Christmas in England

It's strange sat here at home surrounded by Christmas cards and tree and decorations as it kind of feels like Christmas is over - and no that isn't me being a Christmas grinch!!

As most of you will know Dave and I have just been back home to England for a visit and we had lots and lots of fun. Whilst there we met up with all our family and celebrated Christmas early. We had Christmas dinner, decorations, tree lighting, visits to Santa and there was even snow (although I never actually saw it fall from the sky!). I thought I had some photos on my phone to share with you guys, but just checked and I don't appear to have any on there - sorry! So now that we've had all our presents and meals, we don't really have anything to celebrate, although there is one wrapped present under our tree, and we will still be skyping with family Christmas day, but it was strange coming back and everyone talking about their Christmas plans when we have already done it all.

Whilst in England I went to London a few times, went with family to see Santa at Harrods, Ill be honest it was a little disappointing, but I think the kids liked it - I personally thought Santa was a little creepy and his elf was very miserable. I also went with my sister to the Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park, was really good, was free to get into but things weren't cheap once you were in there. We spent a few hours in there and enjoyed the ice kingdom and playing a few of the fairground games. We also went to see The Bodyguard the musical, was really really good, although the big shooting scene I think could have been better done. 

Was great to meet up with friends as well as family, and I'm always amazed at how easily we all fall back into conversations as if we had seen each other the other day rather than many months ago. Guess that is a sign of a good friendship. I think that having facebook helps a lot too as it doesn't feel like you have been away for that long or you are that far away.

Food, food, food. Yes I ate loads even though I said I wouldn't! I made it to Gregg's - twice in fact, the sausage rolls are still awesome. I skipped the curry, egg custard tarts and bacon sarnies this time though. 

Got home Monday after a fantastic time away, was home only a few hours and suddenly got sick, the bathroom was my best friend for the next 12 hours!! I really thought like I was dying.  Not sure if it was food poisoning or a virus I had picked up, it's now day 4 and I am feeling so much better. Today I managed to venture out of the house and eat something other than toast. Plan to resume normal routines from tomorrow. Sadly I had to miss hubby's work holiday party tonight, still quite tired but think that is due to not eating much the last four days. On the plus side I was 6lbs lighter the second day of my sickness than I was before I went to England.

Today I purchased two domain names - this one www.uktocalifornia.com and (name to be revealed shortly). I plan to move all of my weight loss posts/info over to the second blog - so you will see some changes here, as soon as I am finished setting up the second blog I will post with a link to it.

Sarah x

Elf for Health

Hey Guys

Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving :)

As you may have noticed I have a new badge on my blog.

I have signed up to be an Elf for Health. What's that? I hear you ask. 

Two bloggers Lindsay and Elle got together and decided to put on a six week challenge starting from tomorrow running all the way through Christmas into January. It's a buddy system so you get paired with someone and you get to encourage each other and there are daily challenges involved and prizes too. You get assigned an elf every two weeks, so you will get three pairings for the whole challenge - sounds fun doesn't it? The elf matches are being sent out today, so you are too late to sign up for the first pairings, but I believe you can sign up before the second pairing, if you want to join in the fun.

I wasn't going to sign up as I'm heading back home to England for a visit next week, but decided having a buddy should help me stay on track, and hopefully I can help someone out too.

I have also decided to start tracking using weight watchers again. So I will weigh in tomorrow morning and resume tracking, I still have  my online membership so will be tracking online.

Have a great week everyone and good luck to all the elves xxx

3 years on

The last three years have gone by so quick. Exactly three years ago we would have just landed at SFO. I was super stressed and worried about the dogs and eager to get through immigration and customs and go get them. Our immigration process was quick but felt like it took forever, and we then had to get various paperwork signed before we could pick the dogs up. They were so pleased to see us as we were to see they were alive and well (yes I did have moments on the flight where I imagined going to get them only to be told they didn't survive the flight!)

We are now living in our third house and third location since moving to USA. Our first house was in Burlingame, then we lived in San Francisco (well the outskirts of SF) and now we are living in North Oakland (the nice part!), I think the house we are living in now is probably my favorite and the area is really really nice too, even with all the hills!

When we moved here we were on 3 year visas with the option to renew them, so there was a slim chance that if things didn't go to plan I would have been writing this post from England. Luckily things have gone great and earlier on this year we both got our green cards and became Permanent US residents :) 

Now I am a GC holder I am allowed to work, but so far I have been keeping myself busy volunteering 4 days a week at various organizations.], and doing lots of baking.

