I’m really starting to get the hang of our new surroundings, schedule, dynamic… our new life. Which means, of course, everything is about to slam into flux again. Well, it either means that or I’m on Punk’d and a man in a gorilla suit is going to jump out of the bushes and hump my leg.

The house we rented is being cleaned and prepped this week and we get the keys on Friday.

Our brand new king size memory foam mattress (I’m getting excited just talking about it), will be delivered on Tuesday.

Makaio will be starting school next week.

Then we have a house to reassemble, and all the stuff we shipped won’t be here for another six weeks… because boats from England take a long time or whatever. Stupid oceans. Stupid boats. Stupid, stupid boats. If I invite you over for supper and you have to sit on an inflatable mattress to dine, we will call it “rustic”. Got it? Not ghetto, not sad, just rustic.

This afternoon I managed to get my car hand washed, go to the post office and Starbucks and stop off for some grocery shopping… and no one threw a fit, not even me. I’m totally getting the hang of this driving around with two kids thing. So, the silver lining is that I don’t have to pick one kid to keep and give the other one away. It was looking a little rocky there for a bit.

I’ve done a fair bit of blogging about how much I love to cook and how important it is to me to try and eat the best I can, and of course provide the best meals I can for my family.

Trust me, I don’t know where this came from. I ate nothing but drive-thru and bags of chips before I had kids. I just try to read labels and make the decision that works for us. I’m not a sugar-free nazi, but I try to keep an eye on what goes into my kids’ mouths.

Then last week I read about a genetically modified corn made by that great big food company that rhymes with Schmonsanto and I thought I was going to freak out and have a full-blown anxiety attack or go stab a Schmonsanto executive.

This shit is genetically engineered to produce a toxin which… wait for it… “protect(s) the plant by rupturing the stomach of any insect that feeds on it.”

Rupturing stomachs?! Now, I’m no doctor, but I know that stomach-bursting corn doesn’t sound like a great fucking idea. I don’t care if it is designed to target insects and I’m a mammal… it ruptures stomachs, y’all!

And never mind that, “rats fed with the GM corn showed organ failure, and the toxin has been detected in the bodies of pregnant women.”

As the creators of this petition point out, it’s an issue that affects you or anyone you know, who gets food from Wal-Mart (the parent company for Asda UK). Wal-Mart plans to bring the stomach-bursting-toxin-producing corn to shelves near you—unmarked, unlabeled, and untested on humans. Awesome.

Now, I’m not usually a soap-boxer… much… and I’m not a card-carrying-raw-food-diet-vegan. I eat ice cream, and potato chips sometimes. But I like to be able to make informed decisions. And I just think that putting bug-bursting bizzaro corn on shelves without labeling which allows customers to make their own choices is totally crazytown.

What do you think? If you agree with me, go sign the petition. Wal-Mart responds to market pressure, because they want to stock what we want to buy. It’s kind of part of their business model. If you disagree with me, I promise I won’t beat you with a free-trade organic banana. But, pretty please will you tell me why? I’m fascinated by people’s reactions to this.

We found a house!!! The first house we viewed, we rented. It’s perfect. It’s amazing. It’s three bedroom and two bathroom, so I never have to make Makaio pee in the backyard ever again because Novak is having his twenty minutes of alone time. The place was definitely built by people with small kids, you can just tell by the way the house is laid out. It just makes sense.

It is so rare to set foot in an empty space and feel at home. It’s only happened to me a handful of times out of the hundred or so places I’ve lived. But this place… my new home… it felt like home instantly.

It’s like someone took magic and dusted it over a space and then built a house on it..

and then they built in TONS of storage (it makes me wet just to type it… TONS of storage… oh yeah, baby):

You see that dark space at the back of the picture? That space is actually HUGE and has TONS of shelves and cabinets built into the walls. And those awesome 70′s cathedral windows catch all the evening light, when the morning light at the foreground of this picture has faded. So all day, one or both of them is really well lit and warm and inviting and the other one is cozy and peaceful. It’s so fucking zen.

The kitchen and laundry room are off to the right… all the way at one end of the house. So, if you want to do some laundry, or make something in the kitchen after the kids have gone to bed then you don’t have to pray to sweet holy mother of everything that you don’t wake the damn kids.

Then, that door all the way to the left is a hallway, down which the bedrooms and bathrooms are. Good old smart American layouts. Nothing cramped up the ass of another room so that half the house is rendered useless after the children go to bed. No, we don’t need to conserve land space over here, we sprawl, we stretch, we take up as much room as we goddamn please because we’re American and that’s what we do. Isn’t it beautiful?

That’s Novak’s covered parking (look at those trees!!), just to the left of the far left edge of this picture is *my* covered parking (you can just barely see the edge of it starting), which has a covered hallway attached to it which leads to the backdoor. Because I will have the kids with me more . You see that? You see how I did that? I got the one where I won’t get rained on, ’cause I win at being awesome.

