A Very White Christmas

Oh, behold, Christmas is over. And it was really, really lovely.

But let's start from the beginning. I didn't make it over to Av's because London got snowed in the Saturday before Christmas. As in proper snow, not that fizzly stuff that thaws as soon as it hits the ground. I braved the weather to go to the post office to finally collect my work Xmas pressie, then had to witness the local choir murdering some Christmas carols with the help of a totally unqualified guitarist. Arrived home looking like a snow-woman & decided to not go down to South London as the risk of not being able to return home was a big too high for my liking. Instead I huddled up in the house & took a few pictures to prove that we actually had snow in case it disappears again over night.

Well, it didn't. Disappear, that is. Instead it lingered & caused Heathrow to shut down for a good 3 days. Apparently they were unable to clear the runways or whatever, I still don't understand how an airport can be so bloody unprepared. Anyway, a lot of fretting ensued as BA kept canceling flights left right & center, I actually bought flights from Gatwick (which, surprisingly, only shut for a few hours on Saturday & pretty much returned to normal on Monday) just in case & secured a lift by car from a colleague just in case. Yes, I REALLY wanted to go home as the last time I'd seen my parents was sometime early summer.

Inbetween all of this was my second work Xmas party, unfortunately on the evening before I was due to leave so I only stayed for dinner & wasn't around to witness my colleagues getting drunk & disorderly. Bummer.

Just in time for my flight home Heathrow/BAA announced that they were up & operating again, so in the end I made it home to Germany with some delay (45 minutes) but I made it. Dusseldorf airport was a proper Winter Wonderland when we landed - faced with that amount of snow Heathrow probably would have shut down until spring. It took almost an hour for my bags to arrive as the little luggage carriers had problems with the snow and it took about 3 times as long to drive home as the motorway kept getting snowed in.

But thanks to my Dad's driving we arrived at my parents house safe & sound. There was a lot of catching up, I decorated the shiniest tree ever (or so they say), a lot of tasty food was eaten, snow was shoveled, I saw my brother's new house for the first time (it's a shell but I'm sure it'll look great) but couldn't go into the garden as the snow was too high, more snow shoveling & de-icing and some shopping was done. I canceled my BA flight to stay in Germany for one more day & would've loved to stay longer but I had to work today & there wasn't enough snow to ground & cancel my flight back.

Having been back in my home country made me realise how much I miss it. I love that my parent's house is always warm (central heating that works), that I can take a shower where the water actually pours down on you (rainforest shower head & decent water pressure FTW), the town & the shops are so clean & organised. I'm not quite ready to go back yet, but I actually found myself entertaining the thought more & more the longer I stayed.

Going back to London was harder than usual, I honestly didn't want to leave this time. I didn't help that I had to face the usual shambles that is the UK as soon as I got off the plane & boarded the train to Victoria. Which didn't leave the platform for a good half hour & then we got told that we had to board the train opposite (no reason given why we couldn't leave in the one we were in), which subsequently was overcrowded & even more delayed. I finally made it back home around midnight, too wired to go to sleep right away so I unpacked & then curled up under my amazingly cosy duvet.

Work today was busy as hell and tomorrow will follow the same pattern, I was the last of my team to leave at 3pm, though, so I shouldn't really complain. Alas it only means I've got even more stuff to finish tomorrow & I really want to leave early on NYE as I was planning to pick up my passport from the Indian consulate.

My reward for all of this will be the Monkey NYE bash, which everybody hopes will be even more epic than last time. Something to look forward to.

I'm also pondering goals for next year, which I really hope will be better than the last.

Just Keep Going

'twas quite a week.

The dreaded agency debrief on Monday actually went quite well, mostly thanks to the head honcho of the agency presenting who was acting decidedly weird towards me. Must've dented his ego or something. My presentation in the afternoon did go ok as well according to feedback (I thought I was rambling a bit too much). And I made it out to Winter Wonderland in the evening to meet up with Frani & her friends & be sociable. I'll probably go back there tomorrow to hunt for Xmas presents (my flatmates demand I give the presents).

