Christmas 08 was great for three main reasons:

1. My Christmas, my rules. So no bloody turkey (it isn’t that I don’t like turkey – just I prefer all other meats). Had beef fillet wrapped in parma ham and porcini instead if you are interested – Jamie Oliver inspired deliciousness.
2. Because of Thanksgiving the shops don’t start with all the Christmas paraphernalia in October like they do in the UK. I don’t think I heard a single carol before the beginning of December and I haven’t heard Slade once. As a result you aren’t completely fed up with the whole event long before it has started.
3. Christmas a deux. If you don’t have children to enable you to vicariously enjoy the whole santa thing – then keep it simple. Champagne for breakfast then TWO Bond films. Bliss.

Something that the whole season of goodwill did highlight is how we really are two very different nations when it comes to food. The chap requested a trifle instead of Christmas pud. No problem I thought. Well it wouldn’t have been if you could buy custard. Or trifle sponges in the culinary cul-de-sac that is Pennsylvania. I managed to make them so trifle-less disaster avoided – thank goodness you can get sherry here.

Getting Parma ham was hard enough. “I’ll have some Parma ham please” I said at the deli counter. “What’s that?” asked the fantastically corpulent chap behind the counter. “Ham from Parma” I helpfully explained. “huh?”. Turns out they call it Prosciutto here – or more accurately prosciut (pronounced like some bad extra in a Goddfellows movie.) Urgh. That just means ham in Italian. Not sure I’ll ever learn the language. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I want to.

I just love the fact that you get four very distinct seasons here. Spring was lush and bright green, full of exciting sprouting things, summer was warm with day after day of sunshine, and that bright light you never get in the UK, and Autumn with its explosion of colour was  spectacular. It is definitely winter now and it is properly cold here. Some of the weather has been pretty miserable  but today was beautiful.

We had ice rain. Or at least it rained and froze on contact with everything.  The effect was completely magical. Everything was frosted like those sugared grapes you see on top of cakes. Then when the sun came out it was breathtaking, everything shone and sparkled. I ran around like a little kid seeing snow for the first time. I was slightly less impressed when I had to dig my car out from a thick layer of ice but anyway…

I know I shouldn’t find this funny. But I do.

I can’t believe the election is almost here. It has been such a long campaign I can’t believe anyone is still following it. So who will win? Neither McCain or Obama have the complete package – Obama has the personality to sweep people along with him and the charisma to stop them from asking what his policies are. McCain has a slightly better track record but he’s ancient and has made himself unelectable by choosing a frankly dreadful running mate. He has also had some awful advisors (some seriously misplaced comments around the financial issues and some negative tactics haven’t done him any favours)

What I find curious is that there is much talk (talk radio, newspapers etc) of people being scared of socialism and the left . If you consider that Palin  has politics that are slightly to the right of Ghengis Khan(she’s a gun carrying, moose hunting prolifer who thinks that creationism should be taught in schools) then pretty much everything is going to be further left than her. Along comes Obama and all of a sudden you’d think that he was trying to introduce communism. Honestly!

One shining ray of hope in all of this is the fact that this bumbling oaf will be out of the picture.

NOT amused here. I’m losing hours and hours a week to crap IT support. One hour after i put down the phone to one of the support team earlier today I got this:

Last time I got this error was a month ago. I’m still waiting for the tech support call back (got someone else to fix it). I think this is telling me that the weekend has started.

I just spent a couple of days in Chicago – I stayed in a new hotel for me – the Indigo. It was close to the office and cheap as chips ($72 dollars a night – I’ve paid more than twice that for B&Bs in the UK).  In any case it was pretty clean and bright and comfortable but two things troubled me:

1) how the recenptionist answers the phone.  It starts off with the usual 10 minute preamble of “good evening and welcome to the Indigo Hotel, Schaumburg blah…blah….blah”. Then “how can I INSPIRE you?”. Retch.

2) the sign that suggests you might want to save the planet (as opposed to saving the hotel money) by recycling towels was a Haiku.  Too much.

Help Us Save Water
Use Your Towel More Than Once
Mother Earth Says Thanks.

The bedroom was pretty good for 72 bucks though.

Apparently there’s an election bout to happen here – who knew?

actually for a no-resident alien it has been an interesting process to watch. Firstly I was surprised at how much people on the same side took chunks out of each other – seriously undermining each other and pointing out how the other was unelectable (I mean you Hillary and Obama). You’d expect this from the opposition but not from someone on your side.

I’m also soooo bored with all the Palin-mania. She’s often described by the media as “folksy”. I’m not sure quite what that means but I think it is American for “total liability”. Some of the more entertaining parts of the election coverage have been her trying to answer media questions without a script whilst trying to form a sentence.

It has all been about image and presentation and the policies hardly come into it. Event the wives have been wheeled out – all blowdried and hair laquered  – with copywritten speeches. Actually even with the presidential hopefuls, much of the talk about the debates has been how they came across not the substance of the policies. The best bit of the debates is always the post mortem – where all the pundits explain why it was that their chap won.

Personally I think Obama will win it. Mostly beause McCain is a multiple cancer patient in his 70s and his back up option is Palin.  Scary.

The chaps here are completely obsessed with germs. Scaremongering tactics (probably orchestrated by the bleach industry) have made all Americans terrified of actually touching something that someone else might have touched. Many carry around sanitising spray in case they have to touch a door handle and even supermarkets have sanitising wipes for the trolleys *sigh*.

That’s probably why there’s a very different attitude towards irradiation. I recently read an article that expressed concern that salads mostly don’t yet benefit from being zapped to get rid of all those possible germs. I guess I’m used to the European opinion – why on Earth would you want your food to be nuked before you eat it? That’s completely crazy – just buy and eat it as fresh as possible. My mind was made up on irradiation when I lived in Berlin. I left a pack of tomatoes in the fridge – and forgot about it for around 6 – 8 weeks. After this time the tomatoes looked just the same as when I had bought them. I threw them away and have steered clear of irradiated food ever since.

This whole germ thing is irritating though. We’ve survived for centuries with germs – after all, how does your body learn to deal with the big ones if it isn’t tested along the way? That’s why people today have more asthma, more allergies, and a greater susceptibility to the likes of MRSA.  Let them eat dirt I say.