Friday flowers

Sometimes, when I am very lucky, Nick comes home from work with a beautiful bunch of flowers, just because! Normally the bunch includes a sunflower or two, but this week I received a beautiful, jolly bunch of gerberas, which are taking pride of place on our dining table this weekend. What a good boy he is! 

Fixing my face

It’s been a long time coming, but I have finally decided that it’s time to grow up and start taking proper care of my skin. I wear factor 45 every day thanks to being bang on the equator and terrified of both skin cancer and the steadily developing pigmentation issues that are developing nicely on my forehead. But realistically, that not good enough.

            So, despite the fact that I have never really been into products and magic formulas, with a little (huge amount) of help and advice from Kat, it is time to try and fix my face.

            Armed with a list of product recommendations and suggestions, at some point this week I am going to go and ransack every shop I come across to try and tick off all items on the list.  Then there will just be the small issue of forcing myself to use them all on a regular basis, but I can work on that!

Work, work, work

This week has been intense! To say that there has been a lot of work to do would be a massive understatement. As seems to have become the norm, my days are beginning to kick off with calls to the US at progressively earlier start times (they think nothing of requesting me to be in the office and ready to run a meeting at 6am), and they are running as late as they can to accommodate all the local time and India meetings too. What with morning gym sessions and evening gym classes I am starting to desperately need the weekend afternoon naps just to keep up to speed with my sleep!

            This week I did discover (sort of by accident) that the US are trying to work out whether they need to make me the Business Development manager for the entire region, and then have the rest of the local team report into me. This would be yet more work to trawl through (my goodness I hope they get a new MD in to run our office soon), but this shift would effectively mean that my responsibilities shift from SEA and India to include overseeing Australia, News Zealand, China and Japan. It would be a huge jump, but it would also be amazing. Fingers crossed something good comes from this soon – and that I discover twelve more secret hours in each day that I just never noticed were there before to help me get to the end of all the tasks this would include! 

At the moment I am just grateful that whilst I have to be in the office for almost every hour that the day can spare, I do still just about have time for my early morning gym sessions and my evening classes. My stress levels would be an awful lot higher if it were for the BodyPump and BodyCombat classes once a week!

New buddies at Book Club

In London we had a Book Club (quickly re-named Wine Club), which brought us all together once a month for wine, nibbles, gossip, and a very small amount of book-related discussion. It was great fun, a good way to get a new group of girls together, and it forced us to at least think about books even if we didn’t get around to reading them in full every month.

            So, you can imagine my delight when I was invited to join a little Book Club out here that has been building up for the past few months. I attended my first meeting last night, and due to the short noticed, started on the back foot as I hadn’t read the book. Still, I came armed with wine (that I didn’t drink due to a very early Friday morning start) and nibbles, and loved every minute of the very relaxed, very girlie environment.

            Having just recently finished off the BBC 100 Books to Read Before You Die list I have only picked up a couple of fairly random books since then, but I have come away with a great big long list and a huge burst of inspiration to get my Kindle charged back up and ready to go! 

Getting ready

We knew that sending all of our invites out and around the world from Singapore was going to be a considerably more expensive option than sending them from the UK, but international post is a bit more fun (when it all arrives safety), so fingers crossed that none of our wedding invites go missing in the mail.

Almost $100 spent on postage for around 80 invites to go out to the UK, Australia, Canada, Dubai, Thailand, the US and throughout Singapore. The stamps are purchased; most of the envelopes are stuffed, written and stamped. Now we’re just waiting for the calendar to flip over onto the month of August and we’ll be good to go!

A weekend of eating

After a number of months on very best behaviour, which saw me rejecting the majority of the invites that I got to go out and play in the past few months, we are being to ease back into real life while the build up to the wedding still has some way to go.

            On Friday night we went out to meet with Joyce and some friends that he had passing through Singapore, who he thought needed taking out for a few drinks to kick off their weekend. Thankfully, even though we were out to play, I had told Nick that if we left by nine then we ought to go and have a nice dinner, so at five to nine he came and informed me that the bill was paid and that he was ready to leave. I have it on good authority from those who stayed out later due to the lack of a dinner lure, that it turned into a pretty big night, and that things were still in full swing long after Nick and I returned home from dinner and put ourselves to bed. It could have been a whole lot worse!

Lunch with a view!

Saturday was another day of catching up with people that we haven’t seen in some time. Tommy was in town for the weekend, so we had a nice lunch by the seaside with him, Harriet and Jamie. Then following a quiet afternoon in the sun with Liv we met up with Mike and Tilly for dinner in a little restaurant tucked away just near our flat. For a small local restaurant it was absolutely fabulous, and very reasonably priced too, so that was quite a successful little Saturday night outing.

Manlove between Nick and Mike

Finally, Sunday dawned bright and early as we had a brunch date with Nick, Jing and their cute little two year old Kate. Whilst we were both a little jaded, we managed to make it out for a lovey late breakfast at my all time favourite PS Café. After a good few hours of chatting and coffee drinking we officially ended our weekend (at around noon), returning home in the midst of a brewing storm. The rainy afternoon therefore passed in a glorious blur of writing wedding invites and baking scones.

Write, stuff, seal, stamp, repeat

The diet really does start again on Monday. And I most seriously mean it this time.