A few questions I constantly seem to be asked.

What is different here than in England?  ironically I normally say the weather! but today it is cold and chucking it down just like in England! Yes the weather here is a lot nicer and I think people in general are a lot friendlier too. 

Would I ever move back to England? I'm not saying never, right now life is good here and we have no plans to go back, we have been back each year for a visit and had lots of people come to visit us too. In two weeks we are going back for a visit to celebrate an early Christmas.

Does the home sickness get easier with time? This is a good question, and it's this time of year that I normally feeling it the most, you associate Christmas with families and it is hard when we wake up Christmas morning and we know we won't be seeing anyone (except for on skype), I think that is a feeling that will probably never go away.

Do you consider here your home now? I guess the answer to this would be yes it does now feel like home here, but England will also always be my home too, I spent almost 33 years of my life there, and that accounts for a whole lot for sure. 

What do you miss the most about England? I definitely miss friends and family the most, and appreciate that people do spend time and money coming to visit us. It can be tough when we go back for a visit to see everyone, but we do try our best and we do stay in touch on facebook and skype with people. Yes we have made new friends here, but will never forget our friends back home :) and of course proper cadburys chocolate and Greggs sausage rolls!!

Here's to many more years here (well at least 9.5 as that is how long we have until our GC need renewing)

Love you all xxx

Week 36

Only 98 sleeps till Christmas :) I know you are loving my little updates each week.

I actually have quite a few countdowns on my phone:

37 sleeps till Lisa, Paige and Ebbie come to visit

39 sleeps until Lisa, Julia and I take part in the Dirty Girl run

40 sleeps until Dave, Lisa, Paige, Ebbie and I take part in the virtual 'run the hood' zombie dash

42 sleeps until Lisa, Paige, Ebbie and I go to Disneyland

61 sleeps until Dave and I take part in the 10k Awesome 80's run

73 sleeps until Dave and I fly to England for a visit

and 303 sleeps until Comic Con

As you can tell I love my countdowns, also it's been 50 days today since I drank soda :)

Talking of soda, since giving it up I have had no caffeine as the tea I drink is caffeine free, over the weekend I bought a Keurig brewer and I've been drinking a lot of iced tea and regular tea, it dawned on me this morning that this is the reason I haven't been sleeping well the last few nights, I've been awake at 4am each morning, clearly my body needs to adjust to the caffeine intake again.

So week 36, it was an OK week, here are the stats from my fitness pal

Yes Thursday I ate lots, although it wasn't as bad as I expected, I decided to order pizza, garlic bread and wings, normally I would eat the lot but this time I only had two slices of pizza and half the garlic bread, so that's a major improvement for me. I would say I ate 60% clean this week, I do need to work on trying harder with that, as I know the more clean I eat the better I feel and the more energy I have.

This week I worked out  four days. Monday I took the dogs on a 2.76 mile walk, it was a lot warmer than I expected, so was a tough walk. Wednesday I cycled 8 miles on my exercise bike, Friday I did 40 mins on my wii fit, and Sunday I took part  virtually in the Dani Ryan Holmes-Kirk birthday 5k with Dave which we completed in 58 mins. I think the thing I need to focus on the most is drinking more water, as I've been slacking on that.

So the numbers for this week, just a small loss of 0.4lbs this week, but it's heading in the right direction and my total loss is now at 23lbs :) I would like to try and lose 2lbs this week to hit 25lbs next week.

Thanks for reading my blog and have a great week everyone

Sarah x

Afternoon Tea

Today I met up with three friends Marlene, Shannon and Tracey and I also made a new friend Annelies. Sadly Marisol and Deb were unable to join us.

Being British I couldn't turn down the opportunity to have afternoon tea at a local tea lounge, especially when there is a good bloomspot deal on.

Dartealing Lounge (be warned their website has annoying music!) is situated on 3rd St in San Francisco and very easy to get to by public transit or driving. When we first arrived it didn't look that great from the outside - they could do with a nicer sign to make it easier to spot, and make it look a lot more attractive from outside. Although I imagine they don't get a lot of passing 'drop in' customers, unless they already know its there.

For me a proper afternoon tea would involve a lot of cups of tea, and a variety of sandwiches (made with white bread and no crusts), with fillings such as cucumber, cheese and pickle, maybe even egg and cress, and of course a proper English scone (which in my books shouldn't have raisins in!!) and strawberry jam and proper clotted cream. Also a few little petit four cakes (reminds me of Mr Kipling).

