Getting ready for Christmas! Food.

As mentioned on Spark, I've been compiling a list of restaurants I would be interested in visiting while we're in Dallas...finally, here's the list.

I may eventually add a list module-thingy-bobby on the right, but I thought I'd start here. I've also included Julie's two suggestions, and I will add any others that are suggested. We obviously will not have time to eat at all of these, but I thought I'd share the list and I'm open to any prioritizing people want to do...

In no particular order...yet:

Cheesecake Factory

California Pizza Kitchen

Papa John's

Spring Creek BBQ

Pei Wei

Julio's (the new Mexican)

Taco Bueno

El Chico

Gattitown

Olive Garden

Schlotzky's

Cotton Patch

Denny's/IHOP (it's been AGES since I've had proper pancakes...or waffles)

Braum's

Panera

Dickey's BBQ

Krispy Kreme

And to keep Jenny (and our hearts, thighs and everything else) happy, here is an informative article on Spark with  different techniques to minimize the negative effects of eating out.

30th Birthday: Surprise number two: Barn dance!

The next day, Wednesday, Mom and Dad hung out while Mark and I did our last day of work before the vacation time that we booked off. I thought we were going to go out for another birthday dinner with my friend Lydia. We were going to meet Mark at the restaurant, after we popped in to say hello to another friend of mine on the way, who had a birthday card for me.

I walked into surprise number two - a party with friends, work friends and Mark's family! As you can see, I was NOT expecting this at all!





(Actually, Lydia, the one in the purple scarf in the pictures, said that even she was surprised, and she knew what was coming!)

So there was food and drink and everyone milling about. In this picture, right to left, is Mark's sister Sarah, Mark's cousin Sian, Mark's aunt Fran, and Sarah's boyfriend Tim.




Mark had arranged for a bunch of musician friends and colleagues to come, along with a caller to lead us through the dances. A barn dance, or ceilidh (pronounced "KAY-lee") is kind of like square dancing, with group dances and pretty much the same moves (lots of do-si-do-ing).




Although Mark played for most of the night, I did get to dance with him once or twice.






Mark had also arranged for a cake, made by a lady from Los Angeles, living in London. She made it in the shape of a Texas - it was pretty impressive.




Then there was more dancing!

30th Birthday: Surprise number one: Mom and Dad!

For my birthday, Mark planned three surprises - one for each decade. I was totally blown away by them all - I didn't expect anything for any of them, except for maybe right at the last minute. It was an unparallelled feat of logistics and secrecy, and I can't believe how well everyone kept all of the secrets, because it seems that absolutely everyone knew everything about what was going on!

As everyone knows, for the first surprise, Mom and Dad flew to England. They flew into Heathrow on Monday and it worked out really well because Mark managed to finagle a meeting in London, so he could pick them up from the airport. He took them to the Moon and Sixpence, in Clevedon, which is a pub with rooms, on the seafront. They've just redone their rooms, and it sounded like they did a good job. Here's a sneaky photograph taken when Mark dropped them off - at this point, I'm at home at the flat, unaware of anything going on!


On Tuesday, Mom and Dad hung out and slept out their jet lag, confined to their room, because I was working from home most of the day, and Dad was afraid that if they went out in public, I might spot them and the jig would be up. But in the evening, I had a clue waiting for me, which kicked off a sort of treasure hunt all around the flat - and car. The last clue took me to the Blue Ocean, which is a Thai restaurant in Weston-Super-Mare, which is one of our favorites.

Because of the wording of the final clue, and a couple of other things, I had a sneaking suspicion about what might be there, but I didn't think that Mom and Dad would actually have flown over. And when I entered the restaurant, only Mark was waiting there. But then, Mom and Dad came out, which Mark captured on video (most of it is of me, talking, but what else is new....let me know if this video doesn't work - it's my first time including one on the blog):





Then we had really yummy Thai food!



At this point, I knew I had two more surprises coming, but Mark assured me that this was the biggest one, so I relaxed, thinking that not much else was going to happen...so I was totally unprepared for the next surprise!

Getting ready for Christmas! Group Activities

Mark and I dropped Mom and Dad off at Heathrow a few hours ago, and it looks like their flight took off about half an hour late, but otherwise, everything seems to be ok. I'll post separately about their visit here, but I wanted to get this post up, so everyone can start commenting on it.

While Mom and Dad were here, we discussed the "Group Activity" ideas for the Christmas visit that Julie kicked off on Spark. We thought that it may be helpful if we listed them in one place, so I offered my blog (since I haven't been using it much!). I've added a list over on the side with some of the ideas we came up with, and I'll add the ones that have been discussed on Spark. Let me know if there are others and I can add them to the list! The name at the end is the person who suggested the original idea, or who is particularly interested in it, so is the person, I'm assuming, who has taken "ownership" of that idea.

