From the monthly archives:

May 2009

How to be an Ex-Pat

by Lorna Harris on May 31, 2009

I first lived in California as an ex-pat in my early twenties back in the 1990s.  When I moved over here, I thought of it more as a short-term thing, an adventure.  I didn’t have many belongings, most of my things fit in a suitcase and anything else I left at my parents’ house.  Consequently, I never settled.  I always knew I could move back and that set the tone for my time in California.  We didn’t have very much money, so didn’t make any of those large furniture purchases, our cars were cheap runarounds, we rented our apartment.  Everything felt disposable. So when I felt the need to start settling down, I really wanted to make those roots in the UK and didn’t feel I was leaving too much behind by leaving California. [read the rest…]

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4th Grade California Gold Rush Day

by Lorna Harris on May 26, 2009

We joined in with the re-enactment of the gold rush at school last week, another 4th Grade landmark (see Mission (Project) Accomplished).  Following a meeting, when Danny and I volunteered to run the saloon for the morning, we headed into school dressed in our finest gold rush outfits.  Danny and Declan managed to get away with jeans and a flannel shirt but as I was running the saloon, fishnets, a fancy dress, feathers in my hair and a choker was in order (all this at 7.30am). [read the rest…]

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Airship Adventure

May 26, 2009

We had just the most exciting Memorial Weekend ever, celebrating our 17th wedding anniversary with good friends and taking a Zeppelin ride over Long Beach.

Much as I would like to blog about it, Danny has already done so.  As he’s a far better writer than me,  I thought I’d send you over to his blog [...]

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Tweeting Good Customer Service

May 22, 2009

I love Twitter.  Sometimes I tweet a lot during the day, other times, I feel I have nothing to say and stay quiet.  I like that you can dip in and out, jump into conversations when it is appropriate and have the odd rant.
It’s interesting to see companies using Twitter well and others who have [...]

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Baseball Ready

May 21, 2009

Our entire family has embraced baseball over the last few months.  Back in February, I took Declan to the tryouts for the local league.  If you can imagine, we didn’t take any equipment with us and didn’t know what was going on.  All the other boys had bats, gloves, batting helmets and cleats/spikes.  Declan attempted [...]

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Beach Gardening

May 15, 2009

The Balboa Peninsula, where we live, is a tiny place with the ocean on one side and the harbour on the other.  We’re all crammed in, houses up against one another, with just alleyways in between.  No one has gardens, we just have patios, roof decks and balconies, anywhere where someone can squeeze in a [...]

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Who needs a Life Coach? Me, apparently.

May 14, 2009

There was an interesting letter in the Telegraph Online today.  The letter was part of their LifeClass series and featured a man wanting to leave his 86-year-old mother in England and move to New Zealand to be closer to his son.  It was an interesting read and the response to the letter was thorough and [...]

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Whatever the Weather

May 11, 2009

A big reason we moved from the UK to California was because of the weather.  After several summers of rain and gloom, we’d had enough.  We wanted to be able to plan for events and know it wasn’t going to pour down.  Or have a barbecue at the weekend, without having to run inside in [...]

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Mission (Project) Accomplished

May 8, 2009

There are lots of rites of passage in school.  In England, the Christmas Nativity Play is the first big one.  It’s for the children in the beginning stages of school, when they’re still little and don’t really know what they’re doing.  Watching the play, a re-enactment of the Christmas story is hysterical.  Children flub their [...]

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You say potato…

May 4, 2009

We conducted a thoroughly scientific test at dinner last night.  What was the American or British word for certain things?  The boys failed miserably on ‘pavement.’  They were convinced the British word for a path that you walk on was ‘sidewalk.’  The poor things have entered a world of confusion.  They can no longer remember [...]

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