Friday 18 April 2008

Earthquake!

Apparently there was an earthquake last night. I slept through it. It was 5.2 on the Richter scale; that sounds big but I guess I am a heavy sleeper.

The epicentre was not that far from Bloomington:

They say it was felt widely - all the way south to Atlanta and north to Michigan. But not in my bedroom.

I kind of wish I felt it, I've never experienced an earthquake before.

P.S.
Please, Cameron, no bragging about the size of earthquakes in Japan. Or, if you can't help yourself, at least spare us the numbers - no one really understands the Richter scale, it's just something that geologists tell newspapers so that they can sound scientific.

Thursday 10 April 2008

More things Americans don't have

I have tonsilitis. So I went to the pharmacy, that is to say, to the supermarket. Every supermarket has a small pharmacy built in with a proper pharmacist on duty for prescriptions and a small range of non-prescription medicines etc. Conversely, there are stand-alone pharmacies, not usually shop-fronts in malls but free-standing buildings. Having so much floor space, they are led to stock all manner of snack foods, cleaning products, alcohol, you name it! One of the rare occasions I was in one of those, I overheard someone ask if they sold ping-pong balls, and the shop assistant told them which aisle! Anyway, maybe I should have gone to a huge pharmacy because my supermarket pharmacist had never even heard of Betadine gargle. The only iodine he had was for cuts etc. and I don't feel like risking that. And they don't have anything like Butter Menthols either, so I have to make do with honey-lemon flavoured stuff.

In other news, yesterday Cindy's professor made fun of her for saying "poo"; he seemed to think that "poop" is the only acceptable variation in these parts. A quick Google search confirmed that "poop" is far more common in America but the only site that had these under dialect comparisons said that both are acceptable anywhere. I'll have to run it past my friends next time we're down at the pub.

Monday 7 April 2008

Cricket

The weather is getting warmer here now so yesterday we went for a picnic in a local park. It was a big open space so I took along a little cricket set I bought when I was in Australia.

The Americans all found it a great novelty. They couldn't quite get the point of bowling (they kept saying "pitching") and I had to keep telling them to hold the bat below the waist but the funniest thing was the way in which they all dropped the bat and ran in an arc to the other end of the pitch!