The End

After today I will no longer be "An American Librarian in Norwich, England" so the blog will stay up as a record but I won't be adding any new posts. If you miss me you can always visit my other blogs, although they aren't so much about my personal life.

What I Really Think is where I review juvenile books I've read. I managed to read quite a few British juvenile books during my stay here and thoroughly enjoyed experiencing the unadulterated text. (British books published in America tend to be edited to take out colloquialisms.)

Sound and Sense is a blog I started recently which should get more attention now that I am done with this one. It is a place for me to muse on the relationship between the spoken word and what it means using mostly everyday examples. This is an area of interest for me, but I am in no way an expert.

So, this is it! John and I are packed. I spent the day cleaning. I cleaned both bathrooms, although the lower one really just needed a once over after the most recent cleaning. I cleaned the kitchen counters and floor. I want to say, the kitchen floor was particularly gruesome and wasn't really clean even when we first moved in. I also vacuumed all the rooms as much as I was able with our pitiful power sweeper.

John pitched moving to England to me by reminding me that I wanted to "have an adventure." An adventure it has surely been, between learning to live in a foreign country and learning to live with John. (Remember that we moved immediately after getting married.) I know that we will always look back on our time here fondly, but it is with excitement that we embark on our next "adventure."

Goodbye Guitar

So, it's farewell to the purple velvet marshmallow. I looked into getting a hard case so the guitar could travel on the airplane today and there were a couple of problems.

1) There were no hard cases for 3/4 size guitars in all of down town Norwich.

2) The full sized cases cost more than the guitar did when it was new.

Based on these facts I am forced to conclude that although my lovely guitar has served me well the time has come for us to part. It is not meant to travel abroad.

As for my playing, do you think if I played air guitar on a street corner with a hat out I could raise funds to buy another real guitar?

Actually I have access to a guitar at home until I can save up for a nice one.

Like Watching Paint Dry

John had his last final today and FedEx was supposed to bring us boxes to pack our books in. So I was stuck inside all day. By myself. And, to make matters worse, because John was studying all day yesterday I felt compelled to be productive and did a lot of packing then. There wasn't much left to do today.

Here is what I accomplished:

I got my blood test results from the health center (normal, of course). I thought I was going to have to pick them up, but they e-mailed them to me! Much easier. Don't worry, the test was a normal thing they do during pregnancy and the only reason I want it is because I don't want anything that was done for free over here redone for monies back in the US.

I looked into renting a car so we can drive ourselves and our mountain of luggage to the airport on Friday but my looking mostly led me to believe that it's not going to happen. If British people prefer manuals how come the rental companies always run out of automatics?

I got an e-mail from SOS (Southern Order of Storytellers) saying that they are holding auditions which will supply them with tellers for the next year's worth of events. They accept submissions by mail so I started thinking about what I might send them.

That's about when the thumb twiddling began. I talked to Amanda for a little while and then I spent a long time reading. I really wanted to read on the back porch and enjoy the nice weather, but I was afraid I wouldn't be able to hear if someone came to the door.

Needless to say, the FedEx guy never came, but John has agreed to be housebound tomorrow so I can run errands in town.

Packed

Almost everything I won't be using before Friday is packed!

I feel like I've been doing a complicated puzzle trying to get everything to fit.

Warm

I wore a t-shirt outside today!

It's going to be a real shock when I get back to Georgia and it's hot.

No TV

An added bonus of meeting Rachel and Paul was that Paul decided to buy some of our stuff. This is very exciting because we don't have to go through the effort of selling it on ebay. He picked everything up last night. We weren't sure how we would adjust to losing the TV, but it's been okay because now John gets to show me all those movies he's always downloading and I never want to watch. The computer screen is a little smaller, but the company is good.

Perpetual Motion

I'm still trying to work on my running. I seriously lost some ground from all our vacations and, you know, having to share my blood flow and oxygen with another person. I had gotten up to three miles and now I'm back down to one. I was determined to run two miles this morning (this although I am now without an ipod since the iphone got sold and I thoughtlessly left my old ipod in Georgia). Yeah, I didn't run two miles. But it was such a nice day out and I was feeling good, so I ran the first mile and alternated walking and running on the second one. It's something.

John fixed our shower a while ago. Did I mention that? It was sort of anticlimactic since it needed cleaning to be really useable and we didn't clean it right away. But it is fully functional now and John wanted the downstairs bathroom cleaned and out of use so that it is one part of the flat we don't have to worry about. Well, I cleaned that bathroom today. Funny how much dirtier it gets when we use it all the time. There weren't any spider incidents.

Then I packed all my books in one suitcase. But John is undecided on whether we will actually take our books on the plane with us or ship them, so I might be repacking later. Still, they are off the shelf so it sort of seems like I've accomplished something.