The cost of living

So when we started seriously thinking about moving here (can it really be three years ago now?) one attraction was that we should be able to enjoy a better standard of living. I mean, every time we came for a visit, we would pack an empty suitcase in our bags, because we knew that during our visit, we would pounce upon stuff that was so cheap we couldn’t not buy it. Oh, the money we saved – and by extension, the money we would save…..

Well it turns out that it was all a house of cards, as I’ve mentioned before, because, as a visitor, one never knew the cost of health insurance that burdens the American pocketbook. That alone is enough to bring the cost of living here in line with our UK expenses.

Of course, it made other things seem cheap in comparison. All those other things with which we used to fill our empty suitcase. (I can’t even think of one now….). And, of course, we all know the legendary low cost of petrol – Currently something in the region of $2.60 a gallon (43p a litre – actually more, as the American gallon is smaller, but I’m not clever enough – not bothered enough – to do the precise calculation).

I’ve always had a ready reckoner when thinking about US prices in comparison with UK ones and that was that the figure was the same, just the currency sign differed: if something was £2.00, it would be $2.00. The savings, immediate.

But one has discovered a surprising number of other things that are more expensive here than they would be in the UK. Books, for some reason, are more expensive. I think there are no books here under $19.99. Any paperback: £13 - £14. And you pay sales tax on top of that. Here in Colorado, that’s in the region of 8% (you never know quite how much extra it will be, as it varies, not only from town to town, but I discovered recently, from area of town to area of town. A particular shopping centre may well charge an extra % in order to help pay for itself.)

Paint is more expensive. I’ve finally got off my backside to tackle some interior decorating and find that a cheap gallon of paint is $20 – again, £13 - £14. If you want environmentally friendly paint be prepared to pay three times that amount.

Phone, TV and internet connections seem astronomical to me. We don’t pay anything for TV viewing, as we rely on the (frankly pretty horrible) broadcast (as opposed to satellite or cable) services. But if advertisements are anything to go by everyone else in America is paying $29.95 a month for their cheap introductory offer for TV for the first year, then it goes up – to I don’t know what – and you have to tie yourself in for two years or pay a $350 termination fee.

Mobile phone networks tempt you with their astounding services at only $69.95 a month. Internet service providers want the same. If you bundle all these services together you can get a deal for maybe $100 a month (£60), but again, you’ll be locked into the contract for a couple of years where it will increase horribly in the second year, or pay a huge termination fee.

Our electricity, and gas bills seem comparable to what we used to pay. Our ‘property tax’ (council tax)” at $1200/yr seems comparable. I think most food is less expensive, and in any given week, some variety of organic apple or pear is on sale for $1/lb (60p/lb). I can buy a pound of organic salad leaves for $2.50. Bread and cheese cost more, with a decent loaf of bread in the $3.50/$4.00 region. Good cheese starts at $17/lb. But we can find grass fed or free-range meat for $4/lb.

And let's not even mention the exchange rate.....

Apparently April is the month when Colorado can expect more snow than any other. We have had two spring snow storms in March so far, with 9 inches falling last week. Wet and heavy, it was gone within a couple of days. This is a picture of a flock of robins in our neighbour's tree. You will see American robins are bigger, and nowhere as cute as English ones, but they aren't quite such bullies either, and are happy to roost together.

A year later....

It scarcely seems possible that this time last year I was marveling at how mild the weather was, with both Sally and Spencer out on their bicycles in just a light fleece. One knew at the time that the mildness was unrepresentative, but this February is rubbing my nose in it. We had yet another four inches of snow yesterday and are due more today and tomorrow. Earlier last week someone came along with yellow machinery to dig up the accumulated ice on the north sidewalks and road. There are one or two missed bits where you can see the ice on the pavement is a very solid three to four inches. So now I am sighing: Will this never end?

