Blame Canada

*Sigh* So we've been having the house & garden renovated for a year now, and I feel like it's finally time to vent. I came home from England at the beginning of February to find our kitchen missing. It still is. I've been living on cereal and restaurant food for the past 6 weeks. I'm not sure how many more bowls of muesli I can take!

But it's a great diet plan, especially when your fridge looks like this (for some reason, we had to have it panelled - don't ask me why):

I've also perfected the art of pushing past the dust covers that hang over the stairs. You have to be careful not to get any dust on you, while holding lots of things so you don't have to go back in 5 minutes for the rest of your stuff. You also have to be careful not to miss a step and brain yourself on the banisters (tricky when you're limping from an infected toe because you mashed it into your suitcase which you left lying around after coming back from England because you were too tired to unpack).

A few more weeks of this and I'll be qualified to join Cirque du Soleil.

So no kitchen, inconvenient stairs (which is a pain because there's dust covers for both sets of stairs, and they divide the two main parts of our house), and a guest room (right) that looks like Hezbollah's been at it with rocket launchers. Into this pristine scenario, Joe introduces the idea that we should have friends from England to stay for a week.

After I finished spitting fire, he told me I was inhospitable. So now we're not speaking.

On a positive note, our 3-year anniversary is coming up! We're planning to stay in and eat cereal.

By the way, thanks to all of you who posted condolences about my grandad - just to let you know I'm fine. The funeral was very sad (as funerals are) but it was great to be there with my family. I never hung out with my dad's side of the family very much when I was a kid, and I really feel like I'm making up for lost time. So there's good stuff too.


My grandad's flowers. He always called everyone 'buddy'. *Sigh*

I've been taking my skating to the next level lately and actually playing (very informal) matches with people who can actually play ice hockey. I went for the first time a few weeks back - it's taken a while to update you because my grandad died the next day, then I went back for the funeral, so everything's been thrown out of whack.

Anyway, I had the time of my life, and even though I skated about a tenth of the speed of everyone else, they were really nice and passed the puck to me and everything. That's what I like about Canada - even if you're not much good at something, people respect you just for giving it a shot. It helped that my English friend Nigel (an English person, living in Grimsby, who plays ice hockey - what are the chances?) kept yelling encouragements to me even though he was on the other team.

It was even worth the severe aches and pains I had to put up with for the following few days. I'm going next week, so I've got that to look forward to again. Got to cram in a few more matches before the season ends!

I was published in the Daily Mail travel section a few weeks back : ) For those of you who haven't seen it, it's online at: http://www.thisistravel.co.uk/travel/citybreaks/Five-unusual-romantic-breaks-article.html?in_article_id=47540