Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Hey everyone, sorry for being quiet over the holidays. Hope you all enjoyed yours and were able to re-energise for the new year.

I really enjoyed mine. I was in Canada for two weeks at the bf's family. We met up with lots of his friends and family and also managed to squeeze in some lazy time. We did absolutely nothing touristy or note-worthy. All family and friends visits. A little party for New Year's Eve, some shopping (I love Old Navy), got me some jeans, sweatpants and a nice top. And by nice I mean comfy. Actually both of us bought so many clothes that we had to stuff some into our hand luggage as our suitcase was too heavy. Ups.

Flight home started very interesting. We left the gate. And about ten minutes later had an announcement that we would pull back to the gate to let off a sick passenger. Turns out he was sitting just five rows ahead of us. After he left one of the flight attendants cleaned up after him. I kid you not, she removed about six to seven of those little brown paper bags. Felt very sorry for the two people sitting next to him. The bf is now very worried that it was the noro virus and we will be sick too. Fingers crossed that he just had a bad stomach. 

But now we are back home and back to work tomorrow. Sigh. Wish holidays could last forever!!!!

Loooooooooong week over!

Feel like I just survived my first crazy week at work. It was London Book Fair. Even though I only attended one day and one party I felt absolutely crushed the rest of the week. I was there on Monday standing for the most part of 5 hours. I don't know about you guys, but standing is the worst. Walking is fine. But standing around just makes my back hurt. The party afterwards was fun, but more standing!

When I came to work on Tuesday my body was really telling me that it should be Friday or at least Thursday. Everyone at work felt the same. But of course we had a book launch that day, so more drinking in the evening!

Wednesday was pretty quiet. I like quiet days. But I had my Japanese class in the evening. So didn't make it home before 10pm either. 

Thursday I met up with a friend for dinner and drinks. She is here on a visit from the States for our graduation weekend. We went out for Asian food. I had this beauty: Tamarind aubergines:

I was so happy when it was finally Friday. I was supposed to go for drinks on Friday as well, but was so tired that I went straight home to sit on my beloved couch. Yay!

Saturday was shopping day. The bf and I went out early so we could have breakfast first. I went for French Toast. I was delicious, served with yogurt, bananas and berries.

BF went for English breakfast:

And I had a nice smoothie:

After we started shopping. Which was a complete fail. Every item I wanted they either didn't have in my size or it was gone from their line. Urgh. Should not go shopping with specific pieces in mind. But I did go to the optician and complained about my new glasses. Everything is blurry when I look through them and I have to tilt my head back for things to come into focus. They checked them and sure enough they put the most focused spot on the glasses about half a centimetre too low. Sigh. Now I'll have to wait for them to order in new glasses and cut them to my specifications. Which means I won't get them before my holiday. But the nice things about this is that the holiday is coming on super quickly. Squeaaak!  Less than a week to go. I feel like I should make more plans than just having a guide book. hmm, I'm sure we'll find something to do once in Japan.

Hurray!

Back in London, alive and kicking

We made it back in one piece. Our flight took off early in Bremen and we landed in foggy London way before schedule. We had left Stansted airport just about an hour after take off. Sweet!

Christmas time at my parents' place was fun. Unfortunately because of our delay I didn't have as much time to visit people as I would have liked. I was planning to make cookies, a wreath, do some shopping, meet friends and family before Christmas. Well, that didn't happen. Since I got robbed of three days I only managed to bake a cake (much quicker than cookies). Managed to make it lactose-free as my sister's boyfriend is allergic. But that was about it. My sisters plus husband/boyfriend and brother arrived the day after me and then we were busy catching up, drinking mulled wine and eating cookies (my older sister was kind enough to bring a ton of really yummy cookies that she baked).

