america – Steve's Blog

Spring Cleaning

We’ve got some furniture arriving from the USA in a week or so and so we’ve been working on making space in the house for it and also making sure that there is space to bring it into the house through the garden as there is no way the bigger items are going to go through the dog-leg that is the front porch.

So we have a skip sitting on the front lawn with lots of junk in it including an armchair, a broken chest of drawers and a rather large but knackered book case.

The British Heart Foundation have taken the dining table and chairs, bags of clothes, tons of books and the sideboard and we’ve shampooed the carpet in the, now rather empty, dining room.

We’ve also thrown out old crockery and a pile of old beer glasses – so we actually have some space in the kitchen cupboards now.

Thanksgiving

The weather was good with temperatures in the low 50’s °F – its often much colder at this time of year.

There were going to be 13 of us for Thanksgiving Dinner and as we wanted enough left overs to go round we’d decided to cook two turkeys. But how do you do that with only 1 oven? The answer is that you don’t

Instead you use two gas burners, two large “kettles” and more than 6 gallons of Peanut Oil.

Take your two “kettles” and having worked out how much oil to put in (by using water and your turkey) you fire up the gas and heat the oil to 350°F.

Once the oil is hot you carefully, and slowly, lower the turkey into the kettle:

You keep an eye on the oil temperature and adjust the gas flow as appropriate making sure it doesn’t go over 350°F

And cook for 3.5 minutes per pound.

So after 60 minutes we lifted the turkeys out and let them drain for a new minutes.

Then you take them inside, let them rest for 30 minutes and then carve and eat!

Maine – here we come again

Well we’re off to Maine for nearly 3 weeks. We’ve got my step-daughters wedding to go to (I’m doing the photographs) and we want to spend time with Kathy’s mum and we want to go sightseeing. Kathy wants to go down to Pemmaquid and sit by the ocean for a bit.

[Embedded Canalplan Map for Pemmaquid]

We know that its not going to be easy going back. Because of the weather Kathy’s dad hasn’t actually been buried yet so there hasn’t been any real closure and we know that there are going to a lot of tears during the three weeks we are there.

Kathy wants to know if there is anywhere I’d like to go and there are a few places but it depends on which car we have and how we all feel. I’ll have to think it through and see how we all feel.

Happy Holidays

If there is one depressing thing about Thanksgiving it is what comes afterwards – yes that’s right: Christmas, or as they say in America “Holidays”.

Now I know the UK is far from perfect but we don’t leap into the “Happy Holiday Spirit” the way our American cousins do. Right after Thanksgiving the “Holiday” adverts begin. Holiday specials on jewellery, on power tools, on cars – yes they have Holiday Specials on the latest Ford Trucks. Its Madness.

But the madness really shows through when it comes to the Radio. Take 94.9 WHOM (Portland, Maine’s “America’s Superstation”) for example. It normally plays music that is OK to listen to… but not now, oh no, its now broadcasting “100% Christmas Music”. Yes you read that correctly – 100% Christmas music.. from now until Boxing Day… and its not even sodding December yet.

More Cheesy thoughts

This is a sort of a follow up to my previous entry about Cheese – specifically Americans and Cheese

I was over in the US for the past couple of weeks and had the rather unfortunate experience of eating some American cheese. Its not something I’m going to repeat in a hurry.

Lets take an example: Coopers Sharp Cheese. The only thing sharp about this was the blade on the cutter used to slice the stuff. Sharp cheeses should be tangy. This smelt, looked and felt like a Kraft Single – and if you know what those are then you’ll know what I’m taking about.

I also had some smoked “cheddar”. OK it was smoked – I’ll give you that. Smoked on the outside to the point of being more like a kipper than a block of cheese. The inside however was another story completely.

Ever eaten Candlewax? No neither have I but I suspect its rather like the smoked cheddar – waxy, bendable but brittle.

Mortgages

If you have done 6 impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways

Never, ever, ever try what we have just done.

My previous Blog covered the problems with getting my wife’s name on the bank account. Well to that we had to redo the mortgage because the RBS Current Account Mortgage scheme is now dead and they do “OffSet” now which is basically the same but uses two accounts.

The CAM basically ran the mortgage as a huge overdraft with your account balance being negative. Mind you there was something good about going to an ATM and it saying Your Account Balance is £100,000DR. You May withdraw £400 today

Anyway CAM is dead so we have to set up a new joint account (which was fun) and then redo the mortgage.

So then we get a letter from the Offset Mortgage team asking for EXACTLY the same things as we had already provided for the account (Proof of ID, residency etc.). So I tell them – that the bank, their own bank has all of that so why don’t they try to talking to other parts of their company.

In the Middle of all this process we go off to the USA for Christmas. Bank is happy – they will fax us the paperwork that needs to be signed (as long as we sign the originals when we get home). So we sit and wait for a fax.. it “will be there on Monday”, it doesn’t turn up.

We phone them.. its “on its way”, nothing, we phone again, its “on its way”, nothing.

We phone again. The Offset Mortgage team have cancelled the joint application because “the bank told them it was a single application”.

By now we are both pissed off – we now have two bank accounts : our pay checks are going into the new one BUT everything else (bills etc) is still against the old CAM account… you can just see whats coming cant you?

Angry words are exchanged with the bank. They say that they will process it as a single application and then migrate it to a joint application afterwards. OK I guess thats acceptable. So they fax it through to us and I sign it and fax it back.

Now here comes another curve ball. When I moved to the CAM account my old RBS account was never removed from the system for some reason – it sat in Wigan containing no money but with a £1000 overdeaft facility. We never touched it (~more fool us!). The bank in Gloucester said they would delete it for us.

So the Offset Mortgage team settle the outstanding amount on the CAM and then where do they put the rest of the money? Yup thats right – into my OLD account in Wigan, and not the new account in Gloucester.

So we now have my salary in the new account in Gloucester, some Mortgage money in the old account in Wigan, and the CAM account has GONE with all the bills transferred over to the new account

So there we are in the USA doing digital banking shuffling money round from account to account before they decide the close the old Wigan account (which we can only access via Digital Banking).

To be honest – the Royal Bank of Scotland have been useless. It would have been easier to move to a different bank.. it certainly could be any more difficult. It seems that the Offset Mortgage part of RBS is totally disconnected from the rest of the RBS and they deal with them in exactly the same wasy as they would with another bank.

Crazy, Crazy.

Still I did have fun in the US.. Never eaten Deep Fried Turkey before 😉

Pickles

I guess this is a follow on from my bit about the American fixation with cheese. Its the American fixation with pickles.

Try to get a burger.. and if you are lucky enough to get one without cheese then its a sure bet that it will have pickle on it. Pickle seems to have seeped into the diet as a mandatory, yet mainly unnecessary, food stuff (in a similar way to sprouts are to the standard UK Christmas meal).

The “restaurant” in the Interstate Bowling Center in Augusta, Maine actually states on its menu for burgers that they are “served with the infamous pickle”. Served with it yes, but does anyone actually eat the things.. I think not.

Anyway who would want to pickle a cucumber anyway?

…and another thing

.. What is it with Americans and Cheese? Why do they smother everything in the damned stuff? I’m married to an American and she can’t answer the question. As you might have guessed I like cheese but NOT when its cooked – :wierdface:

There you are sitting in a bar and you want something to eat and you browse the menu.. Fancy a burger.. oh look its got CHEESE on it (note I’m not talking about Cheeseburgers here – I guess they have even more of the stuff on them). How about some nice steak tips with onions?… ‘fraid not its covered in cheese..

Arrgggggghhhhhh