How I wound up in Merry Old England

People on both sides of the ocean are all the time asking me how I wound up over here in England. I guess it's time I told the story. :^)

Back in 2005, I joined an online Christian singles site called Christian Mingle. I did the usual constant browsing through all the women's profiles without results for a few months. Then I started getting involved in the forums on the site. In this way I come to know quite a few friends that are still with me today. Because of the nature of the Internet, more than a few of the people I got to know live in other countries, one of them being my wife, Rebecca, of England.

Just as in real life, I was quite the talker/poster on the forums, and as such, more people knew me than I knew them simply because they read my posts without having to respond. The term for those who simply read the posts without ever getting involved in the discussions, is "Lurker." They are merely the spectators on such sites, without participating much. As it turned out, one of these "lurkers" was a woman named Rebecca Jeffreys. She participated in the forums occasionally, but not much. Nevertheless, I noticed her and looked up her profile (as I did with all the women I interacted with in the forums). What I read and what I saw in her picture really attracted me. One thing led to another and pretty soon we were chatting away one day via the site's instant messenger service. We really hit it off! There was that spark that single people are always looking for that may lead to a relationship.

The only problem was that she lived in England and I lived in America. She plainly stated in her profile that moving to another country was not an option for her because of her daughter. Rebecca's ex-husband was, and still is, very much involved in her daughter's life. If she tried to move to another country, there was a good possibility that he would instigate custody proceedings. It saddened us both that even though we found this amazing spark between us, that there was the barrier of 4000 miles of water, not to mention national boundaries, between us also. So we agreed that there was no possibility of a relationship.

A woman down in South Africa who was a friend to both of us counseled me when I admitted to her the problems keeping us from seeking a relationship, that if God was in this relationship, then 4000 miles of ocean was small potatoes; that He would bridge the gap between us. Wow! I never thought of that! If God can create mountains . . . heh, what am I saying? If God can create galaxies, whole systems of stars and systems of galaxies, what's an ocean to him?

Well this clicked with me in an instant! I promised my friend that I would contact Rebecca and share this epiphany with her. And so I did just that - in a rather lengthy email and I told Rebecca that if she was of the same mind, I wanted a relationship with her and that the matter of the Atlantic Ocean would not be an issue! That's all either of us needed. :^) This was at the first of February of 2006.

Over the course of the next several months, we started building this long-distance Internet relationship. I have to admit that within a couple of months, I was in love with Rebecca. I told her as much too. How much of this was true love? I don't know. But I do know that I wanted a much more serious relationship with Rebecca!

By May and June, we started talking about meeting in person. We both agreed that it would be better for me to come to England to meet her and spend some time with her so that we could see if we liked each other in person as well as in virtuality. I was scheduled to have Lap-Band surgery in the middle of June, so June was out of the question. I figured that I would need a month to adjust to having a Lap Band, so I suggested the latter part of July or August. Rebecca said that since school was out during August, she would be in a better situation to entertain me then (have time to take me around to places of interest). So August it was!

I figured that since we would have to make the most of our time together, I better plan on staying in England for as long as practical and as long as I could afford. God provided the means that enabled me to stretch out my visit to England to three weeks. A couple who had kind of taken Rebecca under their wing at an earlier time and gave her a great deal of help as she established herself here in the neighborhood where we now live, told her that they were taking their family on an extended holiday and that I could house sit for them. That's all we needed, so I planned my trip around their plans for their holiday. Without going into too much detail of my visit, I can say that by the end of my visit, I proposed to Rebecca and she accepted! :^) We both felt it was the right thing to do and when her father gave his blessing, that cinched the deal, so to speak.

