lnr | Entries tagged with anniversary

I feel like I have a busy social life right now. On Tuesday night we had a lovely meal out at CB2 for our wedding anniversary - with chocolate milkshakes - and a walk back through Mill Road Cemetery for old time's sake. A very happy 2 years it has been, and we're looking forward to many more! And tonight we met up after work for another good meal out at Loch Fyne - made even better with money off offers - and then met up with some of Mike's colleagues for drinks to celebrate Scott's 30th birthday. Very entertaining when we were both rather more sober (ie completely so) than everyone else (completely not). I did have a couple of beers - but they had no alcohol in! Plus tomorrow I'm heading off for a hen party.

The other thing I did on Tuesday (fun ways to spend your wedding anniversary) was to have a Glucose Tolerance Test at Addenbrookes. Apparently in this area they recommend one for everyone at 28 weeks - but because of the family history of diabetes and my own raised blood sugar in the past when I was diagnosed with metabolic syndrome they decided to recommend I have an extra one around 16 weeks too. You arrive first thing, having not eaten or drunk anything since the previous evening and they do a blood test. They then give you a strong solution of glucose to drink (with a splash of lemon juice to make it taste better) and give you 5 minutes to finish it - then you come back at 1 hour and 2 hours after you finished the drink for more blood tests. I have to admit it made me feel as sick as a dog - so much so I even had to put my book down and stop reading. The results were supposed to take a week, but I got back this evening to find they've arrived.

According to local guidelines they recommend a diagnosis of Gestational Diabetes Mellitus if any one of your results is at or above the following:

Fasting:   5.3 mmol/l
1 hour:   10.0 mmol/l
2 hour:    8.5 mmol/l

My results were:

Fasting:   4.4 mmol/l
1 hour:    6.8 mmol/l
2 hour:    3.4 mmol/l

So I pass! And it's well within the guidelines for a normal result in non-pregnant people too. I think they'll still want to do it again later in pregnancy, but that's great news for now. No excuse to stop eating healthily of course. Though with the hen party tomorrow (which I'm all packed for and looking forward to) this weekend may be a bit of an exception. I have Monday off to recover and go see my midwife for a 16-week check-up, and then I have an appointment with the obstetric consultant on Tuesday - and we'll see if they think I do need any more extra checks or if I can just be counted as a normal pregnancy from here on in.

On Friday Mike and I joined a large bunch of his colleagues in the Boathouse for Pete's leaving do. It's really quite a big pub, which is just as well as we took over a large part of it. Nice pub food though - we shared nachos with chilli etc, and chose from an impressive array of burgers. It was a nice evening, even though I was really tired, and I was surprised to realise it was already 10:30 when we were thinking of going.

Saturday was a fairly lazy day, apart from being woken by yelling so loud Mike couldn't bear to stay in bed. Geeking in the morning followed by some gardening in the afternoon. I'm getting to quite like the sort of gardening that involves sitting on the lawn in the sunshine pulling out weeds. There's a particularly invasive one which creeps and almost entirely kills off the grass, combined with a thick layer of moss, and there's a certain amount of skill in getting them out and still leaving the tiny tufts of grass behind. Still, I think we've reduced its stranglehold on the lawn by about a third now. It looks rather bare as a result but hopefully it will fill out again with time. In the evening I learned that Ian had come off his bike rather nastily, and could do with some company, and coincidentally that the 3 of us available happened to be bridge players, so after a nice dinner (courtesy Tesco Finest) with Mike I headed over to MR for the first time for a couple of hours of bridge, in which Ross and I came out ahead again, but once more had the lion's share of the luck. Ian really does look a state, but it's mostly just grazes and nasty bruising, and he didn't seem to be suffering from concussion, which was the worry. Hopefully he'll get better soon.

On Sunday we got up in reasonable time and decide to make the most of the lovely weather and indulge our cycling addiction a bit more. ( Read more... )

In Newmarket we sat and caught our breath for a while then went for a wander. Admiring the training grounds for the races, and the vast numbers of shiny conkers. We took a look at the maps in WHSmith but decided we knew what route we were taking home, and didn't want to carry anything extra. Then we had a lovely lunch sitting outside a cafe by All Saints Church, which was covered in bunting for a flower festival. Definitely a "this is the life" moment. Still, we figured that given it was going to be a headwind on the way back we'd better head home. ( Read more... )

As usual there's a route map on Bikely. Our dinner of steak and eggs felt very well deserved.

Back to work on Monday as usual, but since it was exactly 6 months since we moved into our house we decided we needed to go out and celebrate. We spent our lunch break looking at menus online, and finally decided on the Riverside Restaurant at the University Centre. I had smoked duck, rabbit, and a vanilla and raspberry pannacotta style pudding. Mike had chicken and chorizo terrine, belly pork, and a chocolate cheesecake. It was strange eating in a room with only two other parties, but it was really nice, and the food was very good. In fact it was a really lovely evening all told, and a good way to mark how happy we are. Yay.

