UK Letter Home January 2003

Welcome to the January edition of UK Bound

January started with snow. The first snow of winter, on the first day of the year. After sweeping the stairs off, we went for a walk and found fox, rabbit and squirrel tracks. We were going to follow them, but the ground was a little soft, and it was just too much effort. The snow went as quickly as it came, and was gone the next day. It was really nice tho, as we both had the day off, and were able to enjoy the snow.

Since we have a bit of a yard, and we're close to a couple of parks, we wanted to get a mutt (aka puppy). But then we thought that we'd have to fence off the yard and we weren't sure exactly how the moggies (aka cats) would react. So, we've decided on a wean (pronounced wayne) instead. We're really excited, and we'll keep you posted. We're not sure on how the moggies will react, but they're pretty calm natured. Solo and Jack have been around small mutts on several occassions, so we're not expecting any problems.

We went to the ballet "The Snowman". I believe it's a 20 year old BBC Christmas production, and I have never seen it in NA. If you get the chance to even see the cartoon, we'd both definately recommend it. It wasn't one of those "everyone doing piroette's" types of ballets, but more just running around. It's hard to describe, but was really well done.

The web site, it has actually overgrown it's current home. There's over 700 pictures on it now. I was thinking about upgrading the site to a bannerless site. If there's enough people that view it and look at it, I might consider it but that costs $$$... or, does anyone know of another site where I could have free web hosting? The site is around 70megs now and is continually growing. I have done quite a bit of work on it in the last couple of months. You can now view it using netscape and I have reduced the number of advertisers popup windows. It seems like I am always working away on it. The France page took over 40 hours to upload, write, and organize. I am currently working on the Italy page, and that should be pretty much all of the recent trips. I still have older trips like Gran Canaria and NY, but so far nobody's requested that I put them back up - these were originally on the old MSN site that was, for some reason, deleted.

On the job front, last on Jan 24th, Kim lost her job. We were half expecting it, but when the axe finally falls, it leaves you gutted. So, Kim had the last week to relax and prepare for our trip to Oslo. On Thursday Jan 30th Kim had an interview, and started on the 31st, leaving Kim unemployed for a grand total of 4 days. So, just a little breather for her. On the down side, since Kim now has a job, we are unable to go to Oslo. I have moved my holidays to the last 9 days in March, so hopefully we can move our flights until then.

We've done a little more home improvements - we've added insulation into the walls, under the floor, and added more into the loft. We were able to get a government grant for the walls and loft. It was actually 100 pounds cheaper for me to take out all the loft insulation, and for them to totally reinstall it rather than just topping it up. Silly place. We have more improvements planned, so the quicker you send us the dosh, the quicker we can get everything sorted.

We also have a couple of T-Shirts from the HardRock in Manchester - 1 large and 1 medium. Let me know if you want one.

And, the last day of January, we had a little snow, with some really high temperatures inbetween. I think the highest it got upto was 18-20C. We've had gail winds, and sideways rain. But hey, that's just normal weather for sunny Scotland.

Hope to hear from you.
Brian and Kim.