Mum’s Visit & Line Dancing

Autumn (or fall) is truly upon on us now and we are still being plagued by bloody leaves everywhere but my Mum enjoyed getting some good photos of the colours and the lake by our house. I think my plan of action will be to wait until more of the leaves have fallen off the trees until I rake again because last time I raked the next day they were all back!

Also in other news my green card FINALLY turned up which is good because the stamp visa in my passport expired and I couldn’t leave the country because I wouldn’t be allowed back in. I mean we haven’t planned to go abroad anywhere yet but it’s nice to have the freedom!

So that was a relief. My Mum was still visiting so we took a couple of trips out and about to hibachi (where I got more delicious tuna) and the four story mall in Providence. We also finally went to the Nathan Hale State Forest in Coventry which we live right by but we hadn’t got round to walking in because there are no trail maps! It was very pretty though there were signs up that said hunting allowed so I don’t know if that means you might get shot at during a nice leisurely walk?

One night we went to Cadillac Ranch for some line dancing which was so funny. None of us were that good at it but we soldiered on.

My favourite thing to do was watch this guy dance, he seemed to know all the steps but he just wanted to do his own thing and the lady showing everyone how to do the dances seemed annoyed.

 

My job is still going good. I was pretty confused the other day when the nice ladies upstairs brought me a cake… mainly because it wasn’t my birthday. Somehow they’d gotten confused and thought it was my birthday.

So one of the ladies made a quick adjustment and now we have some tasty cake at work for a few days. Also that night Kim’s parents threw a party for us at a nice Italian restaurant to celebrate our wedding so we have extra cake!

The last day of my mum’s visit Kim had to go back to work so my mum and I took a trip to Lighthouse Point Park in East Haven. We weren’t really sure what it was going to be like but it was a lovely area and there was a little walk we went on, we got some nice snaps and we found a ladies handbag in the sand so we handed that in. Someone had a wedding on so people were arriving dressed up to a large glass building that had a carousel in it.

After our nice beachy walk we got coffee and drove back.

But not before stopping at Buckland Hills Mall in Manchester for some Taco Bell. Taco Bell is like Mexican food McDonalds and none of Kim’s family likes it but my Mum and I are obsessed.

My mum’s flight back to London the next day wasn’t until the evening so we had brunch at IHOP and we were all so stuffed.

And then it was back to Boston for my Mum’s flight home.

Getting Ready For The Big Move

I have been busy busy busy preparing to emigrate. Although the visa is now all in order there’s a lot of tying up loose ends. I sent 5 boxes off to Connecticut and all the rest of my things have to be given away or sold (which is endlessly time consuming!). I ordered and received my international driving permit which is all a bit bizarre. I just had to pay £8.50, no learning, no test or instructions of how to drive abroad of any kind and I got this old fashioned pre-war looking thing in khaki cardboard.

We finally got our house sorted so Kimberly and her parents have been setting everything up, assembling new furniture and unpacking the old from her old apartment. She’s had the joy of setting up the internet and Sears customer service and meanwhile I’ve been trying to catch up with all of my friends and family. Including a dinner where my friend Emily and I were sat next to this odd wall hanging in an Italian restaurant.

I sent my little fur babies off on a plane and they’re getting collected by Kimmy today from Boston, they were extremely disgruntled at being stuffed into crates and I can’t imagine they’re enjoying the flight very much but we just couldn’t possibly leave them behind. Bunny (the cat) was wise to me and immediately scrambled to escape as I packed her up but poor Barclay was so shocked he allowed himself to be put in with just an upset meow.

In the mean time I live my life in countdowns – only 6 days until my family vacation to Centerparcs and 25 days until I move.

 

No New News

So Kim and I haven’t been up to much, just working working working… and getting taxed taxed taxed. I picked up my visa from the courier finally and I booked my flight so I leave the UK on the 9th July.

It’s pretty flimsy looking, it’s just a sticker on one page of my passport, there isn’t much to it. I’ve been selling some of my stuff in preparation for the big move, the kitties have assisted. They’re booked on a flight mid June however the new house that Kim has been buying keeps getting the closing date pushed back because of the crappy sellers. We are now meant to be closing tomorrow which is the fourth date we have been given but there are still outstanding things which the seller hasn’t done AND in the mean time the house may have gone into foreclosure because they haven’t been paying their mortgage (ugh!) so who knows when we will actually get the keys – what a disaster.

Other than that I have mainly been living as a vampire on night shift (being nocturnal not sucking blood), last night I met up with my lovely Russian buddy Anastasia for a catch up and we were on the watch for the army in Norwich (after the latest terrorist attack) but we didn’t see any soldiers. A couple of weeks ago I saw my friends from uni too which is a feat in itself as we all work shift jobs. We went for a nice meal and afterwards got coffees at Franks Bar where we discovered a drawer in one of the tables that people had filled with notes. We read through them all until Sarah discovered a Polaroid of someone’s butt… then we decided to stop because she felt “unclean”.

