No Tom-Tom for you

Who needs it?

I couldn't see spending the pounds when the rental car guy asked if we wanted to rent a GPS unit for our trip around England.
I know it's nice to have a lovely British voice guide you around the roundabouts but the price? They wanted 10 pounds a day or roughly $16 for each of the 10 days we'd have the car.
That seemed like a lot so I said "No!" while Marc said "Yes!"
He didn't fight hard but I could tell he was dismayed.
In retrospect, I should've bowed to his inclination since he was the one driving but this was our fifth trip to England and we ought to know our way around by now, right?
Wrong.
I'd blessedly blocked out how stressful it is to not only be driving on the wrong side of the road from the wrong side of the car but to also be changing gears backwards and trying to make sense of the road signs at a good speed.
In addition, we'd been flying for more than 12 hours and we were kinda hashed.
So we took off in Enterprise's nice, new, silver Peugeot and headed toward Windsor out of London.
At maybe the third roundabout on our trip Marc started to turn to the right while I pointed to the left exit.
He lost confidence and swerved my direction at the last minute and we bounced off the high curb, bursting a tire and losing air.
We pulled over (which isn't easy in a country with almost no "hard shoulders" on their roads) and surveyed the damage.
The tire was flat, flat, flat and we had no clue what to do. The Peugeot's spare was underneath the car, held on by a bolt released by some unknown magic.
We ended up borrowing a mobile phone from a poor fella trying to eat his lunch nearby and called Enterprise. They sent out a handyman who changed the tire and then led us to a little town nearby with the proper tyre shop.
An hour or later we were good to go.
After that, we borrowed a Tom-Tom of one kind or another from my son and his wife and we weren't ever hopelessly lost again though it was still pretty scary.

The fish and chips were fine near the tyre shop

I feared curbs the rest of the trip, even dreamed we were hitting them. I braked as much as I could from my side and closed my eyes a lot.
We still don't know what the bill is. Marc thinks Enterprise will bear the cost while I'm expecting we bought them a nice new $300 Michelin tyre and a fee for the handyman visit.
Keep posted.

The difference between night and day

I couldn't figure out what was wrong with the airline notification process.
It was the day before we were to fly to England starting with a short flight to Las Vegas to make a connection to Virgin Atlantic.
That was scheduled for 9:50 in the morning with a long layover between flights so we could catch what is basically a Red-eye flight to Gatwick airport in London.
I was expecting an email inviting me to check in online so as I puttered around packing the last-minute items and getting the house ready for a two-week absence I kept checking the computer.
I wasn't getting anything.
By noon I was perturbed.

What you say?

I really like to have things together before we travel including boarding passes printed from the home computer.
What was the problem here?
Was Delta's site down?
Were they running the company with morons?
By mid-afternoon I was trying to break into the Delta website without an introductory email. I had a confirmation number for the flights I had booked way back in early January.
I gave the site my Delta Skymiles card numbers and every bit of information I had.
Finally I got this little note back.
"It is more than 24 hours before your flight departure time," said the message.
What?
I couldn't believe how dumb the website was.
It certainly WAS less than 24 hours until our flight.
It was now 4:30 in the afternoon and our flight was scheduled to leave at 9:50 p.m.
Whoa.
P.M.?
Did it really say P.M.?
It was supposed to say A.M.
I stared really hard at the print-out I had willing it to change before my eyes.
We couldn't go at 9:50 P.M.
I called Delta and told the nice lady my story. Certainly there'd been a mistake, right?
Right.
My mistake that ultimately cost us $500 for new last-minute tickets and $250 for the non-refundable tickets we wouldn't be using. Ouch.
About the only good thing about is it lets Marc off the hook for being in trouble for quite a while...His occasional misses and slip-ups don't quite match this one.

One week from today

Next week at this time, we'll have landed in Merry Ol' England's Gatwick airport — provided we survive the long, long flight across the pond — and greeting the little English lad who makes the trip worthwhile.
Jack is the 5-year-old son of my son Derek and his wife Helen, a grandson who lives in the middle of the United Kingdom where he's raising his parents in a fine fashion.
He's bright, lively and full of imagination and he likes jokes and magic so we're trying to store some up to share.
Knock-knock jokes are his favorite so I've been reading the Boy's Life website. (Knock knock. Who's there? Nacho. Nacho who? Nacho cheese! It's mine!)
We've been planning this for a while so now it seems like we suddenly thought of it.

I'm going around the house wondering if I've packed this and that and the other.
I keep telling myself to think England so I have enough cold-weather clothing.
I have British pounds in my purse and an English guidebook.
Marc is mentally preparing to drive on the wrong side of the road. I'm mentally preparing to deal with that.
It may be the last time we do this because we are getting older and the 12-hour sit in the airplane is becoming harder to bear.
I get restless and anxious and stressed.
To counteract this my doctor has loaded me with sleeping pills, pain pills, a neck collar and little face-masks.
I have Marc's new iPad to play Scrabble on and a tiny pillow.

I won't be blogging for awhile so bear with me and when I return, I promise to bring new stories and some good English knock-knock jokes, compliments of a 5-year-old funny boy.

