Girl’s Week

Gav was in Cambodia this last week on a school trip.  I will let him give you the details, but for all my teacher friends out there, don’t start feeling sorry for him.  It was mostly adults and at no point did anyone cry, beg to call their mom, or shriek about haunted hand sanitiser.  Nell and I had a girls week, which was mellow at the beginning and then ramped up into a friend and cocktail-filled end of the week.

Wednesday night we hosted our monthly book club.  Unlike traditional books clubs, this year we started one where everyone talks about a book they recently enjoyed and then at the end there is a system of how people get to choose the books from those that were talked about (host gets first pick then alphabetically from that person’s name).  This eliminates the need to get lots of copies of one book and lets people differentiate based on interests.  It’s great because mostly we just drink wine and have a laugh.  Nell LOVED it because we had visitors and they brought food.  Win-win.  For the record, I brought and talked about Everything I Never Told You and took A Lesson Before Dying.  Last month I read The Radiance of Tomorrow, which was amazing but super depressing.  Pretty sure this month’s read isn’t going to be all rainbows and sunshine either.  People better start reading some cheerier stuff.  On a side note, one of the women at this books club is in another book club (overachiever) and she was talking about the amazing book they read last month, White Chrysanthemum.  I said “What? I know the author!!!” Mary Bracht, you have fans everywhere!

Then Thursday night I went out with some friends to the steak joint around the corner.  They have a 2 for 1 “Ladies Night” for cocktails and I had heard the Margaritas were pretty good.  Well, regular price for drinks is about £2.25.  So on Thursdays you get two cocktails for just over £2.  And they are pretty good.  This may have been a dangerous discovery.

Friday we had a PD day at school, so no kids.  All teachers know that this is usually worse than just having a regular day of classes, and this PD was no exception.  After we escaped at the end of the day, a group of us decided to try going to the Sailing Club for drinks.  On Fridays you don’t have to be a member and the setting is pretty nice.  You can watch the sunset while people are rowing on the lake.  I did see sailboats but I have no idea how people actually sail, as there has been no wind since we arrived.  The setting was great, the people watching hilarious. Apparently the members are almost all Burmese, but the Friday night crew was heavily expat of all varieties.  I left fairly early, but there were reports of Karaoke in the late hours…

Gav returned from Cambodia in the small hours of Saturday morning (I could tell he was home by the frantic tail thumping coming from Nell’s crate), and the rest of our weekend was pretty relaxed.  I heard about a carpet sale in a private home and was very excited to shop for something that was not acrylic and eye-wateringly patterned.  Everything was lovely and I wanted about 4 of the carpets there, but the prices were astonishing so we are still carpet free in our home.  This morning we finally made our way to the used bike shop where we got one bike to share.  Gav is still dreaming of his electric bike so is holding off.  It was quite the debacle to even get them to let me try out the bike I liked.  It had no pedals, so I asked them to put some on for a test-drive and 45 minutes later they were still trying to fix the gears and spruce it up.  I’m not sure if in the end I actually liked the bike or just felt guilty about the time and effort that went in to preparing it for me to try.  I will report back!