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Oh, and after talking about how I wanted to watch Game of Thrones in the HWEDT comments last week, I had a house guest just hand me a hard drive with all three seasons on it, unprovoked! So today I'll comment about how much I want pumpkin flavored goodies, or at least some canned pumpkin so I can make my own goodies, and see what happens!

My daughter was sick for really the first time ever. She had a fairly high fever and I had to figure out how to convert from fahrenheit to celsius so that I could talk to the doctor here. Like, I know in the US they tell you to give tylenol if the fever is over 100.4...but if I tell the doctor that here they will think my baby is melting. I've basically had no sleep for 2 days, but her fever broke and she seems better this morning. Also, last night at 9 or so the doorbell rang and my husband was far too busy playing plants versus zombies to answer the door. So I went to the door joking that I hope there were no Luther style killers waiting for me outside (we finally watched this season of Luther last week!). So I opened the door expecting to see a friend or something, and it was a police officer! That was startling. Apparently the house across the street was broken into earlier in the evening and they were looking for witnesses.

When I was trying to find daycare/preschool places for my daughter I looked at a place that only did positive reinforcement. It was really strange to watch, but the kids mostly seemed to respond well to it. But the teachers had to be the most patient saintly people ever. There is no way I would be able to remain that calm with so many children.

I knew so many people in college like this. And I went to a really big state college too, not a private christian college or anything. 2 of my roommates had promised God that they wouldn't kiss a boy till they were married, and they knew some many other people who had done the same. They even went to a public proposal type situation where the couple had never kissed, I think they actually had their first kiss after she said yes. My non "no-kiss" roommate who went said it was the most awkward thing she had ever seen. Oh and one of the 'no-kiss' roommates had a gentleman caller who told me one time that network television was evil and he seriously only ever watched cartoons, like actual disney cartoons. A 20 year old dude. It was really strange.

Yeah, that's the reason I took so long to start Doctor Who too...I didn't know where to start. But they rebooted the series in 2005, so the 2005 "series one" is where I started. They kind of introduce the major things, and I just wiki'ed the things it seemed like I should know more about. They have series 1-5 of the reboot on the UK netflix...have they started netflix in Germany yet? Maybe I'll check out the Spanish Rosetta Stone. I actually took 4 years of Spanish in high school, but my pronunciation and vocabulary are shameful and the older I get the more I wished I'd actually tried to learn it in high school.

Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones are on my to do list. I'm working through Doctor Who now and I'm pretty happy I waited to start watching it. So does that mean the Rosetta Stone disks don't work well? I was considering trying to work on my Spanish, you know, take advantage of the time off work.

The only tv I remember from my trip to Frankfurt was a lot of Family Guy in German. I'm not particularly a fan of Family Guy in English, but it relies so much on pop culture references that I really don't understand how it can be appealing in German. I also hear that they have a lot of "Big Bang Theory" there (it's on all the time here in the UK too) so I'm just generally super offended by the tv that they choose to export. And yes, Dean is the absolute worst!

We should start our own European-living monsters club!

:(

A very uneventful day for me. I can't even remember anything that happened, other than the fact that stupid 5* changed the time that Gilmore Girls comes on AGAIN! I think this is the 4th time it's changed since I moved here last spring. How am I supposed to keep up with a 10 year old tv show if you keep changing your schedule, stupid tv channel? But seriously, it's the only good thing on all afternoon and now it's on during my coffee time.

I feel you on the time difference thing. Have you considered lovely Scotland in October? I hear it's supposed to be great. And by "I hear" I mean that I keep telling myself it won't be that bad or that cold or that grey already in October, right?!?

I just did a somewhat similar move to a place where I don't know anyone, and for me i've been able to deal with it so far (haven't lived through a winter yet!) by joining things. It sounds kinda dorky, but I looked up a bunch of clubs and classes and stuff before I moved and have been trying them out one by one in order to meet people. It's worked out mostly well so far. I've met lots of people in the American group, the ones with mostly local have been kind of a bust so far, nice people but no "hey let's go grab a coffee" friends yet. I'm pretty shy so I had to set myself a goal at the first thing I went to to make just one friend, meet just one person that will make you want to go to a second thing. And I'm trying to get out of my comfort zone a bit too....I even signed up for this really hippy dance class because I knew a few of the people doing it, despite the fact that I can't dance at all. So I'd suggest trying to find clubs in your area, maybe something like a college alumni group or something where you have some commonality. Maybe sign up for a class, like cooking or photography or yoga or join a book club or something. Oh and in my experience I've found that life can be pretty good when you have a job you like with people that you like, despite what your personal life might be like. So if you think the job situation is going to be good and make you happy, then you can get through a few bad months before you meet new ppl.

