Progress day 3

Half a couch - screw set was found to be incomplete

Bed frame with the wrong slats so can't put the mattress on

2nd bedroom sofabed is a wonder though , as Keith lounges on it! (yay no more sleeping on foam mattress on floor!)

Back to ikea we go tmw to exchange slats and get screws. And to the furniture store that sold us a bench with a rip on the side. After we already returned a Samsung galaxy 3 that was defective. I guess when u buy a lot of crud, some of it is bound to not work.

Ooh and here's a shot of me drinking a tiny overflowing tumbler of wine at Rodney's Oyster House. Yum oysters

Progress - both fast and slow

Sorry for the lack of updates lately!!

Since Keith arrived last Thursday it has been absolutely manic. We went to the Ahlborns' beautiful wedding of course, and even brought along my bridesmaid bouquet and some of the flowers from centerpieces along to pick up keys to our new rented flat. They are now the only pretty thing in the place and completely surrounded by chaos!!!

That first day the flat looked nice and tranquil and now it looks like some boxes ate it. Added to our UK shipment are a billion boxes from Ike's that we got delivered today.

As u can see, the first day there was the progress of one chair and a lot of boxes to unpack.

On day 2, the progress of the chair is literally and figuratively hidden by the Ikea invasion.

... And I keep wanting to buy more stuff. Next step, 46" TV.

The Tintiweb is magic

It's my niece's 7th birthday next week and she had her birthday parties this weekend (yes, plural). I asked my sister what my niece would want for her birthday, since she gets so many presents and already has so many toys and art supplies (she loves drawing).

My sister asked me to get her some chapter books that are a little more grown up but still have drawings and short chapters that they can read a chapter at a time before bedtime.

Have I said this before? I LOVE BOOKS.

I especially loved books when I was a kid.The library was only a 5 minute walk down the street and I would go there on a regular basis with a big cloth bag and come home lumbered with books. I remember one summer we went to Hong Kong and my carry on for the 12 hour flight was a dozen paperbacks, most of them Baby Sitters Club books. I used to spend my recesses in Grade 4. That probably was taking it too far. I probably should have been getting some fresh air or something. But I didn't. I just wanted to read my books.



So I tried to think of all my favourite books around that age. I ended up getting her the the first out of the Ramona Quimby series, as well as the first of The Mouse and the Motorcycle series. Both are by Beverly Cleary, which I'd completely forgotten! I also wanted to get The Cricket in Times Square by George Selden, but that wasn't stocked by Chapters. The whole section reminded me how old I was, given it was stocked with these fairy ballerina series and a whole shelf of stuff by some guy named Stilton. What is all that stuff?

But what it got me thinking about was one of the books I'd gotten at the school Scholastic bookfairs when I was 10 or so (not quite appropriate for my niece and nephew yet but it goes on the list for future) but all I could remember was the following:

1) it had a brown cover
2) it was about time travel by two kids
3) the time travel had something to do with an old house

That didn't leave a lot to go on, but this afternoon I suddenly remembered:

4) someone was stuck in a birdcage elevator

so I googled "time travel birdcage elevator novel" and the miracle of the internet is that someone had asked a similar question on a forum in goodreads!!! By that random far-fetched search I was able to determine that this book I was after is called Voices After Midnight by Richard Peck!

What did people do back in the day when you couldn't google random crap like this? did they just go crazy wondering and never find out?

Beam me up!

After a beautiful wedding (which led to 10000 hugs handed out by Keith and whoa vomit #2 by me) with lots of crazy dancing, two visits to a brand new baby Paige (who I held for two hours and then got a sore arm, to which my mother expressed some concern over my potential mothering abilities), and just a few nights at the pub which were fun as ever, my London week is over and I am back in Vancouver. Siiiiigh

Thankfully we have a long weekend in Canada as kids prepare themselves to go back to school.

That means the last day of the Pacific National Exhibition, a fair of sorts with performances and, what do you know, exhibits. On the menu, a Star Trek exhibition!!! Of course I was in, as I often express, I am a fan of all things Star related except for Star Wars.

It was mostly pretty cool, with the costumes and a timeline that I have decided I need to have as my living room wallpaper, but the best part was the recreated sets with official photo ops (ka-ching ka-ching)

i can't figure out how to rotate that second photo so just tilt your head sideways.