I am aware that Britain is also in the throes of a particularly cold winter as well. Some say it is all the fault of Barak Obama.*

Despite the cold, I returned home yesterday with a terrific sense of warm smugness, for yesterday, nearly two whole months before the deadline of 15 April, (a date which means nothing to you in the UK, but has every American quiver with dread as it is the day on which one’s tax must be filed), Andrew and I filed our tax returns. Every American, and resident alien (which is Andrew’s official status) must pay tax on their worldwide income. I fell off the radar many years ago in the UK, when, after taking hours to fill out these horrid, horrid forms, I repeatedly came up with the grand number of “0”. I rather thought both the IRS and I had better things to do with our time, and stopped filing. Latterly, of course, one’s personal income was so low so as to legitimately neglect the task.

Last year we discovered a service –provided by the IRS – where volunteers help you fill out and file your return for free! There are some qualifications: the service is meant for senior citizens (of which Andrew can proudly claim to be), and those on lower incomes (of which we can also – perhaps not so proudly – claim to be). But my goodness is it wonderful. We went along with a dozen bits of paperwork, and a nice lady put all the figures into her computer in the right places, and, Bob’s your uncle, we were done. In just over an hour. I can’t begin to describe the relief.

My Mother turned 80 this month, and we held a surprise party for her here. Family members number 23, and we invited another 23 friends and neighbours. She was duly surprised, and everyone had a good time. Proof that my moaning about the weather is all rubbish is this photo, which shows us all outside on 13 Feb on a balmy afternoon. These are the people, and this is the reason I am here.

*….”Hell will freeze over before a black man is elected president of the United States.”

All the News That's Fit to Print

And so 2009 has ended (without comment from me – how did you all manage?) and I haven’t touched a dozen topics that exercise me on an almost daily basis.

Today it’s newspapers. I was sent an invoice for our newspaper subscription last week and I really really wonder whether I should bother to pay it. When we first moved here I was given a free four month subscription to our local paper: The Loveland Reporter Herald. We soon learned that our neighbours refer to it as the Repeater Herald, as any given edition is likely to be full of yesterday’s (last week’s more likely) news hashed over.

When it came time to renew (pay), I gently declined. A friend persuaded me to try the Fort Collins paper, and I did. While it’s marginally better, I decided after awhile that I wouldn’t bother renewing that either. When I phoned to cancel, they were magically able to reduce my subscription rate by 60%. It’s still rubbish.

We also have The Denver Post delivered. It pretends to be more of a national paper, but has more pages devoted to advertisements than news, and it is a daily occurrence to flip seven or eight pages of the latest furniture sales before coming to a narrow column of ‘world news’ consisting of a headlines and a couple of sentences tucked in beside more furniture sales ads. The editorial is yawnmaking, letters to the editor, facile.

I keep abreast by reading UK newspapers online, and listening to NPR – National Public Radio. Not as entertaining as Radio Four, it none-the-less fills a gap. In Colorado they broadcast the World Service between 9pm and 4am, although it’s not the same World Service that you hear in the UK. I’ve also become a devotee of a few US programs –for those of you who listen online, or download podcasts, I highly recommend This American Life. There is also Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me, which is comparable to The News Quiz and usually has me laughing, much to Andrew’s consternation, as I listen to the podcast on my hand-me-down i-pod (Sally’s old model). It’s very odd to be in the same room with someone who suddenly starts giggling and, because you can’t hear what they’re listening to, you haven’t a clue why.

Ah, but I really miss sitting down in the morning with a cup of coffee and a good newspaper which I know will afford something interesting, informative and entertaining. At the moment I think that, by buying the newspaper, I’m contributing to the odd local career in journalism, and to paper recycling facilities. Is it worth it?

Some musings on the healthcare debate

I used to joke, before we moved here, that we’d probably end up moving back to the UK because of healthcare. One year on, the joke has become reality. I’m embarrassed to admit that I really did not do my homework on this subject, and I had no idea just how expensive health insurance would be.

