A Crossroads

Well, no I haven't dropped off the face of the earth, but I have been spending some time in contemplation. I have increasingly felt that my blogging life has reached a kind of crossroads and it's time for decisions to be made.

When I started The Pea Green Boat back in January 2008, my purpose was to learn about the art of blogging. I wanted to explore my writing, commit to regular creativity and learn about building an online presence. What I got in return though was far more than I bargained for.

Through my written journal, I've made connections with people all over the world and in some cases built friendships. I've learned a lot about myself too which has given me a confidence that has reached into other areas of my life. This renewed self esteem and love for the written word, prompted me to begin another blog last June, which focuses on only one aspect of my life - knitting. Could I continue to write animatedly about a seemingly narrower subject?

The answer has been a resounding 'yes.' I've discovered that I love writing about knitting (who'd have thought it?) and somehow I'm never at a loss for something to say on the matter. In turn this has led to almost total immersion in my subject (yes, the house is full of needles, yarn and knitting publications) and even public recognition (at The Little Guy's end-of-season basketball party yesterday, my constant knitting at practices was applauded in the coaches speech!)

It seems natural now then, to have reached a crossroads (induced by time restraints). I have to decide which blog to pursue as life is just too hectic for me to balance both for much longer. On reflection, I feel that The Pea Green Boat (in it's present form at least) has served its original purpose. I won't be abandoning ship (I'll still be checking up on you all), but I have decided that the time has come to make for land and, perhaps dry dock for a while.

In the meantime, I intend to go out on a high note. Last week Rudee at A Knitting Nurse sent me this award which I would like to pass on. Rudee has been a wonderful cyber friend; a true supporter, so if I could I'd award the award back to her! But in the tradition of 'sharing the love' I'm going to pass it on to 8 others whose friendship I have been lucky enough to enjoy.

According to the authors of this award, this blog invests and believes in the PROXIMITY - nearness in space, time and relationships! These blogs are exceedingly charming. These kind bloggers aim to find and be friends. They are not interested in prizes or self-aggrandizement. Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers! Deliver this award to eight bloggers who must choose eight more and include this cleverly-written text into the body of their award."

So, my friends, here's to you Anvilcloud, Expatmum, Ali, Donna, Almost American, Ped Crossing, Bella and Sarah. Thanks for all your support, your friendship and your great blogs!

BTW - if you're at all interested in knitting, e-mail me at wtknits@gmail.com and I'll send you the link to my knitting blog.

Feeling.....Completely Worn Out!

I'm knackered. There's no way around it, I'm completely and utterly cream crackered. My body aches in places I didn't know I had and I could fall asleep at the drop of a hat. What incredibly contorting sport have I been involved in now, you ask? Well, I've been........

PAINTING!

We had a 4 day weekend here in the US and I just couldn't let that large block of time go by without attempting to show my house a little TLC. I was determined to set to and paint DD1's bedroom before she moves out. We haven't managed to put a lick of paint on the inside of this house in the four years since we've been here (and I don't think it's seen any since it was built 18yrs ago), so it's long overdue. We've been rather preoccupied with adapting to American life, organizing 3 kids lives and, oh yes, staying employed.

I knew that eventually it would fall to me to grapple the DIY reins out of ExpatOwl's hands and begin the task of painting this house. The fact that he's only had one day off work in the past 6 weeks made that job a lot easier than I originally anticipated and the fact that he was away this weekend too has meant that there's been one less person to try to fit into the house amongst the removed furniture and general clutter that spewed out of DD1's bedroom. To reinforce the shift of power, I donned his work overalls, rolled up at the bottoms and sexily tied with a piece of string at the middle to give me a waist. With an old shower cap on my head, I looked.............determined!