So nothing exciting really, less than a month until my little family getaway with my mum and brother and sister, my dear chum Crissy is back visiting from Australia soon and has kindly offered to take me to the airport (fool that she is). I still haven’t organised to ship my boxes to the states yet and I also need to book a road trip in to see my great aunt before I leave. I offered to see my dad before I went but as always he seems supremely uninterested and said he was working abroad a lot. They should put that on his tombstone instead of “loving father” he could just have “worked a lot”. Anyway time for a nap as later tonight I’ll be working a lot.

 

TB? Or Not TB?

That is the question! The times are moving ever closer to my USA interview date at the embassy but before I attend my interview I had to drop into London to get a medical completed. I decided I’d just have a day trip to London and not stay over but I didn’t fancy driving or parking so I decided to take the coach for the princely sum of £26.50 return.  It left pretty early so I thought I’d walk into town half an hour before so I could have a nice breakfast at McDonalds and wake up a bit… and it was closed. It opened at the exact same time the bus was due. Annoying.

But I had a nice semi snooze on the coach which dropped me off at Victoria in London, then it was onto the underground. I read once that the underground has its own species of mosquito which is crazy because the pollution is so bad down there it’s amazing anything could survive.

I was a bit early to my medical so I stopped off for some lunch at Wagamamas and got a tasty katsu curry to help me get over the lamentable loss of breakfast.

And then off I trotted to my medical. Now there is only one private medical company that does the medical checks for the American Embassy at £330 a pop so it must be a pretty good earner. I had to give them all sorts of samples of bodily fluids, have a chest xray, have another tetanus jab (which they forgot to charge me for, score!), get inspected all over for drug injection marks and have my heart and lungs listened to. All in all it took about an hour and I got a gown to wear that made me look like a Jedi Knight.

So that was that and assuming everything is fine it gets sent off to the embassy ready for my interview at the end of the month. I assume I don’t have TB. It was still quite early in the day so I decided to have a shufti around the Victoria and Albert Museum because I hadn’t been before.

The museum had a lot of home furnishings and was split into geographical sections.

There was lots of sculptures, massive Persian carpets, pottery and wall ornaments, thrones and beds.

But my favourite was all the odd old fashioned clothes, it’s amazing how short people were back then from malnourishment and disease. There was something very human about seeing real people’s clothes that you just can’t get from furniture or portraits. They had Margaret Thatcher’s clothes, beautiful kimonos with their matching obis, clothes from the 60s… and this lovely number which I think looks rather mad. I mean you could hardly nip to the shops in it could you? The only useful thing I can think of is if you wanted to make a career out of smuggling because you could fit a lot under her fake hips. Or you could wear it through Heathrow security to infuriate the guards and fellow passengers?

Mid afternoon it was time to let them eat cake.

But I fancied a nice scone instead in the courtyard garden.

And then it was time to head back home. The coach went right through the center of London past Parliament and Westminster Bridge where the terror attacks were, the place was absolutely crawling with armed police everywhere but there were still so many tourists so nothing seems to be deterring them for business as usual, which is how it should be I think.

 

March Update

Emigration is slowly inching a bit closer, I now have my medical scheduled and my interview at the American Embassy in April so I’ve been getting things ready for that. Assuming everything goes according to plan at the interview it’s go time and I have 6 months to emigrate.

With that in mind I’ve started to get rid of a lot of my things and pack what I want to take. Bunny, Kim’s cat, has been excited about this because now the bookcase is empty it’s provided her with extra climbing opportunities.

I sold a ton of stuff one morning at a car boot sale, I’d never done a car boot sale but it was pretty good, my things were mostly too low value or time consuming to list each individually on eBay or Gumtree and it feels so wasteful to throw good things away. Everything I didn’t sell at the car boot sale I took to Barnardos and I now have a lot less, win win.

I’ve been working a lot of nights still, trying to get shifts in before moving and then not being able to work for a while until I get a social security number etc. I took a Makaton course with work the other day which is a form of sign language and that was really fun. However the course was after a night shift which was really not fun and I drank about a gallon of coffee because after the course, as I was in the city, Kim and I went on a cinema date to see Beauty and the Beast (we go watch the same movie at the same time in different countries!). Looking forward to when that’s done with.

Other updates are that Kim is looking to buy a house for us to live in once I move, although her parents have very kindly offered to have us stay with them as long as need be it’ll be the first time we’ve been legally allowed to live together properly and I’m looking forward to spending time with each other as a couple. Kim’s been pre-approved for a mortgage which, with her student loan, took some doing! In the UK when you look to buy a house you can just contact the estate agent to view and if you like it you put an offer in, in the USA to view a house you really need your own real estate agent and they contact the sellers real estate agent so that’s an added complication but we’ve found a realtor now called Melinda and we feel like she’s a good fit. We’ve got our eye on a house we like in our budget that’s in a nice area and Kim’s viewing that today but if not we will keep looking and hope to be moved in soon so I can send the cats over ahead of myself.

In the mean time my Mum, my brother Charles and my sister Bronte have booked to go on a little trip to the new Center Parcs in Woburn in June. We used to go as kids to the one in Longleat and although us kids have wives and girlfriends and boyfriends we thought it’d be nice to have one last trip where it’s just the four of us so we are all really excited for a bit of nostalgia before I move away. And that’s pretty much it for March!