Ahhhh...
This is (almost) a sigh of relief. Besides a whirl-wind visit from Jess, I've officially spent the first two weeks of my holidays working. And I'm beginning to feel the benefit. My goal is to get all my work done by this Friday, so that I can laze about for the last 4 weeks. And by 'laze about' I mean: do the long-overdue spring clean of the house, paint the many fences in our garden, sort through millions of photos and choose ones to print (finally), complete a gazillion other little errands and jobs... you know, laze about.But, I did allow myself a small reward for finishing all my so-called 'necessary' work: private reading! Yay!! I have had to discipline myself with not delving into any distracting private reads (besides the Twilight series - love it!) over the past year because I tend to start a book and let it engross all my time... regardless of what else is going on. Happily, with freedom approaching, I've just ordered 4 news books on Amazon: 'The Time Traveller's Wife,' 'The Kite Runner' (read 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' by the same author and loved it; cried my eyes out the whole way through!), 'The Book Thief' and 'My Sister's Keeper'. Yeah, I like those girly wah-wah books. I also got the DVD of 'Life is Beautiful' because I love it and it was only 3 quid. Good times. Anyway, I'll let you know if there are any that I especially recommend.
Sooooo... that damn old MA paper. Still plugging away. I have SO much less confidence in this re-written version than I did in the last one. At least the last one made sense. Not good. Well, still some drafting and re-drafting to do, so hopefully it improves, cause right now it's a load of crap.
Some other interesting news: I'll really have time to enjoy my summer reads because in two weekends, Riccardo and I are going on our first-anniversary trip to Cornwall. Should be lovely! We found a beautiful B&B to stay in (funnily enough, our room looks similar to the African bomas we stayed in while on honeymoon!) and will visit the Eden Project, the coast and Exeter Castle. So excited!
The weekend after our anniversary, the in-laws are coming for a visit from Germany!! It's been a while since I've seen them, Italy at Easter, was it? But we're so excited to host them and plan to take them to Warwick Castle and maybe BBQ (if it ever stops raining). Very cool.
BTW, I'm really annoyed at all you people from Canada whinging about the heat... honestly, wanna trade for 3.5 solid weeks of rain? Gotta love the British summer. Where's my parka again?
Also, we're going to ROME!! Well, that's not confirmed just yet because we're waiting on MY FAMILY to confirm their travel plans because THEY'RE MEETING US THERE!! Yes, my family (Mom, Rebecca, Mike and little Kyra) is finally coming to visit... after just 2.5 years! How excited am I? So the plan is for them to tour around Italy for a few days, meet Riccardo and I in Rome for 3 days (we also want to visit Pompeii) and then fly back to England to see London and our home here in Brum. This looks to take place in October. We're still not entirely convinced it's going to happen though... still no actual paperwork, but our fingers are crossed.
Hmmm... any thing else to report? Well, only that Riccardo's 3.5-year-old laptop has kicked the bucket. We looked into getting him a new one, but that's being put off since for his gaming he needs one with a good graphics card, which means the damn thing will likely cost 600 quid ($1200) and we just don't have that kind of money. So in the meantime, Riccardo has appropriated my laptop, which thankfully for him and annoyingly for me, does support his game. The other reason to be thankful is that we have a techy friend who was able to save all the millions of pictures, music and documents on his hard drive for just 20 quid (would have cost around 100 GBP to have that done professionally). Phew!
Well that's it for now. More updates soon! xx
Ooh I love summer reading! Kite Runner is amazing, I also cried through most of it. And I just started the Time Travellers Wife.