Two green things

First green thing

Well, it turns out that my green card is green, after all. The white one was a temporary one-year one. My permanent one arrived 2 or 3 weeks after it. Husband's temporary and permanent ones arrived on the same day. Can't help thinking they could save themselves some work there...

Anyway, my green card now lives in my wallet (which is also green, incidentally). That's purse, to you Brits, though not to you Americans, for whom a purse is a handbag... Got that? I'm required to be able to produce it at all times. Otherwise, I will disappear in a puff of green smoke. It's in a special little envelope that looks as if it's lined with aluminium foil, which has printed on it:

'We recommend use of this envelope to protect your new card and to prevent wireless communication with it.'

Stop the world, I'm getting off. Are you telling me that people can effect identity theft by waving some wireless gadget at my green card when it's not even visible? I can't keep up with modern life. Can they remove my kidneys wirelessly as I walk round Wal-mart too? Is it safe to go out? Is it even safe to stay in? Aaaargh...

Second green thing

This blog. What am I going to do with it? Clearly it needs revamping in a big way. The design is out of the dark ages. You know, like... like... 2009 or something. I love wittering my heart out here, and it doesn't cease to amaze me that people read it and keep coming back for more. But I'm feeling a bit uncomfortable these days. There's a heck of a lot of very personal stuff on this blog, and I guess my boundaries are shrinking back a little. Which is probably a good sign - a sign of life returning to normal, perhaps. When you're in the middle of a life crisis, it all goes a bit weird. I have to confess that now, I'm not entirely comfortable in my own blog.

Cyber Mummy marked the end of my era of true anonymity, though I'd given away little pieces of it here and there before then, to virtual friends and real ones. It makes writing a blog feel different. I also realised at Cyber Mummy that if I'm giving out business cards, and using this blog as a showcase for writing, then it's not really appropriate for it to be full of personal angst and boobless lamenting. You get my drift.

I hoped Blogger would let me do something straightforward, like hide chosen posts from view. But it doesn't. You have to delete them, and I don't want to do that. I suppose I could copy them all into Word documents, and then delete them. That would be quite a job, though. My research on the issue has turned up the suggestion that you can open the posts, then save them as drafts, which effectively hides them. I suppose I could try. Does anyone know if you lose the comments if you do that? (Comments = best bit!)

Or... here's what I'm thinking of doing. I'm wondering whether to have two blogs. The first would be essentially the whole Not wrong, just different English woman in America gig. Though I think it will become less personal, and more simply a reflection on life in a different culture. I've felt for a while that I've outgrown the whole mummy blogger stage, and that's another aspect I feel uncomfortable about. It feels ok telling stories about children when they are young, but mine are growing up. I'm less happy about sharing them with you all. India Knight said the same at Cyber Mummy, so I'm in good company. But I still have plenty to say about life here, even without them.

The second blog would be where I would dump all the uber-personal old posts from this one. Following the oft-quoted truth that blogging is cheaper than therapy, I would use it to write when I needed to write. I suspect that it would turn into a rather whingey blog, but bloggers quite like reading each other's whinges, so that probably wouldn't matter. I'm guessing the posts would be sporadic, but that's another good sign, isn't it? This second blog would be password protected. That would feel safer.

What do you think, Bloggy Friends? I thought I'd run this by you, and see what your opinions are. Would you follow two blogs? Would you miss the unpigeon-holeable untidiness that is currently Not wrong, just different?

And how possible is it to move posts from one blog to another?

I was going to leave you with Captain Sensible's Stop the World, I'm getting off, but wouldn't you know? Youtube couldn't come up with it. So here is Happy Talk, which seems equally appropriate for a post about blogging. If nothing else, you always know you're going to get the occasional fabulous track from the '80s here. So go on, put it on, minimise the window, and do whatever you were going to do next in another window (the video quality is appalling so you won't miss anything). You'll be tapping your toes for 3 minutes and 17 seconds, and thanking me for it. It's quintessential irony.

