early june, 2003

well that was a hectic end to a trip. it turned out i did need to be in london for the last week of our trip so aly and toby stayed with grammy and grandad AGAIN (it's a good job they had in mind that they weren't going to see their grandchildren for a while after this!). sascha and i went to london and actually got to do some socialising and 'london stuff'. i had my meeting/lunch at the fsa thursday and then managed to meet up with a lovely ex-client, ray ellis, on friday morning. don't ask me what sascha did during this time since i completely lost track of him!

friday night i met up with becky lawrence who I hadn't since we left primary school aged 12 which was great. we had a LOT of catching up to do. we're both hoping it will be less than 18 years before we see each other again! after that, sascha, nick and i all went to pizza express much to sascha's delight - i hadn't let him go before that due to my love of pizza clashing with my current wheat free/dairy free hellish diet!

saturday, sascha and i finally got to go on the london eye with jonp [thanks for all your hospitality jonp!], after which sascha had to go and collect our stuff from the office and clean his desk which freed up a couple of hours for a trip to my favourite stationery shop in the world - paperchase - hooray! we went back to the hotel briefly [the 'plaza on hyde park' which i would highly recommend but only if you can book really cheap rooms online and, unlike sascha, manage to enter the correct month when you book your room ;-p [good job he never reads unblog].

saturday night was EUROVISION NIGHT and mike's eurovision party. andy spectacularly feel asleep before the scoring had even begun. i had ukraine in the draw who scored almost as badly as the UK. this was a good thing since we had to take a drink everytime our country scored a point! i've been wondering how to explain our 'nil points' standing to my friends in the US [since i'd really like to hold them fully responsible] and am still at a loss. of course there is the small matter of it being a shallow song with mediocre singers who seemed to be having a bad day, but since when has that stopped a song winning the eurovision? anyway, great party mike. i throughly enjoyed my lactose-free brown cows and am glad i left before the vomiting in your bedroom started.

the children were wonderful on the flight home and thankfully, due to some nasty sticky stuff dripping out of a storage locker onto the poor woman sharing our bulkhead row, we got the whole 4 seats to ourself! we got a plane which had just been upgraded so had the pleasure of 50+ movies to choose from [which can be started, paused, rewound etc. as you choose] and sascha and i had a great time playing a trivia game against other people on the plane. i'll never forget the smirk 'dennis' in 42D gave me as i turned around to see how smug he was looking after yet another win]. however, the immigration line at LA was almost 1.5hrs so that was more of a hassle than the entire 11hr flight since we'd all had quite enough by that time. the less said the better.

as i'm writing this we're in limbo [but a happy californian limbo] at my sister's place. her now enormous iguana is trying to escape out of it's worryingly thin-looking tank as i write this. fortunately it just seems to keep sliding down the sides. aly asked if it was a monster yesterday :-) i just wish the water dragons would eat their crickets - it's a little unsettling watching them hoping around the tank. at least the cat [boo] and 3 turtles/tortoises [snappy/spooky/skippy] keep to themselves.

my wonderful wonderful californian friends managed to confuse me into not suspecting a thing about the surprise leaving/welcome back party they threw me. it was in my favourite british pub - victoria pub and i got to play pool for most of the night [satisfactorily beating a guy who was waiting for his friend to arrive :-) ] these lovely friends had made me a scrapbook of our time here, which apart from being one of the most thoughful and beautiful things i've ever received, has saved me the job of trying to scrapbook the moms club of ventura :-) thank you all VERY much.

in true williams family tradition, dani and nikki arrived in town this morning after a small 5hr detour on the way down from canada last night. it's lovely to see them again and weird to think that they won't be a novelty soon! nikki is off to a book convention in LA but hopefully dani should be able to spend a few days with us. sascha may or may not be travelling back with them to find us somewhere to live but then that's all a bit too much like forward planning for us ;-)

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