I'm being abandoned

I’ve been dreading the next week or so for months, but the time has finally come. Nick is heading back to the UK for a week of stag parties, Bank Holiday Mondays spent at the village fete, drinks in the spring sunshine with my daddy, mornings eating fresh Aga toast with homemade marmalade, and attending our friends wedding on the weekend before flying back too. He will basically be living my dream week, but sadly, he’ll be doing it without me.

Farewell flowers 

Thanks to a limit of 15 days holiday per year, I have no time to spare for fun and frolics back in the Shire at the moment. Thankfully, due to changes in management that are making my day to day work more mental than normal, I have managed to scrounge three extra days to provide a slight cushion to my July trip home, but that’s the best I could do this year. Still, for the coming week I will be on my own, looking for ways to fill a three day weekend this week, and then hopefully using the empty time that I will have in the evenings to ramp up the veggie-gym-sleep-water efforts. It's going to be a million miles from the week that Nick will be having, but hopefully it will be enough to push me over the line for my July measurements. 

            So, with the threat of Nick’s imminent departure, I decided that it was the appropriate time for steaks and wine for dinner. I bought the steaks, Nick brought me some amazing flowers (cut flowers don’t love living in the tropics so they are always a bit of a treat) and we settled in for a night of cooking, cleaning, packing (for some of us) and an early finish to make sure that Nick would be capable of dragging himself to the airport on Friday morning (anything in the 6’s are not good for Nick!). My world is going to be very empty for the next few days...

Intensive day of avoiding the muffin basket

Each quarter we arrange for a day of training sessions and presentations amongst our little team of eight. We catch up on things that have been going on both locally and internationally, and we work out what we need to be doing in the next business quarter to help with growth and development.

Yesterday was this training day, and I quickly realised that, having organised and arranged most of the event, the most challenging thing for me was going to be spending an entire day in a room filled with treats, cakes and muffins. Even the fruit platter that I ordered was covered in biscuits and treats.

            I’m just pleased that this time we didn’t have to do a full session staying at the hotel and taking up more than one day. I am not sure that I could have handled the pressure for more than the one day at a time! I’ve been dreaming about blueberry muffins with a jam centre ever since! 

Geek Week

The start of this week has ended up being a little bit geekie in my world! Monday night (after a swim) was spent on the sofa watching as much Game of Thrones as possible to ensure that we woulnd’t miss a thing while Nick is back in the UK next week. It’s taken a while to warm up, but it’s finally getting a bit more interesting now, so I’m looking forward to the rest of the series getting underway!

            Tuesday was maybe even further along the geek spectrum.  Nick loved his Avengers marathon so much last week that he wanted to go and see the second movie again, just one week later.

Therefore, on Tuesday night we were booked into the amazing Platinum Class cinema just down the road from our house, where we ate chicken salads and drank tea and sparkling water whilst we cosied into our amazing lazyboy chairs and sat under huge cosy duvets. I always feel that a trip to Platinum Class is a real napping-at-the-cinema risk, but thankfully The Avengers were load and disturbing enough to prevent any naps from taking place. 

A low-key weekend

This weekend was always intended to be pretty low-key, and I think we achieved that nicely, mostly thanks to the weather!

            Saturday morning dawned bright and early (for some of us!) I was up by 6:30, ready to head to the gym for an hour on the machines and an hour doing Pilates. From there I headed home via the shops and collected supplies to try and help ease Nick back to life following his fairly hectic Friday day and night out! Brunch was prepared and ready for consumption, and by around 11am I was finally allowed to crack on and enjoy the mini-salmon and cream cheese bagels.

Then there was a storm. It was an almighty, amazing storm, with louder, closer thunder than I have ever experienced. There was also a ridiculous amount of lightening, all of which looked like it was coming dangerously close to the building opposite our window. It last for around three hours, and it was spectacular. Visibility from our flat balcony dropped to around 3ft max, and it was the perfect excuse to stay bundled up in the flat, cosy and safe away from the explosions.

Dinner on Saturday night was at an amazing Greek place that we have heard great things about but never had a chance to try out. We went with Matt and Monica, both of whom were a little jaded from the night before, so it was a lovely quiet, quick, delicious dinner, followed by a big mug of tea and a lovely early night.

            Sunday was equally chilled out, with a bit of shopping, a light lunch out, the gym and my new obsession – the podcasts of “Serial”. Having finished my list of 100 Books, I wanted to find something to listen to that was not necessarily a book, but something interesting, and Serial is just what I needed. It comes incredibly highly recommended! Treadmill sessions have never passed so quickly!

I’ll just pop out for one

My plan this evening, after a busy week and a pretty hectic day, was to pop out to the bar for one drink to celebrate Ash’s birthday, before heading home for a healthy dinner and an early night. Nick was out for a St George’s Day lunch where he and a load of other English brokers all wear red and white, get drunk at lunchtime and sing patriotic songs for the rest of the day. I knew he would be out for a while, and I thought it was probably better for me to leave him to it rather than trying to keep up!

            I finished work at around six and found myself with at least an hour and a half to spare before the birthday celebrations got underway, so I took myself to a nice little rooftop bar near the venue, where I got set up with a little gin and tonic to enjoy the view. Surprisingly Nick was ready to leave his singing group at around the same time, so he joined me for an hour or so to help me pass the time.

Tucked away table for a gin with a view

Once we got to the venue for the birthday celebrations what I had planned to be just an hour or so of catching up quickly before sneaking out somehow ended up turning into a good few hours of being out and about. Sometimes the groups of people at these events don’t quite work for me, but there were some really great guys at these drinks, and we got to meet Matt’s new girlfriend, who was not only lovely, but who also seemed to need protecting from the masses, so I adopted her for a few hours and we watched the rest of the world falling progressively further into a drunk state of, well, mess.

            By around 11pm it was time for me to go home, and thankfully Nick was in firm agreement, so we slipped out, still a lot earlier than most, but impressively later than my planned 8:30pm departure.