Images by John 'K'

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last update, so what’s been happening in my life…..

 

Had my first American Thanksgiving, but without my wife here as she was back in the UK for a week. Did turkey, stuffing (the only real disaster of the meal – American stuffing is notling like English stuffing [give me a box of Paxo any day]), mashed and roasted potatoes, and a mix of carrot, broccoli and cauliflower as veg, with gravy. We were to have had Danish apple pie and custard for dessert, but we were so stuffed that we postponed that for the following day!

 

I took Thanksgiving week off to be at home with the kids while my wife was back in England (seemed a good deal as I only had to use 3 days of vacation) and during the time I was off, my youngest daughter played in her first proper high school basketball game (and they won), we got a pool/air-hockey table (early Christmas present for the family), I put a load of furniture together (Ikea getting yet more of my hard earned money), and moved a load of stuff into storage. Also kept the local recycling center busy with all the packaging from all of the Ikea stuff we’ve had since we moved in (2 full loads of my SUV, just of cardboard).

 

My wife passed her California driving test last week (and did it with less errors than me, but I got less questions wrong in the written part of the test), so she’s now fully documented and in the system. As expected she was a bit of a wreck before the test (she hates exams – something she’s going to have to work on – can’t keep using it as an excuse), and having an unexpected extra delay before the test as a result of one of the examiners dropping out at the last minute didn’t help, but she kept it together enough to pass, so well done to her!

 

Work is busy as ever – as the company I work for continues to do well and expand, we are seeing a slow but steady trickle of people who have been in from the early days leaving because they prefer the small company/start-up environment that we are steadily loosing as a result of our size and success, and of course the new people, while being good at what they do, have to be brought up-to-speed on all sorts of things unique to our way of doing things.

 

We’ve decorated the house for Christmas – got a nice tree arrangement and some lights and other stuff in the front room, and we’ve been slowly but surely affected by the brainwashing over here and as with at least half of the rest of the street, we now have an array of lights up outside the house. We’ve not gone over the top like some though!

 

We’ve finished all of the medical stuff we needed to get done for our greencard application, and I’ve found out that as well as having a natural immunity to TB (I knew that anyway), I also have it against measles, mumps and rubella, and my prostrate is normal (ouch). So all that is now holding us up with the application is signing off on some corrected paperwork, and getting some photos done.

 

So on the whole, things going well over here.