Okay, but the joke’s on me, because this is the view out the end of his. You know, the view he gets to look at every morning and every evening getting in and out of his car… while I’m looking at the mop in the garage:

and this to the other side:

this is the hill behind my garage, and what I will see out my windshield every day when I pull out to take Makaio to school:

and last but not least… the master bedroom has a door out to a rather large private patio and when you walk out and look up, you see this guy:

It’s almost nine oclock and the kids are still sleeping… actually, strike that… Hudson’s still sleeping. I jinxed it. As I was typing that sentence, Makaio woke up.

Either way: holy. crap. balls.

Biggest update has to be that I have a car. For the first time in four years, I can drive around without being chauffeured by my husband. The kids and I can load up in the zippy-go-go and take off to the beach, or the grocery store (nightmare)… or Costco.

This is what I look like when I can drive myself around:

I bought the car (Mazda 626, EXACT same color and model as one I had when I was 19. It’s life was tragically cut too short by an uninsured driver.) from a super nice guy who has become our family’s new buddy. The picture of the kids the other day on the Vespa was in his shop, on his Vespa. He used his all-powerful Costco card to get us in yesterday so I could buy a GPS. You know, for when I’m driving around all by myself!

I bought a lifetime supply of wholewheat organic spaghetti, and a bag of Israeli couscous which is larger than Hudson. I got a new electric kettle, two loaves of bread for like five cents and a rotisserie chicken that I traded for my pocket lint. Seriously, Costco and I are a cheap-shopping match made in heaven.

My very first day out and about in my independence-mobile had me stopping off at the post office to check our newly-acquired p.o. box and I already had awesomely fun gift mail! I’ve been in California a week and already people are sending me gifts?!

The ridiculously awesome @mommakiss (who blogs here), hand-knitted this ridiculously awesome purple cowl neck. I was drooling on Twitter because you know how I hate psychotically love purple. So the crazy bitch SENT IT TO ME. My very first mail in California was this:

Don't judge me for looking so tired. I'd just been grocery shopping with two kids. I was exhausted!

Also? It makes me look a little bit naked when I wear it with a tank top. Double score.

The first time I turned the ignition in the new-to-me, zippy-go-go that Whitesnake song, Here I Go Again on My Own was playing on the damn radio. Now, I don’t usually buy into that whole The Universe Knows stuff, I’m a pretty firm believer in coincidences and our brain likes to recognize patterns/meaning. But in that moment? In that moment I fucking believed.

Go ahead, tell me how awesome my car is, or how awesome my cowl is. Or how awesome Whitesnake is… whatever.

Week one in California… it’s been damn good to us. More soon, promise. Until then? Images without much explanation:

I got so many questions about the redwoods and the view from the house I’m staying in, that I decided pictures were needed. The view directly from the house is pretty gorgeous, but some of the scenery from driving down through the winding roads gets even better. I’ll take pictures of that for you later. Promise.

But for now, this is the view out of the kitchen window while I do the dishes (the house we move into soon WILL have a fucking dishwasher, I swear on my life):

This is what it looks like when you walk out on the back deck:

And because the redwoods are so freaking majestically tall, you have to look up to see the rest:

*update*: The above pictures were taken just as the sun was coming up, I thought some midmorning shots once the sun was coming through were required:

I know about three people who have better views out their back doors. Are you one of them? Or are you just dying of envy right now ?

I grew up in Oklahoma and Missouri, so when I was 19 I did what so many Midwest kids do: I packed as much as I could into my car and I drove West.

I’m not really sure what the hell I was thinking, and if one of my kids did it I think I would totally get in my car and follow them the whole way for fear that they’d end up dead in a ditch. But I had a couple friends along the west coast who let me crash on the way to a really good friend who said yeah, come stay here. That’s the story of how I ended up living in Portland.

One of the stops on the way to Portland was San Francisco, and I stayed longer than I’d planned. Northern California stole my heart. Instantly. But I figured out pretty quickly that without family in the area or a career of any kind, there was pretty much no fucking way I was going to be able to afford to live there.

I have always said that someday I’d like to retire to Shasta Lake in Northern California. If you’ve ever seen anywhere more beautiful in your entire life, well I might just call you a liar.

Can I just say that where I’m sitting right now, slap bang in the middle of the Santa Cruz mountains… pretty close to just as beautiful.

Maybe it’s having lived so many shitty places since I was here last; maybe it’s because the older I get, the more I realize that amazing and beautiful things are rare and to be appreciated, maybe it’s just the jetlag, but I am grateful to my bones to be here.

Yesterday we went grocery shopping… and afterward I cried tears of joy. How stupid does that sound?! Let me explain. Brands I know, products I love, stores that are laid out in a way that makes sense to me… that was all fine and good. But the process of checking out and paying–I’ve never felt so patriotic in my life.

In England, after having lugged my ass through the drudgery of the shitty shopping experience, and after flinging all of our groceries on to the stupid conveyor belt, and after being treated like I was asking the checkout worker for THEIR money (seriously, the WORST customer service on Earth)… then I had to bag my own damn groceries. I never realized what a shitty job those grocery baggers have! I know, that sounds like the cunty-est thing anyone has ever said, but damn it, it’s the little things in life!

