Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label Fresno

Fresno, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways

1. Because my lovely family live there and I feel a sense of belonging when I am with them that I rarely experience elsewhere 2. It's HOT, hot, hot... and dry - the perfect climate in my humble opinion. Which means there is rarely cause for a bad bouffy hair day in Fresno 3. Shopping malls, lots of them (and a superb exchange rate, like a mega-discount sale every day of the week) 4. People are so friendly it almost makes me suspicious. Not like London where people are just suspicious, only friendly if they've known you for the past decade and/or have read your Debrett's entry 5. The tomatoes taste like tomatoes, not like watery pulpy seedy things. Ditto melon 6. The cars people drive are an endless source of hilarity. I mean, who really needs a huge pick-up when they live on a manicured lot in suburbia? Takes the much-maligned Chelsea tractor to a new extreme 7. Because my grandpa has oranges, avocados, tomatoes, figs and walnuts growing in his garden. Lunch is there to be...
I've been a little side tracked this week in sunny California. I fully intended to blog on a daily basis at the start of the week but good intentions etc. Being sun-drunk and bloated from my aunt's genius culinary skills, not to mention the retail therapy (although sadly the combination of last week's blog experiment and being unemployed has made me exhibit uncharacteristic restraint), has left me like a cow out to pasture. I can barely summon the energy to flick away flies... Now it's near the end of my holiday and I'm jumping on a plane back to London tomorrow. Feeling sad to be leaving my lovely grandpa and my aunts and uncles but very excited to be seeing Alpha and my babies again. Being away from the kids is something I've done rarely and never for more than a couple of days, so being physically parted from their raucous giggles and laughing eyes for over a week has felt a little like I'm missing a limb. Being in Fresno is always bittersweet for me - sw...

YLM back on the blog

OK. This is how it went down. Finished work on Friday, as in - FINISHED work on Friday. Yup, my last day... for ever. Feels weird but good. Friday night was spent packing bags for all of us in advance of holidays. Finally finished, perspiring slightly, powered up the laptop to find I couldn't get online. Cue major panic, cursing and some diagnostic stuff. End result is that Virgin broadband was down in our area and I was up creek sans paddle. IF YOU'RE READING THIS VIRGIN THANKS A BLOODY BUNCH... I hold you entirely responsible for the fact that I couldn't blog or print out my boarding pass for my flight the next day, which left me seething in a hideous Heathrow check-in queue for over an hour. Gah. W*nkers. So the kids and Alpha motored off to France early Saturday morning, leaving me waving tearfully on the doorstep. Sad and lonely, I pootled on to Heathrow (scene of aforementioned chaos) to catch my flight to LA, then to catch another flight to Fresno - which is where I ...