We later planned on a wedding back in Georgia for the 30th of December, 2006. Two days after Christmas of that year, Rebecca and her daughter boarded a plane and flew to America. A few days later, we married in my church, Adairsville 1st United Methodist Church. With all the Christmas decorations still up (minus the Christmas tree), we had a really nice wedding there. Afterward, Rebecca and I enjoyed a rather cold, rainy and unusual honeymoon up in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina (a story for another time). A week after our wedding, we both made a mad dash up to Chicago so that I could get my visa from the British Consulate there. That was the closest consulate that issued visas. :^/ On the 10th of January we were on another plane bound for England where on the next day, I took up residence. The transition was . . . well, that's what this blog is all about, isn't it?

Can you spell it?

I know that I keep coming back to the subject of the English language and the differences between British English and American English, but for me, it's a continuing voyage of discovery. I first encountered this newest phenomenon when I started passing my CV (in America, we call it a Resume`). Not only do we have different words for most everything, but it seems that we also spell many of our words differently! Basically, it's a case of "same word, different spelling." The most obvious examples are the different spellings for words such as color and colour. The British custom is to add a u in many of the words we end with the combination of simply or. Conversely, words that we end in er are spelled with the reverse combination re. Examples of this are found in words such as metre and centre. But, just like many other so-called rules in the English language, the rules are quite flexible and are applied in an arbitrary way.

By and large, the differences are significant enough that most word-processing applications, even those on websites like this one, require the user to choose between the spelling preferences of American or British English. A consequence of this is that, depending upon where my material is going to be read, my spelling preferences should be set for that. But, when I can't change those preferences easily, I then have to go back and either change the spelling of all the words that appear with red lines under them, or pointedly ignore all the misspelled words. However, that entails the risk that I might have legitimately misspelled a word by both definitions. So, now I have become even more aware of my spelling than I used to be, and this is saying something because I have always been very conscientious about my spelling!

On occasion, I come across a word that is not only spelled slightly differently, but is also pronounced slightly differently on either side of "the Pond". Aluminum is such a word. As you can see, I spelled that in the American fashion. Here in the UK, it's spelled Aluminium. Did you catch the difference? Looking at it on paper, most readers will miss the difference in spelling. The difference is the addition of the letter "i" to give it an "ium" ending. There is a fascinating story behind this . . . or at least it's fascinating to me. It seems that back in the day when chemistry was the fashionable science and everyone was in a race to discover a new element, one of the leaders of the pack was a certain Humphry Davy. Sir Humphry called this new element of his Aluminum. But his peers insisted that the spelling should be Aluminium to be consistent with the names of many other elements, such as Helium, Potassium and Sodium. This, of course, ignores all the elements that are spelled with the "um" ending, such as Platinum, Molybdenum and Lanthanum.

Over the years, the British have insisted that the word be spelled Aluminium and Americans, following the tradition of the discoverer of an element having the privilege of naming, and consequentially determining the spelling of that name, called the metal, Aluminum. As it is today, Americans and Canadians spell the word aluminum and the British and Australians spell it aluminium. There is great fun to be had in discussing the merits of both spellings!

In addition to the different spellings comes different pronunciations. Americans pronounce the word as "al-LOO-min-noom." Here in the UK, they pronounce it "Al-loo-Min-NEE-oom." This is one of those key words that can tell you to which major English dialect the speaker subscribes: the Queen's English or American English. As an aside here, another key word that Americans use to discern the dialect is the word Tomato. Americans pronounce it toe-May-toe and the British pronounce it toe-MAH-toe.

And so continues the fascinating journey . . .

". . . and now we go to Kelly for the latest in the weather."

I've been a month or more trying to remember to do this post, but it always seems that the only time I remember to do this, I'm miles away from my computer. As I'm sure all of you have noticed the Weather Bug gadget to the right, I think it's about time I talk about the weather here in England . . . or at least my part of England. Just so that I know that I've covered this little tidbit, let me mention now that the Weather Bug needs to be told what city to retrieve weather data for. Either input Gateshead, United Kingdom in order to view the weather here.

Having grown up in Georgia and the Southeast, I'm used to . . . let's just say, energetic weather. By that, I mean the usual thunderstorms, the occasional tornado or hail storm and when all else fails, a good heavy rain. Let's not forget the super-dense fogs that frequent warm mornings and the crippling hot and humid summer days with haze so thick you can't see more than a mile. In my part of the state, the northwest corner, the annual rainfall is about 48 to 55 inches of rain, except during periods of drought.