The weather didn't really change. It was freezing, about -10 degrees Celsius at night and -5 during the day. The snow stayed the whole time I was there (white Christmas hurray) and it even snowed a bit more. Grandma, grandpa and an aunt came over for Christmas Eve. We had lots of cake and presents in the evening. Was really nice and relaxing. The next day my Mom even made chicken (she hates cooking), potatoes and vegetables. In the evening I went to a friend's birthday party for a few hours and then had to drive on to another friend's birthday party. Since I can remember they would always have their party on the same day (well, they were both born on the same day, but still, gimme a break). I did not like the driving at 40km/h on icy roads in between their homes. But what can you do. Really enjoyed meeting my friends and old classmates. Bf stayed home as he was still sick.

The next couple of days I hung out with my family and a good friend of mine came over for tea. We managed to catch up, but she had to leave early for more Christmas festivities. I enjoyed catching up with everyone, but I wish I had more time. Everything felt really rushed and sometimes forced because I was on a 'timer'.

Let's hope the next flight will be without volcanoes or snow. I'm all for something pretty uneventful and boring.

Btw, the TV was fixed one hour before we left for the airport. My brother-in-law managed to tickle it back to life. Kinda glad we missed that though. My sister went straight in front of it and couldn't be coaxed away again. Come to think of it, I really don't watch that much TV any more. But I do waste a lot of time on my laptop. I guess that's not really better...

Let's play catch-up!

I'm back! Hurray, hurray! We made it back ok despite ash cloud and everything. They shut down the airports the day before we travelled but re-opened them for us. We felt very special. ;-)  Not only let they back into the country, Air Canada was especially nice to us and we had our own check-in counter. When we walked into the terminal we went over to the international counters. The lines were loooong. But then we noticed one empty counter. For some reason, the London flights get their own counter while everybody else has to go to the normal ones. Sweet deal. We were the only ones there and could check-in immediately. This is what it must feel like to book business.

But let's go back to the beginning of our trip. At the airport before we left at the gate next to us was a Dreamliner. Now I am not a techno geek, but that plane looked impressive. It doesn't really show in the picture, but trust me, it is BIG.

Enough about planes though. The first weekend we were in Toronto. On Saturday we went to a birthday dinner at Ki, a Japanese restaurant. The food was delicious especially the dessert. I had ice-cream: green tea, red bean, and black sesame. Originally I was most excited about the green tea, which turned out to be really nice, but the real surprise was the black sesame. It was so good! Tasted like roasted sesame, but colder and sweeter. Hard to describe. The red bean ice-cream was good too, the sweetest out of the bunch. They complemented each other well. Would love to have some today as it is sunny outside!

The next day was mother's day so we went out to visit bf's mom and aunt. Picked up a wedding cake book on the way there. bf's mom is retired but as a hobby she started to make wedding cakes. She loved her present, it had blue-prints for flower patterns and the like in the back. You could see how she was already planning to incorporate those into her next cakes.

After the weekend we took it easy. The weather was not really nice, rain, wind, cold. So we opted to stay in most of the time and hung out and read and watched TV. Very relaxing. One of the days we met up with bf's mom and aunt again and had some nice lunch. Another day we used to go shopping. We picked up some more books since we were finishing ours too quickly. When the weather was good we went on nice little walks. Good times. Sorry, no pictures. Just not good at that.

But on Friday we made our way to the Waterloo-Kitchener area for the wedding. Checked into our really nice hotel in the afternoon. bf booked us a suite because it didn't really cost more than a normal double room. It turned out to be much bigger than our actual apartment! Sweet. Our friends' had put a gift bag into our 'living room'. Had a bottle of wine and all kinds of sweets and nuts in there! We ended up leaving most of those with bf's dad, but I really appreciated it. Was a lovely gesture. 

Our lovely hotel in Kitchener. I loved the town. Used to have a lot of German immigrants so a lot of place names are German.

