour. The mayor and his council buddies wafted about in their ceremonial dress and chains.

There were a lot of floats and dancers and bands.

Most of them were pretty fun.

A couple of them we didn’t understand though, one of them was a tractor and trailer and in the trailer were elderly people waving… who let them in it? I think they need to be more selective.

I felt sorry for the dancers and acrobats because they had to dance the entire length of the procession so they must have been exhausted.

After the procession Sarah, Joy, Nancy and I went to Nandos for some chicken and I saw my buddy Megan quickly and her sister because she had some coffee for me for a leaving gift (thaaannnkkss) so that was good.

Tim had been working nights so I didn’t get to see him but he left me a new addition to our scrabble and I left one back. Nancy and her family go to France every year but she was endlessly confused by the word escargot.

Great Yarmouth With Crissy

So my dear friend Crissy (who I used to work with) moved to live in Perth in Australia a few years ago but she came to visit England so we had a few days of cross over before I moved away and we managed to fit in a little visit. We started off doing some regular things like picking out a dress for a wedding she had to go to and I popped into the bank to shut down my credit card and ISA account.

Then we stopped for a coffee, have you noticed all the ‘vape’ shops about lately? Is there any need for so many? And flavoured too… who the fuck is buying ‘vapes’ in “dinner lady” flavour… how is that appealing?? There is nothing about a dinner lady that sounds like it’d be tasty, not even the dinner being served.

So after that it was on, we stopped off by a tat shop and browsed and found lovely feather flapper style headdresses which we wore about the town with gangster necklaces (they had a costume shop section).

We got a photo of the puppet man for Crissy and we went to the diner for burgers.

Then it was time for some air hockey.

And basketball.

Then we got drenched in the rain, got some photos taken and played guitar hero. The guy at the arcade took a lot of convincing to cut the photo strips in two because he was worried we would sue him if he cut it wrong… yes actually. I mean I don’t know how much time and disposable income he thinks we have to fund this imaginary lawsuit but we had to reassure him several times.

Then we sunk about £10 in 2ps into this 2p machine to win two paddingtons for Crissy’s mum, we had to get both because we had a sneaking suspicion they were brothers!

Bookend brothers.

After that it was time for Crissy to see other friends and me to cram shut my cases but one of our pimp necklaces made a nice car decoration for Crissy’s rental car. I gave my headdress to her to save for Jim to wear (he was away on a stag do in Prague but I wouldn’t want him to miss out).

Center Parcs With My Family 4

This is belated as I’ve had a lot on with the big move but these are the last parts of our family trip.

So our last full day we took a nature walk with a park ranger which was fun.

And we swam in the subtropical swimming area (incident free!). Later in the evening we went for a nice dinner and then we went bowling. Bronte and I had the bumpers up, Mum and Charles said they didn’t need the bumpers up until they started bowling gutter balls and then they stopped making fun of our bumpers!

We also had an air hockey tournament which Charles won.

And then the next day we packed up and off we went which was sad because we won’t see each other for a while but we all had such a fun time. I went to Barking on the way home and saw my Auntie Lily and cousin Elaine so that was good to get to see them before I left.

Center Parcs With My Family 3

I meant to post this a few days ago but I’ve been getting over a horrible cold. So back to Center Parcs, the third day my brother and sister treated my mum and I to a pancake house breakfast so we half and halfed a sweet and a savoury pancake.

I added to my squashed penny collection – a vital part of any trip.

And then we went to the massive swim area where we’d been going each day… and that’s where the problems started. We were sat in one of the pool areas with jets and we’d seen this family about on previous days always sort of causing issues but nothing serious like sitting in the middle of one of the water slides for ages and that kind of thing. Anyway so this one guy from this odd family started staring at me and my mum,  not in a flattering way in a really creepy almost angry way and we were just sitting chatting as a family. So after a while he asked me do you have a problem to which I said uhh… yeaaah you keep staring at me and it’s weird so please stop. I have eyes that look where they want to look he shouted…aaand then things escalated and he was shouting at all of us and security had to get involved and then his family were shouting. Anyways… he picked on the wrong family because my family are not the quiet type who let things go. They gave us free coffee and took our statements about what happened and said they’d get back to us so we swam some more.

Then we went to a coffee tasting which was really good actually and we learned more about different coffees and different places they come from.

We got a keep cup and to pick a bag of coffee.

I liked the blonde mix best, Charles liked the strongest coffee of course.

So then after our tasting we spied the dodgy family again and we were thinking oh jeez what next, we were planning on going swimming again in the afternoon so we rang to find out what happened, long story short we got a free spa afternoon with tea and cake and the dodgy family got kicked out of Center Parcs the next day because it turned out they’d already been in a fist fight with another family over a rubber ring! So dodgy family if you’re out there… thanks for the free spa I guess? It would have cost us almost £200!