I can’t begin to tell you how amazing it is to finally be home!

Like I’ve mentioned time and again, it’s been two years, almost to the day, since we were last ‘home’, properly, in the “country of my birth” kind of home, not Texas where we’ve grown to call home.  Here I sit, writing a blog a week after we landed in sunny Northern Ireland.  Normally from my review here, I’d say that, dripping with sarcasm, however, the weather since we got home, has been fab (especially by Norn Iron standards!) I haven’t even needed my first ever rain coat that I bought in Academy Sports before I left in preparation.

We may have been home a week, but it only feels like a few days since we disembarked the plane in the International Airport.  Time is flying.  Maybe it’s cause we’ve been so busy, maybe it’s because we’re having so much fun, or maybe time just goes quicker on the little emerald isle!

We’ve been up and down the A1 like a yoyo, we’ve already seen a half dozen of the people on our ‘to see’ list and we are almost booked up a week in advance.  It gives me a warm feeling to have been missed and for people to be so keen to see us.  I’ll be honest, with a few people, I was a smidge apprehensive, but, so far, so good.

In spite of the fact that our apartment is falling down around our ears, it’s good to be in our home by the Irish sea.  So far, our washing machine display has no bulb, it’s burned out, (meaning that you can’t see what you want to programme it to do), the tumble dryer is sounding like a machine gun and we’ll probably need to call the Hot Point engineer out to look at both of them before I can trust them with a load of our clothes.

My dishwasher threw an E1 error (meaning it wasn’t getting an water), when we fixed that, it threw an E3 error (meaning that one of 3 parts have gone), so we’ve ordered the cheapest of the three replacement parts and are hoping that will sort the issue.

My kitchen sink tap has a small leak, my kitchen extractor fan light isn’t working (which is more problematic than you might think), my shower fixture has rusted clean off the wall, (so now when you have a shower, you have to hold the shower head yourself,) and my neighbours have covered our landing and stairs with boxes of crap and rubbish – and don’t even get me started on the price of petrol! We just paid £72 (or around $125) to fill up this little Ford Focus we’re driving…and people back in America are up in arms that gas is approaching $4 per gallon!

In spite of all of that, we still couldn’t be more happy to be home.  Between family, friends and food, we’re having a great time being on this side of the Atlantic and I have started to take my camera with me everywhere we go – to save you all from blurry, poor quality camera phone pictures! My brother and my soon to be brother-in-law, tell me I’m acting like a tourist and my friend Liz, said, ‘I don’t know you’ and ran away when I took my camera out to take pictures of the cherry blossoms on the canal!

I have started to type up a day-to-day blog, but, for now, however, I’m knackered and going to attempt to find something to watch with my honey, on our four-channel TV and take in a nap before we watch Round 1, Game 1 of our home-from-home team, the Houston Aeros in their play-off run 2012!