Lessons from the snow

For many years, I always relished coming to the US each winter so that I could finally get my hands on some serious snow. It was a constant source of amusement to friends and family over here about my childlike enthusiasm, and I've been known to make all sorts of snow sculptures while everyone else is inside by the fire. "Just you wait," they all said "just you wait till you move over here and it feels like it never stops snowing. Then see how you like it!"

It's now April 7th (one thing I've become used to is saying and writing the date the American way (and indeed not referring to the American way of doing things as "the wrong way" unless I'm deliberately being obnoxious), and this post has been in the back of my mind for a month or so now. That is, since around the time when I would have thought that all the snow would be gone and spring would have started. You know, around the time when the clocks went back and everyone announced the first day of spring. I waited and waited for the last snow storm before writing this, and while I'm fairly sure we're done for this eternal winter, I wanted to get the post written anyway as tomorrow marks the year anniversary of the move and the theoretical end of the blog.

So to start with a summary, do I still love the snow? I think on balance yes. There's still something exciting about snow that comes up to your shins, and I have dozens of photos of the snow laiden trees and the black and white landscapes of the early mornings, which are even more stunning when coupled with the beautifully crisp and clear sunshine days that intersperse the snow clouds. There's something impressive about a snow storm that lasts for 24 hours, and a certain incredulousness as you watch the forecast amounts increase from a few inches to 1-2 feet. 

There are, of course, some downsides. The frequency and reliability of heavy snowfalls each winter means that you make up snow days at the end of the school year, meaning that we get out on June 22nd instead of June 15th. A mental note for future visitors and summer trips away to bear that in mind! Also, the snow plow crews do an amazing job of clearing the public roads (even our backwater street gets cleared by 6am!) so it's over to you to clear your driveway and get to work (unless you work in schools and have a snow day). That means, at least in our house, that my wife had to go to work, and I had to go snow blow a path out at 6am; no mean feat when the snow is still falling and the wind whips down the street, threatening to freeze off all my extremities.

With that in mind, I want record some lessons that I've learned from the snow this year so that I'm better prepared for next season:

1. When you have the thought "I should go fill up the gas can so that my snow blower doesn't run out of gas in the next storm", do it that day - I managed to get all bar the last 3 yards done on one tank, but I would have been screwed if the snow had kept coming!

2. Always have the right tools - this ranges from having a decent snowblower (check) to having fleece lined trousers, decent gloves and face protection from the wind (all now check). It also applies to a shovel and ice basher (my terminology, not necessarily correct!). Our walkway to the front door regularly freezes over and initially I bought an aluminium shovel to clear it. After bending it in half on the second attempt, I went back to the store and bought the heavy duty basher which I had considered before, and cleared the ice in half the time.

3. Snowblow often - the first few snowstorms, I waited until the snow had ended, and the plows had hit the ends of the driveway. Big mistake. While there was only 8 inches or so in real terms, the wind blows hard down our street, causing all the snow to drift, and my poor snowblower and I struggled to clear the driveway. The other drawback of waiting is that the snow plows push another foot of snow onto anything you haven't hit yet, and my snowblower only clears 2 feet vertically. 

4. The post office has diagrams for bozos who don't clear a path to their mailboxes - I know the importance of this now, but after 2 days of polite notices in our mailbox, and my wife berating me to go and do it, I got the hint. However, when I went to clear it, the drifts around the mailbox were 3 feet high and compacted. I couldn't shovel the snow to the side or behind me onto the road, so I spent a backbreaking hour clearing a rough path. It becomes easier as spring approaches and the snow melts quicker, but I still need to be out there sooner.

5. The correct way to clear the driveway - after many different experiments, I think I have the ultimate route. Clear the left hand driveway in stripes, then continue to cut round to the right hand garage door. Make one last pass up the left driveway, then approach the right (and higher drifting) driveway from the road. Continue back and forth in stripes, then tidy up the remaining triangle. Don't be afraid to blow snow onto the areas that you haven't cleared yet, especially when the wind dictates the direction you can blow in. 

In summary, therefore, I think I still like the snow, but I won't be sad for it all to go and for warmer weather to start arriving next week!