Three white things

First white thing

I made a startling and potentially life-changing discovery while in Scotland, and being a generous soul, I thought I'd share it with you. Those square white plates that they have in restaurants and in catalogues... get yourself some.

We were staying in a friend's house, and the first night, I rustled up a delicious little something for the children: fish fingers, pasta and broccoli. (Oh come on, I was on holiday, I wasn't going to be slaving over a hot stove every night.) But here's the amazing thing. If you serve fish fingers, pasta and broccoli on square white plates, it looks like some gourmet speciality. It really does.

If I was a half-decent blogger, I'd have comparison photos for you. Fish fingers on my usual circular pattern-round-the-edge plate, followed by fish fingers on clean-lines square white plate. Then you could see for yourselves. Sorry. You'll just have to shut your eyes and imagine them... See...? The first looks suspiciously like fish fingers, pasta and broccoli. The second, ah yes, the second has become North Atlantic cod coated in our own special-recipe golden breadcrumbs, oven-baked to soft perfection, accompanied by delicious wholemeal pasta and locally sourced garden-fresh broccoli tips, served with a smooth coulis of 'ketchup de tomates organiques'.

They had rectangular white plates too, which were even more sophisticated. I mean, rectangular, for heaven's sake.

Second white thing

It is very hot here. As we made our descent, the pilot informed us that the temperature on the ground was 108 degrees (that's 42 for you celsius types). It was windy too, and walking out of the plane onto the stairs felt like walking into a giant hairdryer.

Still, we are quite jammy really. It's been over 100, unrelentingly, for two or three weeks, and now the forecast says it's going to drop down to the low 90s - maybe even a cool 89 tomorrow. So we timed our absence and homecoming pretty well.

I am mentally better adjusted to living in this kind of temperature than I used to be. I used to find it frustrating, because, being English, I'm so hard-wired to looking at sunshine and thinking "ooh, lovely". This just led to frequent disappointment. I've had to relearn my reflexes. It's as if Pavlov took his salivating dogs and said "and now, just to complicate things, I'm going to ring the bell, and then serve you food that tastes disgusting and makes you sick... let's see if we can recondition you...". It's one of those complicated ex-pat things. You have to reconfigure some of your good/bad assumptions. I remember being confused when our realtor was showing us round a house in January, and said "this yard has trees, so it'll be nice and shady". It required a mental u-turn from the usual expectation of "south-facing, sheltered, sunny".

So yes, I'm pretty well adjusted these days. I don't look out of the window and think "ooh, lovely". A lot of the windows have the blinds down anyway. I look at Weatherbug on the computer, and think "ooh, hot". I will confess, though, to a residual English excitement at the thought of how quickly the washing will dry (though actually, it's not as speedy as you might think, because of the humidity). I think it will be some years before I lose that.

Third white thing

I've got my green card. It was waiting for us in the mail on our return. It's white. Forgive me for being simplistic, but I was expecting it to be green. This means that I can get a job, and get paid. It's actually rather intimidating (pathetic of me, I know).

So that'll be me, flipping burgers then.

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The Great Outdoors

Do you ever start writing a comment on a blog, and before you know it, you've rambled on so much that you've pretty much written a blog post on the subject?

I've just done that on Nappy Valley Girl's blog. I'm enjoying reading her blog, because she's just moved from Clapham Common to Long Island, and it's full of her early impressions of American life. I can hardly read a post without exclaiming in her comments box "oh yes, I remember that feeling so well!". It also makes me realise how far I've dug in, in three years. Things that strike her as unusual are just part of life for me now, and it takes someone else to point them out for me to notice. She surprised local American friends recently by offering them milk in their tea. I remember doing that. Now I don't, and what's more, I don't even think about it. These things become second nature.

Anyhoo, Nappy Valley Girl was cogitating today on why Americans don't seem to go outside when it's snowy, or even cold. When you're bringing up small children, it seems an essential part of a day to take them out into the fresh air, come hell, high water, or bad weather. But only if you're British.