Entering the Dartealing Lounge it is smaller than I expected, but very quaint. It does look like an English tea room, and there are a variety of different seats and tables depending on how cozy you wish to be. We had the option as part of our deal to chose 4 sandwiches and 4 types of tea. They do have a huge selection on their menu. We went for the fish n chips, hummus and red pepper, brie and chutney and turkey and pesto.  This was served with a basic salad and dressing (not very English at all!). I'm pleased to say yes the sandwiches were in cute little triangles and they had the crusts removed, although they weren't all made with white bread, however the bread was really good, and didn't taste like the usual not very nice American sliced bread you get!

I really enjoyed the fish n chips sandwich (basically a fish finger sandwich with some crisps (potato chips) in it), it was really nice whilst it was still warm. The hummus sandwich was OK, the brie and chutney was lacking a bit on the brie, but again was OK, and the turkey and pesto was nice.

The tea was served in some very cute teapots (if only my handbag had been bigger ;) ) The four teas we chose were creme de coconut, breakfast candy, jasmine and jade and big keeum on campus. The creme de coconut was definitely my favorite, the breakfast candy and keeum were OK, I didn't try the jasmine and jade one. We weren't given refills on the tea which I was a little disappointed with (there will be a yelp review to follow).

 

One thing I did notice was none of the teacups and teapots or saucers matched, maybe they were hoping this would make it look quainter or quirky - I thought it looked a little tacky!

 Based on their menu it looked like we maybe getting sausage rolls, being the Greggs lover that I am (I so wish they would open stores in the US) I was super excited about this, but sadly there were no sausage rolls, not sure if this was because we used a voucher or they just didn't have any today. So instead it was on to the scones...

They get a +1 for the fact the scones were warm, but sadly that is about it. For a start they were orange and cranberry - WTF? Have they never been to England! They tasted nice with the 'sweet cream' (not exactly sure what that was - it had the consistancy of whipped butter), and there was also lemon curd and jam if you wanted. The small (very small) heart shaped shortbreads were cute, but didnt taste great.

Enough of my English bitching!! It was actually very nice, we all had a lovely afternoon hanging out with each other and chatting, I have another voucher for there so I will be going back again in a few months, so will make sure I try some different things from the menu then (and I may even get a sausage roll!). Looking at their site it does just say afternoon tea, not an English afternoon tea - so they did deliver what they promised.

For those of you curious to see a proper English cream tea - this photo was taken in England when I visited recently. Minus the cup of PG Tips :)

Week 9

So where do I begin - this week hasn't been a great week. I've been suffering from sciatica since the end of January, so have been living off painkillers, but the pain has got worse. I started physio last week, but that just made the pain worse. I now have an MRI scheduled for tomorrow, and hopefully they can find the cause of the pain.

I've had a secret for the last few months, well some people knew, the main person who didn't know was my mum. I am flying to England next week for a visit :) I'm excited about this but now it's public knowledge I'm even more excited as it seems real now as I can properly count down the number of sleeps till I go. I was last there in October. Whilst there we are going to Center Parcs for a week with Dave's family which is going to be lots of fun, as we will get to see all our nieces again, I imagine the youngest won't remember us from October as she was only 8 months when we saw her last :(

So weight watchers!! I haven't tracked at all this week, and due to the pain I haven't exercised, plus TOTM, and I've basically been eating very unhealthily, pizza, Mcdonalds (twice) and i don't even like Mcdonalds, plus other takeout. So it was no surprise when I got on the scale this morning to a 4.2lb gain - yes i know 4.2lb, its not good. I think also my mind has started to go into holiday mode. I'm hoping this week will be a much better week. The exercise will be limited, but I'm going to work on eating better. I plan to weigh next Wednesday morning before I fly, then I will miss the following week as I will be in England, then Ill be back in time for weigh in the week after. Last time I was in England I ate loads (those of you who are expats will understand!), but this time I'm going to try and make better choices, but it is a vacation and i will be having a few treats. Last time I gained 10lbs in the two weeks I was there :( definitely don't want to be doing that this time.

I will definitely be blogging from England so look forward to some hopefully interesting blog posts.

I love the Virgin Atlantic countdown

Have a great week everyone xxx

Photo Challenge Day 21

Day 21 - A fave photo of you

Nearly forgot to do the photo challenge today. I have a photo of Dave and I that was taken in April 2008 near our house in England, and it always makes me smile when I look at it, and makes me miss walks in the snow.

Tomorrow's category is - where you work. Which will be tricky for me as I don't work. So will have to be creative on that one.