Happy New Year!

First of all, appologies for not adding any posts for the past few weeks... it's not because we don't care or that the novelty has worn off, simply a technical problem with Blogger, but I won't go into the technical details.

Fortunately, my smart, techie wife sorted it out today... after scanning through the internet she found a reference to try something that she hadn't done before and made one last attempt to sort the problem out... and it worked!

So, time to catch up on what's been going on over the past few weeks! First of all, we got our new kitchen counter top installed just in time for Christmas!


It's looking nice and new and shiny in the picture above, but already after a few weeks of use it is inevitably covered in scratches and marks... but this just adds to the character and soon it will look like it's supposed to look like that!

Also just before Christmas, we had some blinds installed in the upstairs bedroom, upstairs hall and bathroom.


The upstairs bedroom has now become the guest room, so the installation of the blinds was just in time for my parents coming over from the UK and visiting us for Christmas. They arrived the Saturday before Christmas, which was just in time to help us prepare for a large Christmas Eve dinner, with Flo's parents, her two brothers and their families... fourteen people in total! So the kitchen was put through its paces and to feed so many people we bought a huge 8kg turkey! Turns out that this was more than big enough, since we're still eating turkey curry now! We did a quick calculation last night and figured that we're going to get about thirty meals out of that bird!


We think the party turned out well... we enjoyed it at least and hosting dinners like this is exactly what we had in mind keeping the space at the front of the house big and open... one of my friends that saw the house for the first time a few weeks back commented that we have the perfect party house! We just need to make an effort to host some events over the next couple of years... the next one should be the house warming!

For Boxing Day, we took my parents to the Lucent Danstheater in Den Haag to watch the Kirov Ballet of Saint Peterburg perform The Nutcracker! We weren't so keen on the first half of the performance, but the second half is breathtaking and was well worth the visit. It felt like a very special way of spending Boxing Day evening and we felt very privileged to see the performance. We'd certainly recommend going and seeing it, if only for a spot of people watching, since there was certainly a large cross section of the people that attended!

Christmas turned out to be pretty busy this year, so by New Year we treated ourselves to a quiet night in, catching up on the second series of Prison Break whilst drinking champagne and eating fresh sushi from Simonis in Scheveningen (where my parents enjoyed probably the best fish and chips in the Netherlands on the day that they departed back to the UK). At midnight we ventured out into the street and watched the local inhabitants put on a loud and quite spectacular fireworks display on out little plein down the street.

So all in all we had a very pleasant and memorable festive period, so much so that heading back into work took quite some effort! But things are about back into full swing and both Flo and myself seem to be as busy as ever! But there's plenty to look forward to in 2007...