My playlist makes me nostalgic

I have recently updated Mr. LePod with new (but still old) music and when I sit here on the number 25 to work, performing my normal morning routine of extensive people-watching (without being creepy of course), looking out the window trying to count how many Polish delicacy shops there are along Dalry road, and trying to imagine what the prisoners at Her Majesty’s Prison Sighthill are doing right now, I realize that my music is bringing me down memory lane, back to my teens.

I am almost ready to get off the bus outside work and so far I have had the pleasure to enjoy: Alice Cooper’s ‘Poison’, AHA’s Take On Me’, Lighthouse Family’s ‘High’ as well as and Swedish music like Magnus Uggla’s ‘Fula Gubbar’, Ebba Grön’s ‘Pervers Politiker’ and from back home in Piteå, the local punk band Tarmgas with ‘Du’, ‘Nostalgi’. Funny how music can trigger memories and set the of the mood in such a distinctive and direct way!

The blog is back to normal. So are we.

The holiday season is over, a new year has begun, and the Christmas decorations for the blog are now stowed away in a folder and will not see daylight again until next December. If we are still blogging by then, that is. Halfway through the week and work is back to normal as well. Busy as ever and the only difference from last year is that I now get to add a ‘Senior’ to my job title. Om the home front, we are trying to get a bunch of stuff organized and packed up for the move. We are getting more and more excited and Ethan is getting closer and closer to actually crawling, so it’ll be interesting to see if we’ll make it over to the new flat with the modern, shiny floors before he is completely unstoppable.

What else is new? Not sure if it has been mentioned before, but I am helping Piers with a website for his company, something I really enjoy doing, and it is coming together more and more. It is starting to look quite sharp if I may say so myself.

Oh, and Shaena and I have been working on our budget for 2010, so I gooogled ‘count your pennies, count your pounds’ just because I know of a song by The Feeling with those lyrics in it. Can’t believe how many old sayings there are in reference to ‘pennies’! Check it out (if you have nothing better to do):
http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/count+your+pennies

bad penny always turns up
Prov. A worthless person always
comes back to the place he or she started out. Jill: I just found out that
Tom left town after we fought last Saturday. What if I never see him again?
Jane: Don't worry. A bad penny always turns up.

Found on Erin's camera

Let's face it. Some people need longer than others to upload their holiday-photos and videos. Like that time when it took a whole year for Grandpa Keith to produce our wedding video! :) Erin has uploaded her photos from their visit today (but I guess that's ok, as it is the last day of Christmas today. Phew! In the nick of time!) and self-centered as we are, we picked out a few good ones where our pretty faces are represented:

Sneaky Pics

I have finally figured out what the photography class Peter and I took at Telford College was good for!!!...

Snapping a night time photo of my Son sleeping without using flash!

New Years party at Piers & Lesley's

I got to tell you, the New Years dinner at Piers and Lesley’s place was absolutely fabulous! We are thinking this could be our best New Years party so far in our years abroad. Piers is a great chef and treated us to a fantastic pheasant & pasta starter, a traditional roast pork dinner with all the trimmings and potato bake for main course and he also had a desert prepared but we were just too stuffed to handle. (I have only had pheasant once before in my life and that was after my step dad ran one over with his tractor. And yes, you are right, that is what we traditionally would call a 'road-kill stew'.)

Lesley contributed by being an awesome hostess and she had also put together the playlist that would set the mood for the night, which of course is crucial for a successful party. Ethan was stylish as ever in his little green Christmas cardigan and entertained us for an hour before it was sleepy-time, and after that he was out for the rest of the night, which in a way was nice so that we could have some grown-up time for ourselves. We had a great time with lots of food, drink and banter and probably solved most of the problems in the world over the course of a couple of hours.

Never a Year Like '09

"Can we not just sleep on the floor? Like Crocodile Dundee"

It really is amazing how much stuff you collect over the years! We have had the opportunity to move from country to country and from apartment to apartment in the last few years, which means we have had lots of opportunity to throw away things we don’t need/use anymore. Still, when we started going through our closet the other day, we could fill bag after bag with clothes, blankets, bedding and just stuff in general. And we have only just started scratching the surface of this moving project. But hey, turn that frown upside down! Moving to a new apartment is of course super-exciting, so it is all good!

Another luxury problem we are facing at the moment is the purchasing of a new bed, as the new apartment is unfurnished. There are millions of different options and combinations to go for. Let me illustrate:

Size (does size matter?):
For a couple, it makes sense to buy either a king size bed or a super king size bed. So, which one will it be?

Type of bed:
Are we going for a bed base and a king size mattress or are we going for a divan? Or maybe a bed base and individual mattresses? Or maybe a divan mattress in a wooden bed base?

Bed base:
If a bed base, are we going for metal or wood? What color? If a divan; are we going for 2 drawers or 4 underneath? Does color matter? Do we care?

Mattress:
Memory foam or spring mattress? If memory foam; what kind of memory foam? Does memory foam have different levels of firmness? If spring mattress; are we going for open spring, pocket spring, coil, or continuous coil?