Unfortunately we didn't have that much time to enjoy our huge suite. We made our way to the formal wear shop to pick up bf's suit. Stupid buggers ordered the vest in the wrong size so we ended up having to come back the next day just before the wedding to pick that up. Stupid. And then we basically headed straight for the rehearsal. The church they picked was a little bit outside of the city. The part was called St. Jacobs. Had a lot of little shops and cafes. I loved it there. When we were there on Friday evening it was really empty. But the next day it was packed. Must be one of those weekend spots were all the city people end up going relaxing on the weekend. There was an ice-cream place across the street that I wanted to try, but there was no time.

Everything went well and we went to a nice restaurant for dinner. It was really laid back no speeches or anything. The one thing we did was we had two big glass jars where we threw in papers with instructions. One for the bride one for the groom. Some of them were chores, like 'You should always bring out the garbage', others were 'On football Sunday you shall always make chicken wings and have beer around'. Things like this. We wrote the instructions during dinner and they read them out afterwards. Good fun. The food was good, but again it was the dessert that stood out to me. It was white chocolate cheesecake with a berry sauce. The amazing thing was that the cheesey part of the cake was wrapped in a really thin dough and it looked like it was deep-fried. The cake itself then was really fluffy and creamy. Heaven! I think some people went out after dinner for drinks, but we wanted to preserve our energy and went back to the hotel. 

Pina Colada! Yum, yum.

One of three bouquets. There were also three tables. Coincidence?

Amazing cheesecake. See how the dough is wrapped around it. It's really crisp too.

The next day we had a nice breakfast (bagel) and then went for a walk. Had to waste a little bit of time before we could pick up the vest. I think we got dressed just after noon and drove over to the hotel were the groom stayed. bf went up and they took tons of pictures with all the best men. I just hung out in the bar and read and had a drink. After that it was straight to church. Positioned myself in one of the front rows to take pictures. bf was in the wedding party so I kinda had to spend some time on my own. The fun part was that the bride's grandparents sat right next to me. I overheard them speaking in German so I figured might as well be a little sociable and get to know people. Let's just say they were delighted to find another German in the building. Had a really nice conversation with them. They told me about them immigrating to Canada about 50 years ago (wow) and then we started talking about my bf because they knew him from when he was in High School. So I got some nice stories. 

So I was well entertained in the time we waited for all the wedding parties to show up. The bride was fashionably late. But everything else went smoothly. The ceremony was nice and short. We has some good laughs when the bride messed up some of her lines and was really cute about it. For those who are interested, the bridemaids all wore black dresses that they got themselves and all carried little windmills with them. The groomsmen all wore black suits and had a little windmill attached where you usually would put a flower. Some were green some were yellow. The bride had a black and white one. No bouquets. After church we went out into the fields for the pictures. The bridesmaids got to wear green shawls for that. The wind was really strong and it was freezing because of that even though the sun was shining. They also took pictures in an apple orchard and in front of apple crates. Can't wait to see those. I think they will turn out really nice.

One of the orchard that pictures were taken in.

Wellies for the bride. She was the only one prepared to step out into the fields.

See how windy it is. There is a windmill somewhere on the left side. This is the only pictures I felt comfortable posting with people in it. I didn't ask anybody's permission to post them on my blog (since none of them know I have one). How do you deal with that? I saw some wedding pictures on blogs that I read and they always included people. Do you ask for permission first or just post away?

That probably took over an hour to get all the pictures. We then went back to the hotel to drop off the car and took a cab over to the reception. It was a the Canadian glass institute or something like that. Glass and ceramics pieces everywhere, I was little bit scared that I would break things, but luckily these were only in the reception area. The actual dinner area was clear of any breakable things, well except for the dinnerware.

Reception area. See the lovely baby clothes on the top?

What I thought was really neat were the place markers. Every place had an old book on it with a bookmark and a name. They made the bookmarks themselves and had a picture of them on there and the wedding details. Really neat. And I love books, so obviously I was smitten. The dinner was really nice, but again, I loved the dessert. It was chocolate pudding/mousse. Really creamy with some whipped cream and strawberries. Delicious! The photographers were there too. They had some goofy props with them so people took funny pictures. There was lots of dancing and drinking. It was a really lovely evening. I also liked that the couple had given out lists with hotels that most people ended up staying in and they then organised buses at different times that took people back to the hotels. That's how we got home, on the last bus. Very convenient. 

