Eating, drinking and snowboarding

Ooh, I've been busy. Really busy. Obviously I finished the first draft of the research project report in time, and emailed it over to my supervisor by the end of Wednesday. This allowed me to have my proper weekend on Thursday and Friday, and boy did I make use of that weekend. A bit too much, really.

On Thursday I tidied up a bit so I could find my desk, but abandoned that to go to Birmingham for the day. I was meeting people at the end of the day, but found a film that I thought might be good, featuring the gorgeous Johnny Depp. But I went early enough so that I could have lunch at Cafe Soya, which has not gone out of business in the three and a half years since I stopped working in Birmingham and single-handedly funding its existence. It is delicious, and so much better than its competitors, and I had wonton dumpling soup noodles, and they were wonderful.

I met up with friends I used to work with, and caught up with some office news, most of it tales of redundancy and jobseeking and pain. But we cheered ourselves up with some Glühwein in the Frankfurt market that sets itself up in central Birmingham every Christmas, and had some schnitzel, and walked about a bit looking at the stalls on the way to the pub that we like which was too full to sit down in so we went to another pub that we like that was too noisy. But we stayed there anyway and had some beer and then I caught the train back home. It was only delayed half an hour for the half-hour journey. All in all, a very long day.

Now this was all very well and I had a lovely time, but Glühwein before any food plus beer afterwards and a late night because of train delays made me rather tired and emotional. In fact, it was a great deal more than my system is used to, and the thing that I should have remembered is that on Friday morning, very early indeed, Mr A and I were having our first snowboard lesson.

We were awake and up in time, and got there ready to go at the allotted time, but I really was feeling rough despite the pints of water I'd drunk (and the paracetamol), and although I took some breakfast with me, I really couldn't eat it. So there I was, out on the slope on my snowboard, telling my legs and feet to do things they really didn't know how to do, without any fuel to allow them to do it. It all made perfect sense based on my newly acquired dietetic knowledge, but the fact was, I couldn't eat the muesli until two hours later when we had a break. I was transformed after that, and by the end of the session was feeling much better, sliding forwards and backwards, and we had even started making turns.

When we came out, it had actually been snowing, which made it feel even more exciting and holiday-like, and we're really looking forward to the second lesson next week and the holiday at the end of January. But the journey home was quite slow, and then all I could manage was a bath and a bit of lunch and then off to bed for a couple of hours. More like three hours, actually.

The Boy came to visit in the evening, as part of his Christmas tour of parents, so I did manage to get up again for supper (another Jamie triumph from Mr A) but then sent them off to the pub so I could complete my rehabilitation ready for work on Saturday. The weekend's truly over for me, so I'm back to coursework this morning. It's been snowing pretty hard here, so the last I've seen of Mr A and The Boy was them heading off for the slopes of the golf course with the toboggan...