Naming of the products:
Now to the stupid/funny naming of the assortment on beds on offer: ‘Thermaluxe 600 pocket spring king 4drw divan set’, or is it maybe better to go for a ‘Silentnight Miracoil 7-Zone Colorado Super King 4 Drawer Divan Bed Set’ or the cheaper option ‘Silentnight Miracoil 3-Zone Maine Ortho Super King 4 Drawer Divan Set’… or if you want to go really cheap, you can either go for the cheapo Layezee-series or the extreme-cheapo but still surprisingly high spec’ed ‘Supaluxe 700 Super king 4drw divan set’

The reviews:
This one definitely stood out from the crowd:

“As newly Weds we had many vouchers and were in desperate need of a new bed after many arguments The wife always wins! I decided that i needed a BIG bed so i could have a good nites sleep as my lovey husband snores and has a large butt! and hogs all the room in the bed i belive the threat of single beds scared him. The size is amazing it doesnt look huge but when your in it its like heaven its so soft and light its like your on a clould its big enough if your both on the larger size without invading ones space and if you like to stretch out perfect. Like to curl up perfect too with the memory foam supports you perfectly and even if you like to sleep on the egde its great. If like my husband you are a fidget bum and cant sleep in the same spot all nite then this is the bed for you plenty of room for him to fling his arms about and toss and turn i no longer feel a thing and finely i can sleep and he is so far away over the other side i cant hear him snore yeah! Result!”

Before these questions above are answered, thousands and thousands of different potential beds and mattresses are available for purchase online. These options must then be cautiously weighted against whatever budget there is for the purchase and even after some of these questions are answered and you have a clearer image of what type of bed you want and need, there is still a myriad of options and configurations available. But we have made our decision:

You'll be happy to know that in the end, we went for the Supaluxe 700! Why the Supaluxe then? Well, we figured that all things considered it was the best value for money and all that, but mostly our final decision was based on the fact that we would be able to shout from the other room and say: "Hey baby, come hang out over here, I am in the Supaluxe!"

Coffee date with little Ben from Germany

Today, on his ½ year birthday, Ethan got to go on a coffee date with little Ben from Germany. Ben turned 9 months today as well and is Denis and Jess' baby boy. Denis and Jess are our friends through CareerBuilder that moved from Scotland to Germany a while back, when the opportunity arose. Funny enough, Ben is about the same height as Ethan and a tad lighter but 3 months older! Oh, and they also have the same number of teeth (2) in common. Obviously, it was nice to catch up with Ben's parents as well, of course! :)

Ethan 6 months - "What a wee baby! Where's yer mammy?"

The year is almost over

After 4 fun filled days, our wonderful guests bid goodbye and hit the pavement to catch their Ryanair flight (good luck guys! Hope all goes well with your flight home and come again soon!!)

So now it's just the 3 of us again. How strange it is to say 3 of us. Ethan is 6 months old now and keeps amazing us everyday with the milestones he's passing! He has figured out how to get his bum up in the air while keeping his head up which means he'll be crawling in no time!! We're really looking forward to our new flat now as it is way more baby proof!!

The next few days with us will be quiet ones as we wait to ring in the New Year with our friends Piers and Lesley. Peter isn't back to work till the 4th so we have plenty of time to relax and shop for a new bed!! And let me tell you, bed shopping over the internet is hard work! So many options and the negative is that you don't get to try them out. We were thinking we'll order 5 beds, get them delivered, try them out with the packaging still on and the 4 we don't like we'll send back with the delivery guy. he he he. That would be mean eh.

Tonight though, we're going to curl up on the couch and watch a good movie.

One heck of a Christmas partay! Boom!

Well, we sure had a great time at our Christmas partay/food palooza yesterday! The day started out later than planned (or so I thought at least), as the baking crew showed up a bit late, but it emerged later that 11am (the time Jen and Maeghan were instructed by Shaena to show up for) was just given to them as a strategic move to get the girls out of bed a bit earlier and they were not really supposed to show up that early at all, but they are notoriously late, so there you go. Bazinga!

Maeghan showed up first and got crackin’ on baking apple pies and preparing her pot roast. Jen arrived a bit later and contributed to the festivities by baking a pumpkin pie and by preparing tons and tons of mashed potatoes. I whipped up a couple of thousand pre-made Swedish meatballs with lingonberry jam as a 'dip sauce' and Shaena made her world famous deviled eggs. We had asked all our guests to bring a dish of their choice, so on the table we also had roast ham, sausages, vegetarian dishes and much more. These culinary creations tasted amazing and the fridge is now filled with leftovers, pies and champagne! Oh, and the champagne will be prefectly chilled tomorrow for our 2 year wedding anniversary.

We also prepared a game of ‘pass the parcel’ before the rest of the guests arrived. Under all those layers of wrapping paper, bubble wrap and packing tape, we had hidden the grand prize: A 2010 Simon Cowell calendar! Who wouldn't want to win one of those?

Later in the evening our guests arrived and all the food that everyone brought made up an awesome Christmas pot-luck feast. After ‘pass the parcel’, we also played a game of ‘Taboo’ and that definitely got everyone going! All in all we had lots of good food, cold drinks and great banter!

We hope everyone enjoyed themselves! Let’s do it again sometime! ;)

The Christmas copper strikes again!

"Crap, a police check-point! Have to hide the bottle in the glove compartment!"

"Oh no! There is no glove compartment!"

"Better down this puppy!"

"Santa? Is that you?" Part III

[Chuhb-ee]