11/18/10-11/19/10

    It's almost time to move!  Lindsay said she walked past the apartment and it looked like everything was in order.  They may have even put curtains up in the windows!  The keys and move-in packet will be ready for me on Saturday! In the meantime Sean and I walked down the street to Tk-Maxx to see if we could score some cheap bedding.  We did alright, we got a  comforter, sheets and bath towels.  It gave me a piece of mind knowing that we'll have something to sleep on once we move in.  The rest of the day was relaxing, I read and watched tv while Sean did work and packed for his trip to  Manchester. 
   Today Sean left for a short weekend in Manchester so that left me with the job of packing up the hotel room and getting things organized for the mini-move.  I have a plan to go to Chiswick early  in the morning, get the keys and do a load of laundry ASAP.  I am curious to see how this works out since there are no dryers.  There's a washing machine (kind of small too) but no dryers so everything has to hang dry.  I should be able to pick up a few drying racks for pretty cheap at the local home store.  The other idea I had was to use the towel warmers that are in both bathrooms.  These towel warmer racks seem pretty fancy but I think they're useless for towels.  They'll probably make a better drying rack, oh or even a sock warmer on cold winter days.  Mmmmm nice warm socks before going out. 
   It's pretty boring without Sean here.  I walked down the street to the pharmacy, Boots, equivalent to our CVS and then stopped into the bookstore on the way back.  There were a lot of cook books on sale so I picked up a teatime baking book for pretty cheap.  I think I can get used to his teatime thing, especially if there's little cakes or cookies involved!  I'm having a hard time getting used to the fact that places really don't give you refills on coffee or even giant cups.  I like my bottomless cups.  Annnnnddd I also solved my problem of not having a coffee maker here.  I don't want to buy one since I wouldn't be able to bring it back to the U.S. (the whole power cord thingy not fitting into the outlet) so instead I'll pick up a cute little French press.  Yup these are the things I've been thinking about lately. There's a lot of things we can be worrying over but coffee is pretty high in my mind.   So maybe I'll have coffee and cake and Sean can have tea and cake at tea time. 
   In the beginning of this teatime baking book is an introduction.  It may be a little long but I'm going to copy a little paragraph on the history of tea in Britain.  I would try to summarize it  but to be honest I'm just too lazy:
      By sitting down to enjoy a cup of tea and a sandwich or a piece of cake, The British are perpetuating a ritual that has its origins in Britain in the mid-17th century when tea started to arrive via Holland and Protugal, which had established trade routes to Japan and China a hundred years earlier.  Merchants and aristocrats imported small amounts of tea into Britain in the 1650s, but it was Charles II's marriage in 1662 to a Portugese princess, Catherine of Braganza, that establihsed tea drinking as an accepted practice.  Catherine brought to London a 3 pound chest of tea as part of her dowry and she quickly introduced this to her friends at court.  Regular consignments were soon being ordered for the King and Queen and tea drinking became a fashionable activity.  Meanwhile enterprising merchants, keen to increase sales of this new commodity, engaged in elaborate advertising campaigns, and gradually the trend spread.  Tea was served, and loose tea sold, in the coffee houses that had sprung up in London and some provincial towns in the 1650s, but the high tax levied by Charles II meant that it was very expensive and therefore out of the reach of the working classes.  Ale and gin continued to be the standard drinks of the majority of the population until 1784, when the tax was reduced from 119 percent to 12 percent and tea overtook gin and ale in the popularity stakes.  Had the tax remained, it is likely that the British would have ended up drinking coffee like the French and Germans.
  So there you go, a little tea history!  On that note I am heading down to the hotel lounge to eat some apple crumble and ice cream dessert.  Hopefully there'll be more exciting news to report soon with this move in! Cheers goodnight.