You can do it...

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Imagine a large home improvement store. Painted orange. With orange displays.

Q. Complete this sentence:

You can do it...

A.

You can do it. We can help.

Yes, it's Home Depot (that's DEEpo, not DEPPo of course). America's answer to B&Q. And like said store, full of all kinds of stuff except exactly the thing you want. In our case an umbrella for a garden table. You would think in a city where the sun shines every day these things would be popular and cheap. Well, they may be so popular no one has any in stock?

We had a really exciting Friday afternoon. A short swim at the university pool, then visited some car dealers before the real excitement of Home Depot.

Our conclusion is that most US car models are boring boxes (I have ruled out the local Lamborghini and Ferrari dealers for reasons of sanity and wishing to remain married). Choices are down to a Toyota Matrix - a 'fun' mini utility vehicle (aka hatchback) or a Honda Fit (aka Jazz), which is the Hot Car In California at the moment with fuel hitting 4 dollars a gallon*

* Translation note: A US gallon is 3.78 litres. So even with the rapidly declining exchange rate that's 60p a litre in English money. Half the price of our fuel but people drive twice as far to get where they are going.

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