The pot in the middle contains some yellow tulips.

The wedding cake(s)

Little windmill for the guys. The ones the girls carried were much bigger.

The next day we met up with some friends and had a big brunch. After that we dropped of the suit and went back to Toronto. We visited some family before heading back to bf's dad. Monday was really filled with packing and moping around. bf's dad and stepmom had taken the day off to spend some time with us plus it was bf's stepmom's birthday. bf's mom picked us up in the afternoon and drove us to the airport. I must say I loved our vacation but it should have been longer. I didn't get over my jet-lag till almost the end of the week and then it was basically already time to go home. We got back into London on Tuesday morning. After unpacking and doing laundry we planned to take a short nap and then do some grocery shopping. Well, that never happened. We went to bed at 10am and didn't wake up till 4.30pm. Upsi. Yeah, basically had dinner then since we hadn't eaten anything yet. I wanted to go to bed early then but wasn't tired. Ended up going to bed at midnight but couldn't sleep. Work the next day was hell, I just couldn't keep my eyes open. Thursday was alright and now I am over it. Ah I think I am getting older. Body doesn't handle it that well anymore.

While we are on that subject. It was my birthday on Thursday. So we went out for pizza that night. Lovely food. I got some nice things at work. A voucher for a bookstore (bf said, oh no, not more books!), some nice tea, cider and chocolates! Good stuff. I mentioned once at work that I don't like to receive presents that cannot be used up or just serve decorative purposes. Somebody listened (thank you) and now I get things I really love. bf listened too. A nice package from Amazon arrived yesterday and I got some nice manga, that he knew I was looking for, and New Super Mario Brothers Wii! Yay. Haven't played it yet (since I thought I better catch up on my blog) but will definitely do today. Really excited about this one.

This blogpost is getting much longer than I attended. Apologies. I just wanted to get it all out of the way. Even though I enjoyed the vacation I am glad to be back. The weather turned really nice. It's sunny and warm. bf feels a little sick today, but I will be going grocery shopping in a bit and enjoy the weather on the way. You should do the same!

And here for the people who are interested:

Me! I ended up not wearing any of the jewellery, only the red hair-tie with the flower. Felt very comfortable like that though.

We made it!

We finally arrived in Canada. It wasn't the smoothest flight I had hoped for. The plane we were supposed to fly on arrived late so we didn't start boarding till noon which was supposed to be our take-off time. They rushed us all into the plane, which was fine by me. But after being on it for a bit they announced that we had missed our take-off window and had to wait two and a  half hours for the next, but since they hoped to squeeze us in sometime before that we weren't allowed to leave the plane.

Luckily they had the entertainment system on so we could start to watch some movies. I think we ended up taking off at two o'clock, so really we were just waiting for over an hour in the plane. Still annoying. Next surprise was the ever present ash cloud. Some UK airports were actually closed the day before. So we had to take a little detour over Spain and Portugal instead of heading straight over Ireland and Iceland. That added another hour to our flight time.

I really don't wanna complain too much though. The staff was really nice and they hurried out drinks for us and once we were airborne they ushered out the food. One nice thing was because we came in so late bf's dad was able to pick us up at the airport instead of taking a cab or *gasp* public transport. Got a nice Tim Hortons double double and off we were.

Next treat they gave us was some really nice sushi. Loved it. Pretty much went to bed straight after because I was exhausted.

Today is reserved for a birthday. We will go to a Japanese restaurant to celebrate. LOL. I love it! Good trip so far!

Things I love Thursday...

Check out this blog for the idea.

