Pride & Prejudice

I fall asleep during movies all the time. Even if it is 10 at night, and it is an action movie. In fact, especially when it is an action movie. If there is nothing but shooting, car chases and fights, it puts me to sleep. So something totally uncharacteristic happened Friday night. Dave was busy doing a bunch of things he needed to get done, so I had the night to myself. At about 10 I decided to put on a show. I searched the TV channels, nothing. So I turned to our DVDs. I came to the A&E miniseries of Pride and Prejudice. I thought to myself, this is good and I haven't seen it in ages, I'll just watch it for a while. But as I started watching it, I became addicted to the drug, I couldn't turn it off. I think it had a lot to do with living here now. Seeing all the scenery and thinking, wow, I live there. It made me want to see where else they would go, and if I would recognize any of it. Well, when I finally went to bad at 4 AM I was glad I watched it. It was better than I remembered, and good romance movies that I like are few and far between. I checked the locations where they filmed it, and I haven't been to any of those places yet, but I definitely will before our time is up here. So last night, at 10 o'clock on the dot Dave suggested we start watching all 3 Lord of the Rings back to back, I told him sure, but I'll be asleep in 45 minutes!

Caramel Popcorn

Growing up in my family meant that every few weekends we watched a High Family classic movie and downed a bunch of homemade, hot, caramel popcorn. When I went to college I made the family favorite just a couple of times, both with my then best friend, now sister-in-law Kari. We would watch a movie and eat this while our other college best friend, Jen, went out on dates with every eligible bachelor (but we weren't jealous...). After leaving college I never made it. Then once, after years of marriage, Kari and I got to reminiscing about the popcorn nights and Dave was a little disappointed that I had never made it for him. So I made it a grand total of once and then promptly forgot about it again. But this week I was homesick for its sweet, warm yumminess, prompted by Kari's phenomenal work to put together a family cookbook and asking for the recipe and pictures. So for our FHE treat this week we made the old family favorite, and it was just as good as I remembered. The picture above was taken seconds before we dug in. If you want it too, here is the recipe: 1 Cup Brown Sugar, 1/2 cup Karo corn syrup, 1/2 cup butter. Put everything in a pan and stir until it comes to a boil. Pour over a big bowl of air popped popcorn, stir, devour. Be careful that you don't eat it too soon after it comes off the stove because it will be HOT. But eating it warm is the only way to go in my opinion. I have a feeling that in the long cold rainy winter here, this might show up on the menu again!

Book Reviews #2

Here are some reviews of my most recent reads:

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell - After reading The Tipping Point by the same author, which is fantastic, I was excited to read this. It is amazing how fast you can read through this book. It was fascinating. It is a study on how we as humans can read and interpret data about people and situations in a blink of time. And how that is part of our subconscious, it is an uncontrolled response. It also goes into a very interesting study of race relations and our subconscious decisions. It isn't preachy, just good. I love books that teach you something and keep you thinking about them for months to come. This is one of those.

Heavenly Date and Other Flirtations by Alexander McCall Smith (author of the No.1 Ladies Detective Series) - This is basically a series of short stories based on dating/marriage/ love stories. Most of the stories are things you would hear at a - I have a story worse than you - convention. How do people come up with stories like these? Some were fun, some just weird. A quick read.

Mr. Midshipman Hornblower by C. S. Forester - this is the first in 11 books in the Horatio Hornblower series. A couple of years ago Dave and I watched the BBCs miniseries based on the books which were very well done. And the actor who portrayed Horatio, Ioan Gruffudd, does a fantastic job. So when I saw the first book in the series at our base library, I picked it up. It was really good. I found myself re-living the series and picturing our fair hero from the film in all of the books scrapes. I don't know all the naval jargon, but I didn't let that slow me down. A lot of fun, I look forward to reading book 2 and re-watching the series!

Someone Bigger by Jonathan Emmett - During one of our frequent trips to the Library on base Enoch grabbed this book and ran to me yelling, SOMEONE BIGGER. Clearly this wasn't his first exposure to this book. We checked it out and read it to him before bed every night for weeks. It is the perfect story for Enoch. It is about a little boy who really wants to be noticed as a big kid and fly his own kite. I think it is great.

London Calling

This weekend a friend of ours took the kids and we headed into London to meet my sister Melissa and her husband Ken who flew up for a short surprise weekend getaway. Dave took a bunch of pictures that you can see here. He also wrote a small writeup here. For us Sunday was a big day, we went to the British Museum, ate lunch, walked all around Trafalgar Square, West End, Parliament, Big Ben, and other places. Then we caught a matinee of the Lion King, which was very impressive. Afterwards we went to the London Eye and got a fantastic view of the whole city. Then we walked into China Town and ate at a Chinese restaurant and finally took the Tube home and fell asleep. The next morning we headed back to our kiddoes and let K&M have some fun time on their own. It was a great trip and I am glad we went. I sure hope that other people (hint, hint) come and visit so we can do more exploring in London and in our neck of the woods in Yorkshire.

