Lost of things have been happening, and not much, at the same time.
We had our new cooker delivered Monday of last week. It’s all shiny and new and works very well (if a bit scarily too-well). I’ll need to adjust my timings for it but at least it has fire in its belly (!) compared to the old one.
We went to Snape Maltings on Tuesday so that I could visit the farm shop that Katy had raved about from her last jaunt with Donna. I have to say that I’m impressed and we could spend a serious chunk of change there :) We bought some tomato chutneys that I can actually eat, mandarin flavoured olive oil (they didn’t have the lemon flavoured that I already have and love) and some flame-grilled artichoke hearts that have already been found quite tasty on pizzas and marginally less so in my pasta sauce. We had pancakes with some really, really, really(!) good bacon for brunch and then we headed back home through a warren of country back roads. It’s a good thing we had the satnav :)
We went to Lakeside on Wednesday to scope out some preliminary ideas for xmas presents and to try and get a Costco membership. Lakeside was ok. We stopped at Cafe Rouge for lunch. I like Cafe Rouge. It’s generally a nice meal that is also fairly safe, allergy-wise. I had a bit of a surprise this time though. I’d ordered a steak-filled baguette and ended up with a steak and fish-flavoured mayo baguette for my troubles. I don’t know what the kitchen staff did, but they managed to get bits of fish (big enough to point out to Katy and a rather flabbergasted waiter) in my sandwich. No wonder the taste was off… Anyway, they were very apologetic and comped my meal, so that wasn’t too bad. The onion soup was nice as usual though. Costco was a big disappointment. Apparently, neither the EBI or Babraham qualify as valid companies for an individual membership :( I’ll see if I can wangle a membership through somebody at work.
We recently celebrated our 5-year meeting-up anniversary on Oct 1st and our 3-year wedding anniversary on Oct 2nd. I wrote Katy a sappy card and she wrote me a cynical one. It pretty much sums us up :) We were in Leicester this weekend. We had a nice meal at San Carlos and Katy was really happy that we could eat off of each other’s plate. It’s a silly thing, when you think about it, but it very rarely can happen because of my allergies. The food was very nice, as usual, and the cocktails at Las Iguanas were also very nice :) They had a continental market in town with lots of interesting foodstuffs but we were full and cashless, so we headed home.
The car decided that wanted a makeover this weekend and had aspirations to become a muscle car. To that effect, it decided that its exhaust system really needed a throaty growl so it reworked itself to bypass the back-box. Sadly, Katy decided that she preferred to have acceleration, gas mileage and full use of her hearing instead of having the only Toyota Corolla that sounded like a supercar and took her car into the garage yesterday. We would have gotten it done in Leicester but nobody had the parts around to do it on short notice.
Today is Katy’s first day back at work and she’s of mixed minds about going back. Scratch that, both of her minds don’t want to, to be honest. If she can handle it for the short term, it’ll give us a bit of a chance to sort out longer-term options.
The beastie is doing well, even though he’s been a bit of a handful in the past few days. He caught a cold – which he will share with us soon enough – and we think that his teeth are giving him some grief. Other than that, we think he’s just on the cusp of being mobile. The cats look worried. I don’t blame them.