An unexpected party

All of the insurance related kerfuffle had made me somewhat nervous about going to pick up the hire car I'd booked to take me to Norfolk but in the end, no-one made any reference to the whole thing and I was able to pick up the Pergeot 206 and get moving relatively smoothly. We even managed to start pretty close to my planned start time, which was amazing. The car turned out to be a pretty comfortable drive, having poor acceleration but a very forgiving gear box and I really enjoyed the motor down to Norfolk, despite finding rather more traffic than I had anticipated on a Friday morning. There was a CD player in car so Alex was happy and the journey was quite pleasant all round.

When Mum opened the door and found us standing there, her reaction was everything I could have hoped for; she looked shocked, amazed and pleased and didn't have a heart attack :) Seriously though, the surprise seemed to go down very well indeed and not long after I had arrived Dad came home on a half day from work to complete the thing. We didn't do much of note on Friday afternoon, just sitting around, chatting and catching up. Dinner turned out very nice and as always, I enjoyed being in the bosom of my family.

Saturday, we went into Norwich and I decided to break my ban and go on a clothes shopping binge. I haven't bought hardly any since I started dieting because I didn't want buy stuff and grow out of it, but I've hit a plateau recently and I've been finding it hard to stay motivated. Perhaps the pleasures of looking pretty and buying new clothes will kick start things for me again, I don't know. Anyway, Mum and I had an extremely nice time traipsing around and I bought 2 new skirts, 3 tops, a dress and 2 pairs of sandals. I also bought a lovely pair of earrings but I've already managed to lose one in the pub last night!

This was followed by the traditional meal out, booked in secret by Dad, which was in a new restaurant, Chez le Freres. I had possibly the most gorgeous starter in the world - chicken and mushroom topped with puff pastry with a white wine, cream and mustard sauce which was unbelievably divine. The other courses were all great too and it would definitely be a recommendation, although bear in mind that it's at the high priced end of the market (£13 ish for main courses).

Sunday bought hanging around pontificating over the newspaper and sorting through the last drawer of stuff of mine still living at my parents house as well as the collection of games given jointly to my brother and me over many Christmases. I bought quite a bit of the stuff home; I'm sure that my ruthlessness will kick in again eventually but it was nice to see all the miscellaneous bits again and I also took Risk, which I haven't played for ages, and my Chinese Chequers set, which is very pretty. Oh, and we plundered the game of life for money - you can never have too much money :) I'd forgotten exactly what Game of Life was like until we opened the box - I wonder why they had Journalist as a higher paid job than Doctor; I didn't think journalists got that much. Having loaded all this nostalgia up into the car (another good thing about hiring a car rather than the public transport route) we departed for home to spend a leisurely Sunday evening with the cat resting and not doing any of the very necessary tidying up and hoovering; Cassie has gone into full on moult mode.

Bits and pieces

I've finally decided to have a go with an old fashioned way of living, after wondering about it for a while. Tescos is easy, even more so for me, as it's at the end of the road, but I don't think that you always get the best by going to the supermarket, so I've decided that I'm going to try going to get fresh produce. I work in the city centre so it's easy for me to go to the covered market or indeed, as I did this lunchtime, the Wednesday market and buy fruit and veg, bread, and there's the organic butchers there too, so I'll be happy that all of my meat is at least relatively ethically sound.

Of course, there are still some things that I'll need to get from Tesco but because I cook almost all our meals from fresh ingredients, I should be able to do quite a good proportion of my shopping in town, spreading my cash around. There are also a few things that I have to think about, the one that springs to mind being cheese. Currently I buy Tesco half fat cheddar, because I'm on a diet. There are cheese stalls in the markets, but none of these do low fat cheeses. Instead, they do proper full flavoured interesting cheeses (like cheddar with chilli in it). So do I go on buying cheese from Tesco, or do I try and alter my diet so that I can fit in a few portions of fatty but exciting cheese instead?

Initially, I plan to try to do this for about a month and then we'll sit down and have a look at how it compares, both monetarily, and taste wise. Should be interesting at the very least and after wandering around the market this lunchtime I find myself hoping it goes well.