1. Having a beer on a Thursday evening! Whoot, whoot. And watching 'The Hangover'.
2. Going to Canada tomorrow. 
3. Election in the UK. Even though I wasn't allowed to vote in the general election I at least was allowed to cast my vote in the local.
4. Suitcase and hand luggage is packed. Only need to add stuff in the morning and then we are off.
5. New books. I had a voucher £5 off at WH Smith when spending more than 15. So I grabbed two books, found out at the till that they were 'buy one get one half price' so I got another one to get over the £15 to save some money. Love buying books. The more the better.
6. Potato wedges.

Don't know when I'll be able to post next. Can't wait to leave tomorrow. Wish us luck with the ash cloud. Some UK airports were closed yesterday. Today it was all fine, so fingers crossed for tomorrow.

Easter Pictures

There are not that many Easter pictures. I wanted to take a lot on the actual Easter egg hunt. But then it poured rain in the morning so my parents decided there would be no hunt. Very disappointed. I remember when I was a kid that it happened a few times, but then we at least got to hunt for eggs in our living room. They didn't even bother waking me and bf and my sister and husband. So disappointed. I would have hidden the eggs for my nephew! Ah well, I am going to let it slide.

There are also no pictures from the Easter fire. Same reason pretty much. We didn't stay outside too long. Only a couple of hours and half the time we were hiding under a canopy my dad had put up for that reason. I love staring into the fire when it burns down, but this year it wasn't really meant to be. We had some nice hot cappuccino inside though and cuddled in the living room with the dogs and had some quality canasta games. Didn't do that in a looooong time. That made up for the disappointing weather. 

Let's get to the pictures I actually have. Here our eggs are boiling slowly in the pot. I think we boiled almost 30 eggs.

This is the color we used. It's cold color. Just has to be mixed with some water and vinegar. Throw in the still hot eggs...

... et voilà Easter eggs!

Here are about half our eggs. Don't you just love looking at them? We polished them with some sunflower oil.

This is a 1.3kg chocolate bunny that my sister got for my dad. Oh my gosh, it is just so huge, don't know how he is going to finish that. My mom tried to sneak it into my bags to take home, but I didn't have any of that.

These are already the most exciting pictures. There are countless pics of my mom's dogs. We counted 12 at the moment. But who knows, that it changing constantly. She actually sold a puppy last Saturday, but kept one of them. They are Tibetian Spaniels. The cutest things. Sometimes I wish I had a dog too. But that would be too cruel to have it in our studio flat. Here she is. Little Bina Colada. Yeah, yeah, stupid name. I call her Biene (bee). Much nicer.

She looks much cuter in real life. I'm not really good at taking pictures. 

Here you can see her face a little bit better. I wanted to get a frontal view, because she has a brown patch over one eye and then the rest of her face is mainly white. Ah well, next time. But then she will be a big dog!

That's pretty much it. Hope everyone enjoyed their Easter holidays!

Happy Easter!

I am enjoying my time in Germany so far. Already going home tomorrow. Can't believe how time is flying. Easter was fun. Most of the family was here. We had the Easter fire on Saturday and a BBQ. Unfortunately the weather wasn't that good. We kept getting rain showers. It was still fun, but let's hope we will get much better weather next year. I am not even expecting spring, just some sun and no rain would be brilliant. 

I met a couple of friends. On Friday we went to see a good friend of mine in Oldenburg. She just started her first job after university and moved into a new flat. While there we found out that her landlord is my uncle! The world is so small. It was really funny. She just noticed that he had the same last name as me and basically everyone with that name in a radius of about 200km is related to me. No, the family is not that big, but the name seems to be rather uncommon in this area of Germany.

Then yesterday two friends of mine came by in the evening. I also know them from school and we graduated together. One of them is just getting settled in his job. He works in the south of Lower Saxony at church and is basically responsible for their social activities, especially youth work, and their public relations. It sounded like a really good and fun job when he talked about it. 

