g
Browsing Category

Random

Cotswolds Random

Nemesis

Posted on February 11, 2009
While I am settling beautifully into country life, husband’s taking it a little less well. His exact words to me within twenty-four hours of returning to England from Los Angeles in early January were, at volume, “You’ve ruined it.”

By which he meant I’ve ruined his concept of our rural idyll. The Cotswolds is no longer the joyous place where we arrive together each Thursday night for the weekend, our worldly cares evaporating as we leave urban grit behind and roll past open landscape, starry skies, and stone cottages into the market square where the wine bar sits waiting for us with convivial conversation, a roaring fire, and glass or three of wine. It is now the place where I live, littered with the detritus of daily life like dishes in the sink and half-read New Yorkers. I was careful to minimize such evidence before husband showed up for the first time since I’d permanently moved into the country cottage, but he could imagine it and that was enough to whip him into a froth.

He doesn’t seem to remember that this was all his idea in the first place. Gone is any recollection of the way he tarted up a very dull job in nearby Swindon that I interviewed for unsuccessfully last summer. He was a used car salesman touting the merits of an IT directorship for a, yawn, computing society because it was after all a means to an end: to live full-time in the Cotswolds. His brain didn’t seem to make the logical follow-on calculation that if I got a job near the Cotswolds, I would be living here full-time but he would still have a job in London. Now he understands. I live in the beautiful Cotswolds all the time. I am the enemy. It’s a good thing I get two nights a week on my own.

January passes and, luckily for me, husband finds another person to hate. He has a new boss, who coincidentally used to work with me at my former London employer. Husband’s new boss is a music industry big shot, French, and was known to occasionally have a silent conversation with my chest in the elevator. This last fact is known to husband but is not what causes the new boss, already nicknamed Inspector Closeau, to become his nemesis. Husband just doesn’t like having a boss and the situation prior to Inspector Closeau’s arrival was that of a boss in name rather than practice. I am no longer person non grata numero uno, but husband’s resentment towards me still grows because I am unavailable in person two nights a week for him to bitch about the Inspector.

Still, the heat is off enough that I can safely share with husband some insight into the loveliness of my new daily life. There’s the gym I’ve joined in Cirencester, or “siren” as we locals call it. It’s run by the local council, but it’s nicer and cheaper than any private gym I’ve been to in London. You can park (for free!), there’s a café, and you get a little USB type key you plug into all the workout machines so they record your workout. With these kind of amenities no wonder people live in Gloucestershire. It’s a no brainer, the same way homeless people gravitate to Santa Monica. I think this rather than say it out loud to husband.

In his exasperation husband put the London flat on the rental market back in December, toying with the idea that he could join me in my full-time country life. This would mean about four hours of daily commute time assuming all goes smoothly, and with the recession in full swing and the rental market sagging, it seemed a bit of a bluff. There are, in fairness, gentlemen of a certain means who regularly commute into London from Gloucestershire. I’ve seen them on the railway platform with their laptop bags and velvet collared coats on the odd morning last year when I trained into London for work. But I suspect most of them have a pied-à-terre in London to accommodate the not infrequent train cancellations, bad weather, and occasional night out in London. We essentially have a pied-à-terre in London, it just costs about twice as much as life in the country which takes the air out of any charm associated with having property with a French nickname. We may have a house in Poshtershire, but we’re several salary zeros away from these commuting gents.

At the end of January we got a call from the estate agent. She had an offer on our flat from an Italian couple moving over to England to work. They were offering £300 per week, £10 less per week than we wanted. This made it easy. I said no, thinking the matter was closed. She called back the next day: the Italians would go to £310. We thought about it. We debated the pros and cons and did the math, all day, all night, and part of the next day. Crazily, the cost of a monthly train ticket is more than half of our monthly mortgage on the London flat which means there’s a lot of potential commuting aggravation without that much financial benefit in consolidating homes. I told husband it was his decision. He turned the offer down. The agent came back with an offer of £320 per week. Husband apologized, said no, and took the flat off the market. It appears, for now, we have a London flat. Make that a pied-à-terre.

