Alrighty. Bad every day of November blogger.

I do have a very good excuse however. Went to Vegas for a wedding and I really didn’t have time to ask my friend that I was staying with to give me access to his wireless.

Wedding was lovely. Was great to see everyone. Had a good time. Drank a bit too much but not too too much. Only said maybe five really stupid things.

Hung out with my 11 year old nephew on Sunday. The top of his head is at my chin. I am short so that isn’t saying too much.

Flew back to Seattle Monday morning, caught the flight back to London in the evening. Arrived today. Stuart was waiting for me at the airport holding a sign that said THOMAS COLE. Then he negotiated the tube with my ridiculously heavy bag.

“I love you.” I said as I watched him struggling to carry it up stairs.

“That’s just because I’m carrying your fuck-off heavy bag.”

“No. Well, yes. But I still love you.”

“I love you too.”

It is very good to be home.

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Stuart: Ummm I’ve been thinking.
Stuart: If we went to Thailand or somewhere.
Stuart: Just you an me-
Stuart: Would you marry me again?

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I am working from home today so that I can throw stuff in the slow cooker in a couple of hours as Stuart has asked me to make chili.

My chili is a variation of Fran McCullough’s Bowl of Red in The Low-Carb Cookbook but I add other stuff to it that makes it hurt so good. The problem is I can never really remember my variations so each time it is a little different. It is always good however. I prefer the slow cooker to the stove. It takes longer but it is ultimately much less trouble.

It was a bit of a mistake making my chili for Stuart because he loves it.

I know that sounds strange but he wants me to make it all the time because he loves it and while I like it, it really isn’t any sort of culinary challenge.

But I am making it today for him because it was a special request. It has nothing to do with it being a certain day. . . a milestone that he doesn’t celebrate because he doesn’t like gifts.

Nothing at all to do with him being a year older.

I love you sweetheart.

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My snoring was so bad from my cold/bird flu/ebola virus he slept on the sofa last night. . .

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Two years. On Monday it will be two years that we got hitched. Crazy. . .

It has gone by so fast. Looking back at those old entries I really don’t know how I got everything done.

Stuart doesn’t really like marking occasions so I was just not going to say anything about the two-year watermark. Last year I had tried for us to go out and have dinner and hang out in the day and it just made him grumpy so I wanted to avoid that. I think he just doesn’t like being told that he needs to do something for certain things. I think it is connected to his anti getting gift thing. I was really okay with that this year. My plan Monday was to kiss him, tell him I love him and not do anything special.

Tuesday he IM’d me telling me to not make any plans this weekend. That he was taking me on the sleeper train to Edinburgh for our anniversary. Such a surprise. I have been wanting to go to Scotland and specifically Edinburgh for ages. And I love the fact that we are going on the sleeper. It leaves at 11ish and we arrive at 6:30- 7 in the morning. We come back on Sunday night and arrive in London in the morning so I will go straight to work Monday.

I love the idea of going on a sleeper train with our own little sleeping area! It’s like Some Like It Hot, only without Marilyn Monroe, cross-dressing and gangsters. I said that to Al and he said that obviously I have never been on the sleeper.

The only bad thing is this damn cold, sore throat thing. I have meds from the doctor and I am popping over the counter pain meds so I will muddle through.

It was so sweet of Stuart to surprise me. It will be a nice weekend for us.

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Received this e-mail from the solicitor last night.

Dear Nicole

Further to the above matter, I confirm that the Home Office was unfortunately unable to process your application today.

In order to complete the processing of your application, the Home Office has requested further original documents in respect of your husband as evidence that you lived together as a couple during the two-year period. Specifically, the Home Office has requested original bank statements or pay slips in respect of your husband (and addressed to him) for the period 4 November 2005 to 31 December 2006.

We are required to submit the additional documents above to the Home Office before 5 November 2007. If you are able to forward the documents to me by around 3 p.m. tomorrow, I would be able to arrange for your application to be resubmitted on Wednesday 10 October. If this is not possible, I would be pleased to arrange for the application to be resubmitted when your husband returns from his travels. (I would of course return your and your husband’s original passports to you in the meantime).

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any queries or require any further information.
Kind regards

Gabriela

I went from zero to freaked out and Stuart was sleeping- would be getting up around 1AM to do work so I couldn’t wake him up to yell at him. I told him this would happen.

Getting him to put my name on bills WITH him for the last two years has been an exercise in futility. He was happy to get my name on the ones Jen was on- but that didn’t do me any good in prooving that we lived together. I did have about seven letters with his name and or my name on them too and 5 million things with just my name but that wasn’t good enough.

I was also cursing the solicitor because I knew this would happen and I asked them to look through what I was giving them and to tell me if I should get more stuff with his name on it.

To make things worse, Stuart booked a holiday for himself the last week in October even though for TWO FUCKING YEARS I have told him not to during this window of time.

Freud would have a lot to say about this.

I went to bed at midnight, beyond freaked out. Stuart rustled.

“Hey, when you get up, wake me up so I can talk to you.”

“What?”

I told him. Which okay. WAS slightly evil but I needed to share my, “AGGHHHHH HOW ARE WE GOING TO GET THESE DOCS TO THEM BY 3PM TOMORROW!!” wig out session.

He laid there for a few minutes then got up because he couldn’t sleep because of it. I heard him digging in his office and I hoped he was looking for stuff and I slipped into sleep.

He woke me up with a stack of payslips.

“You had all these?!?”

“I save things Thomas.”

I didn’t know if I should kiss him for having them or slap him for not giving them to me in the first place when he knew I needed them.

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Stuart and I do our grocery shopping separately. This is because I buy food that needs to be prepared and he buys ready made meals. The English are big on ready-made meals. Ready-mades are a little different from frozen TV dinners as they are in the refrigerated area and sometimes they aspire to look nicer than they actually could ever be. Like frozen TV-dinners they have enough sodium to pay the entire Roman army.

Since we buy different things, even if we are in the store at the same time we will hunt and pay for our basket on our own. I find this easier because I don’t need to argue every time I put something in my basket.

“Thomas! Do you really need that bottle of sun dried tomatoes packed in oil?”

“Yes, Stuart.”

“But it’s four quid! And goat cheese? What the hell do you need goat cheese for?”

“For the chicken breast stuffed with goat cheese and sun dried tomatoes I am making for dinner.”

“Ppttthhhh. Why don’t you just buy a pizza? Oooo! They’re having a sale on Carlsberg. I’ll buy a case and you can buy one too. We’ll just fill the fridge up with beer. Doesn’t that sound nice?”

Yesterday we shopped, I got in the queue and he joined me a few minutes later. I bought lamb chops, chicken breast, boneless beef rib roasting joint, cos lettuce, radishes, a cucumber and spinach.

He bought Dr. Pepper, two pizzas, garlic bread and a ready-made Peking duck. (The English are also big on Peking Duck. -It is very nice.)

As she was ringing Stuart’s food up, the checker said in her Caribbean accent, “Someone doesn’t like to cook.”

I giggled.

Walking back, Stuart was offended. “I cook!”

“Sure you do honey.”

“I make pizza all the time.”

“I think, maybe? Umm, sweetie? Cooking implies that you made the crust and the sauce from scratch and you put everything together to make something? But I could be wrong.”

“No. I cook.”

“No, honey. What you do is reheating.”

“I’m not a reheater. You’re always saying I’m something. You said I’m an alcoholic—“

“You are an alcoholic—“

“And now I’m a reheater. You watch tonight I’m going to make Peking Duck.”

“That’s a ready-made.”

“I’m still going to cook it.”

That night he reheated the Peking Duck. It smelled very nice.

“Thomas! Do you want to share the duck I cooked with me?”

It isn’t approved diet food, but this week had been a wash so I said yes. As I was shredding the duck and he was warming the pancakes up in the microwave he said, “See. I can cook.”

“Yes honey. You’re the next Nigel Slater.”

Pinter Pause.

“Who’s that?”

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I was dreading coming home to the mountain of dishes waiting for me. Sunday night we had decided to leave them until Monday. I woke up too late in the morning so I decided to leave it until that evening. Ended up on the piss with Al so it became Tuesday.

Had plans to meet up with a Yahoo! buddy that is here in London now after work and the whole time in the back of my head the dishes were nagging at me.

Stuart and I have a cleaner because he likes things clean and I am a bit lazy and refuse to fall into girl does this/ boy does that bullshit which would happen if we didn’t have a cleaner. But even with a cleaner certain things need to get done. Like the dishes.

I do the dishes even if it is something that Stuart has ‘cooked’ (reheated). He will put the dishes away. I used to be bitter about this especially after a dinner party- but then he started to do the laundry.

