Our own personal carbon footprint

Tomorrow we're going to be picking up our new car! It's got three rows of seats (for all the shopping, obviously), a 4 litre engine (!!!), we can plug our ipods straight in, and most importantly, it's one of the safest cars on the market. Vital for the roads out here, where we see a serious accident every time we hit the road.

The car - a Ford Explorer - will probably be very familiar to American readers of this blog, but not to UK readers, where buying one would be financial suicide! I'm really looking forward to driving it. It's so quiet inside, you wonder if you've remembered to turn the ignition on! And my, is it huge. Very very large. We're going to have to learn how to park all over again (thank God it's got parking sensors).

My husband's been off sick for the last few days. The poor thing has come down with the local lurgy and completely lost his voice, a rather important part of CRM! So he's been at home with me resting, which has been lovely. The airline has its own medical centre, and we were really impressed with the staff. Whereas in the UK the airline's emphasis would be on you flying whether you were ill or not (i.e, the flight has to leave on time, and we don't care if you're sick, just do it), over here they put the pilot first, and in fact told my husband he couldn't fly tonight, when he was prepared to try. I really admire that.

We got another part of the bureaucratic jigsaw done yesterday - the blood type test. They put your blood type on all official documentation over here, probably because there are so many road accidents (something I'm trying not to think about.) Now I've just got to get the finger printing over and done with, and then I think we've just got to hand the form in, and then... at some point I'll become a legal resident here (I hope!)