My other friend just handed in his thesis. He just has to take a few more exams and then he will be done with university too. He is studying East Asian Studies and he has spent some time in China. I think he is pretty fluent in Chinese. He loves it there and wants to go back once he is done. Either for an internship or for his first job. I really hope he will make it there. He absolutely loves it. When he was there he stayed in a city in the south and enjoyed the mild winters and hot summers. So apparently he had enough of Northern Germany's rainy climate and is running away as well. Very exciting. Definitely would love to visit him when he goes back to China. 

My sister came over the weekend with her husband and son and stepson. Those two had fun. They are 7 and 9 years old and were outside the whole time building 'tree houses' and just generally getting into a lot of trouble.

We are going home tomorrow morning and are just planning to chill the rest of the day. Can't wait. Even though we haven't been that active I am really tired and not happy about having to go back to work on Wednesday at all. 

Anyway, hope you all had a nice Easter holiday.

Weekend Post

Oh I have been bad. Haven't posted for over a week! I am very sorry about that. Don't really have an excuse. I was off work for most of the time. Took all but Friday half-day off work. My holiday period ends at the end of this months so I had to take the last days I had otherwise they would expire. Of course I couldn't let that happen. So I enjoyed almost a whole week off.

The week was great. For once the weather changed to the better, it is mild now. Almost spring-like. A little bit of rain, but I didn't mind at all since I chose to spend most of my time in the house anyway. I played a good part of Final Fantasy XIII. Really enjoying that. I can't believe that I didn't manage to finish it this week, but I am not complaining. This way it will keep me occupied for longer and I will enjoy it for a bit longer. 

Also got some reading done though I am thinking that it will mostly happen when I go home next week. Being at my parents place usually gives me some downtime. Though I will try to visit some people. Family of course since it is a holiday but also some old friends from high school. There should be some around. Really excited to meet one of the girls I graduated with. She got a job at a city council really close to where we went to school. I think it's a really good job and she's very excited. Can't wait to hear all about that. There may be some of my old crew in town so I might be able to meet up with them. But most of them are scattered all over Germany so I might not get a chance to see them all. I hope I can rectify that over this Christmas period. Because my special project is moving along nicely I think I will be able to take Christmas off this year and go home! That would be the first time in three years. This makes me über-excited about this year. I will probably get to explain about my secret project in the next month or so. I am just waiting on a final confirmation message. But the guy I am supposed to get that from is on holiday at the moment so I just have to be patient a little bit longer. *sigh* I can be a very patient person, but for things like that I want security and I want to know what's happening ASAP. So this is a bit trying on me and my bf. But he bears it with grace. And the waiting should be over soon *fingers crossed*.

Not much else to report. I have been trying to be good and stay in touch with far away friends. But I do have to admit that I find it very hard. It's not that I don't care. I do, it's just that I feel that I don't really have anything to say and then I don't want to call and only write texts bla bla bla. But that said, I actually managed to go on skype and talk to a girl I went to uni with. Was great fun, we had a lot of catching up to do. It's very exciting to see where everyone ends up after graduation. We don't all graduate together. The way my degree was built people could graduate at any time, speeding it up or dragging the process along. So I basically graduated by myself. Which was ok but everyone is at different stages now and it's harder to keep up. Have to keep tabs on people.

Otherwise nothing exciting happened. We are trying to get train tickets to go to the Yorkshire wedding. We figure if we book early we get them cheaper. Which is key. One of the reasons I stayed home during my week off was not to spend any money. There is just absolutely no money left in my account. After I paid the ticket to Canada and the one to Germany my account is basically empty. Pay day cannot come soon enough.

Tomorrow and Monday I have to work and then on Tuesday I will catch my too early flight home. Very excited. Tickets are printed out and on the table next to my laptop. Just have to throw some things into my backpack on Monday and I am ready to go. Yup, no suitcase for me. That would be too expensive on Ryanair, plus my flight leaves so early that if I had to check in I might miss it. Almost happened to me once. Not taking a risk now.

Gonna bugger off and keep playing my game. Would prefer to go out and drinking but that has to wait until there is more dough to spend...