Ta da!!!!
My conversation with Keith when I emailed him these pictures with just the headers Engage! and Beam me up! went as follows:

K: what the heck? Where were u?
M: Why, on the Enterprise, of course!
K: no but WHERE were u?
M: in SPACE Keith it's the starship Enterprise!
K: grrrrrrrrr!

Please note that is a Tribble that my friend Stef is cradling. But that was the only trivia that she knew more than me due to catching the Tribble episode on rerun in a hotel on a business trip. Hahaha!

Well now that we are on the same topic I might as well show u all my photos from the London Harry Potter studio tour, which I highly recommend because they have taken the care to lay it out with lots of additional info, in clear displays, with extra commentary and insight front the actors!! Love it!!

Cool eyelashes

On a car!

More updates on London so far later, but in the meantime check out the cool stylin' on this car we walked by yesterday !

Last thought on NYC

Am now in London!!! It is wet! Before I launch into my week of cold wet fun here in London I will share one last NYC experience - Doughnut Plant in the Lower East Side. Drrooool.

And don't say New Yorkers are mean and unfriendly because my preggers friend Karen was standing there watching them pack her box of doughnuts which she had already paid for when she offhandedly lamented that she meant to get a pistachio one and had forgotten. The girl packing said do you want a pistachio? I can get one for you! And Karen said oh thank you, is it the same price as any of the others I chose so you can just replace it? And the girl said no I will just give you the pistachio one for free as a pregnancy present. Nice! Milk that pregnancy! I told her we must go into every shop after that and try that trick.

Washington DC

Lost track of what day it is. Vacations are great that way aren't they? Until you lose track so badly you don't realise you have to go back to work. But no matter! Nowhere near that yet, one more city to get to first, one more country to hop to!

In the meantime, the good folks at Amtrak are providing me free wifi to blog from while I ride the 3.5 hour train from Washington DC back to New York. What were we doing in Washington DC? Well this whole trip is mini reunion of ex-London KPMG friends, all of whom transferred from around the world to London KPMG in September 2005. I am not sure when we gathered in that fateful training in Basingstoke (was not impressed. Really not impressed) that we even fathomed that we would stay in touch for 7 years. We all thought we would be in London for about 2 years, and indeed, over time, many have departed London on schedule, and so we have started spreading ourselves all over the world. Of the 6 of us that met up again this week, we came from Toronto, Vancouver, Atlanta, NYC, and Sydney. Now, years later, between us there are 3 new Masters degrees (and three new non accounting careers) and three of my friends have not returned home but instead done stints in South Sudan, Michigan, Washington DC, Ottawa, finally settling for the next while in DC and NYC. So when I left London to return to my roots in May and Emma left London to return to Sydney last week, we decided a party in DC/NYC was necessary to mark the occasion.

I didn't see too much in DC in the last two days but that was absolutely fine by me given I know I will be back again sometime because Keith is a geek and there's no way he would want to miss DC altogether. But we did spend 3.5 hours in the American History Museum and I now know more about American presidency facts than I do about the Canadian Prime Ministers (not a difficult bar set there). Uncultured me found the First Ladies dresses one of the best exhibits, and also Julia Child's kitchen. Oh and the Star Spangled Banner, the original one that flew over the fort in Baltimore when the Americans defended it from British invasion in the late 1810's. Raggedy. It inspired the song that is the American national anthem today. I must admit I like that song. Very emotion welling. (Also always reminds me of the fictional Ramona Quimby of the children's books by Beverly Cleary who thought the words were "dawnzer lee light", concluded a dawnzer must be a lamp, and then embarrassingly asked her dad to please turn the dawnzer on. Oh the things that stay in your brain sometimes)

Today we went for a lovely brunch then attempted to walk around but it was too hot so managed to see the White House, the Washington monument, but not really the Lincoln memorial. It did inspire Emma to recommend that I read Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter which I promptly downloaded , sounds like a good airplane read for Friday!!

Signing off with a few photos - the Julia Child kitchen, me at the White House (where I kept recommending to Sara as if, as the American of the group, it is up to her to make such improvements that they should fly the flag only when Obama is in residence like they do with the Queen), a plaque commemorating the friendship between America and Canada and as symbolized by Sara and I, and a DC metro station which I think is quite purty.