Tuesday was pretty uneventful. I roasted my first ever batch of chestnuts in the oven & didn't burn down the house. They were quite tasty as well. I count this as a WIN.

Had my GP registration appointment on Wednesday morning, which was thoroughly disappointing. It was just the nurse checking my pee for diabetes & any signs of cystitis, I also got a little lecture about being somewhat overweight which ended in her giving me a leaflet on healthy eating. Great. I was hoping for a blood test & some advice on my travel health, but apparently you need to make extra appointments for that. What a waste of time.

Thursday morning I set off towards Victoria to sort out my visa for India. I arrived on time, got seen & then turned away pretty quickly. I stupidly mentioned that I work in media in my visa application form, which I should've realised when I selected it that it was a huge mistake. Saying you've got anything to do with TV, journalism or similar professions is always a bad idea when you want to visit countries that are a little bit tetchy about people seeing what actually goes on. So I got to work only one hour late, arranged with my boss that I would take the remaining 3 hours on Friday & spent most of the morning battling the online visa application form. It took various attempts until I finally got something that looked like they would accept it.

And then the power went out shortly after lunchbreak. I was in the middle of telling our student placement's advisor how great he is (he really does a pretty good job) when lights went out. And they stayed out until they sent us home 2 hours later. Which meant we got to leave for my team's Xmas dinner earlier than expected.

I don't particularly like spending non-work time with my colleagues, but the evening turned out rather pleasant. We had a few drinks in some random pub near Carnaby Street, then ventured over to Revolution in SoHo & finally had something to eat at Busaba Eathai in Wardour Street. Totally tasty food, good veggie choices, too. The evening was rounded off in The Sun & 13 Cantons (what a name for a simple pub).

Today I've made another attempt at securing a visa for my upcoming holiday, didn't get turned away this time & I really hope that all goes well. Grabbed a sandwich at Eat, then loitered outside the STA Travel shop until they opened to visit the travel clinic. I tried to go to my GP for my jabs, but they only do a travel clinic once a week at totally useless times & the first possible appointment would have been on 11th Jan. Seriously. The guy/doctor at Nomad was cool, he checked the malaria situation for me (don't need anything for that) & stuck a few needles into my arm. Yes, I had to pay for the pleasure, but it's done, it went fine & I feel safe in the knowledge that the person advising me on my travel health knew what he was talking about. He also got totally excited about international certification of vaccinations booklet, which lists all vaccinations I've had since I was a baby.

Shots done, I rewarded myself with a Starbucks Chai Tea & made my way to work. We had a really impressive bout of snow in the afternoon (not much left of it, though) & my arm now hurts from that damn tetanus jab. I'm praying that the snow/fog situation will be alright for me to get home on Thursday (cue obsessive-compulsive checking of weather forecast), there's a definite threat of more snow for the weekend but things are still up in the air after that.

I'll hopefully get good news about my visa next week & maybe I'll make it to Av's Xmas bash tomorrow.

Now excuse me while I snuggle up in my cosy duvet, it's cold & Friday.

Gaps & Minding

I've just come home from the Monkey Birthday party. 'twas nice, although it took me quite a while to get into the swing of things, for some reason I wasn't really feeling it & making a connection with my friends seemed to take more effort than usual. Apparently I have days when I'm incredibly sociable & find it really easy to talk to people & have fun. Last night wasn't one of those days, but I'm glad I didn't just give up & made a run for it, but stayed & enjoyed myself quite a bit after all.

I did have some rather nice conversations & don't feel too wrecked right now, which is really good & goes to prove that I at least got something right. The afterparty was easier as it was less people & we even got cooked delicious food! I could've done without coming home & finding that some c**** has vandalised our satellite dish. Granted, it hangs quite low, which some drunk bastard (we suspect it was one of our neighbours or their guests) took as an invitation to rip the receiver off. It's not like we have millions of people walking past our door every day, the entrance to our flat is at the back of the building, which means only neighbours & their visitors have any reason to shuffle past. Might go investigate tomorrow, I'm really not in the mood for it tonight. I've already called the service desk & made an engineer appointment, so we should get a new dish after Christmas. Until then the damage has been very expertly fixed by applying copious amounts of electrical tape.

