Tag: slice of life

Weekend in review

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Katy was signed off all of last week for doctor recommended R&R. I took the end of the week off – it was my birthday after all – so we made the most of it. We went to see The Dark Knight on Thursday and I can’t be help repeating all that’s been said about the Joker’s performance. It’s a master-class calibre performance and he’s sure to get the Oscar, albeit posthumously.  Katy baked two cakes for my birthday. One was a backup in case something went wrong with the main one. Hold on to your seats folks, she baked me a train cake!

I mean, how cool is that? She made 3 chocolate carriages, 3 lemon one and the rest are plain vanilla sponge. Have I mentioned that Katy rocks recently? Cause she does. Now the picture above isn’t of the actual cake itself – that’s just a promo picture from the tin. The actual cake is currently frozen because, since Pam had baked me a cake as well, we decided to freeze those we’d made to avoid cake overload!

We went to Leicester on Friday. I did a bit of shopping and ran some errands on Friday afternoon while Katy had her haircut. Rita was supposed to come by Katy’s house on Saturday to pick up her birthday present and be social, but that crashed and burned in a rather spectacular fashion. I’m of mixed feelings about the whole thing. On one hand, I’m happy that it happened because it will now mean that Katy won’t be stressing out every time we go to Leicester to try and accommodate Rita. On the other, I’m angry about some of the things she said. The girl is clearly living in her own private reality at times. I’m not the only one who thinks this and Katy’s parents are firmly behind me on this one. But still, it bothered Katy and I don’t like that. Blergh. We saw Stu for the first time in a while and he seems in good spirits and was happy to see us, so that made up for a bit of the emo-ness of the weekend.

Sunday saw us in a church, of all places. Pam, Katy’s friend, had invited us to the christening of her son, Ethan. It was my first Anglican service and I can say that it’s pretty much like a catholic one, except with more singing and a lot more infrastructure. It amused me that I could translate large chunks of the service in my head. It’s amazing how much church stuff I remember from when my mom dragged us to Sunday services when I was younger.

We had a good weekend in Leics. We ate too much true british food: fish & chips on Friday, curry on Saturday and a lunch roast on Sunday :) Having said that though, we were glad to be back home, sleeping in our own bed. The futon in Katy’s room in Leics is very low and she’s starting to be at the point where she can’t easily get in or out of it :)

The cats seemed happy to see us whe we got in. I was a bit worried about leaving them alone for the weekend – especially since Reenie was just getting over a bit of trouble as we were leaving – but Lennart stopped by the house a few times over the weekend and they were acting very catlike in their disdain of his presence :) Tolstoy seemed to be working on a hairball the night we came back but there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with him this morning.

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A bit of a rough weekend, really.

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Talk about the cure being worse than the disease…

Katy was put on antibiotics last week to get rid of a small boil in her armpit that was very sore. The first round of antibiotics almost, but not quite, got it sorted out so she went back to the docs and they precribed her another round of the same antibiotics. Katy never really reacts well to antibiotics – they tend to make her stomach go completely wonky. Which they did, but to an extent never seen before. She had killer heartburn and it got to the point where she couldn’t sleep on her side at night because the muscles were too tender. She spent Friday night and Saturday night sleeping propped up semi-upright in bed. Suffice it to say, she didn’t sleep well.

We went to the docs on Saturday morning to get something done about the stomach pains. They prescribed something more powerful than the Gavescon she was using up to now. It seemed to help, to a point, until she started having an allergic reaction to it. Nothing too dramatic, just two days of constant itching. Since she can’t take antihistamines, I had to cover her in cold, damp towels during the night to soothe most of the itching. Suffice it to say, she didn’t sleep well.

The midwife came on Sunday morning to check her blood pressure. It’s elevated, but given the weekend she’s had, it’s not as bad as it could be. The midwife thinks that Katy should take the week off and get as much bedrest as she can, so Katy’s off to the docs (again!) to get signed off as sick for the week.

