Hugs, I really do know how you are feeling. Never had a pending message but had a big fat nothing for weeks while everyone else here had scores. The score section never changed from the you have registered for the exam ......... A pending message is positive in my opinion because they must have the exams. If it doesn’t change to a score within the week call College Board because it took many phone calls just to find out what the problem was. From all my phone calls I know there is a slower grading procedure for exams with issues on test day, it sounds like the school followed the new instructions and your exams are just in a pile to be graded last. Not great because you have deadlines but you will have your scores soon. Our nothing meant the exams were lost by the delivery company. We had to retake on a special day about 6 weeks after the original date...Dd was the only student to physically retake on our special day, hers were subject exams only given once a year I believe, Latin and German. We did learn that there is always an exam made just for retakes which are more common than they admit apparently .

Happy Birthday! I am so glad you enjoyed your first Agatha Christie book! I actually discovered Christie when I was in my 40’s too and read the majority of them during a two year time span, then read many of them again as prereads for Dd. Robin has a great list on her 52 books blog with all the books in order which I have found super useful as I am rereading them again, in publishing order. I finished my Susan Mallery and ended up checking out another one. Planning to finish Dracul soon!

If I still had young children I would buy the build a snowman. Otherwise the magnets are my favorite. Trading cards are a fun idea but as a pp said no one to trade with.

Praying

Years ago I did craft fairs and learned that people are really free with a dollar or two at these events. At one show some sold Teenage Mutant Ninja masks for a dollar. All she did was cut roughly 3inch strips out of symphony broadcloth (really cheap) with pinking shears and add eye holes. She sold sooooo many. How about reindeer food packaged cutely with a bit of glitter?

This will make some of you smile....... So today is my birthday and Dh just left to pick up some food so I don't have to cook which is great by itself. Here is the my odd birthday present to me, I just read a few pages of my Ann Cleeves Vera book and I have a location in TYNE and WEAR! I was starting to think I was never going to check that one off the Brit Tripping schedule! I hate to admit it but it has really been bugging me! On to the fluff, I checked a Susan Mallory out because she was one of my mom's favourites to read while I go on my adventure with hubby. I always need reading material, just in case. ? Dinner out tonight with the kids.

Not sure where to post this......safe journey tonight and I hope everything with your day tomorrow goes smoothly. Sending prayers that your dd ends up happy with her living arrangements. It is really good you read the lease so she can make decisions.

Congratulations to both of you!

Well I still haven’t read We Have Always Lived in the Castle! I don’t think this Spooky October will be the one because I have several in the stack and don’t seem to have much reading time. Thanks for the Peaky Blinders recommendation. I just sent a link to it to Dh because it might be something we both like. He is currently getting lots of napping in while I watch Victoria.....I am on season 2. ? Robin, William Hartnell really is one of my favorite Doctors so enjoy them. Not sure how many are complete as we only own maybe six ( my dd could tell me ? )of his but hopefully they will animate some of the missing episodes. What am I reading? Still plugging along on KL but I am behind. The sad thing is I actually really like it but not on the Kindle combined with it being a really thick book added with I have been busy.......I will finish it in 2018! I need it for Bingo!!!!!!!!! Leverage in Death by JD Robb is so good. I can’t believe I am positively glued to the 47th book in a series! Uhm, that’s the book that I am actually reading as everything else will have to wait. I was really enjoying Dracul by Dacre Stoker until I accidentally started Leverage. It is quite good with Bram having a super creepy nanny. Not sure that it will ever make it to London so am listening to Aaronovitch’s Moon over Soho for my spooky London. I have other Spooky London books too! ? Brit Tripping........I think I am hanging out in London for another week. Technically Worcestershire is complete because St. Cyr visited there in When Falcon’s Fall and I am enjoying London and Dublin.....and Eve and Roarke.......

Your blanket is wonderful! Once again I have to say I can’t believe the patterns you are able to do on the loom. @Robin M will get to make the the decision about Bingo ! Doing a happy dance because it’s not a Brit Trip question! Now for my odd geography question because Brit Trip has made me identify where I am in every single book I read. I suspect this is something that will continue into the future, what an odd habit! Does The Little Beach Street Bakery take place on Mull? If you don’t know it isn’t important but as a strange coincidence I was looking at it in Overdrive last night and couldn’t figure out if all the books by that author are set in Mull or not. I vote for listening to all the Three Pines books. I was able to get them all on Overdrive Listen and I was so sad when the narrator changed because of the marvelous Ralph Cosham’s death. It took a couple of chapters but I am now reasonably happy with Robert Bathurst. ? I loved Magpie Murders! After a super long wait The Word is Murder just arrived in my Overdrive.