We used to do our own laundry. I have a bad habit of putting it off so it would be a massive slog of clothes that would need to be done or I would only wash what I really needed leaving everything else to sit there for later. We also hang our clothes up to dry and Stuart is rather particular about how it is done and the way I did it drove him nuts. I never saw a difference between our hanging up laundry styles, but apparently there is. So he took over laundry and I stopped being bitter about being the dish girl.

But those damn dishes from Sunday were waiting for me. I opened the door, walked up the stairs, looked in the kitchen and!

The dishes were done.

He had done the dishes.

Now, I know it was more that the fact that they were sitting there and they were driving him crazy rather than helping me out is why they got done, but I don’t care.

It was a beautiful, beautiful thing.

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Stuart and I are off to Cologne for a few days. The reason initially was to go see The Police but we had bought tickets from a evil company. By the time the dust settled and we got the cash back the hotel and flight had already been booked so off to Germany we go!

Will be nice to have a couple of days - just the two of us and we have a friend that lives near there that we are meeting for for dinner tonight so It’s all das gut.

I am really ready to have a whole week in my own bed however. (Ohhhhh poor you. One week in Spain. One week in Seattle. One week in Germany. It is a hard life!)

Okay, okay. I’ll slap myself later. Now I must admit I am thinking of spätzle, bratwurst, sauerkraut und wiener schnitzel. Und Kölsch bier.

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I made the mistake this morning of plucking Nigel Slater’s The Kitchen Diaries off the shelf and opening it to August. I had thought of him because when we were at Claire and Dan’s this weekend I was thumbing through one of his old cookbooks and had said that I would need to get a copy of it and she had graciously given it to me since she had planned to drop it off at a charity shop.

It was a mistake to read the August chapter of the diary because he is going on and on about how lovely and warm the weather is and all of the meals he makes are appropriate to hot weather when today is a bangers and mash day. Rain, rain and more rain. And it’s cold to top it off. Are there really two weeks left of August? I feel like we have landed in a Dr. Who time warp and the date is really November 19th, which is lovely. . . WHEN IT IS NOVEMBER!

Last Wednesday night when we all went out drinking and I consumed all of my alcohol units for the year, I failed to mention that I was wearing wool. A long wool skirt, a long sleeved dress shirt and a wool v-neck jumper. Shoes were long black boots. I was wearing WOOL in August and I wasn’t uncomfortable.

Last weekend the weather was delicious. Warm but not oppressive, lots of big happy sun. When the sun is out in London the world feels like a perfect place. Stuart took me to the zoo because retards love the zoo*. We had read that owl babies had been born so we wanted to see the owl babies.

We got off at Regent’s Park, walked through the park stopping first at a café in the middle for a tasty sausage roll with lots of spicy English mustard. Once we got through the initial queue it didn’t feel too crowded, but there were lots of families. I warned Stuart about this.

“Honey, you know how we are going to the zoo?”

“Yes Thomas?”

“There’s going to be a lot of kids there.”

“Oh no. . .”

I have decided it is not children that I hate, but their parents, but I will save that for another post.

Not long were we there when Stuart said we should bring Emily our niece.

“But then we would be like all the people that you hate.”

“No. It’s different.”

“Because she’s ours?”

“Exactly.”

We weren’t able to see the baby frog mouthed owls (we did see their parents) but didn’t take a picture.

Stuart did however get a great picture of this sleeping barned owl.

We loved that he was balancing on one leg.

The Toucans were lovely as well.

What you can’t see in the picture is how bright blue their eyes are.

The exhibit for the sidewinder annoyed me.

Why is it necessary to show that this snake lives in the southwest of the United States by including a crumbled pack of cigarettes and an empty bottle of Bud?

After a few hours we were zooed out. We still need to see the lions and the bughouse and the gorillas were napping so there will be lots of things to see when we go back with Emily.

As I said, the entire reason I said we went was to see the baby owls which if you read the hyperlink article were only born because of all the rain and crap weather we have been having so I guess I can’t complain too much the weather is wooly. For every season, turn turn turn. . . there is a reason for the crap rubbish weather. Baby owls.

I suppose I am not too grumpy because in addition to crap weather bringing baby owls, in one week, at this moment I will be in Spain. We land in Seville and will be renting a car and winding our way over to Barcelona.

I am dreaming of flamenco, olives and wine. And sun. I am dreaming of sun.

*Rocky Reference. “Take her to the zoo! Retards love the zoo!”

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