Merry Christmas!!

Well Christmas this year was a little sad and very odd, but we did have a house-full and we pulled off the dinner feast! Our two neighbors are single (Liz and Jim) so we invited them both as well as Geoff's co-worker Ed and his wife, which was nice - we pulled crackers and ate too much and then played the train game for the afternoon!

We went through two trees this year, we got our live tree a little too early - he was very round and short, but a cute one in a Charlie Brown's Christmas kind of way! However he dropped all his needles about a week out and caused an awful mess so we bought a fake one on sale at the last minute to make sure we had one for Christmas day! (Can you tell which is which?!!)

Christmas eve was spent wrapping stocking gifts and tracking Santa's trip on Norad, and we saw him fly over you all right before heading to bed! We also watched It's a Wonderful Life (one of my favorites!) only to find out that Geoff has never seen it before!!

We missed you all terribly, Christmas without family and close friends around was just not the same.

Happy Thanksgiving

Couple of random photos, just cuz I am sharing them with people! I love you and miss you all. I will take photos of the new place this week and upload them with an update.

Our first Thanksgiving dinner - no fire alarms went off and no food poisoning!!! Be Impressed!

The gorgeous lillies Geoff bought me that are on week three and still amazing!

The weird purple flowers that suddenly started blooming out of our pink plant?!

Yes - we are still alive!

Well I am sure you all think that we have died by this stage... so here is a quick update on what is (and is not) new! I am at the library right now, and timed it just right as there was a mass exodus of military people shortly after I walked in due to it being lunch time - so I have access to a computer for around an hour!

Life here is slowly starting to feel more familiar. Geoff's job is going well, and I am heading in to sign a short contract tomorrow. We decided that until we have two cars I am going to work on base as a security contractor - this basically means I get to follow 'civilian' people around all day while they are on base doing work. They have 2 other people doing the job right now, and they call you up and offer you the hours when they need someone, so you can take it or leave it. It should work out pretty well as it means I am flexible, and can work or not work certain days depending on what is going on with Geoff and the housing situation....

As far as our permanent house goes things are still looking a little bleak. It turns out that the renovations are waaaaay behind schedule so we still have not heard any information on our move. They told Geoff yesterday that they may want to move us into a small two bedroom place for around 6 months and then move us to a 3 bedroom, but he is going to try to see if we can stay where we are for now so that we can just move once. We shall see!

We are getting more comfortable with the surrounding area now, we have been out shopping several times and found an enormous mall on the side of a canal in town. It is lots of fun to just walk around and explore, so that is what we have been doing on the weekends! Some of the canal boats even have little book stores which is very entertaining! The town itself holds a big market outside on the weekends so you can walk through and pick up your fresh produce as well as all kinds of strange trinkets - I will have to take my camera next time I go to show you!!

Geoff's new boss arrived last week, so we took him around this past weekend. His name is Blaine and he seems really nice, he lives by George Mason University with his family - he has three kids aged 11 and younger and his wife is originally from England. They have not moved out here yet as they are still trying to assess the school situation - so they will make the decision this summer. Right now he is living next door, but I think he will be moving out into 'chief' living quarters in the next week or so.

I'm not sure if I already mentioned the fact that we did get our airshipment fairly quickly, and were very glad we packed our cooking tools and linens as the temporary stuff way very limited! Mail turn-around seems to vary here. Some things arrive very quicky, and others seem to get misplaced and show up later (or not at all as of yet!). We haven't figured out how long it takes mail to reach the states from here yet, but we sent some cards out this week so we should have some idea soon! Anyway there isn't much else to say, so we will try to update you again soon. Miss you all!

Ahh sweet technology... or maybe not..!

This is just a quick note to let everyone know that my laptop has given up on me... it died yesterday and now only turns on for 15min intervals, so I get to wait in line for the library computers, but this means no messenger since they dont have anything installed and aim express, meebo etc are all blocked content. :( Oh well - life goes on! I will try to get online at least once every few days to send emails and let you know whats going on!

