A whole month... how did that happen..?

Wow, a whole month - it's been a while...

There's been a bit going on - I had a bit more of a battle with salmonella, we had dramas at home with the internet, went off for a holiday over Easter to Malta, packed all our stuff, moved apartment and unpacked everything again...

While I was feeling better after I got smacked with salmonella while I was at home and resting and not eating much - I'd go back to work after the weekends and gradually (or suddenly depending on the week) decline.  I'd had the lovely stabbing pain that came along with the salmonella for almost a month in the end.    :(  I got a phone call from the Disease Centre chasing me up - obviously here as in many other places a doctor who discovers salmonella has to report it through.  The woman at the Disease Centre told me that there'd me about 20 people in this outbreak of a salmonella they've not seen here before (it had an indian name, but I can't really remember what it was!)  and had I eaten cashew nuts in the week I'd contracted it.  Well, I almost certainly had - I'd gotten a mixed bag of nuts from one of the supermarkets near work the week I returned from Oz and in fact I've been eating them on a regular basis (picking out the 'nice' ones like cashews) right up until that morning.  Well, of course a couple of days after I stopped eating contaminated nuts I started to feel much better!!

We were obviously in the middle of having found a new apartment to move in to and the landlord at the old place had started to get ready for some new tenants at our old apartment.  For some reason, part of this was ordering a new modem (although there were already 2 there - not really sure why!) in the process of this the company providing the internet (and modem) had decided that because there was a new modem on order the old one wasn't working - and so stopped the internet coming in on it...  Not very helpful to us when we still had something like 3 weeks left there.

Easter we jetted off to Malta - we spent the long weekend with a couple of other friends/colleagues and although we didn't have the best weather (can you believe it was warmer in Stockholm the weekend we were away?!!) we had a great time all together and a relax away from the project for such a long weekend.

The remainder of the week once we got back from Malta was spent packing - most of which was thankfully covered off in one 3.5 hour session.  Then we had the help of our friends/colleagues and a couple of trips in a rented station wagon to move everything last weekend.  One of the problems of this lifestyle is that you have to live with someone else's furniture (and often ugly things!) in your house.  It's great from the point of view that there's no furniture to move, but from the point of view of your everyday life that's the easier thing sometimes!!  The place we were in needed quite a bit of new furniture to finish it off, but there were lamps in both the bedroom and the lounge that were ok for us to live with - so we had the famous big trip to Ikea funded partly by the landlord.  But there was no pictures on the wall or ugly things around - this new place has ugly pics everywhere and ugly lamps in the lounge (none in the bedroom).  So, the last week has been spent trying to hide most of the ugly, trying not to kill the landlord (we were to have a washing machine installed in the bathroom - that has only worked since Friday just gone, and some more internet issues just for good measure!).  The whole trying to negotiate things when you don't share a first language and trying to get someone with a different work ethic to your timetable - well, let's just say it's less than easy!!

So, we currently have two toilets sitting in the bathroom - well, one sits - the other is actually kind of attached to the water anyway - not so much to the floor, while we wait for the landlord to install the new one.  And the washing machine - installed and looking pretty in the bathroom since we moved in on Saturday, got plugged in on Friday so we could use it - with a long extension cable into the lounge room!  Anyway - at least it works, and I've spent a bunch of time since then trying to work through the gianormous laundry pile that has accumulated since the day before we went to Malta.

So, that's been my last month - oh, apart from missing joining in on the live run of beyond blogging for scrapbookers and looking in any way at my reader with everyone's feeds in it - I'll be working to catch up on that sometime soon.  This week SO's parents arrive for a weekend visit, so we're counting down the days in earnest and getting excited to see them...