Here, the weather is anything but normal for the 55th parallel. In most any other part of the world at 55 degrees North, the summers are cool at best and the winters are brutal. But because the British Isles enjoy the benefit of the Gulf Stream coming up from the East coast of North America, England enjoys exceptionally mild weather year round. Indeed, I have never seen grass displaying a lush green year round as I have here. That's not to say that it doesn't get cold here, but I'll get to that later.

Earlier today, as I was hanging out the laundry to dry, the temperatures were hovering around a very pleasant 72 degrees. Even now at 7 pm (as I write this), it is about 69 degrees and we have another 2 and a half hours of sunlight left. The hottest it has ever gotten here in Gateshead since I have been here is about 82 degrees. Everyone around here were about to drop out because of the heat. My wife looked at me on that day and made the comment that finally she saw me sweating. I replied to her that where I come from, we don't bother sweating until it gets above 80 degrees.

The average rainfall for much of England is about 32 inches or so. Back home in Georgia, that amount of rain would be considered drought conditions. However, because of the gentle nature of rain here, it soaks in with very little run-off. What my wife considers to be a big downpour barely qualifies as a normal shower back in Georgia. In fact, what inspired this particular post was a thunderstorm we experienced a month ago down in Derby (pronounced Darby), the very first thunderstorm I've experienced since I've been over here! No joke! To be honest though, Rebecca and I heard thunder one time a couple of years ago. Just the one instance, and it wasn't even rainy that day. It was off in the distance and we weren't even sure of it for a minute or so.

Then a few days ago, we had a thunderstorm here one afternoon. The lightning terrified Rebecca! The rain that came just a minute or so later was the hardest I've seen it rain here ever. Rebecca thought it was a flood. I thought it merely a shower. I guess it's all in what you're used to.

The fact that the rain here is gentle all the time and is spread out very evenly year round, means that the water table here is very stable. The soil remains moist most of the time. But when extra rain comes, the ground isn't able to soak up much more than it normally gets, thus flooding occurs here during periods of excessive rain. By excessive rain, I mean, if a quarter inch of rain falls in a 24 hour period, they get floods all over the place! The balance is quite delicate. If less than 30 inches of rain fall during the year, the region falls into a drought. More than 34 inches, then extensive flooding. Britain and Ireland are so green because they get regular rain on a very regular pace. Not too much and not too little. Any more or less than their normal rainfall causes disaster!

What the weather lacks in enthusiasm in its rain, it makes up for it in the wind. Northumberland has got to be the windiest place I have ever been! Gale force winds are not uncommon here. There are days when the wind doesn't get below 35 miles and hour, all day long! When they forecast gales here, one can count on winds between 35 and 45 miles an hour with gusts over 50 miles an hour. I'm not kidding! And on windy days that are not so gusty, the winds are commonly like what we would encounter in a heavy thunderstorm. It's so windy here that Windmill Farms are springing up all over the place. In this part of England, a sizable percentage of the electrical power comes from windmills. The sight of 70 and 80 foot towers with three 50 foot blades swirling in the wind, is becoming more and more common.

Oh, before I forget it, in case any of you are wondering about the famous London Fog and if it affects any of the rest of England, there is no London Fog . . . at least, not any more. That reputation was earned back in the 1800s when London was perpetually cursed with what we would nowadays call smog! London was famous in the nineteenth century for the very same thing that Los Angeles became famous for during the twentieth century. They just didn't have the same knack for making new words as we do today.

Pardon my American-ness

I have an aunt who is from Peterburough, about 75 miles north of London. She married my mother's brother when he was in the US Air Force and stationed here in England. I always thought it was so cool having an English aunt. Still do! However, there were some members of my extended family took pleasure at poking fun at her. I never understood why they did this, but I suspect it was because they are bigots who are prejudiced against everyone who is different from them. Fortunately, not all of my family are like this. I can sympathize with how she must have felt. I am in a similar situation.