The Big Five

This is Hilde on her birthday. It was a great day to turn five. She and I took the day off and joined a group bus trip throughout Yorkshire. There were three stops. The first was in Ripley. Here we walked through an old church and the below shot is Hilde in the cemetery of the church.
History is everywhere here. This church is a site where a bunch of people were martyred during Henry the VIII's reign. Although we didn't have time to visit it, there is also a cool castle there, which we plan on visiting when we have more time.
Ripley also has "world famous" ice cream, whatever that means. Hilde got a forest fruits and vanilla swirl cone dipped in chocolate. I just had vanilla, it was really good.
Our next stop was the village of Grassington which had a few rows of fun stores. Hilde and I shopped and spent most of our time discussing what she wanted and what I wasn't willing to buy. We still had fun though. In the town center they had brought in a bunch of sand for a "beach" for the kids to play in. Hilde had fun making a sand castle. After that we hit a pub for a yummy lunch and then the town of Skipton. We didn't have hardly any time in Skipton, so no pictures, but we are definitely going again. Hilde went to the castle on a school field trip, but the rest of us want to see it, and they have good markets as well. After that we headed back to the base and picked up Enoch to play at the park.
Enoch needed some attention to, but as you can see, he had a lot of fun.
We ate dinner at our favorite pizza place and then headed home to open presents.

Birthday Bash

We finally broke down and had our first birthday party for one of our kids. Growing up, I really only remember one birthday party for me, that was to celebrate my 8th. Other than that we mostly celebrated as a family, and I find that to be my natural go to. But since Hilde has a larger social circle than her parents these days, she gets invited to a LOT of birthday parties. So one day she announced to us that she was having a princess birthday party where only girls were invited except Enoch and Daddy and that all the girls had to dress up. After a brief discussion, we decided that it actually sounded like fun. WHAT WERE WE THINKING!

Yesterday we had EIGHT five-year-olds over for a princess party. Although the party was supposed to be from 12-3, one girl's parents misread the invitation and dropped her off at 11. (Conveniently they were also the last parents to pick up their daughter - arriving about 3:15..) There was hot dogs, bubbles, sidewalk chalk, a castle cake, balloon popping, pin the crown on the princess, fingernail and toenail painting, lots of running, screaming and giggling, and when the adults (just Dave and I) were too exhausted to move, we watched about 20 minutes of Mulan while we waited for the parents to collect their princesses. Hilde was in heaven.

Here are some pictures of the occasion:

Olympics - Brit Style

We are getting all of our Olympics coverage via BBC - HD - our one high definition TV channel. We record it when it is on, early in the morning and while we are at work, and then try to zip through all of it at night. The kids have enjoyed it, and Hilde has decided she wants to be Chinese, 17 and be able to do cool tricks (read - gymnastics). Enoch loves to watch the Judo and will ask for a million Judo flips a day. But there are some very interesting things about watching the Olympics here, and here is just a few I thought up:

1) There is WAY more sailing, kayaking, and rowing on than you would ever see at home. Hours and hours and hours of it.
2) If there isn't sailing, kayaking or rowing on, then you are sure to be watching dressage. This equestrian sport would get quick highlights in the US, but you see every moment of every competitor's trials here.
3) The commentators talk a lot about whether or not things are "useful". For example, that swim stroke doesn't seem very useful, what a useful boat....
4) Great Britain apparently cannot compete in soccer in the Olympics, so the one sport I was counting on seeing more of I actually haven't seen at all. Dave had me go to the cafeteria for a couple of minutes Friday to see a snippet of the China/Norway women's game that was playing on the US Armed Forces Network. Great Britain has an agreement with FIFA that allows them to submit multiple teams in international competitions - Ireland, Scotland and England. If they essentially combined those teams into one for the Olympics as Great Britain, they would lose their FIFA independence. Maybe that is why they put so much effort into the water sports!
5) As you would expect, they focus on the British athletes, so don't expect to even see the Americans finish the event. And don't expect anyone other than Brits to be interviewed. I actually like this change. It is a lot of fun to be part of a different culture this way. The only American they really talk about is Michael Phelps, but he is a special story anyway.
6) Other sports you will get a lot of coverage of: archery (we are in the land of Robin Hood and all), shooting, cycling, beach volleyball (for the eye candy I presume), field hockey and badminton. There are a lot of British competitors in badminton this year.
7) We find ourselves easily embarrassed by Americans who are overly loud, demonstrative, or cocky. Both athletes and the crowd. Luckily this doesn't happen a lot, but when it does, I hate it.
8) We haven't seen or heard Bob Costas even once.
9) We haven't heard the Olympics theme music at all. I kind of miss it.
10) I am out of time - there is a lot more Olympics to watch!!!