operation making new friends continues
Jan. 7th, 2009 08:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thereyougothentoday started well, both boys were up before me, and the rest of the morning went well too. they went off to summer school leaving me & Milagros to get organised for today's bit of operation making new friends (well, one old friend of mine, and one old friend of Bill's came too, but let's not quibble).
I hosted a bookswap. I had asked the ESO (astro folk) spouses list, and a fair few people said it was a brilliant idea. I then had to admit it wasn't original! anyway, we even had one non astro-spouse - so operation making friends outside of work might be on its way as well...
I baked an apple cake last night, my first attempt at baking in this house, and it came out really well, I added dried mango instead of nuts, since I haven't got any of those yet.
stocking the store cupboard from scratch is fun, but sometimes I wish I didn't have to go out specially to get a specific thing that I would normally just have. and while i'm on the subject, we've been here over 2 months and today i finally found tins of chopped tomatoes. ok, i did see some that with additional herbs that cost about £1.50 ea. so we don't count those. Still, I paid $890 for a tin today, which is about 90p. 90p for a tin of chopped tomatoes.
and the cheese? we had the cheese conversation today - it's expensive, and the vast majority of it tastes like nothing. I think we'd been doing really well on our food miles, but when I finally found out about the "real" cheddar, I just bought it. even though it's $3450 for 250gm. And the person who told me about it said it was Argentinian. So that's ok. Except it's not - it's Australian. But you can't make macaroni cheese with anything else. So I'll keep buying it. Just not as often as I'm used to buying cheddar. Luckily the blandness of local cheese means that the boys actually like almost all of it, so that's a bonus I suppose.
Summer school seems to be going well. They come home and say they've had a good time. And they seem to be enjoying the bus.
anyway, the book swap - it went well, we drank coffee, ate cake (there was banana bread too, thanks to old friend Cathy), and swapped books.
and I have to admit that having Milagros around is nice. By the time i came back in from waving everyone off at the gate, she'd already tidied up all the mugs and cake crumbs and loaded it all in the dishwasher. Except for the cake plates, which were my gran's china, which she was washing by hand.
Have I raved about my ipod yet? Bill got it me for my birthday, and i'd been having lots of fun playing wiht it, but not really listening to music on it. but then i had a play with the Genius feature. I love it. i keep picking random songs just to see what happens. it's plugged into the internet radio/ipod dock i got Bill for *his* birthday. He unearthed his sub-woofer from the garage before we left edinburgh and hoked it up here last week. it makes the ipod sound as good as the CD. the curent list is based on Nellie Furtado's Forca, and now KT Tunstall has just been followed by Paolo Nutini.
The radio here might play lots of english langiage music, but it all seems to be from the 80's. I don't know how we're going to find new music here. If there's anything good new out there, make a point of telling me, please?
I hosted a bookswap. I had asked the ESO (astro folk) spouses list, and a fair few people said it was a brilliant idea. I then had to admit it wasn't original! anyway, we even had one non astro-spouse - so operation making friends outside of work might be on its way as well...
I baked an apple cake last night, my first attempt at baking in this house, and it came out really well, I added dried mango instead of nuts, since I haven't got any of those yet.
stocking the store cupboard from scratch is fun, but sometimes I wish I didn't have to go out specially to get a specific thing that I would normally just have. and while i'm on the subject, we've been here over 2 months and today i finally found tins of chopped tomatoes. ok, i did see some that with additional herbs that cost about £1.50 ea. so we don't count those. Still, I paid $890 for a tin today, which is about 90p. 90p for a tin of chopped tomatoes.
and the cheese? we had the cheese conversation today - it's expensive, and the vast majority of it tastes like nothing. I think we'd been doing really well on our food miles, but when I finally found out about the "real" cheddar, I just bought it. even though it's $3450 for 250gm. And the person who told me about it said it was Argentinian. So that's ok. Except it's not - it's Australian. But you can't make macaroni cheese with anything else. So I'll keep buying it. Just not as often as I'm used to buying cheddar. Luckily the blandness of local cheese means that the boys actually like almost all of it, so that's a bonus I suppose.
Summer school seems to be going well. They come home and say they've had a good time. And they seem to be enjoying the bus.
anyway, the book swap - it went well, we drank coffee, ate cake (there was banana bread too, thanks to old friend Cathy), and swapped books.
and I have to admit that having Milagros around is nice. By the time i came back in from waving everyone off at the gate, she'd already tidied up all the mugs and cake crumbs and loaded it all in the dishwasher. Except for the cake plates, which were my gran's china, which she was washing by hand.
Have I raved about my ipod yet? Bill got it me for my birthday, and i'd been having lots of fun playing wiht it, but not really listening to music on it. but then i had a play with the Genius feature. I love it. i keep picking random songs just to see what happens. it's plugged into the internet radio/ipod dock i got Bill for *his* birthday. He unearthed his sub-woofer from the garage before we left edinburgh and hoked it up here last week. it makes the ipod sound as good as the CD. the curent list is based on Nellie Furtado's Forca, and now KT Tunstall has just been followed by Paolo Nutini.
The radio here might play lots of english langiage music, but it all seems to be from the 80's. I don't know how we're going to find new music here. If there's anything good new out there, make a point of telling me, please?