One of the things that keeps surprising me is how common the anti-American sentiment is here in England. I would expect to find anti-American sentiments in certain parts of the world ranging from resentment to fanaticism (especially in the Middle East). But I didn't expect to find it so much here in the United Kingdom. It's not necessarily overt, but it isn't subtle either. Let me be very clear about this: it isn't hostile, and not everybody shares the same sentiments! What is interesting is the variety that it comes clothed in.

Some people think that because the United States did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol, we must be a bunch of anti-environmentalists. For those who don't know what the Kyoto Protocol is, it is a UN treaty that provides a framework to limit global warming. Like most folks, they don't understand the particulars about the treaty and why it hasn't been ratified in the United States. They just accept the story that Americans don't believe in global warming and because of this, the treaty isn't acceptable to the United States. When I try to explain that the United States objects to certain details about the structure of the treaty, or that the United States has led the way on environmental issues for many years, their eyes often glaze over with that "don't confuse the issue with facts" look. But to give others credit, this often opens up a meaningful dialogue about global warming or other environmental issues and what both our separate countries are doing or not doing about it.

Another form that anti-American sentiments comes in is that many people here feel that America wrongly led the United Kingdom, and to a lesser extent, other countries, into the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. As in any discussion about war, there are about as many opinions concerning the rightness of the war as there are people in the discussion! I will not discuss the merits of either the rightness or the wrongness of the current conflict. But I will, on occasion, offer the opinion that we in America do not have the authority to commit the United Kingdom to any war, right or wrong! The people here have to look to their political leadership for that and I refuse to accept blame, on behalf of America, for the decisions of the British government!

Along similar lines, we Americans are looked upon as people who condone torture of the POW's held at our military base in Guantanamo Bay. When this topic comes up, I asked how I feel about the issue. I tell people here that I do not condone torture, nor do I condone the treatment of the POW's held at Guantanamo Bay! I know that some of my family and friends will not like my stand on this, but I also think that the vast majority of my family and friends will agree with me. On this issue, I disagree very much with the policy that was taken and defended by the Bush Administration. I feel that the prisoners should have been treated as POW's according to the accepted Geneva Conventions including the protocols adopted in 1949, 1977 and 2005. To do otherwise reduces us down to the same level as those we fight against in the current conflict!

The reason I feel so strongly about this particular issue is because my father suffered in a German POW Stalog when Germany paid lip service at best to the Geneva Conventions as they were written prior to WWII! Thousands of Americans, both military and civilians suffered untold pain and cruelty in camps run by the Japanese who did not recognize the Geneva Conventions at all. And most recently, one of our presidential candidates represents those who suffered at the hands of the North Vietnamese who also blithely ignored the Geneva Conventions. To ignore the Conventions in our present conflict dishonors all the Americans, alive and dead, who suffered because the Conventions were not adhered to in the past. Not only that, it smacks of the philosophy the end justifies the means! Some of my countrymen will argue that the means of questioning that is at issue is not really torture. But I must counter that if it is not acceptable to question an American during normal times in this manner, then it is not acceptable to use these methods on others in this present time. It matters not that they are seen as the enemy!

I'm sorry . . . I get wound up on certain issues and climb up on that soapbox a little too easily. Back to the matter at hand. There are others here who resent Americans because they feel that we think we are better than everybody else or that our way is better than everyone else's way, or that we invented it first (whatever it is at the moment), or that whatever they have - we have one better, or bigger, or whatever. You get the picture, I'm sure. While some of these things are true - much of what we have is bigger than pretty much everything over here (except bureaucracy - the English have been growing theirs for over a thousand years!), we Americans don't need to rub it in. I try to be sensitive to these things. But invariably, some of this is going to crop up when I try to engage in conversation, especially when people here ask about things back home. In this area, I just have to accept that I am suffering from having followed too many loud-mouthed Americans bragging about all the above things. And on this, I have to admit that often all of us Americans come across as loud-mouthed braggarts when we travel in other countries! It could be said that many of us Americans suffer from verbal diarrhea as the expression goes over here.