It’s not all bad though. We managed to get a lot done this weekend. We did a good sorting out of the office, I built the last of the nursery furniture that we’d bought last weekend, I did a stupid number of loads of laundry, we sorted out all our clothing and gave away a bunch of unused stuff to charity and I installed Ubuntu on the home laptop while we had a Harry Potter marathon.

I’m at the office right now but I’m just grabbing some files that I need to work from home. I’m going back as soon as they’re burned on DVD.

Hopefully, things’ll start going more smoothly in the near future.

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Long weekend update

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Lots to say about the weekend.

It starts on Friday, when I finally handed in all the course material that I was drafted to do for a course being given this week, yay! Katy had an appointment at Addenbrookes to talk with a mental health nurse about ways to avoid post-natal depression and how to deal with things while during her pregnancy. She hasn’t been sleeping well – which is apparently very common in pregnant women – and it’s making her tired and a bit grumpy. The recent weather really hasn’t been helping either. I got home at a reasonable time and chatted with Katy and her parents. They came down for the weekend. We went to the chippie for some take-out fish&chips and had a nice quiet evening.

Saturday saw us going to Ikea. IKEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAA!! Le sigh. I’m an ikea-whore, I know this to be true. We bought some nursery furniture: a leksvik chest of drawers that will double as a change station, some trofast wall shelves for storage, a poang chair for those late-night feedings and, joy of joys, it would seem that the leksvik cot-bed that we’ve been lusting after is back in production after being taken out for a re-tooling to fix some sort of manufacturing issue. Of course they were all out on that day, typical, but at least it means that we can get one ordered :) We also got some funky ghost-y nightlights and a rug that’ll really tie the room together, man (*) and some assorted stuff for the kitchen. It’s impossible to go to Ikea without buying random shit from the market area :)

We got home and we had ourselves the first BBQ of the season (yeah, we’re a bit late, I know, but still, we more than made up for it with the amount of food we cooked). I’d made some sangria with cheap, sweet rose wine, fizzy lemonade, lemons, limes, oranges, pineapple, watermelon and lots of ice. It went down exceptionally well in the scorching heat we had all weekend.

BBQ

We cooked chicken thighs with jalapeno relish, sausages, pork burgers with ginger, potato wedges with olive oil & chives and feta & watermelon salad that really was really refreshing and light. We ate outside, which is something that I really don’t like but must work on and discovered that our kitchen chairs are really, really uncomfortable (that’s how often we use them that we only realize this after having had them for over 3 years…)

We had a pub lunch on Sunday and spent most of the day building the Ikea stuff and unwrapping the pushchair. It’s not really a one-handed job, but it’s much simpler than I expected it to be.

It’s been stupidly hot all weekend. They said it would be close to 30 degrees and there wasn’t a touch of wind for most of the weekend, except for when it rained a bit late last evening. It’s been so hot that all the windows of the house were left wide-open for most of the weekend (and those people who know me well will understand the import of that statement). We didn’t see the cats for most of the weekend – we figure they holed up somewhere shady and slept it off. We got worried for a bit when we hadn’t seen Reenie for almost a day and a half (being that she is an attention-whore) but she wandered in for some food and some fuss, so all is good.

This week should be fairly uneventful. Bit of work – I’m giving a session on Thursday in the course I mentioned earlier. Otherwise, very routine on my part.

(*) bonus points if you get the movie reference.

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Wicked and meatball subs

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Now how random is this post title?

It makes perfect sense though, then I tell you that I made kick-ass homemade meatball subs for dinner on Friday and that Katy and I went to see Wicked in London today.

