First meal in the UK

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Holy crap. I'm here. I flew into Liverpool yesterday (well - actually, into Manchester, with a quick drive over to Liverpool after that). I've flown here ahead of my bride and Ella, in order to set up the household, and do various first-few-weeks tasks to get settled in. My colleague took me out last night to celebrate my arrival - we went, of all places, to a Mexican restaurant - "El Macho". Bear in mind that this is one of two Mexican restaurants in Liverpool. My hopes weren't especially high - I'm pretty sure that Mexican immigration to the UK is fairly low. My hopes were buoyed when we walked in, however - they had all the right decorations on the wall. Sombreros. Pinatas. A painted cut-out of a cactus. (Though maybe I should have been alarmed that the music playing was - I kid you not - 'la cucaracha'. ) I ordered a margarita, on the rocks, with salt. My colleague ordered the same. Our waitress nodded, noted this down and scurried off. 5 minutes later she comes back to tell us our margaritas weren't quite frozen yet... hmm.. But I ordered mine on the rocks, I said. This seemed to confuse our waitress. "But then it would just taste like lime juice and stuff on ice," she said. "Yes, exactly - only girls drink them frozen." But hey, I can play along to get along - "Just bring them out when they're frozen." I knew we were in trouble when they arrived - it was the first orange margarita I've ever had. The food itself was decent, if not exactly Mexican. There were occasional jalepenos in the Pollo Asado, along with a side of refried beans. And each plate came with one tortilla. (When we asked for more, we discovered that each additional tortilla was charged for...) We rounded out the night right, though - at the Philharmonic Pub with pints of Guinness. Hey, I didn't come here for the Mexican food, right?
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Thank God

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The packers come tomorrow. For the past few weeks, the stress of trying to sort out all our world possessions has been steadily mounting - And not in the "oh-good-here-comes-the-end-of-the-film-where-everything-sorts-itself-out" kind of way, but rather "Honey-you-didn't-just-throw-out-this-pile-of-papers-including-your-daughter's-first-macaroni-portrait-did-you" kind of way. My bride and I, fortunately, have alternating stress cycles. Last Wednesday, for example, as I frantically ran about the house trying to spot all the missing bits of baseboard, she smoothly talked me off the ledge. Currently, I'm well past the point of stress and into some sort of zen-faith that the packers will manage to make some sense of our belongings. My bride, on the other hand, is bouncing off the walls, alternating between making endless lists of all the documents Her Majesty's Government is likely to deport us if we forget and muttering comments to herself like "they have soap in the UK, right? I'll just pack this, just in case." However, even after we've taken piles (4 trips worth) of unneccessary junk to the dump, and set aside more piles to go to Salvation Army, we still have piles of things all over the house. Moving has forced us to take all those pieces and parts that we've tucked away in closets and drawers "just while company's over" and go through them again. I've come up with no less than 5 unidentified power cables. Not having that many items which have lain about unpowered for months or even years, I've no idea where I've gotten them all. It's led to endless distraction while trying to pack: each of us has, at least a half dozen times a day, been forced to drop everything we're doing (usually right when we're at our packing-productivity-peak) and made to look at some scrap of a ticket from that time we went to the fair and ate too much popcorn and got sick on the Slap-and-Whirl... remember that? Yeah. Good times. The good news is, Ella's taking all this in stride. She apparently thinks giant pyramids of books/videos/clothes/etc. are all great fun, and takes joy in selectively redistributing random items from one organized pile to the next. When she hears a frustrated cry of "Now where's the bloody X?!", she's taken to proudly stating "I did it!" (Which, by the way, really saved my butt on the whole, 'where'd the macaroni portrait go?' question.)
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