Some views

Here are just a few random pictures... I forgot how huge the clouds are here.. I think in the states you would need to be in the middle of nowhere to see them like they appear here so I have been out playing with my camera, there are also a couple of views we see daily to give you an idea of how remote we are!

Clouds:

Sunset by our house:

This is a view from my daily walk to the library:

Here is the view out of our bedroom window (that it a huge conker tree on the left!) the fields are usually full of cows and horses but apparently they are camera shy and every time I went to take a picture they were either on the left or right of the fields haha.

A Mini Tour of our Temp House

Monday was just a cleaning day, so I decided to take some photos to show you around our place.. here we go!

Here is the front of our house - #4 sixth street, see our nice muddy yard with no grass or plants from where they ripped it all out due to the plumming?!?!

Here is the dining area, the open door way is to half of the lounge.

Here is our giant kitchen with all new stainless steel appliances!

This is the new downstairs bathroom with walk-in shower. The upstairs one has a tub but is pink so I didnt take a photo! haha.

Here is the master bedroom.

The other two bedrooms are almost identical like this...

Lazy Days

We had a nice quiet weekend, did some exploring on the town and rented season one of CSI from the library so we really just kind-of watched the telly and nosed around! Not too much to report so we will skip over it and get back with you tomorrow!

Zoom Zoom

Well today we bought a car! We had to open a british account to get some cash and then we went out to the local dealerships, Matt nicely dropped us off, and we shopped with the threat of a 5 mile hike home looming if we did not find anything we began our hunt.

We had previously looked at the lemon lot on base but the 4 cars up there were more than we wanted to pay. At the little dealership there was one little red car for 1500 pounds so we took it for a drive on the crazy little roads around the area and it seemed in good shape. Once the boss had gotten back to the dealership from his tea break we approached him and told him we could only pay 1000 plus fees, the guy looked shocked and said it was a little low so said 1200 was the lowest he could go, but he would absorb fees and would pay for a years MOT at the local garage... we later found out the MOT is 180 pounds and would have needed re-doing in 2 months anyway so we actually got our price. haha. Anyway it is a little red rover and has 70,000 miles and here it is:

Fingers crossed?!

Well the contracters finished our plumbing today and hopefully this will be the end of it! I caught up on 3 weeks worth of laundry as well as ran everything in the house through the wash, and by the end of it all was exhausted!!

Our sponsors took us to Tesco tonight, it was SO much fun!! I cannot even explain how weird it is to walk through a British grocery store again. I picked up all kinds of goodies from my childhood including fruit corners (its a yogurt in two different sections, one is vanilla and one is fruit and you snap the container in half to pour all the fruit into the yogurt... mmm!!), potato waffles, sausage rolls, chicken kiev, a huge thing of hp sauce, ribena, ginger snaps and so many more things!! Our house is now officially stocked with a selection of fabulous food!

The little town we drove through on the way back was not much to speak of, it had a basic 'Boots' pharmacy, a royal mail post office and a couple of indian resaurants and pubs, but apparently there is another town not too far away that is substantially bigger! In talking with our sponsor we found out that they live in Reston and her husband actually lived in Penderbrook when they met (its such a small world!), so we spent some time talking about how much has already changed in the year that they have been here.

When we got home we watched ice age 2 and had a very muddled dinner of anything that took less than 15 mins to cook before heading to bed!

Jinxed?

More disasters... The local contracter is pretty convinced at this stage that our house is jinxed and had no problem telling us so this morning! Our upstairs toilet doesn't work and the downstairs one was running for about 6 hours straight, the sink is still unfixed and they are having problems activating our phone and AFN tv (AirForce Network tv is about 8 american channels that supposedly come standard on base.. ha). So Geoff left for work and I decided instead of watching more things get torn apart I would walk to the library to get online.

We went out for dinner at the 'Croughton Crust' which is the pizza place on base, and then walked home to meet up with a neighbor who offered to help with the AFN. The pizza is the scariest stuff you have ever eaten... (does papa johns deliver via fed ex?!).. and so I opted for cereal instead, and after 2 hours of messing with cables and outlets we now have some version of AFN yay! Fun day.

