Sandy.....

Stranded at the drive-in....

No, not *that* Sandy!

A quick storm update from Monrovia MD.

So far we have had a bit of rain and a bit of wind, but nothing extreme. New roof and gutters are holding up.

The library is closed today so I don't need to come between warring soccer moms fighting over the last Barney DVD. Phew!

Soup is made. Gingerbread is made.

Kids are riding out the storm at their respective colleges.

Cat's are sleeping.

We are just waiting......

Mum's the Word

So we have a storm coming.

Most of the emergency preparations they suggest you make aren't really relevant to students who don't have outdoor furniture to bring in or gutters to unclog. As mine are riding out the storm on campus, here's what I told them.....

"OK this is supposed to be the worst storm ever, so here's some advice from Mum.....

Make sure you have food you can eat without cooking or going out. Halloween candy is good. So are cheerios, crackers, peanuts, bread, nutella, fruit. If you have empty used water bottles fill them with water NOW.

N get takeout pizza, a couple, maybe three. You can eat those cold if you lose power. Bake that banana bread.

In case you have to evacuate pack your backpack NOW. Put your wallet, checkbook, medical card etc in it. K your passport too if you have it with you, and your pill. Also laptop, ipod, cellphone and chargers, something to read, toiletries, loo roll, advil and any other meds, flashlight. Pen and paper so you can teach everyone the alphabet game. That set of Uno cards that you laughed at at the beginning of the semester could stop you dying of boredom now.

Find your raingear... raincoats and wellies. N you have snowboots. Use them.

Close your windows. Put your blinds down. Keep checking weather.com, wtop.com, washingtonpost.com.

If you have to evacuate take your own pillow and duvet if they let you.

Listen to any instructions they give you. Hide in the hall if you hear wind like pterydactyls. Make sure someone else knows you are on campus and that you didn't come home.

Don't get drunk you need your wits about you.

No driving K.

Most important POO TONiGHT while you can still flush. You don't want Mr Hanky hanging around ponging!

Love Mum and Dad. STAY SAFE."

No Thanksgiving Please, We're British.

Thanksgiving is one of those Holidays that, as foreigners, we just can’t get the hang of. Plan A has always been to avoid it by taking a cruise. However since The Son went to UMD, their measly 4 day break has put paid to that, so we have to resort to Plan B, staying home and trying to avoid getting invited to someone else’s gathering.

In the words of the man at the liquor store last week, “when it comes to Holidays, Thanksgiving has it all. You can’t beat the 3 F’s, Family, Football and Food”. Really”?

So we can do the first one, “Family”. The son will be coming home, battling the metro and bus crowds, hoping some kind soul will pick him up in Damascus because The Parents are too mean (or sane) to drive to College Park. So there will be 4 for dinner instead of 3.

“Football”. I don’t think so. I prefer the football that has shorts and rippling thigh muscles flying up the wing to kick the ball, to the “football” with men in pads and tights holding the ball and mincing around.

“Food”? Not looking good. The Daughter is vegetarian, and The Husband dislikes turkey. The Wife doesn’t think vegetables belong in dessert, nor marshmallows in potatoes. Nor does she think that a can of green beans mixed in with a can of condensed soup and topped with a can of fried onions constitutes either a casserole or a vegetable side dish, and thinking about the preservatives just makes her head spin. The Son however isn’t picky and is secretly hoping for pumpkin pie, despite the fact that The Mother only ever uses pumpkins to make jack-o-lanterns.

If ever there was a Holiday in need of a facelift, this is it.

So....

We will be eating The Governor of Wisconsin’s Roast Duck with Michael Caine’s Roast Potatoes, (not sure what they’re having!). We will take our family Christmas photo, which will once again be blighted by “No Shave November” and then disappear in opposite directions with our laptops.

Thanksgiving Bliss!

Pretentious? Toi?

I really don’t get much chance to listen to the radio nowadays, and mainly just dip into Steve Wright on the 2 or 3 mornings (I’m 5 hours behind) when I’m not at work.

Unbelievably after years and years of not hearing a peep out of Clifford T Ward, I’ve heard him played twice on that show in the past couple of weeks. Last week there was “Wherewithal” and today, just as I was getting into the shower, I heard an intro, immediately recognised it and thought “Bloody hell, that’s Clifford T Ward, AGAIN! Has he died?”.

I admit to never having liked the badly coiffed Clifford T. I initially laid the blame firmly at the feet of Mr Hague, our old english teacher, who used to think he was wonderful, perhaps because he was a fellow english teacher made good. Making us analyse his lyrics in class didn’t help endear him to us either.

With the maturity that comes with adulthood, I wondered if I would now better appreciate his flowery poetic lyrics? Today we had the leaking cistern in Home Thoughts from Abroad, last week it was nonpareil, elation and nonchalant, all in the same sentence. I’m sure next week the tray of nice things will be upset. Has he grown on me? Nope. I just cringed and thought “Pretentious, Toi?”

Oh and while we’re on the subject of pretentious, if you were called Clifford Ward, why would you add your middle initial instead of shortening your name to the snappier Cliff Ward, I mean it’s hardly a common name, is it???

So, here's "Home Thoughts from Abroad". Let's hope they've called the plumber.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s_rRHCOTXA

Musical Youth

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you realize that you will never ever quite fit in.

