A Pre-Christmas Day Out

This Wednesday, I had arranged to meet a friend for lunch and a spot of shopping as a pre-Christmas girlie treat.  Although I usually do a class in the morning, I decided to give it a miss, as I had a few bits and pieces to do before heading out. In the end it was just as well, as I needed to stay in for the computer engineer again.

It's only polite, when you've been given a time slot, to make sure someone is in, even if the said visitor isn't polite enough to turn up in said slot and as OH was doing my morning dog walk, so I could go out, it fell to me to stay home until he got back.

Incidentally, the laptop got a new hard drive and is working again, but my photos on the old hard drive are gone forever, as we weren't allowed to keep it and try to recover them. OH has subsequently put some sort of back up software on the laptop, so hopefully it shouldn't happen again. I'll be very careful to put them on a memory stick too though from now on, if I want to hang on to them. On the up side, at least we will have a computer to take away with us.

My day out was lovely.  We took a bus to Canary Wharf and had a mooch around the shopping malls there before having a light lunch at Wagamama's.  I didn't spend too much, but did pick up a couple of things we needed.

It's a completely different world there, where most people appear to work in the financial sector. Very smart, polite and business like with doors held open for you and the like, although it was incredibly busy on this occasion.  As you would expect, the shops are mostly the kind of high end brands that cater to the city workers.  When I've been in the past, I've not really had time to look around, as I've had to get back, to retrieve my car from the gym car park before the ticket runs out, so it was nice on this occasion to be able to take our time and enjoy a good look around.

I always pick up the 'posh' free Canary Wharf magazine, which is really just a glorified advertising vehicle for high end brands and property companies,with the odd interesting article thrown in.  I also picked up the Tatler.  Not because I like the magazine.  I don't.  I did, however, like the free Organic Pharmacy 50ml Marigold and Comfrey hand cream that came with it, which I couldn't buy for the £4.40 cost of the magazine, even if I wanted to. This brand is expensive and this item retails for £22 on the Naturisimo website.  I have tried some (free in a magazine) sample sizes of this brand before and liked virtually everything I tried, so I'm pretty sure I'll like this too.  Let's call it a little pre-Christmas treat.  As for the magazine, I'll probably have a quick flick through and send it with some others to the doctor's surgery for the patients to read. (I'm not entirely sure it will be well received in my local health centre, but hey ho)

I also managed to source a reasonably priced packet of my favourite American candy, Milk Duds. Everywhere else I've seen them in London, they are ridiculously expensive, but probably the number of Americans working in Canary Wharf who wouldn't be fooled into buying them at such exhorbitent prices, they  were priced sensibly there.  I will definitely be heading back there next time I need to get them again.

The next few days, I'm going nowhere and intend to stay home and get on with the list of things I need to do before we go away, wrapping LB's presents being the main one, as she finishes school on Friday and might catch me in the act if I do it when she's around.

Hope all of you are getting your 'to do lists' done too.