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this year, the celebration took place in town. we went to my usual bar, which was also celebrating its birthday. perfect. i think we ended up being about 15, what with people getting sick, people's buses not showing up and people getting lost. i was surprised by who was still there at the end - as usual, it seems - but i had a good time. we left at about 1am, when the music started getting on our nerves (unfortunately, not even something you could dance on).

and today, i plan to do nothing. i got up not long ago, will go for a walk (the weather's gorgeous) and try to catch Oceans, the latest marine documentary, which looks quite spectacular. nice and relaxing, just what i need...

on a walk

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the 2nd date

after last week's failed date, we met again. this time, we met in my local pub. we talked about lots of different things - physics, archaeology, childhood memories, how we got our respective jobs, etc. after a while we ordered food. it was a nice evening. but twice, we ended up with nothing to say. the second time, i waited a bit to see what he'd do, but he didn't do anything, so i found something else for us to talk about. we were together for just over 2 hours, and already, we were running out of things to say to each other.

this might not be the best way to think about it - then again, Mr. J. agrees with me - but with my other dates (apart from the one i only spent 1h30 with), we talked for a lot longer without ever stopping. i remember the evening with H., where i hadn't even noticed it was way past midnight. so i sent the engineer an email, first to thank him for a nice evening but also to express my doubts. the other guys i met through online dating didn't bother ever getting back to me at all, but i thought i should explain myself. he actually replied, saying he felt it was quite normal for us to run out of things to say, seeing as we barely knew each other. either way, for him it was way too early to even think about whether we were suited to each other. he had a point. so i've agreed to meet up again (if he's up for it).

the sun

one thing i must say is great about digital cameras, is that it won't burn your film to take pictures of the sun....

here's a small church in the foreground.

curling

here's a testimony to trying curling...

day trip

i am shattered.

just got back from our day in the mountains with the office. it was so much fun! we started with 2 hours of snow-tubing. and because all the other queues were long, i went to start with a red slope (meaning, mediumly difficult, blue being easy and black very hard), and so we all ended up up there, to face, we soon discovered, a near-90° angle! oops. i screamed all the way down - we'd been told we were allowed to scream if we wanted to, and it certainly released the tension of going that fast. i'm not a big fan of fast if i can't control it... i really liked the black where we kept going up and down the bobsleigh-like course. it was so much fun. and the slope where 2 to 4 people could be joined and go together was excellent. and in the tunnel, i had this irrational fear that i'd hit the roof, but got down in one piece.

after a very quick lunch, we then went to our curling lesson. it's basically like lawn-bowling on ice. i guess Scottish weather was never really that good ;) anyway, i was really looking forward to that, cos let's face it, how often do you get to try that out? and it was fun, but there were a lot of falls and we'll all be covered in bruises tomorrow, that's for sure. i really got the hang on sliding the stone off, but unfortunately in a straight line, which would only ever work for the first 'toss', seen as the other stones are supposed to 'curl' around on the left or on the right. we all agreed that after this experience (it's a lot of hard work), we'll never again dismiss it as an easy sport...

date with the engineer

i was supposed to meet up with this guy, last night. we've been chatting online for a couple of weeks and while he's not really my type, he seems nice and has a dog. the dog's a plus point!

anyway, we were meeting at 7pm in a small coffee shop near the station. i got there at 6.30, because that's the time i got to the station after work. i got to pick a nice table with view on the door so i wouldn't miss him (and it would be hard for him to miss me), ordered mint tea and started correcting homework. from just before 7, i paid more attention to the people walking in the door. at quarter past, he wasn't there yet. presumably, he'd had a last minute work thing. i'd forgotten his phone number on my coffee table, so when he still wasn't there at half past, i couldn't call him to check. typical. so i decided to leave a note. i asked the waitress to keep an eye out for anyone with his physical description who would probably be looking for someone. i felt a bit silly, but what the hell.

i got out, looked around, and saw him standing right there, at the entrance. i said hello and asked if he'd been waiting outside all that time. nope, he'd been inside all that time waiting for me. right. he hadn't seen me. had i been sitting behind the guy correcting copies? uh... that was me, correcting copies, i explained. oh. (this makes me wonder how motivated he was - there weren't that many people in the place...)

the thing was, i was really beat and hadn't planned on staying long (unless of course, i totally fell for him in half an hour!), but since we'd found each other i suggested walking around until my bus left. so we did. as it was raining, though, we ended up in a CD shop. we pretended to be looking at music and movies, but really, we were just talking. he seemed nice, walked me back to my bus when it was time and even waited with me till it arrived (late).

it was too short to say anything else, really, but we've both emailed saying it was nice and we should meet again. we'll see how that goes...

december roses

32 landscape

i love the area my father now lives in. it's really gorgeous. here's a nice example.

