Time flies like an arrow

This weekend has been a strange one. And not just because I found my boyfriend blow drying the rocket this afternoon???

It's been a while since I worked a regular job - since May 2005. It's not an eternity, but it's the longest stretch I have had off work since starting about 10 years ago. To be honest, I really enjoyed being able to wake up when I was fully rested. I didn’t mind being able to stay in my pyjamas until noon , or the time I had to get all of the chores done BEFORE the weekend so we could make the most of those precious weekend hours. This brings me swiftly towards my point.....this weekend I felt manic. I was knackered - completely buggered by my 2 days of 6am starts. Saturday morning I woke up with an urgent feeling of having to get a heap of stuff done. So it was out of bed - WAY too early - to start with the washing. Then there was the replying to emails, updating of a friends website, moving more buckets under the drips, investigating the boiler room upstairs.

Today was another morning of urgency & I was up (knackered, again) to do another load of washing, rotate the wet clothes through the drying cupboard, start ironing this weeks clothes, then to Tescos for the food shopping, home to cook this weeks lunches, back to Tescos because someone had opened our freshly bought vitamins (Kyn got lumbered witht this task), more ironing, cleaning the carpet after I kicked over a jar full of reddish water & now it's dinner time. I'm sure this rushing around is just a result of me being both tired & out of practice with this sort of life. I'm hoping i settle into a routine pretty quickly. It's at times like this I am very glad we don’t have kids yet. I don’t know how parents do all of this for themselves & still have time for little people.

The one bright & shiny moment this weekend was when I nipped over to Islington to see Immi. I stole away for 2 hours on Saturday & met her before she had to head of to work. She is my friend’s sister & has been living in London longer than us. I guess she's my friend now too. Anyway - she's great fun & we try to meet up every few weeks.

This week was my first time to Islington & I really liked it. Its main appeal is that it's high street is just restaurant after cafe after restaurant. It's a sort of wanky neighbourhood like Prahan in Melbourne, Kingston in Canberra or Double Bay in Sydney, but the food is worth putting up with the attitude.

It was in Islington I discovered a great new form of dieting. Buy a nebulous chocolate meringue after salivating at the counter for 15minutes. Sit at a table outside with a coffee & get up 20 minutes later, leaving your meringue safely in its little takeaway box under the table. Discover this fact on the Tube on the way home & try & salvage something positive from the experience. Hence the "Islington Meringue diet" was born.