Day 1 – Thursday

Alright, most of you know that I write – real, honest to goodness, pen and paper letters.  I have done since I was around 8 years old.  As I’ve said before, my P4 Teacher Miss Trainor had a sister who taught in a school in Warrenpoint – they paired us up with each other’s class and we became penpals.

Since then, I’ve always written to someone, even, sometimes, friends I see on a regular basis – there’s something very refreshing about sitting down with a pen and notebook and writing.  It’s theraputic, very like this blog!

On live journal (the online blog I’ve written for a number of years now), I joined a community called Linked By Letters, where I met Vanessa – the same place I met the 3 girls (Izzy, Gen and Nicole) we had dinner with in Seattle.  Ness and I have been writing to each other for going on around 6 or 7 years now (or something crazy-ass like that!) and she and her boyfriend decided to come and visit Col and I, here in sunny Texas for the weekend.

The days leading up to their arrival, I did what I always do when someone comes to town – I cleaned!  Or, cleaned as best I could with two dog-a-bongs underfoot.  Once Sam came to pick up Poppy and Bazil on Wednesday, I really got stuck in to the house.  I was pretty pleased at how clean and tidy everything was.

Vanessa and Mike arrived on Thursday 2^nd, and, true to form, we were a little late picking them up – I’m such a poor hostess!  We had sussed out a Jason’s Deli to go to for lunch (Vanessa is a vegetarian and Mike has celiacs disease so he can’t have anything with gluten in it), but, when we got there, it was closed! GAH!

We regrouped and researched, settling upon an old favourite of ours – Ghengis grill, for lunch instead.  It was yummy (as always) and, when we’d all finished, we headed in to down town Houston to hit up the Aquarium.  Yup – we got straight into the tour-guiding thing, not a minute was wasted!

The Aquarium is one of my favourite places to take people.  It’s not a particularly big, or impressive aquarium, I just like it.  I like spending time playing with the Stingrays in the tank and I like watching the white tiger in her enclosure.  I dunno, something about the aquarium makes me feel good…

After we parted ways with the animals, we went back to Ghengis to pick up Vanessa’s hat that she’d left behind, before heading home to drop Col off to deal with the sky falling.  I know I’ve said this before, but before we go on any trips, Armageddon happens in his work – apparently, that has now spread to people visiting us.  The day Ness and Mike arrived, chaos had erupted in Col’s work-world meaning he had to focus a lot of his energies in work, work longer and weirder hours and that he was a lot more highly-strung and stressed out than normal (which made for some entertaining road rage! LOL!)

While Col worked, I took our guests over to HEB to pick up some veggie-friendly and gluten-free stuff, ahead of cooking, what turned out to be a yummy dinner of spag-bol – which I cooked with ‘fake’ mince that Magz had left me from her freezer to try!

We finished the evening, with the ever eventful Britain’s got Talent – we’d fallen behind, so we were only watching the first of the Semi Finals stage, and introducing our guests to life through the looking glass!