A different perspective

It is with much incredulity that our one year anniversary of the Big Move is coming up in a few weeks, a fact which is motivating me to get some thoughts written on here, as well as to think about what to do with the blog in the future. I had in mind that it would chart my first 12 months here and then end, but I realize that I enjoy writing and reflecting, and it's even more fun to look back at old posts and see how far we've come. On the other hand, do I just put it down as a one year blog, and splinter into other topics that I want to record, such as the bees and our discovery of New Hampshire's great outdoors? Thoughts on a postcard (or a comment!).

I want to revisit some of my first few musings over here in future posts, but today is a more somber topic. Today, Primer Minister Theresa May handed over the letter (a letter! In 2017! Why not tweet?) signalling the UK's intention to withdraw from the EU. I'm still heartbroken by this, as I like to think of myself as a European citizen, part of a great social network of people with multiple languages and cultures able to live and work in closer harmony and unity. For a ridiculous uninformed referendum run solely for the personal political pride of David Cameron to ruin this for me, my generation and my children's generations to come is beyond belief, but then a lot has happened in this last year that I still can't get my head around. I had dreams of being able to tell Jake and Sophie that they could live and work in 30 countries with their 2 passports, and that they should be proud of their British and European heritage. While I still want them to feel British in part, I question how British I feel if this is what the country is moving towards.

I think the problem is that I still feel helpless and powerless about it, a fact which is exacerbated over here by the fact that British news rarely makes it into the public consciousness (which is fair enough, given the shit storm that has engulfed America since January 20th), so even though it's weighing heavily on my mind, there's not a huge number of people here that I can talk to. For sure, I got sympathy at work when I expressed my sadness today, but it was more the kind of sympathy that you give someone who has suffered a bereavement of a distant and unknown relative, rather than someone who has had an integral part of their personality ripped off by a politician. My best connection at work is someone who has a British mother, and while we bemoaned the process for a few minutes and I ranted about how I don't want to pull together as per Theresa May, she politely ended the conversation by saying that maybe we need to accept facts and work together. While I understand her sentiment, it wasn't the kind of response I was looking for, or one that I would have got from a UK colleague.

This different perspective was brought out in a less stressful light this week at lunch. As there are only 3 male teachers at school, we tend to gravitate towards each other and end up eating lunch together most days. We talk sports, and I have learned a lot about football (it still irks me not to call it American football!) and now college basketball with March Madness. It wasn't until this week that one of them brought up soccer and the fact that they had become briefly interested with it a few years back. Now I'm not going to pretend that I have vast football conversations with my friends in the UK regularly, and definitely not at work, and indeed that I've not loved learning about a whole new sporting culture, but I miss having people who know about and get excited the Leicester City story, England's new manager and the current set up in the Premier League. Maybe it's because our lives don't lend themselves greatly to meeting people with those interests, but again it's been interesting to see a different perspective on the things that I consider to be big and important topics.

Taxes

I've always heard Americans complaining about taxes, and there's numerous quotes comparing them negatively, so it was with good reason that I embarked on my first ever tax return with some trepidation. It's seems like such a strange system after living in the UK, where unless you mess up your tax code by moving job or being unemployed, your only dealing with the tax man is your P60 (W-2 over here) as all your tax is taken at source in your pay check. The same happens here, which is why I was initially confused about why you need to file tax returns as we were already paying federal taxes through our pay checks.

However, after a lot of online reading and working my way through the system with the help of Turbo Tax ($35 and I couldn't have been happier with the help and guidance provided!), I now have a better idea of the system and why the returns happen in the way they do here. Here is how I understand things:

- You get paid by your employer, who withholds a certain amount of money each month to cover your federal tax, social security and Medicare contributions (which I compare to National Insurance). At the end of the year (which helpfully runs 1st Jan to 31st Dec!) you get sent a statement of what you got paid and how much they withheld. 

- Your total earnings put you into a tax bracket, whereby you pay a base rate plus a certain percentage of everything over that base rate. This is how much tax you owe each year.

- You can claim deductions against your tax, including child tax credits, childcare expenses, health care expenses and others. 

- If your tax owed is more than your deductions, you pay the IRS. If your deductions are more than your tax bill, you get paid the difference as a tax refund. 

I know this is a simplified version, but it's helpful to me now (and probably will be next year!) to have my understanding of it written down. The yearly returns replace the different benefits and credits that the UK system offers as different packages. For example, we got a set payment to help with the cost of raising 2 kids, and were able to pay for "childcare vouchers" before tax was applied to help with the cost of childcare. The US government does the same, but has it as all part of the same system, meaning that I only have to deal with one set of paperwork.