I was commenting along my usual lines of "oh, I've wondered the same thing!" and found I'd written so much on the subject that, if I just added a tiny bit more, I could repeat it all on my own blog and call it a post. Which is what I've done.

I started off by saying I thought it was just a cultural thing. We Brits have a deep-seated feeling that fresh air is good for children, and that going outside at some point in the day is essential. The Americans don't. Simple as that.

But then I decided that actually, there's more to it than that. I think it's a reflection of a deep cultural difference between the adults. We Brits love our outdoors. We are a nation of gardeners. We like a sunny day because then we can be "out". If we go on holiday, we like to see the scenery of where we are. Our own countryside is sacrosanct.

It's just not the same here. I once tried to explain to a woman who asked me what I missed about the UK, that I missed walking down a street, walking the kids to school, going out and about at the week-ends... that it made me feel disconnected from the "real" world. I said "For example, you could easily live a life here where you literally NEVER went outside some kind of built environment. You leave the house by car from your integral garage. You can run your errands at drive-thrus. Everywhere here has convenient parking lots, so you don’t have to walk to get anywhere. Indeed you physically can’t do that. You could live without ever seeing the outdoors except for the parking lots you walk across."

She looked at me as if I was on another planet, and said "What's wrong with that?"

My guess is that this is one reason why the fear of climate change tugs at the emotions of Brits more than a lot of Americans. We would really mind if our countryside changed. For most people round here, it's a rather remote problem. If the planet warms up a little, your air-conditioning bill will be a bit higher, but it won’t significantly affect your life. No big deal.

I don’t want to get pious here, but I can’t help feeling that it’s important for us humans to be conscious that we belong to the natural world, and not the other way round. There’s a big wide world out there, and we are very small in it. How do your kids learn that, how do they come to feel that, if you don’t take them outside?

Recycling: Part II

When you move abroad, you find out new things about yourself. Lots of it is good, to do with the way you rose to the challenge, aspects that you enjoyed more than you anticipated, inner strengths you didn’t know you had. Feel good in retrospect stuff. But you also find out things about yourself that aren’t so nice. These are the dirty little secrets that don’t make it onto the expat websites. For example, you may be rather relieved if you’re honest, to find out from other people’s experience that your kids will lose their American accents when you return home, in spite of your assertion that preferring one accent over another is a form of racism. Or how about the fact that you never thought of yourself as materialistic, but it’s pretty nice, when it comes down to it, to live in a house double the size of the one you left in Britain.

Here is another one. I am not as green as I’d like to think I am. In Britain, I recycled carefully, I didn’t waste things, especially food, we used buses, only owned one car, a diesel, I minded about the future of the planet. Or so I thought. Here, we have two cars (which in our defence, is a necessity, given the almost non-existent bus service). I can salve my conscience by looking at the guzzling SUVs, and think “well, at least my minivan does around 20 to the gallon to your 15”. I try not to waste things, but it is harder, and I do less well. I do recycle, but it took us a while to get round to it, and I’m more lax about it. I have genuine questions as to the value of recycling – in a country where space is so vast, I do wonder if landfill is not a bad option, set against the energy required to recycle (and the comments on my previous post have done nothing to reassure me). It’s not these questions that make me lax though. It’s the conscience-salving that says I might not be doing it perfectly, but at least I’m doing it more than most people.

I can make all kinds of excuses, and have all kinds of logical reservations, but at the bottom level I know this to be true: I cared more for the environment when I loved it more. I know we’re talking global warming and consequences that will affect us all, worldwide. I know that being green is about safeguarding the planet and not about pretty green English lanes and how early in the year daffodils flower these days, and what is causing the decline in the number of sparrows, but there we are, I’m just airing my dirty washing in public and being honest. I may be a citizen of the world, but I am hugely influenced by my local situation.