I was on a tight schedule. I knew that I would have to fill all the holes in the walls on Thursday night if I was going to be able to sand and prime the next day, so as soon as basketball practice was over, I set to with my spatula. Friday I was back to work by 9am and spent the whole day sanding, masking off and priming the entire room (including the ceiling). As it started to go dark, I got the arc lights out. The windows were open, but even although it was freezing outside, we worked up quite a bit of heat rollering everything in sight. Even The Little Guy donned an oversize T-shirt and shower cap from the dollar store and splattered paint all over himself and the closet walls!

I finished at midnight. The rest of the family had drifted off to bed long beforehand, so I was left to wash the rollers while I contemplated the bomb site that was now my kitchen, the scene of hot and cold running snacks all day long.

I was back on the job after Saturdays basketball defeat, this time armed with the most fantastic ceiling paint I've ever seen advertised. It goes on pink and then dries white, which turned out to be marvellous as I was trying to paint on top of the white undercoat. DD1 looked a little apprehensive as I turned her ceiling a bright fushia pink with my roller expertly duct taped to an old broom handle (frugal's in remember.) Two hours later though, it had dried to a lushious white.

Sunday saw the two of us painting down to the wire. I was masking and unmasking walls (ofcourse she wanted them two different colours!) but the end result has been worth the work. It looks GREAT!! Now I just have to do the rest of the house (groan.)

Just as I finished scraping the last of the paint off my dry, worn hands, there was a knock at the door. I opened it to reveal a tall, dark-haired young man sporting two earrings and a clipboard.

"Good afternoon, Ma'am, and how are you?"
"Fine," I replied cautiously, closing the front door behind me.
"I was just calling to see whether you would like a free estimate on how much it would cost to paint the inside of your house," he said, brightly.

What are the odds, I thought. What are the friggin' odds that some dude would come knocking on my door at this very second asking me that!

Through gritted teeth I joyfully announced that I was just in the process of doing it myself, then I came back in, closed the door and fell into a heap of uncontollable laughter.

"Ok, God. Very funny!!"

'Check' Update

Hurrah! It was an admin error!

The school just called to say that the check/cheque for $4 had been placed under DD1's account not DD2. This is actually the most logical conclusion when you are presented with a lost check and have two potential people it could be assigned to. Although there were only 18 people in the whole school required to pay this particular bill, it was logical to assign our check to the person who has been at the school the longest and also comes before her sister alphabetically.

In future I will always use Patty's tip and write my child's name on the checks/cheques memo line. Oh, the perils of having more than one child in the same school. After 4yrs with them all in different schools, I'm just not used to it!! LOL!

Just Checking/Chequeing?

Do you know, I've got so used to writing the word 'check' for cheque that the British spelling even looks wrong to me now. Goodness, could that mean that I've been here too long? It has only been 4yrs; things are actually still new, so probably not. It's more likely because the word 'check' has been used rather a lot in our house recently.

It took me a while to get back into the hang of checks/cheques. Norwegians don't use them. Moving around town there without a cheque book felt like walking the highwire without a safety net to begin with. I'd wander around like "loadsamoney" weighted down with cash in an attempt to avert a financial crisis such as finding myself skint at the doctors surgery. Then I discovered the giro, a system whereby the service provider issues you with a form for the amount you owe which you take home, fill out with your bank account number, sign and then send in to your bank authorising them to release the funds. Much simpler. No wandering around with your account details in your handbag for any purse snatcher to take advantage of.

But now I'm back to cheques/checks. First of all I had to learn how to fill them out. I'm still not sure whether I do this right. When it comes to cents, Americans seem to get away with writing the number over 100 (e.g. 25/100) where you usually write the amount in words. I guess it's because the line's never long enough to accommodate all that vocabulary. Mind you, I only discovered this when I bought a kids book on the subject of money and it told you how to fill out a cheque/check. It should be standard reading for foreigners!