The past week wasn't quite as bad as I'd feared, although I came very close to killing my contacts in the agency I currently have to deal with. I've rarely seen such a shoddy presentation of research findings, I ended up re-writing headlines & correcting quite a few mistakes, only to get a very snippy reply by the boss of the agency. I think I handled the situation professional enough to show my boss I can deal with such things & don't think I'm going to use said agency again in the future if I can avoid it. I'm not at all looking forward to the official debrief session on Monday. This will also be the day when I have to present some research to the channel team - I really hope I won't have to deal with all of this on a weekend hangover.

And it's not just the Monday at work, next week looks like it's going to be fairly busy. I'm meeting up with Frani in Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park on Monday evening, got my GP registration appointment on Wednesday morning & my team Xmas dinner in the evening. My dear colleagues have decided to choose a Brazilian restaurant for this occasion as they serve huge meat skewers there & none of them feels they can live for a day without ingesting dead animals (this pleasure costs less than £20, which says a lot about the quality of the meat if you ask me). Very considerate of them indeed knowing that I'm a vegetarian. Apparently the side dish buffet isn't all that bad, which probably means loads of salad smothered in mayonnaise & pasta covered in cheese. I think I'll just get a sandwich, thank you.

I've got my visa appointment at the Indian Embassy on Thursday morning at 8.45am, after already having filled out a mahoosive online visa application. I'll have to take another half-day off to go collect my passport again, but at least I don't have to entrust the Royal Mail with delivery of it. Which is exactly where my company Xmas present is currently residing. They've sent it to my home address instead of to my desk at work & unsurprisingly I wasn't home on a workday. The Post Office is only open from 9am to 5.30pm (guess what my work hours are) & we have already established that I was neither in the area nor in a fit state to collect the parcel today. I really hope it'll still be there next Saturday, which is the only day I can actually go pick it up.

There might be a pre-Xmas bash in South London on Saturday evening if I'm not too shattered after the week. And my department's Xmas Do is on the day before I leave for Germany. I just can't win at the moment it seems.

If all of that wasn't enough, I'm in the process of a major soul searching quest, brought on by irrevocably being in my 40's now & the year in general not going quite as splendid as I'd wished it would. More of that later, I don't think my current state of mind is in any way helpful to elaborate.

Let Them Eat Cake

Things so didn't go as planned.

I've managed to come down with a particularly nasty version of the lurgy just in time for my birthday. It all started to go downhill on Wednesday. I was feeling fine in the morning, but then started sneezing like there was no tomorrow around midday and by evening I was feeling seriously ill. I did manage to go food shopping for my party and dinner before succumbing to the ill, but didn't really get around to enjoying my lovingly cooked stir fry as by that time I'd already totally lost my appetite. Things took a turn for the worse over night, which I mainly spent alternating between being really unpleasantly hot and shivering. Woke up feeling like someone had hit me in the face with a large hammer, called in sick and hid under the duvet for most of the day. Seeing that there was no way I'd be up to a huge party, I rescheduled my birthday party for Saturday, which unfortunately meant not being able to see loads of my friends as obviously people had already made plans for the rest of the weekend (or come down with the lurgy themselves).

Anyway, John (who was just as lurgyfied as me) stopped by on Friday for a bit and I had a small but lovely party last night, so all's not bad. I'm already plotting a big all-nighter for the next year, have to make the most of the house while I'm there!

I'm still coughing and my nose is perpetually blocked which means I've lost most of my sense of smell, but my appetite has come back and I'm not feeling all that ill any more.

And despite being home sick, having 4 days off in a row was nice, although it means I'll be super busy next week.

3 Mondays to Christmas!