Sundries

Our lovely neighbors invited us over for dinner on Sunday - they went 'all out' and cooked 4 different curries with all sorts of accompaniments. And a lot of fun and laughter was served up too! They are so down-to-earth and real. Not only that, but ... wait for it ... they 'get' Dale's humor.

We decided to bring an old potting bench from the garden into our conservatory so we can eat out there and enjoy the view. It looks pretty rustic and unfinished, but is sturdy and will serve the purpose until our furniture arrives. Actually, I rather like it.

As it turns out, our container didn't make it onto the ship that sailed around May 7. It's still sitting in the dock at NJ ( the tracker Dale attached to it helped us figure this out). The scheduled journey of our container, once loaded onto the ship, will be as follows: After leaving NJ/NY it will head to Virginia and South Carolina before making for Southampton in England. After that, it'll be sent to Liverpool, and finally put on a big truck, and then our goods will be shuttled to our house via Luton van (box truck). In the meantime, I'm gardening when I should be giving the house a thorough clean while there's no furniture in it. We've since bought a lawnmower, a grill, a dishwasher, a microwave and a blender, items we couldn't ship because of the different voltage here. 

We went to a boot sale at the old Workhouse location in town over the weekend. It was pretty underwhelming as an event, but we got to see the old historic building that housed poor families, who were separated into different wings by age and gender, so families got split up to be housed there.

The cutouts of people at the windows was pretty effective

Our best source of weekly groceries is in Welshpool (12 miles away) or Oswestry in England (14 miles - lower taxes on alcohol purchases). It takes us quite a while to shop since we don't recognize the product labeling, and have to search for everything on our list and still have to go back for things we couldn't find. Going through the checkout at ALDI is mindblowingly fast, like playing a shoot-'em-up computer game - trying to keep up with packing items into the cart as they're scanned is on the verge of being stressful!