A Brit in the US

A few weeks ago, a car swerved across my path and screeched to  halt scudding plumes of yellow dust into the air and causing me to brake sharply and reach for my .45. Before my hand touched it, I saw it was Lenny from the camera club. We alighted from our still purring steeds and shook hands. Lenny had come into the possession of a couple of tickets for the zoo These are like gold dust around Easter time since all the little children have mugged their parents into buying tickets. We both had time off around easter so there and then the agreement was reached that we'd visit the zoo. Bright and early one Saturday morning, before the sun had peered above the horizon, I crawled out of my bed and readied myself for the day. Grabbing a camera and two lenses, I headed for the door. Originally I'd had more gear than that. A con artist supreme had convinced me to buy a ton of gear that never got used, convincing me of the worth of starting a photography business. That ended up as a pr...

This time it was a trip purely for myself. I could lie and say I stuck a pin in the map and decided randomly to go to Macon Georgia but it wasn't so. I had to see people in Macon quite early on Friday morning. Rachel came along for company. The trip up was quite peaceful and there was hardly any traffic. I passed some very interesting things beside the road though. I should have pulled over and taken a photo but I wanted to get to my hotel before dark. As it was, I arrived just as it was beginning to go dark. The journey wasn't entirely uneventful. I'd set my in-car GPS to navigate me to the center of Macon. I'd forgotten about that until I ended up in an area where all the shops had bars over the windows and heavy-set fellows with their knuckles dragging on the ground leered ominously out of the shadows. Then, realising my error, I started using my phone to navigate me to my ultimate destination. I'd used the in-car GPS because I wanted the phone free for calls e...

It was 10:00 at night and I was tired. It had been a long, hard day at the end of a long, hard week. I had been dealing with the public for about 9 days straight and suddenly the phone rang. Dutifully I answered or should I say fearfully. I half expected work to be calling to ask me to work another of my days off. I liked the money but not the broken weekends which rarely fell on an actual weekend. Frequently I'd work several days and have a single day off then repeat the process. I had 3 whole days ahead of me. The only way to be sure not to be called would be to be out of town but I was exhausted and didn't have enough money to head out of town on a whim. Working in retail is like that. It wasn't work which was a real relief. Instead it was Brianne asking sweetly if I'd like to take a trip to Little Switzerland in North Carolina as she'd got an hotel booked and her girlfriend had pulled out. In a trice I said yes and she announced she'd be at my place in the ...

Yes, it's true. I did get to go to Washington DC. I'd never really considered going as it had never been on my list of priorities, strangely enough. It was, however, an interesting experience. It all started when my phone rang late one evening as I was midway through a rather nice bottle of Chardonnay. It was Andrew. Apparently he'd booked some tickets to fly to DC for a few days and had managed to snag some hotel rooms for a song. He and his ladyfriend were due to go but apparently his ladyfriend had just been nabbed by the police for driving under the influence and was now incarcerated awaiting trial. Obviously she wasn't going to go with him and he'd already asked about refunds but that wasn't apparently possible due to the bargain nature of the tickets. Thus, I got called and was reassured that yes, the hotels would switch the rooms from a single king bed to a pair of twin beds. It was on! The trip was on to DC. What with my work schedule I found I had 3 d...

"I am going on holiday to Key West next week. The rooms are booked and I have nobody to go with". With an invitation like that, who am I to refuse? Quickly rearranging my schedules I found two things. First that I could incorporate a week in Key West easily into my schedule as it fell quite nicely between courses I am taking (the last course gained me 91% overall) and that it also slipped nicely into a quiet spot at work. The second thing was that my schedule on my phone was screwed up. Now that never used to happen when I used a Blackberry. Sadly with Android, it happens too often - I feel I spend more time fighting Android than anything else though it does afford me the opportunity to put this blog entry in. I departed from Lexington in my SUV and parked in my friend's garage from where we took her car - largely because her car gets 30mpg while mine gets just 19mpg. With fuel prices like those in Key West which are a good 15% higher than I am used to paying, this was ...