Turns out that a family of four has an average health insurance premium of $13,000 every year! That’s over $1083 or £645 a month. I had imagined that we’d be paying an annual premium that was more in line with the monthly premium, with no idea that we’d be paying the equivalent of a second mortgage payment each month for health insurance. Those of you that know me well, know that I probably don't spend more on health care for our family in any given year than we'd be asked for a monthly premium.

Just to put things in perspective: We insure our house for $300,000 replacement costs. The annual premium for that is some $800. So we would be asked to pay that and more each month times for health coverage. Premiums, on this basis, would get us $3.6 million cover in any given year. (I’m sure there is some reason you can’t compare health care with house building, but you follow….) Only most health care policies have a lifetime payout limit of $2 million, so if your catastrophic diagnosis requires more than that, well, you can just sell your house to pay for the excess.

Moreover, most policies do not cover healthcare in full. There is not only a deductible, so you pay the first $X of any claim, but there are also these things called co-pays, where, you, the insured, pay not only for the premium, but also for part of the cost of care. If my aunt wants to visit a doctor, she has to pay $20 direct, $50 for a specialist. That's in addition to her $500 per month premium.

It all makes perfect sense really, for how else would the insurance companies be able to afford to pay the in-house doctors that have to review every claim in order to second guess your doctor and decide whether the treatment they’ve prescribed should be provided? How else would they be able to pay legions of people to comb your medical records to find pre-existing conditions that render your policy void? (It says here that you had a broken toe that you didn't disclose. I'm sorry, we can't cover your cancer claim.) How could they pay the lawyers to defend the withdrawal of coverage? How could they pay their own executive salaries and bonuses? How could they pay their shareholder dividends?

Apparently over half of all bankruptcies in this country are filed due to health care bills. Seventy five percent of those are filed by people who have health insurance. It’s barbaric.

You may be paying £5/gallon for petrol but thank God you don’t have this debacle with which to contend.

On a lighter note, we've had more snow: 10 inches the end of Oct, and 6 inches yesterday. Here is a photo of our back garden.

And here, one of Spencer on a snow mountain, taken this morning.

Can it be Winter Already?

What a shock to my system a few weeks ago to wake up to three inches of snow on the ground, and a thermometer that read 21 degrees! It's not particulary normal, but not unknown either, and I can recall trick-or-treating in the snow as a child. Alas, the cold has stripped us of most of our autumn colour though, with many trees shedding all of their leaves in one day. In the morning, the ground was white with snow - by afternoon, the snow was completely covered with leaves.

This photo is of cider making. Almost every year, my brothers gather apples from various orchards, gardens and the like, and make apple cider. In the USA, they are inclined to call apple juice "cider".

It all seems a very Heath Robinson affair, with various machines rigged up over the years to automate the process. It started out when my eldest brother inherited an old cider press from some elderly brothers adopted by our family. This year we pressed some 250 gallons!

Here is the press -

And the apples being washed and chopped -


It was all good fun although COLD COLD COLD. The good news is that the 6 gallons or so that I brought home with me have started to ferment nicely and it's lovely stuff.

The really wild west

So I've been doing this work for the Census for just under a month now. It feels MUCH longer....

The census itself takes place next April and, like in the UK, will be carried out by post, but there is a huge amount of preparation that takes place beforehand, and that is what I've been participating in. The team I've been working with is doing spot checks. We are given sections of land to go around, and we are to list any housing units we find therein. Simple enough really.

It's been interesting, as a few of the sections I've been assigned had no housing units a few years ago (if the photos on Google maps are anything to go by), but now are complete subdivisions of towns. Most people are helpful - I've been yelled at by a few too. Those are the urban areas.

Our team was so efficient and finished our area so quickly, that some of us were asked if we would like to help out in Wyoming, where they apparently had difficulty recruiting people. Last weekend then (Labor day weekend - a bank holiday) saw me driving out to Rock Springs. It's in the lower left hand corner of the state. 300 miles from home. They put three of us up in a decent hotel and gave us our assignments. What I didn't understand, and what no one told me, was that there are only three paved roads in the whole of Wyoming! The photo above is the first section of land I was assigned to canvass. It took me several hours to find, as the maps they gave us to locate our areas may have had a single identifier on them. For example, the only identifer on the map for the above area was the California Oregon trail. Where along the trail this tiny bit was located was up to me.

