My Threadless t-shirts FINALLY arrived. Okay, so they arrived last week but making it down to the post office (where they were holding my package on a £15.29 charge!) proves to be more difficult than just wandering down. In any case I am now wearing one of my brand new t-shirts and am loving the fact that I chose the right size purely based on a different sized shirt that I bought Kat last year!

Speaking of the charge, the £7.29 VAT charge I can live with. The £8 Royal Mail handling fee is still bugging me!
Oh, I just found a link to other enraged people.
The post office site reassures me that if there are no customs charges then they won’t charge a thing so all future purposes will either have a $1 gift cost on the label or go via Kat (Kat this is my way of asking if this is okay :tongue:)

I have also been pimping my iGoogle page. Oh dear, all the gadgets! I’m trying to be a Google purist but it’s a difficult road.

I’m Yours – yunfengfu
Baby It’s Cold Outside – Zooey Deschanel & Will Ferrell in Elf
Apache – Sugar Hill Gang
How To Save A Life – The Fray
My – Lost

Had a great weekend up in March. Friday night was the Gang Show and Dominic got Best Cub of the year. How cool is that?!
Saturday was fish and chips with Dominic, Belinda and Uncle Michael. Elisha being the socialite that she is was off with friends. Saturday evening was nice and chilled and we played Monopoly and watched the last bit of Along Came A Spider. Late to bed ready for iceskating on Sunday! Uncle Michael came around and we all went to Cambridge where we met Ana.

The iceskates were brand new and we stood waiting for them to let us onto the rink. When we finally got out everyone was clinging onto the sides. It was SO slippery! I immediately wondered how I was going to survive and hour of this. Nevertheless we set off and it turned out to be a lot easier than I remember (I’ve only been once and from memory it was painful!). Dominic was a natural (of course) whereas Elisha is now all legs so stuck close to me. We zipped around holding hands for most of the time. Dominic ended up tagging onto my other wrist (he is a boy after all). The funny thing about kids is when they fall, they don’t let go to steady themselves, no, that would be far too easy. Instead they hold no even tighter leaving you to somehow pull them up and steady them even though you’re only slightly taller (in some cases, shorter) than them! This isn’t too bad when it’s just one, but when both of them threatened to go down it got interesting! Belinda, being a mum, saw this happen and immediately stopped taking photos and waited to see if we were all okay. Uncle Michael, on the other hand, kept snapping away at the carnage. (If this is any example to go by I think I am going to make a terrible mother!)

After many attempts at Torvill and Dean, more near misses than I care to mention and one viewing of a guy falling flat on his back and whacking his head, we were off to Chili’s for lunch. Me and Dominic shared a fajita trio and fries which was yummy. It reminded me of how much I miss bottomless drinks in the States!

A quick stop off at John Lewis and then I was off packing on the express train back to London.

Now, onto my precious. I am officially addicted to the burst mode. It is the new way of taking photos. I got so many great shots of the kids just by sticking them in front of a blank wall and holding down the GO button. They pretty soon got the gist of it and with every fire of the flash they had another weird and wonderful face pulled for me. My addiction grows…

And people wonder why we have no time these days

…how cute Darin and Urszula’s baby, Alexander Thomas, is!!! I could just eat him up! Good work you two!!

…one day til my camera [read: precious] gets here!

And I just had a mad dash to find a cheap compact flash card since my eBay purchase doesn’t seem to be arriving in a timely fashion. Amazon disappointed with not being able to display the fast shipping option but came through by providing a link to MemoryBits who have next day shipping and thanks to this morning’s Metro I found a coupon code at My Voucher Codes for 10% off! Now providing it actually arrives tomorrow I will be a very happy camper!

I finally found a decent exif editor! All those pesky timestamps that are out of whack due to timezones, daylight savings and pure acts of stupidity are no more!

It’s not that I do things for the sake of doing them. Well, not all the time at least. Maybe it’s just the sense that I’ve been getting lately of being a little part of something big that made me enjoy it so much. Maybe it was the fact that the Christmas lights weren’t traditional and looked a little geeky. Maybe it was because Nokia were the ones running the show. Maybe it was because I got to walk down the middle of Regent Street without being bowled over by a car.
In any case walking down Regent Street last night in a mass group of people all in a bid to turn the Christmas lights on was just plain fun. I’m totally going back on 14 December for the next one!

Last night I took on the challenge (set by myself) and organised dinner using only ingredients that I could find on a last minute shop at Sainsburys Local. I came up with prawn and cheese quesadillas (which turned out to be bigger than my head!) to start, chicken, mushroom and sour cream tagliatelle for the main, with Cadbury chocolate pots for dessert. Round off with two screenings of South Park the movie and it was a great night!