Posts by Amy Gale
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'I'd like a glass of water, please.'
<blank look>
'Water.'
'What was that, hon?'
'Wahdder.'
'Oh, a glass of WAHDDER! Coming right up.'I have had that exact conversation more times than I can count.
(See also: beer --> bee-ERRRRRRRR)
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I'm periodically reminded that I think like an American
I'm dying to know what this entails. "Mmm, this feijoa is great, but it needs more corn syrup and cheap gas"?
The flip side of homesickness and struggling with reentry is the way your sphere of familiarity widens. If you're in NZ then Australians are foreigners, if you're in the UK they're cousins, if you're in the US they're practically siblings. Right now part of my looking forward to a trip to the UK is that it's Such A Relief, almost like going home, to be able to talk without seeing stunned incomprehension in the face of my non-rhotic accent. Plus they understand about cups of tea.
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I'm constantly surprised that people are still opting for marriage in NZ, now that CUs are available. Why wouldn't you go for the non-discriminatory option, given the choice?
I wonder whether some people have a lingering sense that if they get CUed then their grandparents (etc) won't understand the significance.
I think they'd be wrong, mind. If you've seen a depression and a world war and the moon landing and now you have a computer and Sky TV, how is a Civil Union hard to take in?
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last night my belle and I happened to be watching an old episode of the daily show(*) featuring an interview with Mike Huckabee. Here's part II, where they discuss gay marriage.
When it first aired, this interview riled me up so much that even yelling at the television didn't help. Spontaneously, from nowhere, a coping mechanism came fully formed into my mind. I now pass it on:
When someone on TV is seriously infuriating you, go get your checkbook straight away and make a donation to a counter-cause.
Seriously, try it. Better than any amount of talking back to someone who can't even hear you.
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*plots ways to combine being given lots of household articles and drinking a lot of gin*
Turn 21.
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And the thought of driving to Levin via Featherston, Pahiatua, Palmerston North and Shannon is truly something out of a doomsday horror movie.
OTOH, I bet I'm not the only person who has ever insisted that a trip from Wellington to the Mt Bruce wildlife reserve go via Palmerston North because she hates the Rimutaka hill road Just That Much.
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Megan, join us. Jooooooin usssss...
I for one am not joining until I get the five husbands I was promised.
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Probably food poisoning. Maybe all your friends deciding that you don't like them.
Now, now, this is exactly the kind of fear I'm trying to allay.
You can't give your friends food poisoning or make them not like you over a tablespoon of sugar more or less in your drop scones. I promise.
If my friends are anything to go by, you can't even make them not like you by serving them blue soup (proper anthrocyanin blue, none of this Bridget Jones string nonsense) .
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You can just leave the sugar out. I do sometimes, perhaps even often.
People[*] bang on a lot about how baking is Precision Chemistry and you Can't Change Anything. It just ain't so. Sure, you might not want to make huge extempore alterations to a recipe you are about to prepare for a big party[**], but what's the worst that can happen, really?
[*] I did this just for you, Emma
[**] though I'm not above that, either -
Handy hint: Google can do a lot of conversions for you.
eg "convert 2 cups to mL" (473 and change)
or "450F to C" (232 and a bit)NZ cup _is_ bigger than US one, I'd forgotten that. Ours is a quarter of a litre and theirs is a quarter of a quart. Obviously it's virtuous to do the conversions properly, but my tendency would be just to undermeasure a little and call it good.
Also, you know those big conical metal measuring cups you get that have all the clever little calibration columns so you can measure out 100g sugar or 50g flour without a scale? They have an a"American" column.