Random

One Upmanship

Posted on January 29, 2009

Just when we Americans felt all special for electing a black President, Iceland has gone and one upped us with their appointment of a gay, female prime minister. A former air hostess nonetheless, which is much more fun to say than flight attendant (and now, being practically British, I feel very entitled to use the term). There’s nothing I can think of that’s more fabulous than a lesbian career trajectory from the friendly skies to head of state, and it’s clear my great expectations problem now extends to cover the entire gay population. It’s also clear the only way for Britain to up the stakes is to oust Gordon Brown and bring in a cross-gender person of color. I’d even settle for a cross-dresser, of which there are reputedly many already wandering the Houses of Parliament. My soon to be acquired vote is going to Eddie Izzard.

Random

Great Expectations – Part 1

Posted on January 28, 2009

Our outing with R and R on Burns Night made me own up to a dirty truth: I have an issue with gay men. It’s not homophobia, quite the reverse. I simply have very high expectations of my gay male friends. I demand neither camp nor queen, but I do expect just a little bit of fabulousness. And on this count, Burns Night was a bit of a disappointment.

Don’t get me wrong. R and R are lovely people by hetero standards. R number one works as a marketing executive for an electronics firm. R number two appears to be more or less a kept man, having dabbled in antiques and more recently nutrition, inspired by his own experience with drastic weight loss and an earnest desire to help others. His dalliances with work remind me of the career path of every British au pair I knew in L.A.: nanny then masseuse or personal trainer en route to the most coveted post of all, wife. Only of course R number two has already bagged his man.

In my last post I wondered if R and R had been driven out of town by Telegraph torch-bearing conservative locals. I found out Saturday night that R and R take The Telegraph and The Times, so that theory was more off base than I realized. They shoot. They drive a Porsche and a Mercedes. The truth is they fit in to Poshtershire way better than husband and I ever will. And that’s without even factoring my new Prius into the equation. I’m fully prepared for a few cold shoulders at the wine bar once I’m spotted around town in that.

I blame my high expectations on one man, Mr. M.F. who made the very pages of this blog when he visited husband and me in the Cotswolds last spring. M.F. is my template gay man:

  • Liberal – check: always good for an embarrassing pic of George W. Bush.
  • Creative – check: online editor and author of umpteen humorous books including The Metrosexual Guide to Style and Death by Powerpoint.
  • Funny – check: full marks for sarcasm and witty retorts, many directed at husband, much to my amusement.

He’s far from flamboyant in his trendy nerd glasses and prepster apparel, but is he fabulous? Oh very yes.

We ended Burns Night with a fireside whiskey at our local inn. As R number two took orders for a second round, I could tell husband was fading. A wave of panic washed over me as I flashbacked to a dinner party husband and I hosted a few years ago in L.A. The guests were a couple who were friends of mine and somewhere during the appetizers and a prolonged discussion about golf, husband deemed them boring. Shortly after dessert he disappeared. After about 15 minutes I went to look for him. I checked the bathroom first then found him watching television in the bedroom.

Despite the earlier haggis induced excitement, I feared Burns Night would end with similar antics. Husband would excuse himself to the bathroom, slip out the back door, and I would find him home in bed half an hour later after lots of embarrassed excuse making. But my panic was for naught. We spent our second drink merrily discussing a whole lot of nothing, exactly the kind of things we talk about with other married friends.

California Random

The Thing About Lenny

Posted on December 30, 2008

Today was my grandmother’s ninetieth birthday party. It was held in an anteroom of the Arrowhead Country Club whose decor, prime rib menu, and bartender, Manny, had not changed since I was last there roughly thirty years ago for my grandmother’s retirement party. There were thirty-three family members and friends in attendance, most of whom were elderly women who had outlived their husbands. The handful of men included a neighbor who is rich from selling Italian tractor parts, my father, and my great uncle and his two sons, one of whom is the notorious Lenny.

Lenny came half an hour late, which would have offended most grandmothers on the occasion of their ninetieth birthday but he had already done that when he displayed the same margin of tardiness at my grandfather’s funeral five years ago. When he did arrive today he was at least bearing belated Christmas gifts. As with last year it was a CD, this time of Laura Nyro. And as with last year’s Neil Young which came with a burned copy on which he had re-edited the track order to “improve” it, this one also came with very specific instructions to ignore the bonus tracks.

