my life

I don’t mess about… or I do mess about, one of the two. Anyway, I’ve moved house. To give you a feel for where I used to live, Sunderland: imagine living in Peterlee. Hull: imagine living in Woodmansey. That’s where I lived; miles away from anywhere. It wasn’t even officially in Denver. I had a great big nice room, fantastic flat mates… but every time I went out into Denver of an evening I was paying about $25 for a taxi to get back home.

The new house - a day after the snow. It's the one in the middle.

So I’ve moved to a place about 5 minutes drive from the campus – it’s a cool place! I’m paying slightly more, but I get a bed (at last!), a desk, and even a PC, with wireless cable internet, which is great for a geek like me! Plus, I have my own living room area, and my own bathroom. And my flat mate, Krista, is really nice too. She’s a fashion designer who makes skimpy suits for male and female wrestlers… I suppose someone has to do it :)

And it’s great because now I can walk to university… it takes about 40 minutes. There’s a trickling stream, trees with roots that push up the pavement, squirrels running around and empty baseball fields… and when the snow has fallen it’s like walking through a Christmas card scene!

My big box of 70s porn

Myself and a couple of friends were driving around today on our way to Cherry Creek Mall, when we saw an advert for a ‘house sale’. A house sale is where someone is moving house and they want to get rid of most of their stuff, so they put price tags on nearly everything in their house and just open their front door to anyone who fancies popping in for a bargain. We popped in.

This house was full of crazy and amazing stuff!! If I knew anything about antiques at all I could have been dangerous! But I don’t, so I ended up buying a box full of ‘Playboy’ and ‘Playgirl’ magazines from the 70s. They’re great! Hardly any porn in them at all… mostly adverts for “Smoke Marlboro – They’re good for you!” and other classic one-liner adverts… There are about 40 of these things in the box, and I hope to make a killing on ebay. We shall see.

The fridges are MASSIVE! No more moving yoghurt to make way for milk, shifting cheese to make room for beer, oh no! You could probably buy one of these things, install a chair lift and sell passes to midget skiers.

Second thing: Luxury toilet paper here is as cheap as Netto toilet paper is back home. Imagine paying 50p for 6 rolls of toilet paper in the UK… you’d be lucky if you got 6 rolls of that grease-proof stuff you used to get at primary school. You know, doesn’t remove the problem, merely redistributes it. But here, in the US of A, when you pay 50p for cheapo toilet roll, you get luxury quilted velvet silk – the stuff that fluffy bear wipes his bum with on the adverts! I might set up a toilet roll exporting business. Or there’s always ebay… I could ship it as a bonus gift with the porn :)

So, there are some things I like about America. Not everything of course, because fridges and toilet rolls are no reason to stay in a country. I like it here for a lot more reasons.

One thing I don’t like about the USA…

I pay to RECEIVE calls to my mobile phone. Yep, if someone calls me, the time I spend talking to them comes off my minutes!! Now, I’ve only just found this little gem out… I’ve been making my outgoing calls as short as possible, and not even thinking about the time passing by when people call me. I’ll think twice about idly chatting away to that ‘wrong number’ caller again I can tell you!

Thanks to everyone who remembered my birthday today, and sent me a card, email a text or called me… it really meant a LOT to me to know that I haven’t been forgotten about :)

So tonight I’m staying in and cooking a nice birthday meal, and watching a video with my flat mates… I have to get up at 7.30am tomorrow morning, so I’ll only be having a few glasses of red wine to celebrate. I think I’m getting old… what do you think?!

It’s party time on Friday – it’ll be different without people I really know, but it will make a change. I have lots of new friends at university now, so they are all coming, along with other people I have met, friends of friends etc. It’ll hopefully be a good night! Pictures will be posted here…

Happy birthday me! :)