Monday 9th November 2009
Arrived at George and Marjorie’s house in North Carolina USA, 19 hours after leaving Liz’s house in Reading, England. The plane was delayed taking off from Heathrow and there was a little boy on board who was ill with a high temperature the whole journey. This meant, of course that we were delayed in disembarking at Toronto due to him having to be checked for swine flu. Fortunately his test was negative. However it did mean I missed my connecting flight and had to wait 4 hours for the next one.
It was very fortunate that there was another one that day, and the people at Toronto airport were such lovely and helpful people.
I knew the bedroom I would be sleeping in would be crowded with things, but it was actually much more so than it was 7 years ago. The only access to the bed was one corner at the end of the bed (and I mean just the corner – none of the side or end was free). I cleared the bed of clothes and bedding and pillows and lay the bedding I was using on top of a bedspread. There was no way I could tuck anything and I had to stand on top of the bed to sort it out.
It was fortunate that I had a comfortable bed in a warm house owned by friendly people.
I went to sleep at about 1:00 a.m. NC time and woke up at 4:30 a.m. needing the loo. Couldn’t get back to sleep so got up at 6 a.m. and did my devotions and preparations for writing paid lesson plans for a teacher.
Tuesday 10th November
George took me to the Whole Food Market in the morning to buy me some food. The diet they have is typically American and processed, so there was no food in the house that I could eat because I eat organic low carb vegetables with organic meat and a fat source such as nut butter or nuts.
The enormous American Refrigerator was jam packed with not one inch available for my purchases. However, when I cleared it out there was plenty of room, because much of the contents were out of date.
It's fortunate the bins are emptied soon and i enjoy cleaning.
Wednesday 11th November
I thought English people were obsessed by the weather as it creeps into most conversations we have. But I don’t think we have a whole television channel dedicated to the subject! It’s been raining all day today and it seems to be such a big deal. It seems normal to me. It often rains all day in England. The word ‘storm’ doesn’t feature much in English weather. When it rains it’s just rain but it’s a storm here. In England a storm has to have high winds with precipitation for it to be called such. It does seem, though, that we’re getting some high winds tomorrow being on the edge of s hurricane.
So today I created a little space in the room I’m sleeping in and cleared and cleaned a bit more of the kitchen. I’ll be glad when I can get to the windows in my room and able to open the curtains. It is very likely they’ll need cleaning also.
There is no Internet access in this house so I’m writing this offline and hope to get to the library soon.
It's fortunate I have a laptop to work offline.
Thursday 12th November
There's so much fuss here about the weather. Rain and high winds. Just like a normal British day! A bit of flooding, but Britain gets that a lot too. I walked to the library and it was no big deal.
It's fortunate it's not as cold as Britain, but nearly so. It will, however be a warm weekend - early 70's F! Yay! Like a British summer.
I'm so glad to be back in Garner library. It's such a lovely large, purpose built building with a toilet. (That's unheard of in England, even the newly built ones.) And there's WiFi, oh, and loads of books too.