Anyway, my story today starts with the awful combination of teenagers and money, in this case a check. The two never really go together very well. For a start most of them don't understand the value of it which actually makes them very good at draining it away. Most parents I know with teenage kids feel like they're providing a permanent financial transfusion to their offspring. This is why I love the allowance. It sets boundaries. Nothing teaches a teenager more about the value of a buck (substitute your currency) than having money of their own.

Now back in November DD2 needed $4 for a school expense. As it was school related, I wrote her a check for the bookkeeper at the High School and thought no more about it. She folded it up, stuck it nonchalently in her back pocket and assured me she'd pay it in as soon as she arrived at school.

She didn't. She lost it.

"Well," I said, "I guess you'll be paying it now." She was very miserable, after all $4 might as well be $40 when you're 14 and you've got rabbit feed to pay for on a regular basis and a busy social life. I also hoped that she would learn a valuable lesson about treating checks/cheques like cash and being careful with them. She was quite freaked out when I added that our bank details were now floating around out there somewhere and I'd have to watch our account like a hawk because of her irresponsibility.

Two weeks later, during one of those hawk-watching sessions, the check passed through our account. I was overjoyed, she was ecstatic (no need to pony up that cash now.) Lesson learned; I rest my case. At least, I thought I did. Last week she came home with a print out from the bookkeeper because her teacher claims she has not paid that $4! The money is not listed under her name, but the check has been cashed.............................Who found the check? Who cashed it? Was it the High School? If so, why isn't it listed under her name? Could someone else have passed it off as theirs or is this just yet another administrative error in our American lives?

DD2 is now acting like Nancy Drew. She took a print out of the check to the High School bookkeeper who asked us to call the bank to find out who had cashed the check. They did not want to go dumpster diving in their database unless they knew for sure it was them. "But it has my parent's names on it," DD2 queried, not wanting to subject me to more work, "Why wasn't it under mine or my sister's account?" The simple answer to that is that these days so many kids have different last names to their parents that the name on the check doesn't really mean anything. This means that any kid can find a check and pass it off as being from their folks!

Thanks to online banking, I had a copy of the back of the check with their stamp on it by the following day. DD2 has also learned a valuable lesson. The school is now going through its database looking for that check. I really hope that someone just assigned it to miscellaneous. I'd hate to think that another teen passed it off as theirs.

This episode has sparked quite a discussion at home right now. Raised under the proviso of "Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves," ExpatOwl and I don't suffer fools gladly, that's one reason why we've encouraged DD2 to pursue this; "$4 dollars today, $400 dollars tomorrow." But when I think that a teen's life could be so close to the edge that they'd commit a fraudulant act over $4, then I'd rather pay their $4 as well than see the full weight of the law fall on them for the sake of so little.

I'm really praying it's all an admin error.

Earthquake

I'm a bit tired this morning. I was rudely awakened at 5.25 am by the small matter of a 4.5 magnitude earthquake. To be honest, it isn't the earthquake that's caused my tiredness, it's rather the fact that I'm sleeping with a man who is working 14hrs a day, 7 days a week right now. To say that he's exhausted is an understatement. I see him briefly in the morning and then not again until he wakes me up in the night snoring like a warthog!

So it was this morning. The sleeping mask and earplugs must have been defective, because I woke up at 4.30 to the deep rumblings of a worn out man sleeping. I sighed, rolled over and tried to drift back off. The next thing I knew there was an almighty bang and the bed shook. I sat bolt upright in bed fully expecting to see The Little Guy standing in the doorway shaking with fear having had a nightmare. There was no one. I looked at the clock - 5.25am. Maybe the window had cracked?.......... Perhaps there was a burglar outside, I thought?......... Unlikely, I countered. They'd already been round at 3am earlier in the week! (Nextdoor, I hasten to add.)

Slowly reality dawned. Could it have been an earthquake? Hmmm, what do I do?

I lay there for another ten minutes and then tiptoed downstairs to make a cup of tea. (British to the core!) The girls were awake too and instantly confirmed my suspicions. "Yes, Mum, it felt like an earthquake."