Yesterday as we were walking up to the checkout, and there was no conveyor belt, and the bagger was standing at the end of the aisle waiting anxiously to earn his keep, I turned to Novak and quickly whispered: When we get up there, just push the cart up and Man 1 will take the groceries out of the cart as he scans them, and Man 2 will bag them. You don’t have to do anything. When they’re done, Man 2 will offer to take them out to the car and load them, to that you can say no thank you.

Really?! Are you sure? Do I need to tip them?

And then Man1 and Man2 proceeded to be the nicest men on the planet.

I had lovely, genuine, American banter with them about having just moved back and this is our first official family grocery shopping back stateside. We talked about having lived in the Arkansas of England and then the lady behind me in line told me about her own trip to Lincolnshire once and how her sister was living in Germany. Before you know it, there were five or six of us chatting about nothing in general and you could have killed me dead right then and I would have been happy.

When Man 1 pushed the cart around to Man 2, Hudson didn’t want to get out. As I was trying to coax her out of the seat, he said, She can stay in. If she’s cool with it, I’m cool with it. Yes, yes you are, sir. You are very cool with it.

As we left, the kids got stickers… which pretty much blew Makaio completely away. He wouldn’t stop talking about the nice men and the stickers. I hugged him and said, “Welcome back to the Land of the Free and the Home of Customer Service. It’s literally the first day of the rest of your life.” And then I cried. Only a few silent, dignified tears damn it.

Friday night my husband had this “leaving do” (going-away party) for work. They went out for dinner and drinks and I figured he’d be home around 1:30 when the pub closed so I headed up to bed about that time, since that’s my normal bedtime anyway.

When I woke up at three, he still wasn’t home. Highly unlike him. Three-thirty and he still wasn’t home. Really unlike him. I called and it went straight to voicemail, now I was freaked out. He was dead in a ditch and his phone had been run over by the truck which squashed him.

No way does he ever stay out until dawn, not call and then shut his phone off. I was really panicked.

I lay awake staring at the ceiling, steeped in total anxiety. Four oclock and he still isn’t home. That’s it, I’m the crazy wife now and I’m calling the hospital. I come downstairs to get my computer so I can look up the phone number and there he is, asleep, on the living room floor with a pillow and blanket.

Keeping in mind that the movers took all our furniture that morning, there wasn’t a soft spot for him to land. Just my drunk husband and a blanket, so pathetic. I was overwhelmed with anger, anxiety, relief and sadness…. Kind of like when your kid runs out into traffic. I just started crying and I woke him up by shoving him, “I THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD!”

Huh? What? What the hell?!

You didn’t answer your phone, it was turned off, it’s four in the morning and you weren’t home, I THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD!!!

I WAS home! I was right here, I was being considerate! I didn’t want to wake you up!

No, you were DEAD!!! What the hell?! By the way, you have a crazy voicemail on your phone.

Then I went upstairs and slept in my son’s single top bunk with him because I was still SO pissed off at my husband for being dead.

*this little interaction may or may not be brought to you courtesy of international move stress. we head down to london tonight to stay overnight and fly out first thing in the morning. Next thing you hear from me will be a stateside update. CRAZY!*

If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you spent Thursday evening getting real-time updates on my final efforts packing the crap that we weren’t sure we wanted to take until we packed the crap we definitely wanted to take… so we could assess the amount of second-string-crap space we had left over.

Here’s my packing pro-tip to you: turn it into a drinking game. One Box One Shot was a screaming success.

Also? Keep track of the weird stuff you uncover while packing the remnants of your life into cardboard boxes. Maybe it’s just me and my super sitcom life, but here are a few things I found:

1. My husband’s Moby CD in his collection… we will never speak of it again.

2. 25 reusable shopping bags. Is this still eco-friendly? Somehow I think not. There’s something about conservation that has failed to sink in here.

3. Packing makes me sweat between my boobs until I felt like I needed a shower when I finished. But it was 2:30 in the morning and it seemed likely I would wake the whole house up. So I went to bed feeling like I’d been to the gym. Bleck!

4. Staying up late to pack isn’t nearly as much fun as staying up late to watch Sex and the City and surf the internet. Which means it’s only slightly more fun than getting jumped into a gang and risking a visit to the emergency room.

5. I found a dildo under my sofa which had been inexplicably missing for almost six months. If you can tell me how it ended up under my sofa, I will give you all the money in my pocket. Which, to be fair, might only be about fifty cents… assuming I’m even wearing pockets today. Life’s a craps shoot.

Go on then, take a guess at how it got under the sofa. Or guess how much money is in my pocket. Or if I’m wearing pockets. Or better yet, what’s the weirdest thing that’s happened to you while packing/moving?

If a video of a three year-old spelling her name, with a slight sibilant S impediment, isn’t the cutest thing you see today… well, then I’m not sure we can still be friends.