What To Wear?

I'm packing for our Ireland trip tonight (we leave tomorrow morning) and I realized that I wasn't sure what we should wear to a medieval banquet we're going to while there. So looking for more information online, I realized that I could search Flickr, a website which people share their photos on. Sure enough, I found recent pictures from the medieval banquet at Dunguaire Castle in Kinvara, Ireland. From a quick scan of various people's vacation pictures I determined that jeans were appropriate...you gotta love the worldwide web.

USB Flash Memory Car Adapter

We recently purchased a USB adapter for the car and I'm really happy with it! It might sound like a very silly purchase considering that we don't own a car, but it only cost 5 pounds ($10) and we rent cars often enough that we knew it'd come in handy. We tested it out this past weekend and we're surprised how excellent the sound quality is considering the cheap price.

It's really cool because it works with any USB flash drive, so I loaded up a 2GB one tonight with songs for our 5-day road trip through Ireland, which starts on Saturday. In case you haven't seen one of these before, below is the picture from Amazon where we purchased it. It plugs into the cigarette lighter and then you tune it to an unused radio frequency...much like a drive-in movie :)

Read It Swap It

I recently joined a free online group here in the U.K. called Read It Swap It and am really happy with it. The idea is simple - all members post books that they want to trade. If you see a book you like on someone's list you submit a request to trade with them. If they're interested in a book on your list, you swap books. Otherwise you just indicate you're not interested in any of their books.

So far I've traded 9 books and I love it because the only related cost is postage, and light books cost as little as 50 pence to ship. I only wish I had all my books being stored back home because I'll probably never re-read them and was only hanging onto them because I didn't know what else to do with them.

It's been especially convenient for travel books as we don't intend to return to anywhere we've been, with the exception of London and Paris. For example, I recently traded our Venice pocket map for a Barcelona guidebook.

I still get most of my books from the library, but it's not very convenient for us to get to the library, the loan periods are short, and you're limited as to how many items you can take out at a time. I really, really miss the Madison public library system, but being able to swap books online is a nice alternative.

The Questions Never End!

I'm enrolling students this week at work, approximately 150 each day, and I cannot believe how many students comment on my accent. I get so many questions from each that it literally takes me twice as long as my co-workers to process students.

They are the same old questions...
- You're not from here, are you?
- Where are you from? (when I answer Wisconsin, it's always met with a very blank look)
- Why did you move here?
- Do you like living in the U.K.?
- Do you want to move back home?
- And my favorite question...are you sure you're American? You sound Canadian.

I'm sure all these questions seem innocent enough but the enrollment process doesn't really allow time for chit chat, so it's become quite annoying. Especially when the men tell me they want to talk more with me and then ask where my office is located (there is no academic reason that they would need to get in contact me with after enrollment).

Oh and the students who think they're being funny end our conversations with "have a nice day." Something you would never hear a British person say except when trying to imitate an American.

One Year Left

Well, in just one year now I will officially be old. In the meantime, I'm going to live it up and travel as much as possible because we've decided to start trying for kids next summer and then our lives will completely change! I suppose it's all relative and that many, many people think 30 is really young, but it's one of those ages where you have to really start seriously thinking about having kids, buying a house, making sure your career is on track and that you're contributing to a 401K.

This past year living in the UK has been an adventure and I'm happy to say that we feel really settled now and are definitely enjoying living here. Chris is back to his old habits. He's just purchased an Axis & Allies board game and he's also doing his first triathlon in England in less than 3 weeks. We never thought triathlons would be a possibility for him due to not owning a bike. However, our Italian friend Dario really badly wanted to try doing a triathlon and didn't want to do it alone, so he had his Dad drive a bike over from Italy for Chris to use.

As much as we love living here, we're both looking forward to returning home...hopefully in 2009, if everything goes as planned. Chris will start job searching as early as next summer, so we could be back even sooner!

Thank you to everyone who called and sent birthday cards. I really enjoyed hearing from you.