Rough plans

Alarm clocks are evil. Alarm clocks going off behind locked doors more so. Grumpy this morning much. Still not sleeping well and slept in an odd position on my sore shoulder and well, it's sore!

Anyhow, it's not all grumpy grumping today. Last night I decided to cheer myself up I started working out a rough itinerary for our Europe trip so that I could leave it on the pillow for Gene to look at when he got home this morning. Wow! What a trip :)

As a rough guide, the first week will be spent in France, Paris for Christmas and visiting friends and family. The start of the second week sees us travelling South to Toulouse to connect with our train/bus to Andorra La Vella. We'll spend a couple of days there before heading to Spain to live it up in Barcelona and then possibly Ibiza (costs allowing) and then Valencia before we fly up to Britain. A week or so in England doing the family, museum, theatre thing before we start our whirlwind tour of Wales, Ireland and Scotland. From Scotland we fly to Norway where we're heading north to the Arctic Circle to see the Northern Lights. Once we've frozen ourselves we'll travel south to the The Netherlands, possibly Germany but we may not have time or cash and then a quick stop in Belgium before relaxing back in France for a few days seeing friends and family again. After we'll be on our home stretch heading back to Doha, then Singapore and then Melbourne!

This activity turned out to be a bad idea because instead of wearing out my brain it just got me excited about the trip which is possibly only 58 days away! Eek!

Detailled itinerary to follow in the next few days as we start to make bookings. We're in the process of contacting various people to arrange visits :)

Sleepy Still

What a great, if somewhat sleepless weekend! Saturday night was great fun. After a short nap in Geelong we got ready for the party. It's always odd going to a 21st when you only know a few people. Being the small world that it is, it turned out that one of Loz's friends used to go to high school with me! So there was a bit of catching up that night and a little dancing. We're a little (okay a lot) out of practice with our swing dancing so we're planning to rectify this by going to class tonight. Hopefully there's room on the dance floor for the class! I've heard they're packed right now.

Sunday morning saw us watching old videos of Gene when he was two, not sure how that came about... but he was such a cute two year old! Then we had lunch before heading off to my parents house to catch up with Mum & Dad. Picked up my pretty new Palm and have been playing with it almost non-stop since I've synchronised it with my computer. Tee hee hee... pretty. So I'm slowly updating addresses, birthdays etc. It's great.

This morning has been less fun so far, although I've managed to achieve one thing on my to do list today. We'll be able to recycle plastic and glass in 48 working hours according to the lady on the phone. Gene & I decided to trial the alarm on the Palm this morning as we woke up to the tune, can't remember the name of it, that you hear played on a bugle before a hunt.

I'd write more but I'm too distracted with trying to find software for my Palm so perhaps I'll have to write later.

Inspections and Dreams

Yay for the house inspection going well! Close call though. Gene & I both slept through the alarm this morning. The only reason I woke up was because of my bad dream, but more on that later. So we jumped out of bed, got dressed and was just about to drag Herman to the car when our buzzer rang. It was 10:40am. So Gene stashed Herman in our room with a blanket over him and his stuff while I went to get the door. Our real estate agent seemed about as awake as we were. Looked around slightly disinterestedly and asked if we had any maintenance issues. We conversed and about 7 minutes later she headed off.

Herman's now sitting behind me in his cage eating kibble. I think he likes our room because it's quieter than the living room.

As for the dream I had... that's what's making me feel sick. The last part of my dream involved me trying to take a multi-vitamin capsule but for some reason I just couldn't swallow it and I woke up choking. So now I'm feeling a little bit ill because I can't shake that feeling.

Okay, shopping time now!

It's Oh So Quiet

This morning I tried out the alarm clock function on my new iPod. I highly recommend Björk's "It's Oh So Quiet" as fantastic wake up music. The hint of the triangle gives your brain a subtle hint that something is about to happen before the quiet melody of the woodwinds gently ease you into waking. If that didn't grab your consciousness, then the brass section is sure to remedy that! It almost has a snooze function with the quiet sections interspersed with blasts of theatrical music that you really can't complain about. All in all a great piece of music that I love at any time of day (certainly better than a blaring off-key siren) and a cute film clip to boot!

The dogs seemed a little drowsy when I let them out. Particularly Clio. I think she must have had trouble sleeping. I heard her pacing around in the wee small hours of the morning.

Today will be a tough day. I've had about 3.5 hours sleep and I'm aiming to be awake for a few more hours before I undoubtly crash and have a nap. I decided that I needed to go to the doctor regarding my stupid foot which hurts to walk on. I might mention that I've been having trouble sleeping. Then again I'm sure that the sleep patterns being strange have something to do with the recent changes to my social life having moved to the burbs while house-sitting.

I should also go shopping and get some more dog food for the dogs and a set of 7mm circular knitting needles for myself. I also need to put petrol in the car . That will be expensive given the size of the petrol tank and the type of fuel. Oh well, it's a price that I'll pay for the luxury of not having to walk to the doctor's.