Our First Week Home Alone

"Hey Emma, glad to hear you have settled in now and life is getting back to normal. Ian's away again, so that's got to be kind of normal!" (FB comment from a friend in India!)

So yes, Ian's had to do his first (of many in the future) stints away. We'd only moved into the house for one week before he had to bid us farewell and fly back to the UK. By the way I have actually stopped saying I am from the UK and now say England because twice this week people have introduced me as being from the Ukraine.

In England I knew our house, I knew our neighbours and our friends were close by. In India I had 3 guards rotating the house 24hours (unless they were sleeping! http://madrasmater.blogspot.com/2009/01/twas-night-before-christmas.html ) and a driver who always assured me that he was only ever 10 minutes away if I needed him. I felt safe. It's not quite the same here at the moment, we have no close neighbours, and well I won't go on. What we do have is a new and very super duper alarm system and we do live in an area with a very low crime rate...and it just takes time to settle into a new home get used to its noises and creeks - I haven't slept much, but probably more than I think.

So, if anything can go wrong it will - when your husband leaves the country...

Day 1 - 2am in the morning and the new super duper alarm system begins to bleep constantly. It wakes me up. I lie in bed. I cannot move. In my sleepy head fog I run through all the scenarios, as you do, and I try my hardest to remember all the instructions the alarm guy had given us and convince myself that an intermittent bleep is NOT something to worry about. I get up and go to the control panel, press a button but it doesn't stop. I look for a phone number, see one, call it, to be told it is no longer a number in use - 'oh help me'. Then my eye falls on another button that is lit up and I gingerly press it. Thank goodness, because it tells me the problem, stops the bleeping but doesn't actually put my mind at rest. There now follows a very wakeful night. In the morning I talk to Ian and he says 'why didn't you just call the telephone number on the window stickers? and through gritted teeth I reply because no-one had told me it were there and that was where I should look!

Day 3 - And I'm Driving Thru My Life and I have to Drive Thru the ATM on the way back from school to get cash to pay for Ellie's birthday party deposit. Ellie & Luke are kicking off big time in the back of the car, through the screaming (them and me)I manage to take the money and the receipt but leave the card behind...which I discover when I'm in the supermarket later trying to buy stuff for dinner. I try to use my English credit card but after a certain number of transactions abroad you have to call to re-verify your card - and I've left my cell phone in the car. Thankfully my UK debit card works fine and we're eventually on our way. When I got home I spent a very unproductive 2 hours trying to call the bank to stop my atm stranded card via, joy of joys - an automated service - and if you thought UK automated call centres were frustrating - think again! The options available were just not what I wanted. At least the 'voice recognition system' eventually (about an hour eventually) recognised my shouts of I WANT TO TALK TO SOMEBODY. So an hour to talk to somebody and a week to wait for a new card and I have about $2 in my purse and no husband around to sub me. So, the next morning I paid a visit to our 'branch' and the wonderful staff at Bank of America issue me with a temporary debit card there and then - they are, apparently one of the only banks in the world to do this.

Day 5 - 3am and a phone rings and wakes me up. In a very similar fog to the one of a few nights before, I pick up the home phone by the bed - no-one there. Perhaps I'm dreaming. But I can still hear noise and voices and I pinch myself so I know I'm awake. Panic, no terror if I'm honest - and I can hear rustling and muffled voices. SH**! I know I turned on the security system, what's going on? And then I hear Ian's voice, mumbling but his voice nonetheless and he's talking to someone. I leap out of bed and out into the hallway....and from the cupboard where he has temporarily wired up our UK Vonage phone I can hear him talking....from, it transpires the same phone which is now in his pocket that he called our Vonage phone a few hours earlier and has accidentally managed to activate, call the answerphone and spook the living daylights out of me! He thinks it's quite funny...I think I aged considerably overnight...over the last week in fact.