I decided to file online as my previous experiences trying to fill in taxes for Kelsey for her earnings abroad confused me greatly. Even though each form comes with a helpful explanation sheet, there's a lot of terminology that I wasn't sure about, and I didn't want to start my dealings with the IRS with a mistake ridden return. Fortunately, the program I chose not only filled in the form for me by using my answers to its questions, but I was able to click on any words or terms that I didn't know and got a succinct and clear explanation of what it meant and how it applied to my situation. It took me about an hour, but I was pleased with the process and came away with a better understanding of the tax system over here.

As for the result? Well, let's just say we are entitled to a bigger tax return that we had anticipated, and that, all things being equal, it should hit our account in 3 weeks. There's a residual wariness of getting money from the taxman, as I've had situations in the UK where I've been sent a tax refund and spent it, only for HMRC to ask for it back a few months later. However, I've been assured that this is a legit process, and the money is ours to spend any way we see fit. I doubt we'll get as much of a return next year, but the idea of having an unexpected windfall each year will help with our travel and home improvement plans greatly!

An assortment

Often an idea for a post stays with me for a week or two, and I gently roll it round, thinking about what I want to write on that topic. However, all of the following have been in my mind for a while, but they form no coherent narrative but I want to record them as part of this first year's experience.

Chip and pin

Chip and pin came to the UK in 2006, so it's been a natural part of my daily spending and one that I've not really thought about. The technology is slowly being introduced over here and it's interesting watching what is meant to be one of the high-tech nations struggling. Complaints about the speed of the connections and increased transaction time abound, but for me there's a much more confusing part to this. In many situations, I can make a payment, especially by credit card, without having to provide a single piece of identification; no PIN, no signature, nothing. This terrifies me in a way that I never was in the UK. Yes, I know credit card theft happens and people can make payments in other ways, but I feel like this is akin to leaving the back door open and hoping no-one finds your house. Hopefully chip and pin will end this, but it still seems strange to be asked for my signature, especially when no one bothers to check if it looks like the back of the card!

2 for $6

A deal is a deal, and I like using store-based bargains to save money on our food shopping each week. An interesting quirk of American grocery stores is how they price a deal of say 2 for $6. In the UK, I would expect one to cost $4, thus incentivising me to buy two for $6 to bring the average cost down to $3. Here (and trust me, I've done my research) if a product is on sale 2 for $6 and you only buy one, you only get charged $3. While this is great for me as a consumer as I don't overspend (unless I truly need the second one!), I feel that the supermarkets have missed a vital trick here.

Change

Ok, I admit that I have always found the image of foreigners to the UK scrambling around in their wallets, examining each individual coin and performing mental arithmetic just to buy a packet of crisps amusing. Indeed, one of my favorite stories about my father in law is when he went to buy a round at the bar and just held out his handful of coins and asked the bartender to pick out the right amount. In the US, coins just simply aren't used. With the smallest bill of $1 widely available, and the cost everything elevated so you won't find much on sale for less than a buck, the concept of paying in change is alien here, and I get funny looks when I do it. I often avoid it for this reason, and also because despite there only being 4 coins, I find the math involved to get 42c using 25, 10, 5 and 1 more frustrating than carrying round a pocket full of coins. That, and I'm collecting the special state quarters so I don't want to mistakenly give any away!

Snow

Anyone who knows me on either side of the Atlantic knows that I love snow. I love the cold crisp days that goes with it, I love being the first person to make footprints in the virgin snow and I love the snow days from school. However, after undergoing weekly snow showers for most of the last 2 months, I want to revise my position slightly. I still love snow, and I'm more in love with how beautiful and pristine it makes the world look when your world is mainly trees and bushes.

However, having to wake up extra early to snowblow the driveway so you can drive to work because apparently 6 inches of snow doesn't not a snow day make isn't cool. Having to break your back chipping ice off the walkway to your home because you didn't shovel it when the snow was fresh and now it's frozen harder than a rock isn't cool. Having to pay back snow days at the end of the school year, when no-one wants to be at school any more and your best friends are coming to visit isn't cool.