Going to Canada

Finally booked our flight to Canada in May. We are attending a friend's wedding. I cannot wait for that. Should be great fun. We fly in the week before so should catch all the pre-wedding action. This year is the year of marriages. That will be the second one and there is a third on the horizon in June.

Now just have to gather up all the money to pay bf back. Actually had problems paying online. The issuer held the payment for some reason. So we had to call and tell them to be so kind to release the money so we can book the flight. Weird.

Fun thing is I think we are booked in on the exact same flight times that we took in December. I liked them. Noon departure and afternoon arrival and on the way back evening departure and early, early morning arrival. Probably will spend most of that day catching up on sleep since I have to go to work the next day. Sigh.

But so excited!!! Can't wait to go. Only two more months to go!

New Year, new Post

Happy New Year everyone!

Hope you all spent your holidays with family and loved ones. I am back from Canada where I spent Christmas with my bf family. We had a good time. Stayed most of the two weeks in Toronto and the last few days in its suburbs. It was freezing cold and we had snow. I enjoyed that so much. Really like a good cold winter. One of the first things I did was buy a proper winter jacket. I think it's for skiing. Very warm and cosy! Love it.

I didn't do that many exciting things. There are basically no photos. All we did was hang out and meet friends and family. Had a lot of good food. Went to a basketball game. I really enjoyed that. We were in the last row, but still had an amazing view. I am always very impressed by the technology and 'show' level at North American sporting events. Half of the time spent there (about three hours) was actually not any game play going on but some sort of entertainment. Don't get me wrong. I like that. I am not such a big sport fan, so the entertainment in between is one of my favorite parts of the games. I was a little bit disappointed in the end. There is a pizza company that sponsors a slice of pizza for every person if the teams scores 100 points or more. With about 20 seconds left the score was up for 98 and Toronto was leading. So instead of going for it and getting us all pizza they opted for the save ending and just kept the ball in possession for the last seconds. Didn't even go for it and threw it at the end. Grrr. Was a bit mad. Ah well, I survived without free pizza. But still, would have been nice. You have to give back to the fans!

Another nice thing I enjoyed was the swimming pool with whirlpool that was in the apartment complex where we stayed. Especially the whirlpool was great at the end of a cold cold day. ;-)

The flight back did not start out too well. It was a couple of days after the Detroit incident and they tightened up security. Shouldn't have affected us since we didn't fly via the States, but I had the distinct impression that there was not enough staff to handle us because they were all busy trying to get people into the States. I think we stood in line for one and a half hours for check-in. They only had half the counters open. Crazy. Well, made it to the plane on time. We were even lucky because there was a duty-free right across from our gate. So at least be could pick up some ice wine and cookies. Ice wine was delicious. Had it for New Years Eve. Very sweet and thick. Like a dessert wine. Yum.

Anyway, back home now. Loved to come back. Made me realise how much I like it here. Home sweet home. Hope you all enjoyed your holidays and are ready to start the new year!

Last day of work post

Tomorrow is my last day of work before the holidays! I can't wait to get it over and done with. Saturday I will get swept away to Canada. Can't wait for that either. BF's Dad sent over some pics and it is snowing. Awesome! Might actually have a white Christmas this year.

I think our flight leaves at noon. But for some reason we 'have' to be at the airport three hours before the flight leaves. So, the plans seems to be to leave at 6am. Uh, I am not convinced. But hey, then I get to hang out at the airport. Get some nice breakfast. Buy some tax-free alcohol (as presents obvs not for myself ;-)

Should be two lazy weeks ahead. Though I am planning to take my bathing suit and possibly get some swimming done. Hm, might keep off some of the holiday pounds. I guess Canadian Christmas food will be delicious. Hoping for lots and lots of it.

Now I need to be off and get some things organised. Though the actual packing won't start till tomorrow after work. Doing everything last minute!

Remember, remember

It's not the 5th of November, I realise that, but we are going to see fireworks today. I hope it will be nice and cold. Which would mean no rain please.