Umm.. help?!

Well today was a bit of a disaster. It turns out the newly remodeled kitchen has a really bad plumbing job, and so all the yards in the 5 remodeled units have to be dug up to re-do the piping. This means the kitchen sink and dishwasher are out of commission for a couple of days and we get to hang out with the contractors... yay?!

While they were tearing apart our place we borrowed Matts car and escaped for a while to the commissary. It was very odd to find pretty much everything you could find at safeway - but we stocked up on canned goods and basic groceries and bypassed their rather frightening produce and meat sections deciding to try to get out to town later in the week! We stocked the fridge and Geoff headed to work while I worked on finances for the afternoon. Later in the evening we headed to the bowling alley for dinner (since the kitchen was un-usable) where we had a very healthy meal of burgers, grilled cheese, and fries!

"Left, right, left right left"

We got up early to get ready to walk to the main building, but unfortunatly my stomach decided that airplane food does not agree with me and I ended up staying behind while Geoff went to find out about getting IDs. In the afternoon Geoff came back to get me and we started our rounds, we had to get base IDs and then apply for a rations card - this took quite a few hours of photos and paperwork, but Matt (the guy Geoff is replacing) managed to show us the mail room, bank and subway in between.

After everything was done I got dropped back at the house while Geoff went through his list of briefings, I spent several hours laughing at how much British TV has not changed (it is still 5 channels and all the same shows are still playing: Emmerdale, EastEnders, Neighbours, Home & Away, Corination Street etc), and then we met up to walk around the base before heading to bed.

We have arrived

After a pretty good flight where we got upgraded to Economy Plus and seated by the emergency exit where we had more legroom than we could even use, we arrived at around 10:30am U.K. time and cleared customs fairly quickly.

Our driver met us at the gate and we headed to the base. He chatted the whole way there, in the process explaining that the 'flood' that hit the area was really just heavy rain for a couple of days that wasn't absorbed very quickly because it has been so dry - and that they see it pretty much every year, but there obviously isn't enough news right now because they had to make it look dramatic!

We saw that Croughton is very much in the middle of ... well nothing really! You can see it from miles away as it is surrouded by fields, but it is a pretty enough area! When we got in we were greeted by our sponsors and their two or three children (we still haven't figured out if they all belong to them or not) they asked us to come out with them in the evening, but we were so tired that we just passed out for most of the afternoon. We woke up to unpack and then went back to bed for the night!

Welcome to.. where was it again?

Due to the overwhelming requests for a blog continuation while we are out here, welcome to our first entry!! These past couple of days have been an adventure to say the least, but we wanted to start out with giving you a run-down of where we live, so here it goes!

If anyone has seen 'The Unit' that gives you a pretty good idea of the base housing community - the wives are mainly stay-at-home moms or part time workers. They play strange games once a month like ' ' which is some sort of girls only bonding time, and they are already recommending starting a family in this odd place (save me!!).

The base itself is fairly small, and you can walk to most of the buildings in 15 to 20 mins. The library has 4 computers, 2 fiction shelves, a few non fiction shelves and a big wall of movies (does it sound like this was geared towards Geoff?!), but you can request books online and for now I am reading 'Marx'. There is also a small bowling alley, a subway, a pizza place, the commissary (which is about the size of a small safeway and has only american food), the RX (which is like a mini walmart with basics like clothes, pharmacy stuff, toys and kitchen items), and a bunch of work buildings. The one thing we found out very quickly is that Sundays and Mondays EVERYTHING closes on base, so people around here live for Tuesdays.

Our temporary house is a duplex (like a townhouse), it has three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a big kitchen, dining room, living room, and has new basic furniture in it. Our estimated time frame for moving is 3-6 weeks but we have no idea what kind of place we will get at that stage as of yet.

I will get my camera out in the next couple of days to give you a better idea of the area - and will update with our crazy first few days in a little while!