I've been having a very lazy week, since I was tired out after a full weekend. But actually I've done quite a few things.

On Monday I didn't go to see Bearsuit at the new Barfly (upstairs at the Graduate). Tom may now call me names lots, but honest I really was too tired.

On Tuesday lunchtime I went to the dentist, and had one filling done, and while it was numb the teeth in that quadrant de-scaled. The filling was necessary because part of one broke away when I chomped on a bit of crab shell in an otherwise lovely sandwich in Norfolk. However while some say I should be cross with the chef I am in fact quite pleased that it got me to get round to going back after 5 years. I was *very* glad I was numbed while the cleaning was going on - scale so bad it shows up on the x-rays. I have another 3 quadrants to de-scale yet, and another filling in one of my wisdom teeth. To be honest I've got off lightly. It's still horrible, and I am a bad girl and must also get better at cleaning my teeth.

On Wednesday we bought dinner from M&S and ate it while watching the football. England v Russia and it was an excellent match to watch. Obviously England winning helps.

And today (Thursday) I went for a bike ride at lunchtime, because the weather was nice and people had been talking about cycling on irc. Notably we'd been talked about fixies and singlespeeds. I'm pretty sure the former wouldn't suit me, but as an experiment I simulated the latter by staying in the same gear all the way round my 12.6 mile loop. On balance I think I'd want a higher gear. I made it up the one hill with a bit of oomph to spare (albeit rather red in the face) but was struggling to keep up on even the smallest of downwards inclines. Still, it was fun. Route on Bikely as usual.

Tomorrow Tesco are coming to bring us lots of nice food, and then it is the weekend again. And on Monday we will have to go out to celebrate having survived 6 months of living together, happier than ever.

I've been very lax about writing what I've been up to lately, and seem to have entirely missed out two weekends and I'm nearly at the third. Basically I've not been doing anything very exciting though. Lots of lounging around reading or watching DVDs, a couple of nice meals out with Mike, a nice walk, that sort of thing. So I'll skim over all the stuff I can't really remember and pick up at the weekend just gone.

I spent Saturday morning extremely unseasonally by mowing the lawn. OK so it's needed it for at least a month, but now the tree has finally dropped all its leaves and it was dry and vaguely sunny I had no excuse to put it off any longer. The big green bin was practically full when I finished, of grass clippings, wet leaves, the weeds growing under the neighbour's fence, and most of the sage plant which was trying to take over the universe. Very satisfying. Saturday evening was Richard's rather early birthday party, which was nice. My lovely skirt from Whitby got lots of nice comments, though I kept having to stand up to demonstrate that the back was even better than the front. Vicky was very taken by its bum-framing properties.

On Sunday Mike washed up after the party and I cooked us nice soup (OK, Covent Garden Soup Company), garlic and lemon roast chicken with roast spuds and parsnips, leeks, broccoli and carrots and gravy, and tesco choc brownie cheesecake for pudding. It was rather nice. And a very pleasant meal chatting too. As those of you who read Richard's livejournal have probably gathered by now I've been thinking that I'll probably want to move out and find a place with Mike at some point yesterday, so some of the conversation was about logistics, but it's nice to know Richard isn't too unhappy about the idea. I probably want to wait until March before getting too serious, because my annual increment comes round then and that's also when my student loan will be paid off, so I'll have rather more disposable income.

Monday night I took packet mushroom risotto and made it much nicer by the addition of leftover chicken and gravy and generally had a very quiet night. On Tuesday Mike and I went to see The Holiday at the pictures. Very predicatable and cheesy feel good romantic film that it is I rather enjoyed it. Aww bless. Dinner out afterwards was good, before staying over at Mike's since it's closer - and always very tempting when I have a meeting first thing because I get into work much earlier :-)

Wednesday morning I took a detour to pick up a parcel for Mike from the post office depot on my way into the office, and when I got home on Wednesday night and handed it to Mike he opened it and then handed the contents back to me. And in a pretty bag, in a pretty box with a ribbon, in a smaller pretty shiny hinged box was a lovely lovely white gold ring. Mike had tried to buy me one for our anniversary in November but the lovely one we found in town was not available in my size. This one came from Gerald Online who will do most of their rings in larger sizes to order. It's very very lovely indeed. So we decided it was obviously an excuse to celebrate our anniversary some more and we had a nice (if too greasy) indian takeaway and watched Elizabeth, which isn't exactly the film we'd have chosen for the occasion but is what was currently on loan. It was a really nice evening, and I don't care if we are a bit soppy with it: we're both really really happy.