The subs were nummylicious! Take herbed pork meatballs, brown them and then simmer them in tomato sauce with lots of basil for 30 minutes. Slice open some nice baguette, dress with sliced havarti and then smother in meatballs in tomato sauce. Serve and enjoy but we warned, it’s a messy meal :)

Wicked? was good. I’d booked some tickets for the matinee today. We took the train to Tottenham Hale and the tube to Victoria. We got some food from M&S and had some tea at the station. The timing worked out well because as soon as we’d finished our tea, Victoria station was evacuated. The rumour was a bomb, but it was more probably just some idiot tourist leaving his bags unattended and the powers that be making too much about it.

We went for a bit of a walk but we didn’t go far. We ended up at a small belgian cafe having fresh waffles :) The smell suckered us in.

After a very satisfying snack, we went back to the theater to pick up the tickets from the box office. I have to say that we were not impressed with the theater organization. There was a “line” to get the tickets but, once we were almost at the head of it, some overly-polished junior manager-type told everybody that they had to go outside and line along the outer wall of the theater. So of course everybody rushed out and we? were stuck at the back of the new line. So this message goes to the management of the Apollo Victoria theater: fuck you, you suck!

The show itself was fun. I had to real expectations or idea what the show would be like. It was really fun because it took the well-known Judy Garland story and turned it on its head. The wicked witch of the west is actually a very nice girl with a kick-ass signing voice. I had two critiques about the show. The first is that some of the musical numbers with the whole cast were very loud and musically un-coordinated (and the acoustics of the place aren’t ideal). The second critique has nothing to do with the show and all to do with the stupidly big party of stupidly big (and loud, annoying, smelly and generally unpleasant) asian lads that monopolized the seats in front and next to us. They just made the experience less pleasant than it could have been.

The nordic girl sitting next to me who showed me half her butt when she got up at the end of the show was an unexpected bonus though (her jeans had ridden down something fierce!).

We got back home, had prawn, bacon and pea risotto for dinner and Katy is now inflicting some weird documentary about speed eaters and how they can train for their competitions. They mentioned a woman who ate 64 eggs in 6 minutes. What we have here is a failure to communicate, indeed ;)

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yawm!, and ow!

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After more than 3 years of working at the EBI, I finally have an office inside the main building. I’m of mixed feelings about this. I’m going to miss the air conditioning and the water cooler but I’m not going to miss having to go out in the rain to go to the loo. In the process of moving to our new office, we had to move some desks around and I managed to magnificently squish my thumb between a metal desk and a door frame. The nail is turning a nice shade of purple and it hurts like a mofo but at least the swelling is going down.

It’s going to be a long day today. Katy had to be at work for 7am and that meant getting up at 6:30. We were both rather braindead over our cheerios this morning and I don’t see it getting any better during the day.

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I love nasty nasty house music

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In fact, I don’t.

Katy and I went to the gym on sunday to try and get back into the exercise groove. The grunter was there when we arrived. There are several stereotypical gym members: the poser, the socialite, the fitness nut. We had to endure the grunter this weekend. You know the type: every move that is made by the grunter seems to require tremendous force and the only way to get it done is to make an obscene amount of noise, as though extracting strength from the air itself. Decidedly unpleasant. The atmosphere in the gym really wasn’t helped by the grunter’s choice in music. The post title was the only lyric in a song that lasted well over 10 minutes. At least he left shortly after we arrived, so we managed to get a decent workout with decent music.

We had a nice weekend, generally. I mowed the grass (while it was still less than a foot high – unheard of!) and Katy met the midwife assigned to her for the first time on saturday (about 6 weeks later than she should have, but no harm done) and we went into town on sunday to do a bit of shopping (I bought new frying pans, yaaaaaaaaay!) and to catch a movie. We watched Wanted. Some people don’t like it but I found that, even though it’s a no-brainer and that bits of it are far-fetched and/or predictable, I was thoroughly entertained for 2 hours so it’s all good in my books.

I made coq au vin for dinner and prepared some prepared some tandoori chicken, which was left marinading overnight for tonight’s dinner. Besides that, not a whole lot happened. The cats got fuss, the fish still need cleaning out and all is generally well in the world.