But on the whole, the vast majority of people over here do not let these things get in the way of making friends with any American who comes across their path. Whatever their feelings are on these issues, they still show an inordinate amount of hospitality to us Americans whether we deserve it or not. And so it goes in my continuing journey of discovery here in England.

I weigh HOW much???

All the people who know me personally such as family, friends, acquaintances, enemies (I'm sure I don't have any, but you never know . . .), know that I am really big. In fact, I am what doctors call morbidly obese, which is a fancy way of saying, "he's enormously big!" Over the years, I have tried various and sundry diets, some having better effect than others, but they all have ultimately been unsuccessful. Several years ago, at the urging of my doctor, I started considering what's known as Bariatric Surgery: the branch of surgical medicine that deals with the causes and prevention of obesity. After a year or so of investigations, I settled on having the Lap Band procedure. This is where a surgeon placed an adjustable band around my stomach in a laparoscopic procedure. I had this done in June of 2006, six months before I got married. The primary reason I settled on this procedure instead of the more common (at that time) gastric bypass is that I wasn't comfortable with the idea of having drastic changes made to my digestive plumbing. If there ever arose complications to the gastric bypass, I would have to live with them because gastric bypass is non-reversible. That is to say, it's a one-way trip; once done, there is no going back. Gastric banding, however, is reversible if necessary.

So, where is all this going? Well, when I moved here to England, I naturally came under the care of the National Health Service. Since I can't afford to fly back and forward to Georgia on a frequent basis, I had to find doctors here in the NHS system to take over the care and maintenance of my gastric band. One of the, um . . . features of the NHS is that all medical care that is not handled by one's GP is done through clinics at various hospitals, according to which hospital speciallizes in what fields of medicine. What this means is that I go to one hospital where they hold clinics for sleep disorders (mine is sleep apnea) and I go to another hospital where they speciallize in, amongst other things, weight management.

When I go to the weight management clinic, down at the Royal Sunderland Hospital, I have to weigh in before I consult with the dietician and the doctor who's pulling duty that particular day. As you might imagine, my weight is measured in kilograms. But when I come back home and my wife, Rebecca, asks me how much I weigh, she expects an answer in the English system of weights, that is to say, she wants to know how much I weigh in stone. When I tell my mother about my visit to the clinic, she wants to know how many pounds I weigh. That's three different measurement systems, all in one day! :-) To answer everyone's curiosity, after a setback in my program, I am now back on track to lose weight. I had regained weight during this setback. So, when the doctors readjusted my band to where it should have been, I weighed 170 kilograms. That translates into 26 stone, 10 pounds or 374 pounds. I told you I was big. :-) Since then, I have lost weight and now I weigh 164 kilograms, ne 361 pounds, ne 25 stone, 10 pounds.

So, what is a stone? Here in England, when one is talking about personal weight, a stone is equal to 14 pounds. Now the question is, why do the English use stone as a measurement of weight - I should point out here that they only use stone (the plural usage is the same as the singular, just like deer) when they are talking about a person's weight. When it comes to other weights, they use either pounds or kilograms . . . or at least, that's what I am told. It won't be the first time I was wrong about these things if I got this backwards. Back to the question, it took some digging to find the answer to this one. According to this website, it came about in this manner:

"In techniques for measuring weights, the Babylonians made important improvements upon the invention of the balance. Instead of just comparing the weights of two objects, they compared the weight of each object with a set of stones kept just for that purpose. In the ruins of their cities, archaeologists have found some of these stones finely shaped and polished. It is believed that these were the world's first weight standards.

The Babylonians used different stones for weighing different commodities. In modern English history, the same basis has been used for weight measurements. For the horseman, the "stone" weight was 14 pounds. In weighing wool the stone was 16 pounds. For the butcher and fishmonger, the stone was 8 pounds. The only legal stone weight in the imperial system was 14 pounds."