I still check for snow on my weather apps with eager anticipation every day, and I think I'll be sort of sad when spring rolls round and there's no further chance of it, but it will be a different relationship with snow as the years go by.

Bees

Part of the big draw of being in the US is to be able to live a little more sustainably. I've talked some about my initial homesteading efforts last year, and I'm starting to plan out my first ever vegetable garden here - more of which in later posts. More excitingly, my mother in law and I will be keeping bees this year. It started as an idle conversation when we were living there, and I then attended a one day course to see what it was all about: I was hooked. Bees are fascinating creatures and the idea that I can do something to improve their genetic stock and keep the species alive appeals to that hippy part of me. So we've ordered the bees to arrive May 10th (maybe I'll keep a homesteading blog as well) and we're currently attending bee school, which should give us enough knowledge and information to make a successful first year. Watch this space!

Oil and heating

This final thought is more registering some information for me to refer back to. Now, I fully appreciate that we went a little over the top with our first house purchase, moving from 800 square feet in Leeds to just under 3000 here. I also appreciate that the winter is colder here and I'm not entirely sure how well insulated our house is. Regardless, we have had a delivery of 100+ gallons of heating oil each month for the last 2 months, and the cold weather won't let up for another couple of months yet. This just seems like an awfully large amount (3 gallons a day!) and I wouldn't say our house is hot at any time, more like comfortable, with a drop in temperature during the day when we're out. A small bit of research says that this is normal for a house this size in New England, but I can't help but feel that we could be doing a better job of using less oil. Again, watch this space for updates as the warm weather arrives.

Pollo

All good things must come to an end. I know that when we first got our cats, we had the joking conversation about who would take them to the vet at the end, but I don't think we ever truly thought about the reality of either cat dying. In some respects, that makes sense as it feels morbid to do so, but in others, it's also a bit silly as their life expectancy is so much shorter than ours.

So it feels like more of a shock than it should do that we had to have Pollo put to sleep this morning. He had managed to develop two conflicting diseases in different parts of his body which required treatments that would counteract each other. The vet gave him less than a week, so while it feels like an awful decision to make, I now understand better what it means when people say "put them out of their misery". Pollo deteriorated so quickly this week to the point where he couldn't really move or be comfortable, so I feel that, given the inevitable, we made things a little easier for him.

In a way, the death of Hayden, my wife's beloved family dog, just after we arrived in the US has made talking about Pollo with Jake easier. We've decided to discuss the idea of heaven with him, so when we found out on Tuesday that we were going to put him down, we told Jake that Pollo was going to join Hayden in heaven. Jake burst into tears and we cuddled a lot and talked about how much we love our pets. Jake worked out something was up this morning when he found out that his grandparents were taking him and Sophie to daycare, and asked if Pollo was going to heaven today. When we nodded, eyes full of tears, he leaned to give him a pat and a kiss and told him he would miss him. I'm sure we'll discuss Pollo more over the coming days with Jake and how it's important to keep our memories of him alive by talking about him more.

Pollo didn't look great towards the end, and that's not really how I want to remember him, because the skinny emaciated cat he became is not what my memory says he was. Even the idea of him being the states conflicts with this memory, which is of him, fat and chubby,  on the windowsill in our house in Leeds next to the tumbler dryer, gently snoring behind the curtains. That's the picture I will always have of him in my mind (and indeed that multiple people have sent me when we told them the news!).

So here's to Pollo, thus named because when he first arrived in our house, he hid under everything for the first week like a big chicken. The name also comes from playing "hunt the cat" around the house, where we felt like we were playing Marco Polo with him, calling out to him and hearing him respond in his traditional yowl.

Here's to Pollo who gave us a heart attack on the first day we got him by hiding in our kitchen for 24 hours. We honestly couldn't work out if we had actually got two cats, or if one had some escape despite our best efforts to keep all doors shut. Eventually, my wife found him nestled in a notch in between the top of the fridge and the built in cabinets. I still don't know how he found that space comfortable, or how my wife's hearing managed to work out this unusual hiding spot.

Here's to Pollo who lived in permanent optimism of getting wet food. Anytime that we opened a can of kidney beans, he would come running and meowing and wouldn't stop until you let him sniff it and realise that it wasn't cat food. It was actually one thing that tipped us off that the end was near when we tried to feed him a pouch of wet food and he didn't touch it. He never quite realised that giving him wet food was always our way of getting him to take his meds as he always lick the bowl clean.