There’s another element, of course. It’s not all to do with the English countryside. I tried to be green in the UK because everyone else is trying to be green. Sometimes it’s by reason of moral choice and sometimes it’s with financial or other incentive, but it is fairly unavoidable. Being a good citizen is increasingly bound up with being a green citizen.

I don’t share Margaret Thatcher’s view that there’s no such thing as society. There clearly is. We are hugely influenced by those among whom we live. This can be for evil – history shows that the majority of us can turn into the people who spy on our neighbors and colleagues, report them to authorities, turn on them, or turn a blind eye. I think it is often ignored, though, that society is a force for good too. We are all better people for rubbing along beside others who, in all kinds of ways, bring out the best in us. It is easier to behave well if the prevailing wind is carrying you along.

Recycling

Pig in the Kitchen has burst my baggie bubble, by asking if I feel guilty about where these little plastic darlings end up, in all their non-biodegradability shame. She has a point. I have been meaning to write about recycling for ages, so I thought this would be a good moment.

When we first moved here, I was rather horrified at the lack of environmental concern. It has become such a way of life in Britain. Here, recycling is a minority interest. If pressed, most people would agree that it is a Good Thing (difficult to argue the opposite), but few people actually do anything about it. It’s not that easy to do anything about it. You would have to look very hard to find a recycling bin in a car park; in fact, I’m not sure I can think of any at all. At first we paid a supplement to our trash collection service, and once a fortnight they would collect our recycling. We gave that up for three reasons. First, I don’t like paying for recycling if I don’t have to. Second, we had to put it out sorted into four supermarket carrier bags (newspapers, glossy magazines, cans, glass) in an open box, and on more than one occasion I found the wind had taken the lightweight plastic box halfway down the street. I imagined the newspapers and magazines had gone the same way. It’s very windy round here, and open trash boxes are not the way forward. Third, having witnessed the collection of the sorted items, dumped together into the back of a lorry inside their plastic bags, I did doubt that it ended up anywhere other than a landfill site. Maybe I just saw them on a bad day, but I didn’t feel I wanted to continue paying for the service.

We now collect all our recycling in our garage, and once every now and again, load it into the minivan and take it to a recycling center. It’s an intriguing experience. The place is staffed by volunteers, whose average age must be in the 70s. How shaming that the lead is being taken by the older generation who have little personal stake in all this. One old lady sorts and assists, going from bin to bin slowly and painfully with her zimmer frame. You have to dump your recycling items into the appropriate bin, so it is quite a task, sorting out the different plastics and papers. They recycle everything in great detail – even the lids of milk containers. There is often a line of cars if you go on a Saturday, so a round trip can easily take an hour. Our kids quite enjoy sorting and dumping, so we sell it to them as a fun trip, but I suppose you have to be fairly committed to recycling to be bothered.

On the depressing side, this recycling center, though very admirable, is small. There is space for no more than a dozen cars to park and unload at one time. The bins are not much larger than the kind of bin you see in every supermarket car park in the UK. It serves a city of over 300,000. Does that tell you how much recycling activity there is here? On the optimistic side, I do believe that there is more awareness and activity now than when we arrived, less than 2 years ago. The school has set up a working group, the preschool collects plastic bags to recycle, Dillons has a bin at the entrance for Dillons bags. It’s not high on most people’s agenda, but the beginnings are there.

So Pig, to answer your question. No, I didn’t feel guilty about baggies, but I do (a bit) now. In my defence, I don’t use THAT many (how much Playmobil do you think I have?), and in the kitchen, is it any better to use cling film? You have made me stop and think, though, you and the commenters who wash and reuse their baggies. I have never been a washer and reuser of baggies, but henceforth I undertake to be so. There you are, lovely Bloggy Friends. You are slowly changing the world through your blogging. As for you, Pig, don’t tell me you weren’t very grateful for plastic bags on this occasion (make sure you read the 'Addendum'). And none of us would blame you at all for not recycling those ones...

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