The GirlAlive Blog

Dollars and Pounds

For those that don’t know, the exchange rate is about two dollars for every pound right now.  So for a dollar, you’d be lucky to be able to buy a Milky Way here.  That’s why I think it’s so silly that there are still dollar bills. 

There are one pound bills here (in Scotland only, not England) but I’ve only seen about three of them in the time I’ve lived here.  There are one and two pound coins.  So with a two pound coin, that’s almost the equivalent of a US $5 bill.  And that’s still worth too little to warrant paper money in these parts.  

I love pound coins.  At my favorite charity shop you can buy a book with a single coin, and still get some change back.  You never have to feed a dollar bill into an unwilling slot in a vending machine.  Yes, it makes the change section of your wallet a little bloated, but it’s worth it.  

I think America needs to ditch dollar bills.  There was nothing wrong with the Sacajawea dollars except that no one was forced to use them.  They were great for bus fare and vending machines.  But if you bought anything, all you got in change was dollar bills, except at the post office.  I would have loved to have used dollar coins, but I could never find them.  They need to be pushier about dollar coins.  Stop printing bills.  Stop giving bills to banks.  Make people use the coins.  They’ll learn to like them.

The one problem I can see with dollar coins is with strippers.  How does one tip a stripper in the UK?  Do you stuff a five pound note in their waistband, and ask for change?  Do you shove coins into their panties?  That seems a bit weird.  I guess for all the advantages of coinage, it’s probably the strippers that suffer.  Unless they strap a piggy bank to their butts, there’s just no good way to tip a stripper with change.

Alana 

P.S.  Make sure to check out this guy from Britain’s Got Talent, who may or may not be related to my husband.  He’s one of my favorites.  But I have about 6 favorites so far.

addiction

My name is Alana, and I have an alpaca addiction.

I was surfing through the "nearly expired" listings on Etsy a while ago and I bought a few small balls of hand dyed alpaca wool from Larkspur Funny Farm.  Now I’ve entirely fallen in love with alpaca yarn.  It’s all soft and squishy and made from alpacas, which are some of my favorite animals.  Alpacas are like little tiny llamas.  They’re cute and fluffy.  The problem is that their wool is also quite expensive for someone who usually only buys cheap acrylic yarn from the 99p store. 

For my family and friends, if you’re ever stuck for a gift to get for my birthday or Christmas or anniversary, or anything, you probably can’t go wrong with a big pile of alpaca yarn.  If you really want to impress me, buy me an alpaca farm and a spinning wheel.  

Back to trying to stretch my tiny ball of alpaca wool into a viable knitted scarf…

Alana 

Teen Self Portrait

There was a challenge to draw yourself as a teenager, and I have responded.  The quality is crappy because I have not used my little drawing tablet much, so I draw like an epileptic monkey at the moment.  And the fact that the subject matter is me didn’t help at all.

And for comparison purposes, I did a quick sketch of me now.  Not much improvement, frankly.

Alana 

Timing a run to Tesco

I had to go grocery shopping.  I hate that.  The walking to the store and buying crap and walking back home is all pretty tedious.  When I was working all the time, I had to go after work and it was always crowded.  But lately I haven’t been working so I have to work out the best time to go to Tesco to get soup and toilet paper.

Morning is out.  I’m not so good at getting out of bed.  Noon is no good because that’s when the kids from the high school down the street are off for lunch, and allowed to run wild in the streets.  (Apparently no one ever thought of closed high school campuses here.  The streets are lousy with make-up caked 14-year-olds every day at noon.)  One o’clock is no good.  Kids are still at lunch and Buffy is on.  It’s one of my favorite seasons, with evil Willow.  If you wait until 2:30 or 3:00, the primary school kids are out for the day, and the place is crowded with mothers ineffectually trying to corral 7-year-olds who are running wild.  

So I have a small safe window for shopping.  If I get out of the house the minute Buffy ends I can get to the store just after 2:00.  It’s pretty dead right then, other than staff trying to quickly clean up after the high schoolers.  There are a few mothers with pre-school kids trying to get the shopping done before the other kids get out of school.  But if you can navigate the aisles with military precision, you can get everything, pay for it, and get out of the parking lot by 2:30, thus avoiding all the children around here.  It’s not that I dislike children.  I just dislike the undisciplined rabid zombie beasts that pass for children in this country.

Alana 

Fun at the 99 Pence Store

I shop at the 99p store a lot.  The one in my small town is not bad and sometimes has good deals, and it’s a good place to get caulking guns and coloring books and hamster food at the same time.  I’ve even found pregnancy tests there.  But I wouldn’t trust the 99p condoms.  There’s a line.

Anyway, a while back my husband and I were just browsing the 99p store and looking for intersting stuff (and craft supplies for me) when we found some disturbing/funny items in the food section.  We found the following marked 3 for 99p.

I wouldn’t have been so amused if it had been called Pot O’ Fruit, or even if it had followed the lead of the British food item Pot Noodle and called itself Pot Fruit.  But by calling it FruityPot, the main thing they are selling you is pot, which happens to be fruity.   Not fruit in a pot, or fruit with some pot, but pot that is fruity.  I have eaten the pineapple in a sweet and sour dish, but the mandarin remains in my cupboard.

Then we found on the "2 for 99p" shelf, this brilliant little item:

In case you couldn’t extrapolate, it is called "Celebrity" with the description "Danish Pork Luncheon Meat."  It is imitation Spam.  It may be made from pork.  It may be made from blonde Danish girls.  But it certainly isn’t actually Danish.  Further proof of its lack of Danishness:

My Asian language skills aren’t great, but that looks a whole lot like Chinese or Japanese to me.  Last time I checked, that’s not the alphabet they use in Denmark.  If the fact that it is bargain priced meat of questionable origins isn’t bad enough, it is also going to stay fresh until 2012.  I could hang onto this can and eat it while watching the London Olympics.  Or not.

In fact, I did eat the can of Celebrity.  I can’t swear that it was actual pork, and I’m 100% convinced that it was not Danish.  It tasted like Spam, but not quite as good.  I had it with sweet and sour sauce and the pineapple FruityPot.  And I survived to tell the tale. 

Alana