Here's to Pollo who took comfort everywhere, and had a special penchant for lying on scrunched up newspaper. Don't ask me how, but he always made it look like a memory foam mattress. He would also fall asleep leaning on things, and my friend Vicky sent me the most wonderful picture of him sleeping on the windowsill (of course!) and smushing his face into her handbag. I'm pretty sure that his head would have stayed that way had we removed it.

Here's to Pollo who will always stay in our family's memory as Sophie's first "word" (She would scream the word KITTAH whenever she saw him) Right from the word go, she has always been obsessed with him, and slowly over time he has got used to her and allowed her to practise "gentle hands" on him. There's a lot of cute pictures of her staring lovingly at him, with Pollo staring back in a "oh just get on with it" kind of look on his face.

Here's to Pollo, half of our first fur babies. He became an integral part of our life in Leeds and everyone recognised his yowl (earning him the nickname Yowlsey). Pollo even changed how people used our house, after he pulled Matt's coat off the radiator and peed on it, which forced us to buy coat hooks to put everything out of his reach. Our phones were filled with photos of him and his sister and to say that he will be missed is a massive understatement.

So here's to Pollo, gone but not forgotten.

Football (not soccer!)

I don't think any blog about America from a foreigner's point of view would be complete without at least one post on sports. I've long been a baseball fan and always looked forward to spending a few weeks each summer watching the Red Sox play just about every evening. It was a treat this year to follow them from start to uneventful finish and get to know the players (and even get to a couple of games!).

However, I wanted to write about football (and for the duration of this post I mean what in my head I still call American football, rather soccer which is what I normally mean when I say football). It's hard to avoid given that the season starts around the start of the school year, and just about every boy in my class is a massive fan. Living in New Hampshire means that there's no towns big enough to have their own pro sports team, so you'll find most of Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine all support (or pull for as the Americans say) the Boston/New England teams. This means that I've become immersed in the New England Patriots, and can now proudly name more players than just Tom Brady, the quarterback.

Just on that note; there are a couple of kids who support different teams through their dads (one Green Bay, one Philadelphia) and it does make me wonder what Jake and Sophie will do about non-US sports teams (Soccer. Mainly soccer). Will they find their own way and end up cheering for some Premier League side that they see on TV or follow me with my hopeless following of Luton Town (currently struggling in League 2 after many years in the non-league wilderness). It's a sadness that we'll end up going back to the UK over the summer most years when there's no soccer worthy of the name, so the kids' first experience is likely to be the MLS, and I'm not sure it'll be the same without pies and Bovril...

Anyway, back to the Patriots. Up until this year, I usually caught one game over the Christmas period when we visited, and I still had my soccer superiority head on, full of stereotypes about too much padding, simplistic game play and too many commercials. This season, I've sat and watched a couple of regular season games and now both post season games (Super Bowl is next!) and the more I watch, the more I'm beginning to enjoy myself. My brother-in-law, who is incredibly knowledgable about all things sport, has been coaching me a little and made the analogy between football and a chess game, where everything is planned out and you're trying to read your opponents to gain an advantage. When you watch the game through that lens, it becomes incredibly tactical. The big blokes pushing each other around suddenly have multiple purposes and the padding is there to protect the necessarily hard tackles that stop a runner and push them back vital yards. You realise that the long touchdown passes of the highlight reels are rare and that the scores are usually made up of much smaller runs and passes.

I'm not sure how long it will take me to get to the same level of interest and understanding that I have about soccer and the Premier League, but it's been an education in sport and a revelation to finally get what all the fuss has been all about. Whether the Patriots win or lose the Super Bowl (or Superb Owl as my friend Linz refers to it), I'll be watching and learning, getting ready for next season.

Happy Holidays

This post has been on the back burner for a few days now. I had intended to write it during winter break (not Christmas holidays!), but with our whirlwind trip to Toronto and our first family American Christmas and the start of the new school term, time seems to run away from me quickly! However, I wanted to record some thoughts of my first festive season as a US resident.

The war on Christmas

The first interesting thing that you find over here is that despite the majority of people celebrating Christmas, the number of people around here who will wish you Merry Christmas is minimal, with everyone going for the safer and more PC Happy Holidays. Personally, I like Happy Holidays (even though Americans call it a vacation?), but at the same time I can't see how wishing someone who doesn't celebrate Christmas to have a Merry Christmas is going to cause them mental pain; a bit of social awkwardness perhaps, but they're unlikely to slap you or burst into tears. The interesting part is when people use Happy Holidays as a way of making a point, either in sarcasm to show their disdain for being PC, or to show off how PC they can be. In either case, it's interesting to watch and listen to the conversations in not-very-diverse New Hampshire compared to the blanket Merry Christmas in slightly-more-multi-cultural Yorkshire.

Christmas in school

The US believes heartily in the separation of church and state, whilst the UK has no such restrictions. However, I find it interesting again that issues that are only issues because of religious teachings, such as gay marriage, contraception and abortion, are way more contentious over here and are battleground subjects during election campaigns. It also highlights that for all the problems I have with UK politics, the US remains a much more conservative country in a lot of matters (though 2 of 3 states that border New Hampshire have legalized marijuana...).

I digress a little from my original thought process. In my school, there was no Christmas mentioned, only holidays and winter. All the decorations were snow men, Christmas lights and snowflakes. Some classes had twinkly lights up, and my next door neighbors had a Christmas tree, but it was interesting to see everyone very cautiously not talking about Christmas. It made my approach of not discussing Christmas less obvious, and I think it makes it easier for those kids for whom the vacation isn't the most wonderful time of the year.

Proper Adulting

My wife and I often joke about how sometimes we look at each other and realise that we're becoming real adults (someone on the internet talked about it as "adulting" and the phrase stuck with us!). The first time was when someone offered us a six figure mortgage, another was when we found out that we were pregnant each time and a more recent example when we bought a car based on how safe it was and how much storage space it had in it. This year, we reached a new pinnacle on Christmas morning as it was the first time that we had spent it away from either of our sets of parents in our lives. The vicarious excitement of the morning through Jake and Sophie was delightful, as was setting up our own traditions. We still went round to my in-laws in the morning and did the rest of the day as we had done previously, but it felt like another big step of ingraining our lives over here to have our first ever Forbes Wolfson family Christmas by ourselves.

Christmas Tree, oh Christmas Tree

Our house is big. I still get surprised by it every now and again, like when I'm turning the place upside down to look for a Christmas present that Sophie has somehow squirreled away somewhere very safe. However, I've found a way to reduce the size a bit, and that's to buy an enormous tree. I was sent with a brief to not come back with a Charlie Brown tree, and I definitely didn't! This thing is huge, probably somewhere around 11 feet tall, and about 8 feet in diameter at the base. It looks sparsely decorated in places, even with 10 years worth of decorations, lovingly imported from the UK, hanging all over the place. It's become a comforting presence in the house, and I will miss it when it's gone.

Epiphany is tomorrow, which means we really need to take it down and undecorate it, as Jake says. I'm not sure how he'll feel about that, and I'm also not sure where we put the tree! There's around a foot of snow still in our yard which is likely to be added to in the coming days, and I don't relish trying to drag it out into the woods. Maybe I need to bust out my hacksaw and cut it into smaller bits, but I'm not sure how Jake will feel about that either! In either case, I think it's been a great experiment this year, but we'll go for something a little smaller and more manageable next year.

Lighting the House

One of my favorite things about the festive festive season over here is the way that just about everyone decorates their houses with lights. The sparsely populated roads and lack of light pollution in the sky means that even the smallest set of lights "pops" out as you drive along, and there are some houses that cover themselves top to tail in lights, including lit up moving reindeer in the yard and twinkling candles in every window.

I decided that I wanted to copy this design, and quickly found out how hard/expensive this can be! The first thing that you need is miles of electrical cables. I drastically underestimated how far the trees are from my house (combined with the insistence of labelling everything in feet...I don't have an accurate mental image of 40 feet yet!), so had to go back twice to get more cables. I also found that it is massively time consuming to string lights around a tree in a way that looks pretty in the dark. In the end, I settled on a net version that doesn't look great if you look at it too long, but does the job in passing. I also strung twinkle lights on the awning the garage, and that is my favorite part of the final look. It makes the house look cosy and inviting, and those electric candles that haven't been moved/stolen by Sophie just add to that inviting look. The reflection off freshly fallen snow definitely helps the romantic look, as does the knowledge of the warmth and family that await within.