I recently saw that the next Gamache releases early next year ...... this is coming from the person that was obsessed by Gamache last year. ? I am looking forward to it, maybe a reread is required! Speaking of rereads, I just finished Christie’s The Mysterious Mr. Quinhttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16356.The_Mysterious_Mr_Quin and rather enjoyed it. It took me several attempts via Overdrive to actually finish it.....I wonder if it is actually as super popular as it appears by the wait list or if there are 3 other people reading a story or two each time the book appears in their Overdrive! I really liked a couple of these and found the book as a whole a bit spooky. Just who or what is Harley Quinn????? I still don’t really Know! ? For Brit Trippers there are a couple of trips to Wiltshire and London within the stories and several trips to sunnier weather. I have been plugging away at a few Brit Trip author rereads........ Josephine Tey........I gave up. I just got bored if I am really honest. She wrote a couple of good ones and the others that I had sourcing issues with just had no real appeal and sat partially read for weeks. They fell by the wayside in popularity for a reason I suspect ........ Dorothy Sayers...... I recently finished The Five Red Herrings which I have never managed to read before. I sort of made myself finish it. Next up is Have His Carcase which I remember enjoying. I doubt I will finish this project in 2018 because I want to finish Bingo and Brit Trip. Agatha Christie, in order.........I have finished a dozen, mostly in order, and have decided this needs to be looked at as a long term project. So far I skipped two, one being Murder on the Links where I listened and slept through the 2 hour BBC production and another where she wrote under a pen name. The master list is on Robin’s 52 books.......I do want to mention this has been a highly enjoyable project as many of the books they I remember disliking from previous reads I have greatly enjoyed. I am actually rereading via audio whenever possible which may explain why I like some much more!

Prayed

One of my friend’s Dh has a long bucket list of places which seems to frankly suck the fun out of many occasions imo. He found it in a book and they never seem to be able to just go somewhere and enjoy it, frankly they can’t go and decide the adventure isn’t for them and end up someplace slightly different either. They have to find a certain location etc. It seems to be a constant “treasure hunt” and seems stressful. Photo is a requirement. Dh and I had a goal to move to the UK in our 40’s for roughly 3 years. Our actual move looked far different, as in I am not in London and we didn’t wave the UK goodbye in three years. But we accomplished the goal to our satisfaction but I wouldn’t call it bucket list. There are things I would love to see and do but no master list.

I am now reading the huge translation of KL. I do think it reads smoother but as it’s the physical copy I am happily sip reading a few of the small sections most mornings and am enjoying it. Not quite done with section 1 of the second book. Erland is so unworthy......I like Kristin again. I finished a quick quite good romance with an N in it to finish spelling Egyptian Lotus....... E....What Ales the Earl.......by Sally MacKenzie G....Sophie’s World.......by Jostein Gaarder Y......You Say It First .....by Susan Mallery P......Cry Wolf......by Patricia Briggs T......A Duty to the Dead......by Charles Todd I ......The Inspector and Mrs. Jeffries .....by Emily Brightwell A......Before and Again......by Barbara Delinsky N......About That Night......by Julie James L.....The Mischief and the Misletoe .....by Lauren Willig O....Shadow Hunt ....by Melissa F. Olson T.....The Governess Game.....by Tessa Dare U.....Unnatural Selection.....by Aaron Elkins S.... Exposed in Darkness....by Heather Sunseri

My choice to home educate has been questioned frequently and impolitely in two places where we have lived by strangers. My experiences pretty much show the only way to make someone like that quit is a fact like you used regarding your daughters.

I have no idea because I tend to hear about my American cookies, so I would guess it would be called that. Just to increase the confusion there are also traybakes which Americans ( at least me) call bar cookies. I quit watching with Mary Berry but I think they do traybakes. My favorite traybake is Mary Berry’s lemon drizzle. http://www.maryberry.co.uk/recipes/baking/lemon-drizzle-traybake Don’t get me started on the whole aubergine/ eggplant thing. I never can think of the right word when I need to for the people I am with!

Crackers seem to be biscuits in most people’s vocabulary. Cookies/biscuits are generally sold in a tube style packaging so are firm. You can buy soft cookies by the bakery section.....5 for £1 to £2 depending on store and type, I believe those are labeled cookies.....milk chocolate chip cookies for instance.