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Silver Cross and Bad Wolf

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We’re in Leicester this weekend to celebrate Katy’s un-birthday. We went ’round to meet up with Pam and Justin, two of Katy’s friends from way back who have recently had a little boy (he made page 3 of the Leics Mercury for being the 1st baby born in the hospital at the beginning of this year). We had a nice 5-hour chat about baby stuff, religion, politics and why shopping has replaced organized religion in Britain. It was a really relaxed afternoon and I really enjoyed myself. Ethan is a cutie. As it turns out, I’d correctly remembered that Pam had the same sort of pram/pushchair that we’re considering getting and we got some really good first-hand feedback. We had a test drive of the pram and found out that it will fit nicely in our car boot. That’s made up our mind and we’re going to be ordering it off tinternet soon.

It was really weird, and I can’t explain it very well, but I had the strongest case of deja-vu that I’ve had in a very long time while we were chatting in their sitting room; as well as the weirdest feeling that everything would be all right. Completely mental, I know, but there you go.

We stopped at Kubek on the way back to Katy’s parents’ house. They had a sale going on, though sadly the 4-poster bed we’ve been lusting after for the past 2 years wasn’t reduced and is still £1000 and therefore completely out of budget. One day… one day… it will be ours.

In completely unrelated news, tonight’s episode of Dr. Who has me positively giddy with anticipation for next week’s season finale. It promises to be most impressive, nail-biting, awe-inspiring grandiose explosion of goodness. I can’t wait.

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The green, green grass of home

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We cut the grass this weekend.

We had to.

It was becoming shameful.

I’ve seen hay fields that has shorter grasses. Katy has seen meadows that were less densely packed.

If you left the lawnmower in the middle of the grass, you could only see the top of the handlebar. It took about two hours to get everything done and even then, I stopped counting the number of times I had to restart the engine because it cut out.

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Weekend update

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Tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiired.

We went to Leics this weekend to see Katy’s parents. Donna and Will came up on Saturday to collect the fish from Mel’s pond (he wanted to get rid of it and they bagged all the fish, plants and rocks for their own pond). Katy had a nice chat with Rita and we all enjoyed Pam’s curries on Saturday night (though we suffered the following days – gotta love those chillies).

We came back to Cambs Sunday evening after depriving Mel of even more fish – the aquarium ones this time. We got half a dozen plants and about a dozen fish for ours, which finally make it seem nice and populated now. Best news is that none of them were floating upside-down this morning. See how the next few days go.

The weather is really starting to heat up hereabouts. They’re forecasting 24 today. I already miss winter.

Plans are going forward for our trip to Canada at the end of the month. We have the hotels booked for Montreal and Quebec. We only need to book the Hilton and arrange transportation across all the cities. This should get done this week.

We need to get the tires looked at on the car. It would seem that the alignment or the tracking is off because the wear pattern is off and they seem to be balding on one side more than the other. This is going to prove fun to do because of English law – if the tires are deemed unsafe, we can’t drive it off the lot but at the same time this is our only car and Katy needs it to drive to work. Fun.

Did I mention that we’re both tired?

We are.

I can only hope that the coming weeks don’t kill us for the vacation and that the time we spend in Canada is fun and uneventful.

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It seemed very important at the time

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I’ve mentioned before that I’m in the process of moving my blog to WordPress. This has caused some inconvenience to some of you because of a pop-up asking for a password when you loaded your friends page (as a side note, this has been fixed).

The reason there was a password request in the first place is that when I imported all of my 2000+ LJ posts, WordPress set them all to public by default. A few of those were private, and about 200 of the rest were friends-only. I’ve been going through all the locked posts to see which ones I need to reset as private. Surprisingly, a lot of them don’t need it any more. A lot of them dealt with old jobs, old dates and other things of that nature.

It’s been rather eye-opening to reread a lot of this stuff. Sometimes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Also, I don’t believe how emo and whiny I was only 3 years ago :)

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