So I found out that it could be worse. If you follow the link above, you'll find the whole article and learn the rationale behind many of the methods of measurements we use today. Despite knowing this, that there is a rational explanation behind using stone as a unit of weight measurement, I still find it hard to do the mental arithmetic to change from one to the other or to even think in terms of stone. But then again, I didn't grow up using it. For my wife, it's as natural to think of weight in terms of stone and pounds as it is for me to think in terms of pounds alone. Interestingly enough, I have learned how to do the mathematical gymnastics for the conversion between pounds and kilograms; I simply divide pounds by 2.2 to get the equivalent in kilograms and conversely, multiply by 2.2 to convert kilograms to pounds. That's easy! But I either have to pull out some paper and do it by longhand or get a calculator to do the math to make the conversion between stone and pounds or stone and kilograms.

Now my American readers may be asking why do the English persist in using this somewhat clumsy method of measuring a person's weight. Probably for the very same reason that we Americans still insist upon using similarly clumsy methods of measure; inches divided by a multitude of fractions, 12 inches per foot, 3 feet per yard, 2000 pounds per ton, etc., etc.. It is what they are simply used to using. I am finding it more and more easy in this land of multiple measurement methods, to use the metric system. Having said that, there are some things I don't think will change. Even though I weigh 164 kilograms and stand 179 centimeters tall, I'll always think in terms of miles when I think of distance and speed. The more some things change, the more some things remain the same, I guess.

Despite the fact that the metric system was invented by the French, it is imminently logical and quite easy to use, once you get used to the new units. The arithmetic is so much easier to do! Instead of having to figure out how many yards, feet, inches and whatever fractions of an inch there are in the length of something, the metric system is decimalized. Everything is divisible by 10. It's a shame that the French can't be as logical or use as much common sense in their other activities. LOL

Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam...

Invariably, when I meet someone new, there are the usual questions asked of me about my move to England. They all ask me how long am I visiting here for. When I explain that I now live here, without fail, I get the amazed look along with, "why on earth would you want to move here?" This one always amuses me. People over here in England think that it's so much better in America than it is here. Well, yes and no. It is better in many ways, back in America, but in other ways, it's pretty nice here. Then they will ask me if I ever get homesick. The short answer to this is, yes I do! Sometimes I get very homesick and at the strangest of times too. Just yesterday, while sitting in church, I got to missing my home church back in Adairsville, Georgia, and my church family. So, what do I miss the most about my life back home in the United States?

Naturally, I miss my family a great deal! I miss my mother and my two sisters. I miss going out to my sister Nancy's home and seeing all the farm animals she and my brother-in-law, Joe, have. They usually have several goats and sheep; here lately, they also have a donkey or two in the pasture right behind their home. I miss seeing whatever is Joe's latest project. One time, he bought a small tractor with a back-hoe (that's a digger for all you Brits reading this) similar to the one above, so that he could dig trenches to plant loads of tomato plants so that he could sell tomatos. More recently, he and Nancy bought a motor home very much like the one to the left, and a boat so that they could go camping down at Lake Allatoona on weekends. He has rigged up solar panels and a wind-driven generator to charge all the batteries for all his "toys." He's always into something and it's always facinating to see what's new. It's always nice to sit on their back poarch and look out across the valley from their hilltop perspective.

I miss spending time with my mother! She and I are very close and the 4000 mile separation is hard to bear. As she is now 80 and her eye sight is failing. She suffers from Macular Degeneration and she is not able to read like she used to. My mother taught me how to read when I was four and five years old and she instilled in me her passion for reading. Because of this and because she has relied on me for so much ever since my father died more than twenty years ago, I miss spending time with her!

