Shopping

Yesterday we went shopping. Mostly just shopping, not buying: scoping out stores for kitchen appliances and furniture and stuff. Apparently, although they call beds "twin, double, queen, king," they are not the same sizes as ours...we shipped Joseph's Harry Potter bed with mattress, so that should be fine, but we just brought the mattress for Emily's bed, thinking we could get a bed here--she wants a loft bed so she can play underneath it. We found a great one at one store, about four feet off the ground, with drawers and shelves and a slide-out desk top underneath, as well as room to play. But it's not quite the same size as her mattress. We either need to get a new mattress, or get the "king twin" which is a few inches larger than the other, and so will be a little big for the mattress...details, details...lots of options in beds, especially if you want to spend a LOT of money. Then you could get a nice platform bed with a built-in LCD tv that pops up from the footboard...don't tell Joseph about that one. Or one with a built-in dock for your iPod. I think we'll just look for a basic model, though--but maybe a king, since the queen is smaller than ours, and the king is between king and queen, but maybe we'll just get cosy and conserve room in the bedroom, which is not going to fit both our dressers, anyway...maybe we should get a loft bed, soo, so we can play underneath...watch out, and I'll get as weird at Manford. It's being upside down. Surprising things are backwards. Door locks, light switches (up is off), and the sweater ("jersey") I just bought Manford has the zipper on the opposite side. I still get confused getting into the car (usually not driving it, any more) if I think about it too much.

They probably have this array of outlandish appliances in the States, too; it's just that we haven't been shopping for everything at once, there. The appliance store we liked (they had reasonable things, too, and a nice saleswoman) had a pink dishwasher and a giant fifties-looking lime green fridge for $5000. I think we'll pass on them. Most of the fridges are small, by US standards, but have a variety of configurations (freezer up, down, and some with extra doors and drawers for various functions), and since we're redoing the kitchen, we can try to figure out what size we really need, and make a space for it. Next week we will meet with a kitchen designer (sounds fancy, but not really) and start to make a plan. The only things we actually bought yesterday were small plastic stuff (we found a store with every plastic thing you could imagine) like a microwave popcorn popper (you can get the bags here, but they're expensive) and juicer (we have a citrus tree of some sort in the rental house. I can't tell if it's lemon or orange, or a cross they apparently have here).

We did our first baking this week--oatmeal cookies with chocolate chips, kind of. They have chocolate "buttons" that said they were for baking, disks about the size of a dime. I decided to try them, and the kids liked them fine, but I think I'll get the (more expensive) Nestle chocolate chips next time...and I have to figure out how to measure butter here. Butter is very cheap--less than margarine--but it comes in a huge hunk (a half kilo, a bit more than a pound in one slab). Apparantly there are lines on the package for measuring, but I had long since discarded that. I know, I can use the diplaced water trick, but I was lazy and estimated. They are mostly metric here, but still remnants of old measures on food packaging and recipes--we will have to learn to convert both ways. The oven is in Farenheit, but about half of things you buy are Celsius. I am assuming someday we will stop converting and have a sense of metrics...

Today Manford and I will go to meeting (no kids program today) and then later we will go to a dog show with another family (of the tutor--clinical training coordinator--from work), and then have tea (dinner) with them. We are bringing cake. They have no shortage of cakes here. No shortage of bakeries, either. No, we're not getting a dog yet, but I'd be surprised if we didn't have one by Halloween...