“It was called the Thirteenth Confession for a reason,” he informed me.

Like Neil Young and T.C. Boyle, Laura Nyro is in Lenny’s canon of artists on whom he is forever pontificating. I tuned out somewhere between Lenny missing Laura Nyro’s Woodstock performance because he had to work in a steel mill to pay his way through college and the declaration by an “authentic rasta man” that his son was the chosen one in the family and had recently reeled off an epic poem comparable to Blake in twenty minutes. To be fair to this son, he has forever been in the shadow of his Ivy League student body president/McKinsey Consulting/Gates Foundation/Harvard Business School sister, so it was strangely sweet if slightly deluded to hear his father championing him. (Come to think of it, our entire family is in his sister’s shadow.)

As we said our goodbyes, Lenny separately directed both my sister and me not to “look for homogeneity” and to “expect variegation” in our new Laura Nyro CDs. In the country club parking lot my sister, an FBI agent in another state, told me how Lenny had left several frantic messages for her earlier this year. When she called him back he reported that his girlfriend had lost her wallet. My sister informed him there was nothing much she could do, omitting to clarify for him that most FBI agents are busy with other stuff like, umm, trying to prevent another 9/11. Instead she calmly directed him to a website which walks you through the steps you need to take, esoteric things like call the police and cancel your credit cards. I’d like to expect variegation in next year’s annual visit with Lenny, but somehow I am expecting homogeneity. Maybe Neil Young or Laura Nyro with their voices edited out and Lenny’s in their place, droning on.

Random

Routines for Sunny Climes

Posted on December 23, 2008

Day three and things have fallen into a vacation rhythm of sorts. In the morning we jog around my parents’ neighborhood which consists of a Russian doll-like series of gated communities with names like Mystic Ridge and Heron Glen within the larger security guard manned compound called Pelican Landing. It’s like Checkpoint Charlie with palm trees and landscaping to rival the royal parks. The Colony is the ultimate lockdown sub-community within Pelican Landing. It has it’s own separate golf course, country club and security guards, who recently turned my mother back as she attempted to breech the perimeter on her beach cruiser bicycle.

After jogging we head to Bonita Beach for a couple hours of sun therapy using the aging and NRA bumper sticker adorned Toyota Avalon my father has lent us for the week. Having forgotten my bathing suit in London, I wear a twenty year-old faded purple and neon pink paisley bikini. Through the dual miracle of American residential storage space and worn out elastic, I found this high school relic in the upstairs’ bathroom drawer at my parents’ and it still fits. Lying on the beach listening to the radio from Doc’s Beach House blare out “Send Her My Love,” “The Time of My Life,” and a synthesizer version of “Deck the Halls,” it feels like nothing has really changed from my high school days other than some extra bulges and extra money manifesting in the form of our double chaise lounge rented for fifteen dollars and ninety cents.

With all this beach time I am working my way through my airplane reading material much faster than anticipated. The New Yorker fiction issue has been consumed cover to cover bar The Financial Page, and by tomorrow I’ll be done with my novel. Even my mother’s Bon Apetit, thanks to which I am now familiar with the eating habits of Ryan Seacrest, has been picked clean. I’ll soon be left with nothing but the enemy, silent contemplation set to the lapping tide of the Gulf of Mexico or, worse, forced into actual conversation with husband.

Like a toddler who prefers the bubble wrap to the fancy toy that came in it, Taco Bell and Target are two of the small pleasures of returning to the states. Lunch at Taco Bell—cheap and Mexican, both rare in England—happens before or after the beach depending on how early a start we got, then the afternoon is spent on what husband calls a “spot of retail therapy.” It’s ok when this phrase is used in a lifestyle magazine but somehow wrong when it falls from his lips. At Target we routinely have to perform interventions with one and other to prevent regrettable choices. Today I had to have a large black leather-like tote with lots of shiny hardware and a sticky zipper pried from my hands in the check out line by husband. I had entered a delusional state brought on by the prices, even at these exchange rates, and had convinced myself the purse was a Birkin Bag-esque steal. But there was no stopping husband from purchasing the half size too small Chukka boots that do actually resemble the pair in the gentleman’s clothier in Cirencester.