As I mentioned above, I miss my church family. Thirty years ago, my family and I joined the Adairsville First United Methodist Church and I have been a member there for most of those thirty years. For a few years, I was a member of another United Methodist church because I was more involved there than I was at Adairsville UMC, but after a while, I felt the call to move back to my home church. Most of my oldest friends are part of my church family; that is to say, they have been my friends longer than any others. Many of them I have known for all of those thirty years. Others have joined over the years and became good and dear friends. In the past few years, before I moved to England, I became involved with the Senior Saints and their Wednesday morning Bible study group. Since this group didn't adhere to a particular program, they set their own agenda and move along at their own pace. Because of this, the discussions are often meaty and thought provoking! I miss the Wednesday morning Bible study group because I learned so much and I came to love and trust this group of people as my own family!

Twelve years ago, I went on the Walk to Emmaus, a three day non-denominational program designed to develop leadership within church congregations. The Walk to Emmaus, for those of you who have never heard of it, is not a physical walk, but a spiritual walk; a mini-course in Christianity, if you will, that is based upon the model that Jesus used when He taught the two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24). The Walk to Emmaus organization is centered around regional "communities" which hold the Walks on a regular basis. The Mountain Top Walk to Emmaus Community is the particular community that I am a part of. These people, from all walks of life, from various denominations and churches, are a very dedicated group of people spread from Asheville, North Carolina to Bartow County, Georgia. Since my Walk to Emmaus, I have become very much involved in the Mountain Top community and have many dear friends scattered all over the North Georgia/Western North Carolina region. I miss these folks very much and I miss being involved in the five or six Walks they hold every year. It has been my privilege to be a part of four different Walk teams. And I have lost count of the many Walks I have worked either in the kitchen, the dining room as a servant or in the prayer chapel as a prayer warrior. I have walked many a spiritual mile with these awesome people and they are my Emmaus family. I so look forward to the day when I can rejoin them in ministry!

And this brings me to what else I miss most dearly: the Blue Ridge Mountains of Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee. I cannot tell you how many days of my life I have spent wandering and exploring as many different roads in these mountains. I must have driven a hundred thousand miles over the years trying to find new places and revisiting all the old places I love so much. I have seen some pretty awesome scenery all over the United States. Of these places, like the Grand Canyon, or the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone, none surpass the beauty and majesty of the Blue Ridge Mountains, especially during the Fall! I miss driving through the communities, villages and towns of these mountains. Places like Tellico Plains, Tennessee; Andrews and Franklin, North Carolina; or Blairsville, Hiawassee and Young Harris, Georgia seem to be calling out to me, begging me to return home, my spiritual home. It was in these mountains where my family, as I was growing up, met and overcame one of our biggest challenges: our unity during a crisis where my father had open heart surgery in Asheville, North Carolina at a time when open heart surgery was still quite novel. It was here in these mountains, on a hill overlooking Lake Chatuge, that I went on my Walk to Emmaus and my Christian faith took on new and vibrant dimensions. It is in these mountains that I feel most alive and closest to God!

There are other things I miss, like the sound and feel of power from a good V-8 engine. In a land where a 2 liter engine is considered to be big, the opportunity to enjoy driving a V-8 equipped vehicle are far and few between. I miss going down to watch the Rome Braves play baseball. I miss going out to eat with my family and friends back home. But all of these are trivial to the big things I listed above. It is the things like my families and the mountains that I miss the most. However, in spite of missing all of these things, I would still give them up if it meant having to choose them over my wife, Rebecca, and my step-daughter, Emily. They are my greatest treasures here on earth!

Let there be Light?

I was talking with my sister last night about things going on back home. One of the things she mentioned in passing was that Georgia Power is replacing the electric meter at her home with one that sends data from the meter via satellite directly to their offices, thus doing away with the need of a meter reader. In one fell swoop, the power company does away with the expense of all the vehicles needed to read all those hundreds of thousands of meters, the fuel consumption, not to mention the reduction of the carbon footprint of all those vehicles. The matter of the employment of the meter reader is not something this post will dwell upon.

