2 Month English Anniversary

MAJOR UPDATE OF THE WEEK: our boiler is fixed! We have heating! INSIDE THE HOUSE! Unbelievable. We've been brushing our teeth with warm water just because we can. I've noticed a jump in everyone's happiness and definitely in how I feel when I wake up in the morning. I don't have to wear sweatshirts to bed and my windows don't have condensation on them anymore, which is so, so, so nice.

The little sunflower in the garden below me died -- but since Halloween was just a week or two ago and a little boy lives in the house with the garden, it's been replaced with a Pirate flag.

Time has actually been going by quite quickly. This year already feels smaller and I'm surprised at myself -- I knew the loneliness would turn itself around, and now that it has, I'm pleased, content, and of course more confident. July might come sooner than I thought it would. And now that I'm here-here, settled, and now that I'm attached to this place, it feels like home. Where I belong. And it's nice.

I've got a pretty good relationship with the post man. I'm the only one who gets packages (parcels) here, and over the past 2 months I've gotten so many packages. This past week I flew downstairs when I heard him knock at the door, and I was out of breath when I opened the door and he was concerned with my health! He also commends me for having family who look after me so well even though there's an ocean between us. He did say, though, that I should probably tell them that most things in America are in Britain, too, so they shouldn't worry too much. He's a nice man. Getting a package in the morning makes me so happy -- it usually makes me late to class or campus because I rarely give myself elbow-room in the mornings has far as time goes, and since I *have* to open the package immediately and look at each and every little thing in it, I end up running to campus and sweating through class.

That is one thing that always drives me crazy. It's either windy or freezing (except this past week has been rather warm) and because it's windy, you try to walk quicker than you usually would because you want to get out of the wind as soon as possible, and since you're wearing quite a few layers of clothing because it's windy, you get to class, peel off the layers because you're hot, and then because it's warm inside the buildings, you literally sweat for the entire hour. And somehow I have only JUST understood the idea of layering clothes. I have no idea what I've been doing in the past winters of my life, but I've realized that in order to layer you have to layer correctly, and place the layers so you can take them off accordingly, and summer clothes still get used (excepting shorts -- I wear those inside on the weekends) because you can put layers over them. Novel, novel, novel -- and another thing to support the fact that I'll probably be clueless about something for the rest of my life.

I love my housemates. Yesterday we literally spent the whole day sitting in the living room together talking, listening to music, or watching tv together. My housemate Amlyn had 3 of his friends from Wales come up because they wanted to go to a concert at night, so they were here, too, and we all smushed onto the couches together. And then Leander cooked dinner for mostly everybody (I cooked for myself because she was making fish pie) and we all ate together. It's so nice. Fitting into a foreign family -- and none of us knew each other before we got here. In the living room, I have my American flag hanging over the couch, so Ben and Joe hung a St. George's Cross flag over the mantel. Amlyn had his friends bring him a Welsh flag and he's planning on hanging it up soon, and Steph's going to find a German flag somewhere so our living room will be like the Flag Building at Tech. And while I've adopted some English-isms (bathroom = toilet, toilet paper = loo roll, dish towel = tea towel, dinner = tea), there are some I refuse to use (cigarette = fag, friend = mate, guy = bloke), and we pick on each other for how we say things. I like to emphasize how I pronounce things different than them and they like to use words they know I won't understand. They love to pick on me for "leisure" (which they pronounce "leh-sure") and "tomato" ("to-mah-toe").

Sunday mornings are nice. We've had sunny Sundays. I make coffee and sit on the front steps, usually in my shorts because I wear my shorts inside now since our boiler got fixed, and bask in the sun with my coffee until I can't stand the cold anymore.