It was mostly an uneventful day. No nutella but I think I've finally found the motivation to start working on a paper for my former job, so that hopefully my former job will turn into my future job when I get back to the states. Also, I've decided that since I'm living in the UK I may as well give in and watch Doctor Who or whatever. I watched the first episode of the reboot (I guess...this whole 50 years thing confuses me) and it was pretty good. Hmm...I hope this doesn't affect my paper writing.....

You should totally look her up. I had a similar situation in h.s. except that I was the girlfriend! My enemy ended up going to the same university as me and we became very good friends. I think it actually freaked out people that we knew from back home. One time some random chick from h.s. came up to her and tried to gossip about me and she sorta flipped out on the chick.

I remember being really upset that the church I got married at made you get pre-approval of all music before the ceremony. My mom tried to defend the church by saying that some people choose crazy music for their wedding and she used the example of a high school classmate of hers that had "You Ain't Nothing But a Houndog" play when he entered the church but I think now we have a way better example.

My day kinda sucked. Someone stole 60 pounds out of my wallet and the only 2 options for who could have done it are both shitty options. Other than that I guess my day wasn't that bad. I did have to babysit a friend's kid for several hours and y'all 2 year olds just don't quit. At one point he was standing on my coffee table trying to somehow both pull a bike up there with him while also trying to jump onto the couch at the same time. Oh and I ordered my favorite sandwich at my lunch place and I think they forgot it on the grill because it was kinda burned and all of the cheese had puddled outside of the sandwich. So I was basically just eating hard toast with the essence of brie.

Flanny! There's a documentary on over here tonight about 1D super fans and like the new face of fandom in the twitter age or something. So basically all week they've been airing commercials (adverts?) of screaming girls and girls writing Louis/Harry fanfic and hating each other for having iphone photos with the guys. And these girls like find out what hotel the guys are staying at and then just go rent rooms in the same hotel so that maybe they will run into them. They interviewed 2 of the girls on the UK version of the Today Show yesterday, and accidentially mentioned that 1D would be on the program next week and these girls flipped. I'm pretty sure they went and hid in the bathroom afterwards to wait till next week. Anyway, maybe you can find it somehow in the US. Ok I just looked it up, it has a super creative title "Crazy about One Direction".

I've never been to LA so this might be a stupid question....but why would Michael Jackson's death affect traffic on the freeways? Like, I get that traffic by maybe the news station, morgue, hospital, his house or whatever could be screwed. Do I just not understand the geography of LA?

I had an ex that I was really hung up on for a long time after we broke up and I recently found out via facebook that he is potentially a preacher. Also, there was a dude I dated in high school that I know was hung up on me for a long time, and now he's got a girlfriend/wife type person with fake boobs and a fake tan and posts pictures of his gun collection all of the time. I guess I should clarify here that I don't have fake body parts and am fairly liberal and not so churchy so either of these guys would have been horrible matches with me in the long term. They were probably pretty terrible matches at the time but I didn't really realize it, or they didn't in the case of gun guy. I guess what i'm trying to say is that you're probably going to find out some really weird shit about this dude in 5 years and think: "whew, I dodged a bullet there!"

I've been watching a lot of Gilmore Girls recently too, and I forgot how truly awful the whole Dean/Lindsey/Rory thing was. Why oh why does Rory have such terrible taste in men?

PS, I hope your eye is doing better!

My day went ok. I'm still in internet purgatory over here, when I asked the customer support lady how it could possibly take so long to get a permit for a crane she just laughed at me and said it could take up to a year. I'm sure she told her coworkers all about the silly impatient American she had to talk to today. Anyway, in a fit of desperation after that phone conversation I discovered that I could actually stream Netflix over my phone's 3G...it doesn't have enough signal to update my facebook properly or download more than one podcast at a time but I can watch 3 episodes of Orange is the New Black over it. So yay, I can watch some American TV that isn't The Big Bang Theory!!! Oh and sorry Britons for abusing your 3G network. In other good news, I got to go on a mini vacation last weekend and saw lots of Shetland ponies. Unfortunately I missed the pony parade where they were all wearing their sweaters though.

Hope you feel better and ugh about weight obsessed parents. I made the mistake of telling my mom about said calorie counting app and now when I go to visit all I hear is "how would I enter that meal...I can't find this brand in the data base...why does the app say it was 170 calories while their website says its 160."

There was a Jehovah's Witness center right around the corner from my last house and they would come around our neighborhood once every couple months. Usually on a Saturday morning at like 10am....which is an inconvenient time for pretty much everyone on the planet. We had a big window right next to the front door and they had a direct view of our couch from the porch. They would ring the bell and my husband would look up from the tv, make direct eye contact, turn back around and change the channel. So I guess my point is, they are probably used to dealing with assholes.

I got new glasses today and they are very trendy. I keep catching glimpses of myself in the mirror and half the time I think they are awesome but the other half I think they are way too huge for my face. It doesn't really matter because I wear contacts most of the time anyway, so the only person who is going to see them is my husband. If my hipster tendencies bothered him he would have stopped talking to me ten years ago when I wouldn't shut up about The Strokes, so I think I'm safe with the glasses. Also, I'm kinda bummed because I found the perfect AC Slater picture to replace my avatar with, but I keep getting an error message when I try to replace it. Boo.