What our discussion did do was to turn to my description of the utilities here in the UK and how they differ from my sister's present experience. When I first moved here to Gateshead two years ago, It took me quite a while to find the utility meters for our house. The reason being that they were not anywhere near where I expected to find such meters. No, indeed I would challenge any American, upon their first visit to the UK to find the electric and the gas meters! After a while, I had to ask my wife about these matters. She then took me to our pantry, which occupies the space under our stairs, moved several boxes on the floor of the pantry and showed me the meters. There tucked away from sight and any source of light sat both meters nestled in the bottom corners of our pantry!

Naturally, my first question was how did the meters get read each month, because to the best of my knowledge, no one had been in to look at either meter since I had moved in. She looked at me with a funny expression on her face and said with the tone of voice that conveyed what she thought should have been obvious to everybody with a lick of sense, that the utility companies " estimate" what the meter readings should be. Estimate? Yes! They guess at what the meter should read and then bill the customer on that assumption. Oh, the meter gets checked every once in a while, maybe even once a year or so, just as a back-up. They also want accurate readings if and when you change your utility supplier. Even at this, they call up the customer, or send a mailing, and depend upon the customer for an accurate reading on the meter. Honest! This ain't no joke!!! When I tell people over here about how all the meters in America are outside and easily accessible, without fail, they wonder in amazement why nobody thought of doing that over here. I guess some solutions are just too obvious to be noticed. :-)

Over the course of the two years I've been here, I've had opportunity to check the locations of the electric and gas meters in several houses and it seems that in every case, the most inconvenient and inaccessible place is found to install the meters. In one house, I had to go down into the basement, open up a small door and crawl under the other part of the house to find the meters. So why would I go to all that trouble? Well, it's customary to find the breaker box next to the electric meter - in a manner not too different from the way houses are wired in America. But in America, the breaker box is usually mounted on the inside wall (normally at a convenient height too) opposite the meter on the outside wall.

As you can imagine, this practice of "estimating" the meter readings can lead to all kinds of confusion about billings. We are in the process of a dispute arising from this very situation over a bill about a year and a half ago. Since that time, we have changed utility companies a couple of times and have been very diligent about keeping a record of the meter readings at the time of change-overs, to avoid just this kind of confusion. While such cases like ours come up often, for the most part, the customers abide with the estimation of the utility companies, to the various companies' huge profit!

This last Monday night, I watched a report on the evening news about a gentleman in a city down in the Midlands, who challenged a well known utility company which has spent tremendous amounts of money advertising their eco-friendly nature and their supposedly cheaper rates over their competitors (like who doesn't advertise such things nowadays). His challenge was that this company were secretly charging a lot more than their advertised rates. He had detailed records of his meter readings going back for more than a year, showing that not only had the company significantly inflated their estimations of his power usage, but that they were also charging more per kilowatt/hour than what they were supposed to be charging. The regulators took notice of this too and now the power company, in order to limit the damage to their reputation are voluntarily giving all their customers major rebates on their power bills! I guess they are hoping this voluntary operation will impress the government regulators and thus save them massive fines.

Here in the UK, television is looked upon as a utility also. I'm not talking about cable TV or satellite television, but any kind of television. If you have a television here in the UK, you have to purchase a license to be able to watch that television. It matters not if you are watching BBC, satellite television or even your DVD player. You must have a license! If a family has two or more televisions in the same house, all the sets are covered by the one license. But if two unrelated people are sharing a residence, you know, roommates, then if each person has a television in their bedroom or something, each person has to purchase or pay for a license. Since we haven't purchase another TV since I've been here, I haven't seen how the government keeps up with all this, but I suspect that it's all dealt with at the point of purchase, that is to say, the store files the paperwork on every TV purchased.

The purpose of this license is to pay for BBC and to keep it commercial-free. As such, BBC resembles to some degree the PBS network in America. However, you'll still find regular programing on the BBC channels such as game shows, sitcoms in addition to the excellent dramas and documentaries. But what if you don't watch BBC? What if you only watch your own programming from your DVD player? You still have to make those monthly payments for your TV license. What a strange way of doing things!