High resolutions

No matter what Marc says or does to entice me to appreciate the fine world of high resolution, I remain largely unimpressed.
Granted, I like watching television when I can see the players and actors who don't appear to be in the middle of a snowstorm but when it gets to noticing the hair in their ears and the sweat on their brows, I can't see the attraction.
I lived (and live) through the first weeks after we bought our new flat screen TV with daily queries about how marvelous it was and is.
I nod when Marc asks me to notice how fine a picture we receive. I smile politely.
(I just want to see my soaps without interruption, please.)
Now, he's waxing on about the iPads -- yes, that's a plural because my son has asked us to bring him one when we come to England next week.
Not only did he wait anxiously for them but when the store mistakenly sold them when they didn't reach him on the phone, he was livid.
Finally, Monday, he got one in his hot little hands and it's the greatest thing since the invention of the wheel. He's flying high.
"Look at the resolution," he instructs. "Can you believe how crystal clear it is?"
I peek over and see a screen with little icons and little colors.
I watch as he works over the Google maps to show me where the little towns in England are with the cemeteries we want to visit.
I see fuzzy trees and rooftops and tiny roads.
"Isn't that great?" he implores.
Yeah, sure. It looks OK to me but I weary quickly as he drives on through the screen, on and on and on. He's already planning on new apps, new "clothes" for it and a keyboard while I'm still trying to see why one needs a Smartphone AND an iPad.
I guess it's pretty spectacular.
Everybody but me seems way impressed, so much so that they're spending beaucoup bucks on these little devices and willing to stand in long lines to do so.
I suppose I just don't understand what I'm seeing.
People tell me it's "so cool" and "way out there."
So why don't I care more?

It's not easy to be green

I thought I was doing pretty well keeping up.
I'd had three small grandchildren for four days and despite the rigorous demands that come with being 9 months, 3 years and 6, things had gone surprisingly well. (How does their mother do this?)
Everybody got fed. Everybody got clean clothes to wear and nearly everybody got regular naps.
I got the kindergartener to school every day on time and remembered to pick her up at 3 p.m.
I got the preschooler to preschool and back without fail even though one day she had to walk in wearing socks borrowed from her cousin because we forgot her shoes when we went to gymnastics.
Everybody got to gymnastics. Everybody got bedtime stories and baths.
I never once forgot the baby.
I even kept track of the magic blanket and the all-important pacifier.
So when I sat waiting for Adell to come out of school Friday I was surprised to see everyone was wearing green. I was curious as well.
Was it a school holiday? Was it "wear green" day and I didn't get the memo?
I realized the next day would be St. Patrick's Day but that was the next day and not today, Friday.
I became increasingly worried as floods of green-shirted kids came out of the doors.
Every child was wearing green but for Adell who was wearing a bright yellow but clean shirt, one of the uniform shirts her mother left me for her to wear.
I had remembered since it was Friday, she could wear jeans.
We had put a pretty yellow and brown bow in her hair.
She had shoes on and socks. But she wore no green.
When she came out, I hugged her and asked, "Were you supposed to wear green today? Did we miss a note?"
"It's OK," she said, looking at me rather sadly. "My mom gets notes on the Kindle so I got pinched."
Oh dear. Grandma missed that one.

Dead meat

It's been a week of frustration as we tried and tried to save our dying refrigerator.
At first, it looked hopeful although expensive.
The repair guy thought he could swap out the compressor in our 8-year-old Maytag machine and keep it running for another decade or at least a year.
He sent for one from Las Vegas and promised to put in in right away.
That meant we had to store our meat in a neighbor's freezer and limp along with a barely working fridge for the weekend.
We bought lots of ice and changed it out daily.
But after the new $400 compressor came in and was put in, things did not improve.
The ice cubes were water and the frozen juices were soggy in their cardboard containers.
We reported the bad news and the repair guy came back.
He wondered if the relay thingy was bad and replaced it with an industrial strength kind.
That heated things up, literally.
The freezer unit was now hot to the touch.
Inside the fridge, warm air was blowing through.
I moved all the meat out again and bought more ice.
Now, two more days later, I'm tossing all my meat.
We fired the repair guy and called R.C. Willey who kindly brought us a brand-new refrigerator for a mere $700.
It isn't as fancy as the one we lost.
It doesn't have all the removable shelving and the little light in the freezer but it freezes and it keeps things cold.
For me that's good enough.
And I'm resigned to throwing out approximately $100 worth of once-fresh meat. (It's especially hard now that it's refrozen and looks just fine.)
I've tried to tell myself it didn't get that warm or that thawed.
On the other hand, I don't want me, my husband or anybody I invited to dinner to be the dead meat in this story.

The Achilles Heel meal

Most of the time, I'm a frugal gourmet.
I buy meats at a discount. I use a menu so I can use up leftovers and things hanging around.
I carry coupons with me so I can get the best deal.
I'm generally watching the prices pretty carefully when we eat out which means Marc usually doesn't dare order anything more expensive than my dinner.
So when I threw caution to the oceans last weekend and ordered the $70 crab legs, he was pretty shocked.

The last time I did something so out of character was when we were in Hawaii with my daughter and she wanted crab.
"OK," I told her, "as long as it's not more than $50. That's the sky-high limit."
The market price that day was $49.99.
This time we were celebrating Marc's positive job review which came with a raise and a nice bonus so I was feeling pretty flush.
I will admit, though, $70 crab is way up there.
That's when the waitress moved in for the kill.
"You better grab it while you can," she said. "We may not be able to get crab for much longer."
She explained that the Alaskan fishing industry is worried about crab demand and availability. She said the industry board had cut what could be sold in half.
"That'll make it too expensive for us and for most customers," she said.
Suddenly $70 seemed cheap. That's what, a mere $35 a leg?
I ordered the crab legs.
I ate the crab legs.
I so thoroughly enjoyed the crab legs and Marc enjoyed the morsel I shared with him.
We don't regret the extravagance although I'm a little worried about my next crab meal. How much is that going to cost?