I just don’t know how to tell you this.

Well my international drivers permit has arrived… yay! In the UK… Boo… I’m sure Sarah can post it and get it here before the weekend and then I can hire a car and go for a spin, or at least cross the road! Sarah hopefully will be able to scan it before she sends it to me, I just prey this will be good enough for the car rental place.

Also today I have ordered mattresses for the kids bunk bed, I pick them up on Monday. Just a couch, drawers and bookcase type thing to go.

I have been here exactly 2 weeks and today I heard myself say something I thought I would never say. You have to understand that in order to be understood here you need to say things in a certain way. It is an elevator, not a lift… it is a trunk, not a boot. I swore to myself I wouldn’t fall into using American terms, but it is all happening in my subconscious. I noticed that I said “Peanut Budder” for peanut butter, when we all know it is pronounced “pe-n-b-er”. This is not the weirdest one. I actually said “aluminum” (a-loom-in-um), oh dear god what is happening to me.

That said I have also found myself saying things I wouldn’t usually say in the UK. “He’s fair shifting it, look at him go!” Again, this got some funny looks. I think they are humoring me so far, and it seems I am getting away with quite a bit. We were talking about a scruffy diagram I had drawn and I said “It looks like I have scribbled it in the back of a pack of fags”. Yeah, let’s just say something was lost in translation. Some of the things I say seem to be the talk of the office. The term “bits and pieces” has some them in hysterics, and even now I’m not 100% why.

If somebody asks what they sound like to me and I can do an American accent I usually say, “shewer, naat a prablem”.

There is one thing I have given up on though. I have been writing this with a US spell check, so please excuse the z in organize and the luck of a u in favorite. British blog, American computer, I have learnt to live with it! I do miss the GBP pound sign though. This reminds me… if you are ever asked to hit the pound key on an American phone they mean the # (hash key). This is Shift + 3 on a US qwerty keyboard, where the GBP pound sign should be.

I was getting wound up about this and then I thought “forget, abaad et”