the nightmare after Xmas

on Thursday, as it continued snowing in the UK, we just knew the plane my sister was booked on wasn't going to leave, so it really wasn't a surprise when i, after my lesson, checked the airport information to find out her flight had indeed been cancelled. she had, however, and despite easyjet's assertion to the impossibility of finding another plane out for a week, been able to book another flight for yesterday. but with more snow here and over there, we were again quite sceptical about the whole thing.

we constantly checked the weather forecast and the easyjet info page for several hours, but with about an hour to go, the plane still hadn't been cancelled, so we eventually made our way to the airport. she checked in alright and was assured her plane would probably only be delayed an hour. the following plane had been cancelled, but hers would leave. definitely. we looked at each other. oh well, it was worth a try. plus, she had to go back sometime.

in the end, her flight got delayed 5 hours - same time as on the way over here. as her mobile didn't work, there was no back-and-forth information updates this time, although i did keep checking both on the internet and on teletext when her plane was due to take off. finally, they left at 10.18pm. finally, i was able to go to bed and get some much needed rest.

not again...

i knew this would happen. work has barely re-started but i'm already suffering from those weird headaches again. not headaches exactly. it's more like a diffuse but all-encompassing pain. hopefully, the problem will be sorted out next week and things will get back to normal. if not, things are not going to look pretty for my health...

tower

Twilight

my sister insisted i watch Twilight the other day. amazingly, despite my general love for vampires (well, Buffy - i got hooked at uni, after years of saying that people who watched it must be idiots...; i never really got into the Anne Rice stuff), i'd managed to avoid this new saga. mostly, i couldn't see why everyone thought the lead actor was so gorgeous although whether or not he is doesn't affect whether or not i watch a movie. maybe i just did what i usually do, i.e. refuse to do something just because everyone else does. that's how it took me forever to get started on the Harry Potter books. the whole 'saga' factor was also important: after waiting and waiting for the LOTR and Harry Potter movies, as well as for some books of a Swedish saga, i know how annoying it is to do just that: wait until the next one. ...but i disgress. so, Twilight was, indeed, good, inasmuch as a teenager chick flick is good, obviously. but now, the question: will i watch the other ones? stay tuned for the next episode...

Avatar

yeah, it was good, but not the 'all and all' that i'd been led to believe (my 21 year-old co-worker told me it was the best movie he'd ever seen!). it was very well made and the graphics are great but let's face it, plot-wise, it's nothing new, although i am a sucker for the good vs evil of mankind type of movies and very big on the environment. it was definitely entertaining, and i liked the music, always a big plus with me.

on a side note, i've just found out that the digitalised version of the movie takes up 1 petaoctet, which is apparently equivalent to listening to an MP3 file for 32 years!

the back to work nightmare

i, for once, wasn't all too pleased about going back to work. not enough sleep and dreading new client problems. i knew about the snow, but thought that surely by now a) they would have figured out the new bus timetable, b) learned how to drive those new buses and c) someone would have listened to the weather forecast and put some salt on those roads and informed the snow ploughs. but no.

i actually thought i'd be catching the previous bus, thinking it'd be late. i was right on the lateness, not about catching it. after waiting for 15 mns, i overheard a conversation whereby someone was informing someone else that they'd been waiting for a whole hour already. right. another 15 mns later and there were more people waiting for the bus than spaces on the bus. and as people clearly hadn't checked the weather forecast, all those people going back to work after the holidays were clearly surprised, so the roads were chaos (although, to be fair, my town had been nicely taken care of in terms of snow on the road).

i went back home to take the car. i was gonna take the back way. humm... 2 mns later, i was in first gear and stayed there for the next 7 or so kilometres. it took us a looonnng time to get to a place where i luckily veered left into another back way, where i was able to do 60kph (thanks, snow tires!), but as soon as i hit town again, chaos resumed. more so in Geneva, as the ploughs obviously hadn't been around, nor had any salt been used. and 2 of our 3 buses were stranded in the uphill, while a bus-person was trying to help the bus move, with about zero success.

i finally made it to work at 9.45 (i'd left home at 8.15 originally, so not that bad), after parking the car behind some other cars and stranded buses in one of the very few non-paying zones. when i picked it up tonight, it turned out i was parked on the cycle-path, but that people had been nice enough not to fine me for it. lucky me.

more plane trees

and here you can see how they try to tie them together so as to make shade in the summer when the branches are all leafy and green...

the plane tree

so, apparently, they are called plane trees in English. they're very popular in France, especially to make natural umbrellas on terraces in the summer. their branches are led by metal wires, to reach the desired effect. here's just one of a series of pics.

4 years later...

showing the cousins around, we went back to the tree sign, that i posted some years ago. this is what it looks like today! in 4 years, i think the sign will be no more...

today

4 years ago