Homes, Sweet Homes....

Well, I'm finally back Stateside after 10 days in the UK. Even though the trip back was pretty exhausting (an 18 hour travel day will do that to you), I had a great time.

The trip was essentially two halves for me- the first half was London which was my reward trip from work and the second half was in Essex with my family.

Both halves were fantastic but quite different. London was very lively as cities generally are. Even though the people there are all people who work for our company, they brought their spouses and the whole event did not feel like work at all. It probably helped that the most we had to do for work was one two-hour meeting to discuss ideas for moving the company forward. The rest of the time was spent in more social events as well as free time.

The social events were actually fun. Since we were all essentially there on holiday, it was a very relaxed atmosphere and I had a lot of fun getting to know some of the spouses. I was sort of held up as the resident expert on London and ended up being the translater of all things decidely British (i.e. what's 'rocket'? Answer: Arugula), the converter of currency (i.e. "how much is 52 pounds in American dollars?) and the navigator on the London underground. I didn't mind a bit. I love London and don't mind showing off my knowledge of the city.

The free time we had was fantastic. I got to be a tourist and see things I've never had the time to see such as the Tower of London. I loved it. My rather dark streak gravitates to the more gruesome aspects of British history so seeing the tower where prisoners were kept, the private execution spot, the torture devices and seeing where Henry the Eight's wives were buried was fascinating to me. I also took a trip around the National Gallery, briefly visited Harrods' food Hall and became somewhat of a regular at Fortnum and Mason since it had a fantasic food hall and was only a brief walk from the hotel.

I also got to spend a day with my cousin who I haven't seen in quite a few years. It was lovely to discover that she has also got the same dark streak as me and when she suggested we go to the London Dungeon, I knew that we were definitely related. That place is a lot of fun- it highlights all of the more brutal aspects of British history. I think, by nature, the British do tend to embrace our dark sides a little more and it's not considered quite so twisted to be interested in that stuff when you're there.

Obviously, one of my favourite parts of the whole trip was the food. I abandoned my typical healthy eating/diet and decided to just enjoy myself. Each day, we had access to an amazing breakfast buffet from the hotel which included all the fixings of a traditional full English breakfast as well as kippers, smoked salmon and multiple bread selections. I also got to indulge in lots of my favourite British foods such as sausage rolls, pork pies, fish and chips and, of course, good beer. Fortunately, my terrible eating was counteracted somewhat by the massive amount of walking I did. I seriously think that for the most part, I walked several miles a day which is rather easy to do in London.

All in all, the London part of the trip was wonderful. It was nice being a tourist but not really feeling like one. By the time everyone else left for the airport, I was ready to begin the second half of my trip so after a little drama with Fed Ex- my coworker had left me in charge of a package because she had to catch a plane- I did manage to catch my train two hours late and head to my grandparent's, a mere 35 minutes away.

That part of my trip was far more relaxed. I got to spend the first day and a half with just my granny since my grandad was away in Germany- his native land. It was lovely to just relax in her kitchen- the traditional gathering spot of my grandparents' house since I've been alive. I haven't been back for three years so it was lovely to catch up and feel right at home.

When my grandad came back, he was laden with German goodies such as sausage, bread and chocolate galore. Thus, I got a nice German feast as well as the traditional British food that I normally enjoy.

The only problem with staying with my grandparents is that my granny thinks she needs to feed me. She declared that I was quite thin and could thus stand to eat more. This meant that anytime I sat for more than 10 minutes, I was either offered food or food was placed subtly in front of me. Believe me, I'm not complaining but I do think that now I'm back in the U.S., I'll be calorie counting a lot harder than usual and trying to exercise a little more. I have to make up for all that terrible but wonderful food somehow.

I also got to see more of my cousins as well as my aunts and uncles. I didn't do too much once I hit Essex other than go for walks around the town and once to the neighbourhood where I grew up. It's strange how instantly it seems so familiar and yet seems so distant. Our old house has changed but elements are still the same. I wandered around with that nostalgia that hits when you realize that time moves ever forward. It doesn't seem that long ago when I used to do somersaults on the pole that was a support for the little porch of our house or I used to plant marigolds in a makeshift flowerbed I created in our old front yard. The ghosts of my playmates still hang in the air and walking down the street that was once home made me remember everything so clearly, it actually felt it had all just happened.

It was a good thing to do, that walk. It made me realize that I think no matter how long I stay away, England will always be home. It's in my blood. I wasn't that old when I left but I was old enough to be a person, not just a child and that person was formed by the years spent living in the UK. The U.S. has left it's imprint on me too but at my core, I'm a diehard Brit.

By the time I left on Saturday morning to begin my long journey home, I had managed to do all the things I wanted to do, see all the people I wanted to see and eat all the food I wanted to eat. I left with a sadness that always occurs when you leave a place you love but it was also nice to get home.

It also helps that I had two little furry dachshunds to launch themselves upon me as soon as I walked into my parents house and who've barely left my side since.

In a way, I feel like my trip to the UK took me home. Yet I also came home when I saw my parents at the airport and was assaulted with affection from Sookie and Rory when we were reunited. I think I'll always feel like I have a foot on each continent as long as I'm alive but it's only now when I realize that that's definitely a wonderful thing. I plan on going back a little more often than I have been going.

But...not for a while. I need to do a little dieting first.

Happy Monday and thanks for reading!

Walking and Tripping...

This will probably be my last blog before I leave for London. Even though I don't leave until Wednesday afternoon, I know myself well enough to know that I will be busy with packing and organizing and trying to prepare for missing eight days of work and won't be able to work in a blog.

Even though the focus of my weekend has been to get ready for my trip, I also managed to participate in the Susan B. Komen Race for the Cure walk on Saturday. Our company president wanted our office to sign up to participate and so we did. Thanks to my generous friends and family, I managed to raise a nice little sum to contribute.

The walk actually ended up being a lot of fun. Even though I had to get up earlier than I do on a workday and even though we ended up getting quite wet in the rain, I enjoyed both the exercise and walking with my teammates.

It wasn't supposed to rain. In fact one of my coworkers and I were waiting for the rest of our group to arrive and we spotted Mr. Weatherman- Frank Marzullo from Fox 19 news. My coworker called out to him and he said hi and assured us we'd have nice weather for the walk.

Less than ten minutes later, it started raining. I'm not kidding. By this time, Frank Marzullo was up on stage, doing some grandstanding and he didn't say a word about the rain. It didn't help that I had stupidly listened to him the day before when he promised it'd be dry for the walk. Thus, I came wearing a t-shirt with a thin hoodie over it. Had I known it was going to rain, I would have brought the umbrella I keep in my car or I would have brought a windbreaker. Silly Captain Monkeypants!

Still, in spite of the fact that we were dripping by the time the walk started, the rain stopped and we managed to dry out as we progressed. As the walk started, it became pretty clear that there were going to be two paces set by our team- the slow walkers and the fast walkers. I'm a fast walker by nature so I broke ahead with the fast walker pack from our office. We ended up finished about 25-30 minutes before the rest of the team.

It didn't take as long as I thought to finish the 5K walk and afterwards, I simply headed home to figure out what I still needed to shop for to take on my trip.

The rest of the weekend has been spent making a packing list and organizing my clothes. This seemed like an excellent time to switch over to my fall/winter wardrobe and pack the summer stuff away, sad as I was to do it. I also decided to be ruthless and donate a lot of my clothes from all seasons. It's probably the influence of "Hoarders" but I decided that if I had some clothing I hadn't worn over a year or if I hadn't worn it all during the last season, I would donate it. In the end, I had two large IKEA bags full of donations. Most of it is good stuff that either doesn't quite fit me any more or just isn't my style. Having moved from California back to the Midwest, my style has changed a lot since I moved.

It felt good to purge and organize. I now have a well organized closet and lots of leftover hangers. I also have my packing list made for my trip with only a few toiletries left to get.

The hard part is that even though I'm staying in a hotel for the first half of my trip, I'm going to be moving on to my grandparent's for the second half so I have to be prepared for both legs of the trip. Even though I can do some shopping in the UK if I need to, I'd still like to try and minimize it if I can.

Aside from physically packing, I'm pretty much ready to go, I think. I'm not ready to be apart from the pups for 10 days but I'm not thinking about that. I know, logically, they'll be safe with my parents but it still doesn't mean I won't worry about them. I'm an overprotective mother, I know it and knowing is half the battle. I have their bag half-packed- I stocked up on their favourite "chompers" which is our name for the long lasting treats they get whenever I have to leave them for a while. They're partial to Busy Chewnola's which keep them busy. It also stops them from chewing things they're not supposed to chew.

So, in three days, I'll be London-bound and my pups will be spoiled rotten by their grandparents. I won't be blogging while I'm gone because even if I took my laptop, I wouldn't necessarily have an internet connection and, frankly, lumping a computer to the UK is a lot of work. I've done it before and I'd rather not do it again. I'm sure, however, I will have plenty of stories to tell when I return. Thus, for now, I'll bid you all adieu until I return. Or, as the Brits say, "Cheerio!"

Thanks for reading! Happy Monday and on!

London, eBooks and Other Monday Musings

For a Monday, today wasn’t so bad at work. The day flew by. I think this was probably because I was still playing catch-up from last week. We’re a small office of seven people in the office. When five of the seven go on vacation in the same week, it generally means that I’m going to be a little busy.

Now everyone’s back and I’m still working from the fallout of having to cover so many areas in a week. I’m not complaining. There’s nothing I like better than a Monday that flies by. Given that last Monday, we found out someone who worked for us had died, this was a much better day.