It’s never more apparent than when the subject of “the music of our youth” crops up. I guess I had a different sort of youth. I didn’t go through the stoned “Yeah Man” phase, I don’t really remember the Beatles, Woodstock or Vietnam, and didn’t go through a country rock/protest song/singer-songwriter/blues/jazz phase. You see I grew up on the other side of the Atlantic, where the music of my youth was “pop” music, and where my teenage life revolved around the holy music trinity of Top of the Pops, Radio One and the Tuesday Top 40 Chart Countdown.

Imagine if you will, a country where there are only a handful of radio stations, all geared towards a mature audience, a country where there are only 3 TV channels, a country where records cost an arm and a leg. Imagine an era of major unemployment, strikes and power cuts. This is the country and the era I grew up in, 1970's Britain.

Imagine then, the dawn of a radio station for young people, one that played “pop”, (ie popular), music of all genres that young people, rather than their parents wanted to listen to. They called it Radio One and the kids loved it, I loved it and my teenage life revolved around it.

On Tuesday lunchtimes Radio One would reveal the new chart. I would dash home from school for lunch, dying to find out if Slade were higher than Sweet, if Mud had gone up or down, or if, horror upon horror, as all was revealed at 1pm, if Donny Osmond had come straight in at number 1. Then I would race back to school and tell everyone the good or bad news.

Thursday nights, (and for a while Fridays), was Top of the Pops night on TV. Everyone watched TOTP, kids to see their favourite bands, dads to see a scantily dressed Pans People strutting their stuff, and grandparents to tut tut about long-haired shirtless men wearing make-up.

The theme music was a rock guitar riff and only many years later did I naively discover it was a Led Zeppelin song. Radio 1 DJ’s would introduce the new entries and climbers of the week and of course the number 1. Sometimes they would play promos, later to be called music videos in the MTV era, or sometimes the bands would perform “live”, except they didn’t, they lip-synched very badly and played unplugged electric guitars.

It was 45 minutes of pure escapism where glam acts were followed by soul acts, and disco was followed by punk, where Chinichap ruled, where Mud performed their tightly choreographed Mud- dance, where the Quo played their 3 chords in scruffy denims, where Freddie postured in his leotard, Johnny snarled and John walked in his white suit through the white house and played the white baby grand. This was the music of my youth.

My music week would be rounded out by the Sunday evening chart countdown from 6 till 7, an hour which I blissfully spent listening to my favourite songs, on my tranny, in the meagre 3 inches of water that constituted the British weekly bath.

Real Plastic Vinyl

Exactly which neighbour actually came up with the idea and which one just pretended they did, is still open to debate, but

"Let's get people over one evening for a few drinks and listen to our old vinyl together, like we did in the old days", they said.

Hmmmm, I thought, my "old days" must be a bit more recent than theirs. I was more Radio One, mangled tapes and the sony walkman, than pot, Cat Stevens and "Ina Gadda Da Vida".

Still, trying to get with the programme, Friday night found The Husband and I ferreting around in the dank closet in the basement where we had stashed and forgotten our boxes of records when we moved in 11 years ago. I have to say my LPs were pretty uninspiring, and the ones The Husband was unearthing, I was quite frankly thrilled to have neither seen nor heard in 11 years.

At the gathering, my vinyl went down like a lead balloon. People pretended they had never heard of the Human League, I mean "Don't You Want Me", who has never heard of that? They thought Tears for Fears were Depeche Mode and that Depeche Mode were Canadian...

The real heroine of the night though was Ms C, whose 45s were like a fantastic "Best of the 60's" compilation, and included the fabulous "Leader of the Pack" single by the Shangri-La's, which was greeted by "Oh is this from "Grease"?"

If the evening taught me anything, it's that I don't look back fondly on the era of skips, scratches and pops, that I love being able to zap easily through songs I don't like, and that it is a hell of a lot easier to transport 4000 songs on an ipod than 20 LPs in a crate on a dolly.

My one regret is that I couldn't find my Saturday Night Fever album, which I suspect now has pride of place in The Brother's living room. Still a quick click on Spotify and I can listen to it anytime for free, and with service like that, who really needs vinyl?

Chinese Food, Mandarin and "Honey"

A visit to my favourite Chinese restaurant is always entertaining, not least because the proprietor is always so glad to see us, and gushes about how wonderful The Children are, but also because of the music they play.

"What sort of music would you expect to hear in a Chinese restaurant", I hear you ask? A nice bit of classical? Perhaps. Some Chinese opera? Probably not. How about some unsung digital channel that plays a constant loop of Rod Stewart, Boyz II Men, "Unchained Melody" and 50's Doo Wop? Now you're talking!

Except that last night it wasn't the usual station, and we found ourselves listening to backing tracks of easy listening songs that were familiar enough, but with a bit of a twist.... the vocals were sung in what appeared to be a high pitched squeaky chinese. "Mandarin". I was authoritatively informed by The Husband.

By the end of the meal, my nerves frazzled by the musical equivalent of nails on a blackboard, I was wondering if they could have played anything worse?

They could.

The next song started with a lush string intro, soaring soprano and the dreaded opening line, this time in english, "See the tree how big it's grown..."

In the time it took them to plant the tree, crash the car and get the puppy, we got the bill, and exited right on cue, just as the angels came.