For the 2 months that I've lived in the UK I've been in internet purgatory and the only things on TV have been like 5,000 documentaries about kings I didn't even know existed, and since I've been back home on vacation Luther has started back up, Top of the Lake has aired and now freakin Cumberbatch has been on Top Gear. I'm missing everything. All I'm saying is that royal baby better stay inside another week!

That guy won Eurovision....like people from multiple other countries voted for him? Crazy. I'm going to have to look him up on youtube now. In my imagination everyone in Finland looks like him, or is at least tolerant to all of the other Finnish citizens who walk around looking like him. Also, yes, I totally agree. I voted for Greece and even bought "Alcohol is Free". My husband thought I was crazy, but he voted for Romania so really, you tell me who the crazy one is. I also think those Greek dudes have some pretty big balls to come out with a song titled "Alcohol is Free" after all of the bailouts and whatnot.

So I have a pretty big obsession with Finland right now, mostly based on Eurovision. Last year (2012) was the first time I got to watch and during the voting/results show they had all the countries report their votes on satellite. All of the other countries had very young very pretty/handsome reporters standing in front of their famous landmarks, e.g. pretty lady in front of the Eiffel tower. Finland had a dude dressed up like one of the members of GWAR (maybe he was one of the dudes from GWAR, are they from Finland?) standing in front of a green screen with like rainbows in the background or something crazy like that. I saw that and decided that I had to get to Finland as soon as possible.

you're right, I totally need to change my avatar. I'm going to have to search for the perfect AC Slater picture though, maybe one from the dance contest. This is my new weekend goal.

Northern Scotland

I've been wondering how ghostwatch was going, and was sort of nervous that I hadn't seen you post a lot lately. I just don't ever go into my basement, so I just totally avoid my ghost dungeon situation. Although i recently found out that our neighbors that share one wall with us haven't lived in the house for like 30 years and they are apparently very creepy looking and come by every once in a while in the middle of the to check on all their stuff. And supposedly their house is just filled with weird junk like old fashioned baby buggies. Creepy.

Today's pretty good. We are back in the US for the 4th and that means: 1. I got to eat Jimmy Johns and a Dr. Pepper for lunch 2. I'm back in the land where it actually gets dark at night, so I can sleep at night, even with jetlag 3. The baby did pretty good on the plane and doesn't seem to be having jetlag either 4. The weather here is almost unreal it's so amazing,upper 80s to low 90s and no humidity. 5. Oh and before we left last weekend I got to go to a wedding in a castle and and I finally saw a highland cow!!

Not to be a buzzkill (ha), but are you sure this super Christian wedding is going to have alcohol? I've been to many a Texas Christian wedding with zero alcohol and they are not very fun. The last one was with both my mom and husband, and they both kept leaning over to me asking where the wine was and what did I mean there wasn't even any wine. Just thought you might want to be prepared for the possibility and maybe pack an emergency flask.

I had a pistachio marzipan on vacation a few weeks ago that was sooo good. I'm so mad at myself for only buying one. And now I'm jealous of your cheesecake too. I need more pistachio flavored desserts.

Eh, my day had ups and downs. I've been pretty homesick lately, which is dumb because I'm actually going home to visit my family next week. So really I should be happy that I get to see everyone and hang out in 100 degree weather again. So to top off my homesickness, I turned on the tv this morning to watch 2 week old episodes of the Ellen Show, as I do every morning. But instead of Ellen, it was this reality show/documentary made about 10 years ago about the place I used to work at. Seeing people with fulfilling jobs in my adopted hometown is not what I needed this morning. But then I got my new favorite panini for lunch today, brie, bacon (american bacon) and caramelized onions. So really it's not too bad.

I just want to know more details about this pistachio cheesecake. Was it awesome or the most awesome? Did it actually taste like pistachios or just green food coloring and almonds?

He'd probably drink all of the moon-gin too. We've got to protect the moon-gin!!

And sorry for the random stream of consciousness, I've been wanting to talk about this all day but I'm really against politics on Facebook and it's not something i'd want to start talking about with brand new expat friends.

y'all, I can't explain how homesick this makes me. It's been really hard to follow this from halfway around the world. And I would typically qualify that statement by saying something like, "not like I could have made a difference" but the whole "citizen's filibuster" or whatever they're calling the last 10 minutes was freakin amazing. I know Texas gets a much deserved bad rap with Ted Cruz and Rick Perry and whatnot, but we have a great history of total badass women. I was watching some youtube videos of this with my daughter this morning, she just learned how to clap this weekend, and while the crowd was shouting and cheering she started to clap and shout. Hopefully one day she'll be a badass woman from Texas too.

like that wasn't already stuck in my head!