Custard is sold pretty widely as a dessert topping and is vanilla flavored thin American cooked pudding in my personal opinion. It is really popular with fruit based desserts. I found a you tube on how to make it. Most people just buy it and you pour it in a jug for serving. Most of my experience comes from working at church bring and shares! Cake almost always gets cream poured on it when cream is available. Even though the double cream whips they just pour it on in liquid form. I grew up eating my apple crisp with milk in the northern US but that was it. In terms of milk or cream on desserts that wasn’t whipped. The whole do we have enough double, single, custard, for pudding at bring and shares (potlucks) was a total revelation! No one in my family adds it to anything except Christmas Pudding which does seem nicer with custard. My kids are pretty British about most things but not soggy desserts. ?

Robin, I just went and looked at my Bingo card and Hanman’s Blind was my 14th Century Book. It’s a really good book that takes some extra effort to like, I abandoned it once because the first couple of chapters are boring. We are finally in Spooky London! I reorganized the routes so many times trying to go through London in October! There are some great spooky books set in London (at least in part) beyond the obvious Dr, Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and my favorite Dracula, books from Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series and VE Schwab’s Darker Shade of Magic series definitely fit the spooky description! I have been busy lining up more books than I can possibly read this week and have Dracul by Dacre Stoker, Will Starling by Ian Weir, and Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler, all on my Kindle. Hopefully I will also be listening to the next Rivers of London sometime this week too! I am assuming Dracul will end up in London at some point.....the description says Dublin and Paris. I also found an odd spooky just for October, Plain Fear by Leanna Ellis. This may be more horror than I can handle but it has Amish Vampires. ? I could not resist checking it out! I haven’t been getting much accomplished because I caught a cold to go with my jet lag. I have been reading very fluffy books because I was abandoning books with well, great abandon. I wasn’t going to have any left in the stack! I think all the cold medicines have me really foggy. Robin, notice I won’t be watching the Doctor tonight and let us know what you think of it! The C’s think they just want to binge watch this series on I Player later.

Hugs!

We quit watching when Mary Berry left....... Ok, I live in the north, so not a particularly fancy part of England, but this is what my years in England taught me. In general pudding is a term for dessert. In a restaurant, Do you want a pudding? refers to dessert in general in my experience. I always look at the term pudding as a catch all, people refer to sliced fruit as being a pudding choice. Normally if you are serving pudding properly you have a couple of cream (single and double) choices to pour on the cakes, custard is a huge bonus. I have watched people pour double cream on Carmel (toffee) corn and eat it with a spoon! I never made those people Carmel corn again! Biscuits are cookies, doesn’t matter how many times you baked them! ?. People are going to say the biscuits were good. If someone is referring to biscuits made by me they might get termed as cookies out of politeness. Dd won a biscuit making contest recently with her very American peanut butter w/ chocolate chip cookies that my family calls Cowboy Cookies.

Not sure how helpful this is but our copy machine is in a closet on top of our extra(small) freezer. We rarely use our fax machine so that lives in a box in the garage. Our printer was in the living room but has been exiled to another closet. We are pulling it out as needed.

Glad to hear the building project is getting close to complete! I am trying to finish Gail Carriger's latest in The Custard Protocol series. I am not loving it but want to finish Competence. So far this book just deals with the children of the Soulless characters, I suspect I would enjoy it more if my favourite characters made an appearance.

I vote for signing him up for driving lessons. Both of mine were over 18 and not initiating driving at all. DH and I just did not want to deal with trying to teach the kids how to drive so signed them up for an intensive program with about an hour of previous experience. Being licensed in two countries made us really afraid we would teach them incorrectly for passing the test which is what we needed to have happen in one country at least. The driving teacher absolutely loved having them because she considered them completely ready to learn....sort of a clean slate. She told me repeatedly that she wished everyone would just start with her because all her customers spend the same amount for the driving intensive and she felt she was getting my kids through it easier and was actually able to do an advanced lesson with each in the basic package. So they actually got a bit more for our money than many who started a bit ahead of them in experience. Please note, my kids aren't perfect drivers and we are putting our time in the car with them after the license so they get more experience. But they have licenses and can drive themselves if needed. I actually had to go through the licensing process in the UK with 30 years of bad habits that took points off the actual UK road test which is intense. I spent tons of time with a driving instructor to get rid of a couple of huge point losers......crossing my hands with a big turn of the wheels was my hardest one. Also had to only use my mirrors for lane changes, no head checks ever allowed which still makes me nervous. Now that I am licensed I can do both, but I needed that license. The lessons did make me a safer driver.

Good luck!