After retail it’s dinner with my parents at a chain restaurant in one of the infinite new strip malls. My parents only eat at two restaurants, Bone Fish Grill or Carraba’s, maybe P.F. Chang’s China Bistro if they are feeling zany. The strength of the boundaries to this culinary repertoire became clear when, on night two, my parents offered to take husband out to dinner for a belated birthday meal. Husband suggested a nice hotel by the water or maybe one of the outdoor restaurants in downtown Naples. We knew from the balking that followed that the invitation was really only good for one of the chain restaurants. We were at Carraba’s in time for happy hour two-for-one Pinot Grigio. My father knows all the wait staff by name, including our server, Tiffany, from whom he not so secretly ordered a sundae with a candle. The delivery was accompanied, inevitably, by the entire wait staff singing Happy Wishes to You in Italian to husband.

I’ve given up on any post-dinner, communal family television watching. The first night I attempted this with an E! True Hollywood Story on Oprah. My parents expressed a bizarrely vehement disdain for Oprah, their chief complaint seeming to be a suspicion she doesn’t read all the books in her book club. I suspect there’s some Obama related mistrust lurking there too, and I decided if we couldn’t agree on Oprah (I mean my God, who doesn’t like Oprah??) there was really no use trying with anything else.

Random

The People Have Spoken

Posted on November 5, 2008

The people (especially the younger one’s) have spoken and we defer to them and the need for “change.” Congratulations! We will see you back for the next congressional elections in two years. May this new President be blessed with wisdom and strength (and economic knowledge——–there is no free lunch). Hold on to your wallets! DAD and MOM

I got this email from my staunch Republican father today. I found it remarkably gracious compared to our previous discussions on the subject. Husband and I had worried he would still be sulking at Christmas when we visit. Looks like all that can now be channeled into his displeasure at not having been made a grandfather yet. Oh, the anticipation…

Random

Negotiation Blues

Posted on October 18, 2008

Yesterday I went for a morning meeting with HR at my potential new office. The practical purpose of the trip was to try out the commute real time. But my mind was pretty much made up. I brought the contract, unsigned, with the intention of signing it there.

On the way I made a few calls about the cost of parking — I had found out earlier in the week none was available on site. A year of parking would come in around £3,000 or roughly 10x my annual bus fare in London. My joy over the petrol card benefit subsided. After a pep talk from husband, I decided to negotiate on this and a few other benefit related discrepancies. Husband is a well known negotiating wimp who fails to take his own advice but hands it out with authority.

I hate negotiating. The only way I have ever done it is if, like in this scenario, I can string together some benefits-related story that shows I am worse off than in the previous job despite a salary increase. Unlike a Loreal model, I have never been able to say actually I want X amount “just because I’m worth it.”

The impromptu negotiation took place with two HR ladies in a conference room named Vivaldi or some other universally liked composer. Despite my discomfort with the situation, I think it went reasonably well. By which I mean I wasn’t cast out from the building to the tune of accusations of being a greedy bugger who didn’t know how lucky I was to get a good offer like this in the midst of the second Great Depression. In general they displayed lots of eye contact and affirmative nodding and only the merest hint of annoyance that it had taken me over a week to ask for more money. I was full of assurances that I was ready to accept if we could come to some agreement on the matter of these expenses.

Friday came and went with no feedback from HR ladies. The rational part of my brain tells me they just couldn’t get in touch with the boss who had to authorise my request, and I’ll hear something Monday. Husband backs this up with assurances that negotiating was the right thing to do – there’s always more money on the table than the first offer—and that the measly sum I was trying to up sell them on is but a drop in their vast corporate ocean.

The crazed emotional wreck side of my brain tells me the boss is furious at my impudent behaviour. Rational brain reminds me I am a grown woman and boss man is not my father. I am a negotiating, skilled professional businesswoman even if crazed emotional wreck brain tells me I have absolutely no skills and these people are clearly insane to offer to employ me at such a wage. They are surely right now at this very moment over evening cocktails coming to this conclusion and my offer shall be promptly rescinded Monday morning.