On the plus side, it seems that as of Thursday of this week, I’m going to officially qualify for our “Top Performer’s Trip” to London. These means that my lovely, generous company rewards those of us who’ve met a certain ‘quota’ by a certain date with an all-expenses trip to London.

The trip happens every year. Usually, it’s somewhere in the U.S. but since this year is the 30th anniversary of the founding of our company, our owner decided to splurge and send the top performers to England.

Naturally, I’m rather excited. While there will be some group activities involved, for the most part, the trip is about letting the ‘winners’ have a relaxed trip to London. We get lots of free time, spending money and travel paid for. Since I have family in England, I plan on extending the trip so I can spend some time with my grandparents. I’m trying hard not to think about leaving the pups for over a week but I’m still a little worried about anyway. They’re my babies and it’s not like I can call them on the phone. I’m hoping that my parents won’t mind doggy-sitting for me. I should probably ask them, shouldn’t’ I?

(Hey, mum…would you mind awfully looking after the girls for a while in late September/early October? I’ll buy you and dad dinner. Thanks!)

So, anyway, I got my last placement today to qualify for the trip which made Monday rather pleasant for once. It doesn’t mean I’m likely to stop working hard but it’s definitely been an incentive to work extra hard. Hey, if you wave a free trip to London in front of Captain Monkeypants, I’m not going to let that slip!

Today was also good because I had an important revelation regarding publishing e-books: People don’t want to pay $1.99 for a book but if you give it away for free, you’ll ‘sell’ twice as many copies in a day as you have in the last four months. True story.

Personally, I didn’t think that $1.99 was that steep of a price for a book. I mean, granted, The Reluctant Demon isn’t up there with, say Pride and Prejudice or War and Peace but I thought that $1.99 was pretty cheap for an e-book. I mean, as an ‘author’, it is nice to charge something for your work. Giving it away for free is very benevolent but there’s something rather satisfying about making a few pennies for each book that sells.

I mean, I own a Kindle now. If I see a book for $1.99 that sounds interesting enough to read, I don’t exactly say, “oooh, that’s almost two dollars! I don’t know about that. It’s a bit expensive.” Now, I do that when it comes to bestsellers because I think it’s a bit of a rip-off. For example, I wanted to buy the newest of the “Game of Thrones” series recently. I’m not quite ready to read it yet but I’m close enough to finish book four that I started to panic that I’d finish it and wouldn’t have book five to start reading immediate.

As a sidenote: Yes, I am aware that this might be slightly obsessive but I’ve made no attempts to hide the fact that I have an obsessive personality. It’s just a fact that if I’m reading something that’s part of a series and I’m enjoying it, I simply cannot relax until I have all of the series at my fingertips to read. I can’t help it. It’s the same problem I have when I fly. I pack WAY too many books in my carry-on because I panic at the thought of finishing a book and not having another one to start. Weird? Maybe…but I know I’m not the only one who feels like this.

Anyway, back to my Game of Thrones anecdote. So, I priced the hardback to see where the price was lowest. I mistakenly thought it was Target because the book was priced at $24.95 and there was a “30%” off sticker on the cover. However, apparently the $24.95 is the price WITH the 30% off already. I find this misleading and rather annoying, Target, in case you’re reading. And yes, now I’m picturing a giant store with arms and a bullseye for a head reading this blog which is a weird image to have in my head.

Eventually, it turned out that Costco had the best price. I still wasn’t sure $19 was worth instant gratification so I decided to hold off on buying it until I’d checked the Kindle price. My theory on books is that it does cost money to print a hard copy and thus the cover price makes sense. However, e-books only take the cost of formatting them for this version and since almost 99% of writers tend to write electronically these days anyway, it’s tedious but not difficult to do. Thus, my rationalization was the e-book version of “Dance with Dragons” should be at pretty inexpensive compared to the print version.

Wrong. It turned out it was still almost $15. For the extra $4, I returned to Costco and now have a physical book which seems much more worth the $19 than the $15 it would have cost to have a file on my Kindle.

So, my point is that for my hard copy of Emmy Goes to Hell, I have no choice but to meet the minimum cost of printing the book which turned out to be $12. I literally will make less than 50 cents a book in my attempts to make it affordable. However, since I’m not actually selling anything physical on the ebook version, I can’t justify charging anything close to that. Thus, my e-book version of Emmy is $2.99. Yes, I raised the price of it from my first book a whole dollar. I apologize. Inflation stinks.

Besides, I’m giving The Reluctant Demon away for free at the moment. It’s my shameless attempt to try to tempt more readers to buy Emmy. I figure they might want to read the sequel and if I give them the first one for free and leave them on a cliffhanger, they might buy the next one for the low, low price of $2.99.

All in all, it’s been a pretty good day. Between qualifying for free trips and publishing revelations, it’s been a better Monday than most. Since they don’t happen very often, I’m choosing to be very thankful and appreciate it for everything it’s worth.

Thank you, Monday for not being a typical Monday.

Happy Tuesday!