Happy 4th!!!

Hello all! I wanted to take time to send out Happy 4th of July greetings to all of my family and friends back home and to all my fellow Americans! Brit Boy and I had our BBQ celebration and fun yesterday, since he had to go to work today and it isn't a holiday here for obvious reasons :)

So today it's just Trevor and me around the Yellow House and Trevor wanted his picture taken so here he is showing his patriotic spirit ;-) For those of you who are new here and don't know who Trevor is, check out these previous posts here and here.



Also, I've been a bit under the weather lately so I haven't had a chance to do a post with my Wimbledon pictures, but it's coming in the next couple of days. In the meantime, check out Brit Boy's post about it on his sports blog, The Sports Ground!

Have a wonderful day!

Collective Experiences & Super Bowls

Hello all :-) I’m so glad that I can finally get a chance to post here. It has seemed like forever since the last time. I’ve been kinda knee deep in studying and various things, so today is a beautiful lull in it all. Today I’ve just been trying to have some down time, although I did cook this afternoon and I even exercised this morning. But both of those things are making things better in the long run, so they sort of work into this whole reconnecting thing that I’m up to lately.

It will probably be a bit of a late night tomorrow night, but that’s customary for me these days anyway. As I’ve mentioned here before, I usually get a burst of energy at around 11pm and then I’m wide awake for a couple of hours at least. So it’ll work out really well for tomorrow night in particular.

As many of you know, tomorrow is Super Bowl XLV. Here in England it will be shown later over into the night, starting a bit before 11pm (my golden hour)…LOL. So the timing is tailor-made for me. Brit Boy plans to check it out too for a while. I doubt if we'll stay up for it all, but you never know. The end will probably get recorded ;-)

Here’s the thing…I’m not really an NFL football fan or really a sports fan at all. LOL. I watch tennis and golf a little bit and dip into baseball sometimes, but I’m not what I’d call a “sporty spice” ;-) Note: I often say this "sporty spice" thing. LOL. It comes from one of the Spice Girls' names and I just kinda adopted that to mean a sports fan or in my case not a sports fan. I'm known to make up names for stuff like that. LOL. I’m quite pedestrian about most sports. Brit Boy is an avid sports fan, with football aka soccer, being his favorite. So anyway, as you see, I’m no sports fan. However, over the years I’ve more often than not tuned in to the Super Bowl at least for part of it. And the halftime show always pulls me in.

I was having a bit of a think about this earlier and I guess that the Super Bowl for me is more about the collective experience of the whole thing. We don’t get many of those nowadays with our attention being pulled in various directions. With so many channels nowadays and the internet, it is rare to share something with so many people. And I think that for me, since I live abroad, it has become a collective experience even more. It makes me feel connected to home in a roundabout way. It’s funny when I think about it. Who knew that a football game would EVER have that kind of pull upon me :-)

So tomorrow night we’ll be watching along with millions of others. We won’t have the special commercials to watch from over here, but there’s still the halftime show and all that exuberance to take a look at ;-) It should be fun!

Then it’s back to business on Monday, but the weekend has so far been just what I’ve needed. Have a great weekend! :-)

Trooping the Colour, Here We Come!

I have some fabulous news! Brit Boy and I are going to see Queen Elizabeth in June. We’re going to Trooping the Colour. This celebration is the Queen’s official birthday parade and is held on a Saturday in June, every year. The Queen’s actual birthday is April 21st. This is a wonderful display of true pageantry and I can’t wait to be there to watch it all unfold. I sometimes can’t believe how things have been turning out for this American girl who still feels like a tourist sometimes :-) I come across to the other side of the Atlantic with no wish lists and through Brit Boy and me giving everything a try, we get in to see all the things I would have wanted to see if I’d had a wish list when I arrived. Who knew that being a plucky couple got you this far :-) Sometimes I feel like we ought to have our own reality show. LOL. Anyway, I’m very grateful that we are getting a chance to go experience something else great together. What a blessing. We definitely know how lucky this all is. Often when we get opportunities like this, it reminds me what happens when you put the effort out there in life to go for what you want...you never know what can happen :-)

Our tickets arrived yesterday. So when Brit Boy came home from work, I sprung the envelope on him. He blogged about it last night. We had to apply for the tickets through a public ballot, which is very similar to how we got tickets to Wimbledon. Here's the post about that. When we originally thought about going, we had figured that we would just turn up on the day and stand along The Mall, and see what we could see. But then we figured that we may as well apply to be put into the public ballot and see what came of it. Well, we got in and our tickets are ready and waiting for June :-)

This should be very cool, because we will see the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, and some of the other royals. Brit Boy and I saw Princes William and Harry back in 2007 at the Concert for Diana, so we may add to our list of royal sightings substantially in June. We have to dress up for the occasion, so Brit Boy will have to get all suited up and I will be getting to work on my outfit. Wish me luck! ;-)

So it’s an exciting time around the yellow house. I’ll definitely be sharing all the details from our day out on June 13th! Have a great day :-)

Olympics 2008 & Two Teams In Our House

Brit Boy and I, like many around the world, were absolutely amazed by the Opening Ceremony at the Olympics in Beijing. The visual imagery was astounding to see. We were very impressed by the beauty of it. I also always like the parade of nations and you get to see all of these athletes who have worked so hard to get to the biggest sporting stage in the world. I can’t imagine the pride that they must feel to be able to compete and do their best alongside the rest of the world. Sadly, there always seems to be strife going on in the world, but for that one moment, a great chunk of the world is on the same page. I love getting that glimpse of what the world could be.

So now that the pageantry of the opening is done, Brit Boy and I are good naturedly cheering for our own national teams. It’s a funny thing about living in a house with two nationalities. Just by us coming together and marrying, we have forever linked ourselves regardless of our backgrounds. So we live our lives as just us. We both feel a divided loyalty and it works for us. (smile) However, just to rib each other, we take up the flag of our teams during the Olympics. It’s all in fun.

I gave Brit Boy some robots for Christmas and the main one has been dubbed Trevor… or Trev for short. He is our family mascot of sorts. But poor Trev has to parade the flag for both sides. He’s so loyal to us both. (laugh) Here’s Trev with the England flag and the Union Jack for Great Britain as a whole.



And then here he is with the American flag.



And then little Trev is showing his divided loyalty proudly with all of the flags. He’s such a team player.




So we support two teams in our house, but mostly we just enjoy the world all playing nice together and giving us all something to cheer about.

Guest Blogger: Brit Boy! - The Word on the Street

When Americano Girl first mooted the idea of me being a guest blogger on her site I thought that I might talk about my thoughts on her homeland, based on my trips over there, to give a flip view to that of her opinions and experiences of life here in England. Well, I may do that in the future - if I ever get invited back! (smile)

But another subject came to me yesterday. Americano Girl (AG) mentioned that she had been watching “Return to Witch Mountain” that morning, and we agreed that those series of films were very much of the 70s. We often talk about our experiences of being kids in the 70s, and remark about how similar our childhoods were, even though they were lived out on two different continents. AG always used to be Jamie Sommers when she played, whereas I was always Steve Austin - both running in slow motion somewhere, or making that ih-ih-ih-ih-ih-ih sound as we lifted an imaginary rock to throw at an equally imaginary enemy. Bionics were definitely a big thing in the 70s - less so now if you have seen the recent (pale imitation) Bionic Woman remake!

So, what other things were symbolic of the 70s? Well, still in TV land, I remember that the words “One banana, two banana, three banana, four” were the prelude to the best half hour of the week - or of the day if you were lucky enough to be a Brit Boy on his summer holidays. And you have to be a child of the 70s if you think that HR Pufnstuff made any sense at all! And no Saturday night would have been complete without learning what was the latest “word on the street” from Huggy Bear as he helped Starsky & Hutch to put away yet another “mean cat”.

You were a kid in the 70s (or I guess before then too) if you can remember being off sick from school and not hearing or seeing a single vehicle drive down your street. Wasn’t the world quieter then, or am I just getting old? You go out in the middle of the day during the week now and it is just like a Saturday afternoon.

If you were around in the 70s then you will remember the day that Elvis died. Our parents always talked about remembering where they were when they heard that JFK had been shot, and the modern day equivalent would be Princess Diana. But in the 70s, the big shock news was that Elvis had died. I was on holiday in the south west of England, and can still vividly remember turning on the TV when we got back from our day on the beach, to see pictures of the thousands of people outside of Graceland.

And the 70s was the era of Space exploration. Yes, the first moon landing was in 1969, but the 70s was crammed full of Apollo missions and for a youngster growing up in that era it was the most amazingly exciting thing that you could imagine. I was fortunate enough to get to go to the Kennedy Space Center a few years back, and it brought back all that excitement and wonderment of being a boy in the 70s marvelling at the exploits of these superheroes called astronauts. Americano Girl and I hope to go back to Cape Canaveral someday soon, but she may have to hide my credit card for the day - either that or keep me out of the shops there. Like a kid in a candy store (smile)

Being a kid in the 70s meant loud clothes, Star Wars, space dust, chopper bicycles, strange haircuts and a million other wonderful memories. It is just one thing that binds me and Americano Girl so closely. I always knew that Steve and Jamie would get married in the end! (smile)