More on hotel life - VF

Here is our hotel - if you are really keen you can take a photo or virtual tour of it below the picture! This week we (I!!) have done more cooking in the evenings than before because there really is a limit on how many times you can eat out without a) becoming the size of a house and b) getting tired of homogeneous food. But now I have a list of things we need to bring back with us next week like seasonings and proper microwave dishes (styrofoam plates definitely don't do well in the microwave!) so we will almost be needing a trailer to bring our supplies with us! Or maybe we are just being fussy - yes maybe that's it because last night we went shopping to buy two new pillows because we are finding the hotel ones lumpy and the night before we bought lots of candles (yes the favourite pomegranate ones) so that room smells less like hotel air freshener. Suzette whom I went out with this week has lent us a little stove-thing with two heating elements for cooking on so we'll have to bring a pot as well next week!

I've had a couple of outings this week with some of the wives of the partners in the practice - one to a cafe for the 'Newcomers Group' and one out driving around potential neighbourhoods to live in. The Newcomers Group is for people who have just moved to Saginaw, although lots of the people have been here for ages and still go along to hang out with their now not new friends (or maybe they want to make new friends). So thats all an improvement on life as there was not much coming and going in the Detroit neighbourhood (although I did recently have an invitation to coffee from someone called Chrys in Berkley that I met online through finding her bookcrossing books).

Other local people I've met are 'Tracy' who goes to the hotel gym around the same time of day that I do (see last weeks 'more on the leisurely life posting'). She shares an apartment with one of the people who works at the front desk here and hangs out with lots of the other people who work here so I get to find all the goings on about their lives and past lives. 'Mary-Lou' also is into the fitness thing (it was inevitable that living here I would eventually run into someone with such a stereotypical USA name wasnt it?) - she is an older larger lady (probably in her late 70's) who is an ex-schoolteacher and has lived here all her life. She has a pacemaker and her doctor said that she had best get into shape if she wants to live much longer. So she comes to the pool every day for an hour. She walks up and down with her glasses on and neatly-done hair and calls out to people going past and chats to me as I swim up and down! Then she does lots of other exercise moves and uses her big blue and white polystyrene weights to firm up her arms. I told her she should run an aqua-aerobics class and people might pay to come (she has ALL the correct moves from when I used to do it!). When she is not using her weights she always offers them to me so I have a bit of a go from time to time - it's amazing how much resistance they create - it's actually quite hard to use them! She has lived all her life here, although in saying that, her and her husband go down to Alabama in Winter and up to their lake cottage about 360 miles away in Canada for the summer.

Whilst on the bike and treadmill at the gym I get enough of a dose of US cable TV to last me all day. There is always something yummy on Food Network and today the history channel had a documentary about a plane crash in 1982 where an Air Florida (no longer in existance 'cos the families all sued them and it went bankrupt) plane took off from Washington DC in a blizzard and crashed into the Potomic River. All but 5 people died (plus 4 in their cars on the bridge that the plane clipped as it went by). The rescue was complicated by gridlock traffic so rescue services couldnt get there and 8-inch thick blocks of ice on the river. It seems that there were a couple of reasons for the crash: the plane got de-iced, then had to wait another hour to take-off but they did not want to be too late so they did not de-ice it again [I will NEVER get annoyed again about the time it takes to de-ice planes that I am on!] and then when they did the pre-leaving checks the co-pilot read out the checklist 'engine de-icer' and the pilot said 'off' when in fact it should have been on [moral of the story for me - always fly out of Michigan in Winter on an airline like NorthWest that is used to snow, not on one based in a warm part of the country that is not used to having their internal engine de-icers on] so that the sensors were frozen up and did not register that it was not going fast enough along the runway or that it was not lifting up as it should when it did take off so within 30sec of taking off, it had crashed. For those who are into such things (I know who you are...!!) there is more info on these other sites and apparently it has been made into a movie as well.