One Year in America

It's been one year now since Sarah and I staggered blearily into the sun out of the long immigrant lines in security at Dulles Airport and arrived in America. It's been a very busy year. Our stuff arrived alittle late, due to Volcanos. We've moved into a flat, bought a car, and then bought a house. We experimented with gardening, and managed to grow a single chilli. We've also had a wonderful time exploring our local area, seeing new family and had plenty of people come to visit. We even took my parents to a genuine(ish) rally in DC.

It's been a great year, and through it all I have been very grateful to Sarah for keeping me sane and going on all the adventures with me.

This weekend, with all the talk of the luckily averted government shutdown, Sarah and I decided to have a shutdown of our own and take it very easy.

We did find time to buy some paint and test it our for our living room. Below, from left to right, we have Harvest Brown, Cozy Cottage and Creme Brule.


I think Cozy Cottage is my favorite.

Also, Sarah finished her first stained glass project:

Cherry Blossom Festival

This weekend, Kristine was in town and we decided to visit the Cherry Blossom Festival in DC. It was beautiful, seeing all of the trees in bloom along by the tidal basin.

Suddenly, as we were walking along, my spidey sense began tingling...

Lo, a giant storm was rolling in. We rushed to the Metro, but before we got there, the storm arrived, and we were pelted with hail and rain against a backdrop of thunder and lightning.

Later, Home safe, we proceeded to potter around the house and make light repairs to the garden.

Stained Glass Class

Sarah is taking a stained glass class, and bought home some of her work from het first class:





I am hoping the high lead content does not affect Sarah too much, although I would like winning at scrabble every so often. Here is a zoomed in picture:




I am not taking the class, as am not allowed near sharp things after 'the incident'.

Fixing the Roof

A few weeks ago, our roof developed a small leak from a skylight in the bedroom. Looking at Sarah as water slowly began to drip through, I looked alittle grumpy and wondered if we could call the Landlord on the weekend.

Then, it was explained to me (at length) that when you own your own house, you can't call a Landlord to get the roof fixed. This seems a disadvantage of home-ownership that is not included in the glossy brochures.

However, our roof has now been re-done, and this weekend was spent repairing a small hole in the plaster by the skylight near the leak. We did this using magic purple resin-stuff which when set covers up holes:

We both had a go at putting up the purple stuff:

Even only covering and painting less than a 3 square inch patch, I manged to cover a greater area of my own surface in paint:

As if by magic, the hole was gone:

March Madness

This weekend, Sarah and I again headed out to Skyline drive in Shenandoah National Park, to get a look at the park as the trees are starting to bud.

I also took a picture of this weekend's Supermoon, from out the back of our house:

Whilst very exciting, my picture looks more like moon.

Finally, we headed to watch some games of the women's college basketball games, part of the March Madness tournament. We went to see the games at our local State University's stadium:

The games were good fun; and local teams won both of their games. Not sure I quite get the rules yet, but it is definitely something to do with being tall. Perhaps this is why I never played as a child?

Washington in the Rain

This weekend, we set of with Russell (visiting from England), to show him the wonders of our nearest city at its finest. Unfortunately, Washington didn't play ball, and instead decided to try and wash us away.

On arriving in the city, we quickly bought some extra umbrellas. Ours have gone the way of many occasionally useful items, and been temporarily misplaced during our move. I hope they are in the basement....

The Umbrellas were unfortunately single use:

We escaped from the rain, and went to look at the National Air and Space Museum, which was wonderfully empty. On a quieter day, its much more fun, and a great museum. Here is a model of the Hubble Space Telescope with a Russell to scale:

The rain calmed down enough for an obligatory White House Photo:

We escaped the city early. Luckily, our house had survived the storm and we were able to receive our new table for kitchen as well.

Crazy Ipad Queues

Yesterday, Russell from England (in town for a long weekend) and I headed over to our local Best Buy on iPad launch day, to show him a real American Mall.

Amazingly, we were also able to see a rather long queue for the release of the IPad 2. Have never seen such craziness on a product launch:



More interesting (less queue-based) pictures from Russell's visit once I get the photos from our camera.