Immeasurably More

And my choices for British TV are BBC Three: Being Human BBC Four: Paul Merton Looks at Alfred Hitchcock ITV3: Teleshopping Sky Three: Road Wars Channel 4+1: Angela's Dying Wish (Why is this not Channel 5?) More 4: More4 Preview Film 4: Film 4 Preview QVC: In the Salon with Gatineau (oooo.... moisturizers.....) 4Music: Party Bangers (currently something with Justin Timberlake.) Dave: Home Shopping (I want my own TV station. There's nothing on Dave at the moment, as it turns out. But between 7am to 3am, it's "the home of witty banter".) Virgin1: World's most amazing videos. (Look... it's a village being decimated by a volcano...How...amazing... How amazingly sad! What's wrong with these people?!) TMF: Today's Music First (It's a man in red football sholderpads with feathers stuck on them. huh.) Ideal World: Ironing solutions (In my ideal world, I can afford a maid. But they are pitching Windows XP Media Center. Does...

Got home from Sydney this morning and have managed to stay awake until now thanks to Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes and a bag of Sour Cream and Onion potato chips. Ah.... It's the little things.

Why does it keep surprising me that people here speak English? ~~LeAn

Question 1: Umm, AUSTRALIA??? How did this happen? ~~~Guilty Mom Answer 1: Dear Guilty Mom, My sincere apologies for not keeping you apprised of my plans. I'll try to do better in the future. My new position requires two full weeks of training at Division Headquarters in Sydney. I found this out about a week before I left for London. Sometimes we must suffer for our work. Blogging-for-you-at-2-52-am, LeAn

Packaged snacks could destroy Australia. This had never occurred to me until I arrived at the Sydney airport this morning. After queuing to get a stamp in my passport, I mobbed with all the other recent arrivals into the baggage claim hall and then after that the Quarantine hall. Notice I do not refer to this as Customs. Other countries refer to this as Customs, a process whereby officials can search your bags and charge an extra custom if they find excessive amounts of alcohol, cigarettes or foreign currency. The proper disposal or declaration of fresh fruit, raw meat and soil specimens is a secondary purpose. In Sydney, these things are reversed. The predominant goal of Quarantine officials is to make sure that nothing potentially hazardous makes it into Australia. And by hazardous, I mean not only obvious things like animals, bushes, and mexican jumping beans but also food of any kind. Like trail mix. The Quarantine offensive begins on the plane. There is a special video whi...

Today it rained which may surprise anyone who expected it to snow. And because it rained, the sky was gray. Or grey depending on how you look at it. It certainly seems like there should be room on the color palate for both. You know, white, gray, grey, black, sort of like blue, blue-green, green-blue, green. Think of all the words there are for blue. Navy, Azure, Ultramarine, Cobalt, Sapphire. And what other words do we get for gray? (You're not allowed to google it, and you're not allowed to follow it by the word "gray", eg . "pearl gray" because people also say "pearl white" whereas no one says "Sapphire yellow" even though it's possible for sapphires to be yellow. ) All I'm saying is give gray-grey a chance. Anyway, the second thing that resulted from the rain is that I didn't go to visit any estate agents about apartments. I did however meet a number of women in my new office who offered to drive me to visit apa...

As I flew over Western Massachusetts yesterday, I looked out the window and saw shadows, plowed roads and naked trees lying clear against the white snow. After flying through the night, the plane began its descent and for a few moments we were flying between layers of clouds where the rising sun had created a rainbow along the horizon in front of us. This weekend, little things - things that wouldn't fit in boxes, plans gone awry, things broken in transit, gifts forgotten on airplane - events that might be overlooked against a brighter landscape stand out as dark lines against my exhausted and over-stressed psyche. But if the weekend has been black and white, I expect tomorrow to be a rainbow of color. ~~~LeAn