My advice to you all in England is to rush out and buy a good Ordnance survey map and revel in its detail. Linger over the marked paths, the roads, the indications of a school and a pub and a post office. You don't find that kind of detail here - not on a map, and sometimes not on the ground either. This is where I ended up.



For my pains and skills, I have been selected to accompany a bigwig from Washington who wants to come out and observe what we do out here in the field. So later this week I shall collect this man, and head out to Cheyenne. It will be my last assignment. We're going to be doing one urban area and one rural area. Because this is a big deal, I was asked to go out in advance and check out the location. It wouldn't do to be driving around for hours with a man from Washington wondering where the @#%&* some dirt road or other was now would it? I eventually found it. Here is a photo of what we are supposed to traverse.....

I kid you not. Wish me luck!

One Year On....

I woke up last night and realised that I'd missed it. Our moving anniversary. It was 12 months ago yesterday that we arrived on these shores (the fact that we left on the 22nd and had an overnight flight complicates things just a little). Tempus fugit.

It has been flying even faster in the last month or so because it has been stuffed full. We saw Sally taking classroom driving lessons for a week and obtaining her learner's permit before she flew off to England to spend two weeks with her best friend, now in Chalvington, and a few days with school friends in Tonbridge. She returned on the 31st of July with her friend in tow, and the following two weeks were spent taking two girls shopping - oh, and a trip to Rocky Mountain National Park, more shopping, inner-tubing down the St Vrain river, more shopping, a trip to the county fair, more shopping, camping in Wyoming, and uh, more shopping.

Somewhere in there I had to obtain my own Colorado driving license, for which I had to take both a written and practical test. What a palaver. I'm happy to report, that I passed, and while I could have legally accompanied Sally during her upcoming driving practice without a Colorado license, she has to record 50 hours of driving time with someone who has a Colorado drivers' license before she can obtain her full license. Interesting rules here which have caught us out a bit: She has to hold her learners' permit for a full 12 months before she can obtain her full license. Once she has the full license, she is still on probation, as it were, as she is not allowed to drive with anyone other than a family member for another length of time. This staged licensing is meant to avoid teen accidents, and I think it's a terrific idea.

When we took Sally's friend back to the airport on the 16th, Andrew accompanied her and is in the UK now - doing I'm not sure what. He had an MRI scheduled at Kings College Hospital, and it was less expensive to fly to the UK to have it done than have it done here - although if the results, which I believe he'll get today - are negative (as in not what we want to hear), I have no idea what will be the next course of action.

As it happens, his timing has been rotten, as I was offered a job working with the US Census just before he left AND the children started school the following day as well. My sister, who lives in Laramie WY volunteered to come and ferry Sally and Spencer to school while I was off being trained to list addresses for the Census. Working for the Feds is as interesting as you could hope. One the one hand, everything is very thorough, repeated many times, every i dotted and t crossed, but within that minutiae are the most preposterous and glaring errors. Moreover we are told one thing one day and another the next. To their credit, on day one, they told us that flexibility was the name of the game. I was told that this job would be 25 hours a week for 12 months, but when I arrived at training they said that come hell or high water, this job had to finish on October 9th. Happily, I'm flexible.

Finally, Sally has started Japanese lessons at the University today. Her school has scheduled a free block of time for her before lunch, and in that time we are able to drive up to Ft Collins, she can attend her class and we can return before her next class starts. It will be interesting. Her books were $180. At least the high school pays for tuition and fees, which would otherwise be in the region of $1000. I think we are going to have to invest in a Prius (which in the USA is pronounced Pree-us - we were all pronouncing it Pry-us) to save on petrol.

Anyway, I've been feeling a bit like Alice's white rabbit with no time to say hello, goodbye. I'm late, I'm late, I'm late, goodbye.