THERE IS NO VANILLA IN LONDON

It's odd.

Have you ever gone grocery shopping with someone else, noticed what kinds of things they put in the shopping cart, and thought that it was just a little weird? That's what the grocery stores are like here.

There are just things that I'm used to being able to find. Things that are considered "staples" back home. And they're next to impossible to find here.

For example, I got it into my head to make chocolate chip cookies the other day. There are no chocolate chips here, but fortunately I knew that before I left the US, so I brought some with me. But then I had to find the rest of the ingredients.

Baking sections are almost nonexistent. The Safeway I went to had about 5 types of flour, but only about 3 bags of each, and of those, 4 were self-rising. I found one little tiny bag of plain flour, and bought it.

There was no vanilla. I'm serious. I looked all over the store, and finally found a little place high on a shelf where vanilla "essence" was supposed to be, and they were out. I'm used to having my choice of about 8 different types of vanilla, some real, some artificial, some in pure bean form...and this is just in a normal grocery store, not in some kind of specialty shop. And the baking section takes up an entire aisle, not just one tiny shelf section.

But in this same store, there were at least 8 distinct types of curried chicken in a can. They all looked equally revolting. And Pork 'N' Beans here are called Baked Beans (which is a different food item in the US), and they have everything from Beanie Weenie to beans with onions and four different types of meat and mushrooms. They eat this stuff for breakfast, on toast. By all accounts, the stuff with the gazillion meats and mushrooms is revolting.

It's just strange that Pork & Beans is something people eat all the time. It's one of those things that people just...have.

Kwyrde.

So I'm not weirded out about things any longer, and am more amused than anything else when days go by and I am completely thwarted in all of my attempts to do anything.

For example, the other day I woke up in a really foul mood. It was one of those things where everything sucks--for example, if I had lost 80 pounds, I'd have woken up thinking, "I've lost 80 pounds and I am STILL UGLY." (All right, so I have lost a few pounds, although not 80, and this is astonishingly similar to a thought process that I did actually have.) I stopped myself and made myself go through all of the reasons that I should be happy, and eventually put on makeup, dressed nicely, and decided that this sort of thing would definitely improve my mood.

By the end of the day, I was feeling a little less cranky, but still not jumping for joy.

I had noticed that Peter actually has a bathroom scale, and I knew that some of my clothes felt a bit looser than they did when I arrived, so I thought that maybe if I weighed myself and saw that I'd lost weight, I'd feel like something had been successful, and this would improve my mood.

So I looked at the scale, and noticed that it was a) digital, and b) sans battery. So on the way home, I picked up a battery to put in the scale.

This was a big moment. I had thought that it would be nice to just keep on not knowing how much I weighed, because this seemed like a mentally healthy kind of a thing. But I had decided that I was in *such* a foul mood, that drastic measures were necessary.

So after buying the battery, I rushed home gleefully to find out how much I've lost.

(Incidentally, usually when you tell people in England that you've lost 10 pounds, it's a tragedy. Heh heh. All right, that wasn't funny.)

I put in the battery, and noticed that there is a switch on the bottom of the scale, giving me the options of "KG" or "ST". I can never remember the pound-to-kilogram conversion factor--I usually end up doing the centimeters-to-inches one and multiply everything by 2.4 and then just get confused. But everything was all right, because "ST" probably means something like "Standard" and so everything should work out fine.

As I'm sure you've guessed by now, it turns out that I have the option of weighing myself in kilograms or stone.

Yes, yes, I know, I can divide by 14 to convert stones to pounds. I don't have a calculator. But I did the long division and according to the scale in question (also known as Most Vile Tool of the Devil) I have gained weight since I got here.

A full stone, as a matter of fact.

Stimpson, one of Matthew's cats, has decided that I am okay after all. The entire time I've been typing this, he's been walking back and forth rubbing himself against my legs. Evidently this whole reserved thing doesn't apply to British male cats.