Switching on the TV, we watched the first reports coming in on the local news. At this point I realised that the most worrying aspect of the whole incident was not that ExpatOwl slept through the whole thing (he's slept through a Cat 2 hurricane before!) but that I have no instinctive reaction when the earthquake hits. I've never done an earthquake drill, so it takes me forever to work out what is actually going on!

Two months after we arrived in the Northwest we experienced our first quake. It happened at night. We were sleeping on airbeds as our shipment had not arrived from Europe yet. In fact we'd just bought a bed (destined for DD1 eventually), so ExpatOwl was in that, but I'd given up trying to squeeze into a full-sized (double) bed with a man who's 6 foot 3" and had gone back to the airbed. When the floor started to roll beneath me, I was about to yell at him to stop thrashing about, when I remembered where I was. As I really came to, I realised that it wasn't just the bed that was moving, it was the whole room! The quake was small, 3.6, and the epicenter was about 6 miles away. For a girl from East Anglia though, it was a wierd experience!

This morning's experience was different - less shaking, more loud noise. (I never knew earthquakes could sound like a sonic boom.) Thankfully everyone and everything is ok. Brings the old First Aid kit and emergency supplies back to the top of the list though. Think I'll go and check things are up-to-date..........just in case!

Catching Up

Well, the past two weeks have been rather hectic. The kids have all been off school sick one after the other, so I've barely had a moment without someone yelling "Muuuuummm!" Thankfully no one has required a doctor, which is just as well because DD2 still hasn't received her insurance card.

The medical insurance saga continued for several days before I finally got somewhere with it. ExpatOwl was quaking in his boots, fearing that he had left his youngest daughter off the original application form and wouldn't live to see his next birthday if he was guilty. He begged the lady at the insurance company to put him out of his misery. He got to live. The mistake, she said, was theirs. Someone in data entry had simply missed DD2 out when they'd entered our information. She is now number 5 on our family I.D. but still awaiting the paperwork to prove that they have actually rectified the situation.

After several phone calls (in which I managed to get myself a case number), I was able to ascertain that we get to keep our lovely pediatrician! The relief was immense. DD1 will be able to continue with the expert care she has received to date which makes the increased costs almost worth it.

As to the Human Resources dept at my husband's company, well, we did as Expatmum suggested and contacted them, but they seem to have a small problem with time management. Either that or they don't know how to use a telephone? Living in a completely different time zone to us seems to be causing some problems because they have yet to return our calls. Mind you, we're learning that being based in a state on the other side of the country from your head office, doesn't come without its problems. I'm quite shocked to discover that the cultural differences can be so great between one state and another that communication can be misinterpreted. When I come off the phone fuming because someone at the insurance company has talked down to me in a patronizing tone, ExpatOwl quickly assures me that that is not the intention, but just the way it is there.

This makes what happened last week seem all the more remarkable to me. The fact that America swore in a new president who won election by a monstrous landslide in a country of such huge diversity, is truely miraculous. It's like trying to get the whole of Europe, Scandinavia and the Balkans to agree on one representative! They may speak the same language (or languages as Spanish is very widespread), but culturally, this country is incredibly diverse. Obviously not everyone agrees with the results of the election, but the fact that so many people in this vast nation did vote for a change, is a testament to the power of democracy. It is amazing to see people coming together, despite their differences, to make things better.

But that's what is so unique about America. It embraces the elements that make someone different. From a young age kids are taught to be proud of who they are. Even at school, they start getting up there in front of their peers to do "Show and Tell" when they're in Kindergarten. This is in stark contrast to our more reserved British upbringing. I love this part of America. It's great to watch my naturally shy kids begin to blossom as they're forced to overcome their fears.