I too am off for some cocktails to ease the anxiety: a tutored wine tasting benefit at and for the village hall.

Random

The Good Life

Posted on October 11, 2008

The proverbial home grown, organically reared carrot is dangling in front of me. This week I got a job offer that’s a “commutable” distance from our Cotswold town. Despite all my big talk (and some action) about opening a wedding planning business, it’s not that kind of job. It’s a proper, grown-up, corporate job that materialised on the back of some looking around I started many months ago when my current company was going through lay-offs.

All my talk about a life in the country is about to be tested. And fast.

So like any big decision I am making a list of pros and cons. Here’s what I have so far:

Pros:

  • I got a job offer in the midst of one of the largest global economic meltdowns in history. I say this not to gloat but to remind myself not to look a gift horse in the mouth.
  • I could live in the Cotswolds full-time.
  • The music industry (my current job) is dying and still has no strategy. Potential new company has strategy. They even talked a lot about it during my interviews. Hurrah! How very novel.
  • Potential new boss seems like the kind of guy I could get along with.

Cons:

  • Husband and I would live apart two nights per week. Or is this a pro? Still trying to work this one out. Husband is so obsessed with work right now that most nights in London are spent zoned out in front of the TV when he finally does arrive home sometime after 8PM. Is this any different than being apart?
  • Gas costs – would have to drive to new job – something about a petrol card in contract – must investigate. Oh yes and must get driver’s license!
  • Commute. Have never had a commute, even when I lived in L.A. Am trying to think about bright side. Could download KCRW podcasts for the ride and pretend like am now a Southern California commuter.
  • Cotswold house is a postage stamp intended for weekending. Then again London flat is a postage stamp. Need somewhere to hang all my clothes in the Cotswolds. Damn England and it’s lack of built-in closets.

Four all for now.

Random

What’s in a Name?

Posted on September 29, 2008

Amber. It sounds like a mean cheerleader. And wedding and motorcross sport event planning sounds exactly like the kind of job Amber the mean cheerleader would have when she grows up. That or an aggressive realtor in the model of Annette Benning’s character in American Beauty.

The real life Amber who taught my wedding planning course in Bath this weekend looked the part of a former cheerleader. Slim with blond hair and blue eyes, she also would have been the homecoming queen and student body president. She is the cheerleader you couldn’t help but love, nothing like the mean Heather or obnoxious Tiffany types.

As if to reinforce the high school paradigm, there was one man in my class of ten women, and he looked exactly like Rod Whited, captain of the mighty Green Wave football team. Then he opened his mouth to speak and all of a sudden Rod Whited had a Yarmouth accent, shattering my trip down memory lane. All the better, there was a mood board and some craft glue calling my name.

Sixteen classroom hours later I am the holder of a diploma from an accredited professional wedding and events planner institution. I’ve also become some kind of cliched nightmare of an aspiring small businesswoman. Today at work I toggled back and forth to a surreptitious Word document where I was constructing nauseating prose in the third person for my website profile (Bob Dole says…). Tonite I procured every possible variation of my company domain name, then spent the rest of the evening fiddling with the Vista Print free business card online editor. I’m now the one in danger of becoming the Annette Benning character in American Beauty, albeit a bit fatter. I won’t worry until husband quits his job and starts lifting weights, smoking pot and chasing a high school cheerleader.

Random

Wedding Planning School

Posted on September 25, 2008

Having discounted my plan to top the proprietress of The Cotswold Ice Cream Company and assume her identity as a far too risky and frankly not very nice way to attain the rural entrepreneurial dream, I have signed up for wedding planning school in Bath this weekend.

Yes, I am still employed in my proper London job, but husband and I have been harboring the secret, embarrassing dream of starting The Cotswold Wedding Company. Being an obsessive compulsive project manager at my core, I will gantt chart brides’ rural wedding dreams into reality while husband films it all for the happy couples to enjoy for years to come.

I’ve just received an email informing me that my tutor for the weekend will be international wedding & motorsport event planner Amber Hunter. I am a little afraid of women named Amber (and motorsports for that matter). Whatever happens to my entrepreneurial dreams, I suspect Amber and her motorsport anecdotes will be good for a few blog posts.