Things That Still Unsettle Me

Dumping out my change purse this afternoon to see if I had enough money in it to do laundry tomorrow and get ice cream this evening without going to the bank. I do. In fact, going by the current exchange rate, I have about $30 in there. I'm not used to coins actually being worth so much.

Laundry. Back home I do laundry with reckless extravagance. In the summers, when I was staying at the coast house and it was hot and there was no air conditioning, I would change my clothes 4 times a day - go running, shower, put on pajamas, sleep, get up, get dressed, go for a walk, change out of sweaty clothes, shower again, put on another set of clothes, lounge around, put on running clothes again. I did a lot of laundry. Here, it costs $4 to run each washing machine, and $2 to run the dryer. The machines are tiny. I blow about $12 every wash day. (Currency converted for your convenience.) Needless to say, I have begun to resort to the dreaded sniff test for items such as sweatshirts, instead of just throwing them in like I would at home.

The peanut butter. I do not have the words, but I'll try. It's oily. It's bitter. It has mysterious flecks of wrongness in it. When you try to scoop it out of the jar, it oozes back off the knife. I have already Skyped home and begged my mother for Skippy.

I have, for the most part, gotten used to the way British people speak. I've never been one of those people that could imitate accents, so I have resigned myself to getting more and more annoyed with the nasalness of my own voice and the way I don't pronounce my t's. However, I am never going to get used to the way they spell artifact as "artefact." As you can imagine, I have to look at this spelling a lot, too. I complained about it to one of my British acquaintances and even she admitted that "artefact" looks completely wrong. Seriously, I can kind of understand your shoving extra vowels in anywhere, and I can ignore your "aluminium" weirdness, but why change the spelling of "artifact?"

The weather. I used to try to check the weather on the BBC site every morning, but it lies through its lying little teeth. Really, I'm not sure anyone could predict the weather here anyway. It rains out of sunny skies. Or the weather site will say "heavy rain" for the day, and there will be 5 minutes of drizzle and then sunshine all day. Or the site will say "sunny intervals" and it will begin to hail, as it has been doing this entire afternoon. I just don't know. I have at least learned to always carry an umbrella (you can buy them in the vending machines, too.)