I'm not quite sure how we want to decide what to do, or track who wants to do what, but I thought the first step might be to put them all in one place!

Catching up...part two...Westonbirt.

A couple of weekends ago, we visited Westonbirt, the National Arboretum. It's located outside of Cirencester, about 45 minutes away from us. A friend of mine is a member because she lives not too far from it and she visits it a lot. She and her husband were going to be away for the weekend, so she gave us their membership cards to get in for free. I think the last time I had been to an arboretum was for Jenny & Jeff's wedding, so I was interested to see if there was anything new happening with arboretums (arboreta?) these days. Plus, it's a good time of year to look at trees, of course.

It's a pretty big place, and we spent most of our time in the new bit. They allow dogs in that section, and it really was Dog City. All you needed were little name tags on each of the dogs like the trees had and you would pretty much have a Dogeretum.

Anyway, here are some nice pictures of trees (and people - no dogs, sorry!):



This is a beech:



I think you all know this one:




(This is the only picture we have of me, so I'm throwing it in - I'm actually standing with one of the redwoods):



A Japanese maple:



A really impressive cedar tree (hold your nose, Mom):


A 2,000 year old lime coppice:



A festive holly:




And speaking of festive, we thought this one looks like it's straight out of Who-ville!:

Holy counted sheep, Batman!

Normally I seem to dream a lot, but I don't remember them much beyond when I first wake up. I've been generally disappointed with my dream life, because I don't seem to experience them very clearly - it's always through a haze, or I can't see well in them or something similar. Occasionally, I'll have a fairly vibrant dream, and there are a few that are still with me (a couple good, a couple bad), but normally it's all pretty boring stuff, and pretty easily connected to whatever I was doing the day before.

Mark, on the other hand, seems to have really cool dreams - he's a spy, he's being chased, he's traveling interesting places, he's single-handedly saving school buses full of children (ok, I made that last one up, but the rest I know he's mentioned at some point). I've heard interviews with film directors that actually have the whole lucid dreaming thing going on, and I have a friend that has dreamt entire short story. I've actually dreamt a full film once, but I only remembered the end when I woke up. It was really annoying.

Then the other night, I dreamt I was Spiderman. I don't remember a lot of it, but I do remember distinctly BEING Spiderman, in that way that dreams have, where you know something is absolutely true, even though it's wholly inconsistent with reality or history or logic or anything else. I definitely was Spiderman. There was a villain, and at one point, my spidey senses tingled. I woke up really pleased with myself, finally having an interesting dream, but then I was replaying it, and I realized that actually I didn't do any wall walking. I didn't do any swinging. What I did do, was a lot of talking. I remember talking with the villain, talking with other people hanging about. It was like if you took all three Spiderman movies, cut out all the exciting action scenes and then spliced it together. I had no swinging chases. I had all dialogue. I was so disappointed - my one shot at a superhero dream and all I do is yak.

Catching up...part one...home.

I have been receiving some reminders to update the blog, so here are some photos from the past few months. Nothing special, just in and around the home kinds of things. Canny readers will realize that a "part one" in the title implies that there will be more to come...I will endeavor to post more frequently than I have been doing of late - there are a couple of events with photos attached - Mark's birthday and a recent trip to the arboretum, so those are easy ones to do. Those to come!

After uploading all the photos I realized I didn't have so many of Mark, so here's a random one to get us started. This is actually a little bit old, since it's with the older camera, not his nice new one that we got on the cruise.



Here's a photo of me working from home. I don't normally wear a headset - I just happened to be testing a new bit of online collaborative software (Webex if anyone has used it) with a colleague (Roger), so we were testing out the audio side.



Here is a sunset from our living room window:



Here I'm talking on the phone with Mom and Dad. Again, this one is a little bit older--you can tell because I have my old glasses on. (Sorry to be dredging up photos from the archive, but they're the only "domestic" ones we have...):



Here's a more recent one that Mark took while I was shortening some jeans. I'm getting to be not so bad at it, I've had so much practice lately. I even measure properly now!



The next photos are from the normal walk we do around Clevedon. These sights should look familiar to Dad and Jenny! We took these on an actual sunny day in September - I think it was sunny day number 3 out of 7 so far for the year. In one of the photos you can see a big bank of clouds coming in...lately even when we get sun it doesn't seem to last!








And finally, we bought a new TV a couple of months ago, so of course, somebody needed to get into the box and Mark won the toss. I know, it's weird because it makes him look like he doesn't have any legs. But it's a great box: