High Maintenance?

I usually pride myself on being a down-to-earth, low maintenance kind of girl. It occurred to me, after an incident that happened last night, that this may not be an accurate representation of myself.

The front desk at the hotel where I've been staying all week keeps a small tea tray of treats on it for guests. Every evening there is some kind of candy, cookie or other food on display. Last night's treat was delicious looking banana bread that was covered in inch thick butter.

We walked by the desk en route to the bar to meet up with Matt's work colleagues. The amount of butter was too much of a deterrent and I walked by without taking any. I was grumpily (and hungrily) sitting in the hotel bar with one Matt's work colleagues while they debated how many more beers to drink before we could get food.

This has been the theme of the week. I'm starving and want to eat around 6:30 and they want to drink and watch the football without giving food a second thought. I cannot survive on an alcohol, liquid diet.

Matt could tell I was hungry. When I'm hungry I lose control of my ability to reign in my inner bitch. My blood sugar drops, I feel nauseous and at that point I'm pretty much ready to eat my own hand. I knew he was trying to move things along and I wasn't upset with him. I was annoyed that because we were in a group (and I was the tag-along girlfriend on a work trip) that unless everyone was prepared to go we would be staying put.

Matt offerred to get me a piece of bread from the bar but I explained about the butter and mostly joking said ' I'll eat it if you scrape the butter off'. Some twisted part of me wanted to see if he would do it. And, to his wonderful boyfriend credit, he went and retrieved some bread, scraped all the butter off and gave it to me.

At that moment, I looked across the table at his colleague Dan and said " I swear, I'm not as high maintenance as this makes me seem!" You kind of lose credibility when you've just made your boyfriend scrape butter off of some bread for you.

This week has been a bad example and I have been slightly princess-esque while I've been here. The whole time trying to keep in mind that I came along for the week because I'm doing freelance work so I can work in the hotel and, as it turns out, I'm kind of a wimp when Matt goes away for a week or more for work. I rationalized it by taking driving lessons (that were slightly less expensive up here than in Surrey) every day.

I really do believe that I'm easy-going for the most part. The fact that I spent every night this week in a pub watching football and barely even complaining is a clear demonstration. After last night thought, I think I'm going to try to check myself a little bit more often and continue striving for more independence.

Independent Sarah took quite a blow moving to another country. The consistent thought in many of my blog posts has been my struggle to rely on other people when I'd much rather do everything by myself. I'm not very good at delegating since I most often think that my way of doing something is the best/right way of doing it. Living with someone else, not having as much control over my life is forcing me to let another person in and rely on him.

Driving is coming along slowly. If I could understand roundabouts better, I'd be set. I can drive the car now, changing gears is still strange but doable its the traffic rules that are causing me issues. I still can't get a full U.K. license for a few more months but I almost feel like that license will be even more hard earned than my original driver's license at 17. Also, If I ever have kids, they are learning to drive a standard car first!