To be frank, they're not the only ones. Last week I taught my second art class. I wasn't as nervous this time. I was more frustrated by the fact that TLG fell ill on the one day in 6 weeks that I'd committed myself to doing something for an hour! I'd cancelled December's lesson because he was sick, so I just couldn't do it again. I had a sleepless night trying to work out what I was going to do. Thankfully DD2 came down with the same thing and so she stayed home to look after him. I've never been so glad to have her off sick!
But I digress. The class went well and I actually found myself enjoying it. The teacher and I got into a routine. I spoke to the class and she moved the slides at my request. Even the Norwegian Rosemaling exercise went well. I led the kids through the process step by step and even managed not to be freaked out when the Principal wandered into the classroom, just as I was waving my brush around like a conductor's baton demonstrating the stroke.

Hopefully, with practice, I can follow in my kids footsteps and allow America to help me blossom into my true self, free of some of the inhibitions that make me oh, so.........well.....errr.....British?

Medical Minefield

The ferocious US medical system makes the old NHS look like your cuddly Great Aunt Betty. You know, she of the big comforting bosom and voluminous apron. Right now I just want to run right back into her arms, even if I die in the queue waiting for my protective hug.


You see, I'm still struggling to deal with the intricacies of a system which contains so many paper pushers that it makes government look lightweight. The words "Red Tape" seem insufficient to describe what goes on in the medical arena here, unless ofcourse you're talking red duct tape! (a la "Red Green!" for all my Canadian friends.)


In the 4yrs we've been here, we've had 3 different insurance contracts. Each one has resulted in increasingly higher bills and a change of doctors. You see, if your doctor isn't contracted with your insurance company, you have to find another or otherwise pay higher costs. As a family of five, three of whom require specialist care, this is naturally out of the question.


Insurance contracts often change with the waning year, so January is quite a 'hot' time in the medical insurance business. I soon discovered that the beginning of the year would become synonimous with looking for new care providers (so much for continuity of care.) Yet it was only in my second year here that I discovered that it works both ways. Imagine my horror when the family doctor, who I had come to respect and rely on, told me that he was no longer contracted with our insurance company and therefore could no longer treat my family! I spent several months looking for a new one, got accused of 'starving' my skinny (but healthy) teen when I did and finally ended up in the lap of a saintly pediatrician, which was the one good thing to come out of the whole experience.


Well, it's January again and I'm an anxious wreck. I fought through snow and ice at the end of December to get two of the kids to their allergy specialist before our insurance changed. We said goodbye. You see, I had to make medical decisions based on money, which, when you hail from a land with socialised medicine, is an extremely difficult thing to do. We have had to discontinue treatment for one child after three years. I'm hoping it will have been enough to build her immunity. Fingers crossed.


I'm also crossing my fingers that we can keep our wonderful pediatrician. I don't fancy being accused of not feeding my kids again. I also don't fancy trying to find someone who won't fiddle around with her medication just as she's approaching the SAT's and AP tests. Without her medication, she'd be bouncing off the walls and her whole future would be at stake.


But, I'm getting ahead of myself. Due to an admin error we only just got our new insurance cards. Due to another admin error, there are only four of them! At last count, we were five. The Little Guy's feeling good. For the first time in his life, his rank got bumped up and he came in as number 4 on the family medical listing. DD2 wasn't so lucky. It would appear that she's ceased to exist.

What does this mean?

Goodness only knows. Do I stop her going to her first dance competition this weekend, because she's got no coverage? Do I keep her confined to her room, so that she doesn't trip down the stairs, eat something bad or get knocked over by a maniac on a motorcycle? As she joins the ranks of the approximately 46 million uninsured Americans, do I pull nationality and stoically declare, "She's British !" forcing her to stick out that stiff upper lip, or do I cave to the inevitable and give Verizon (phone company) an extremely good business day.


I guess it'll be the latter. I'll have to get on that telephone again and find out who made the error this time, wish that I hadn't taken for granted the stress-free days of NHS England, and dream of running back to Great Auntie Betty's ample bosom.