I can tell that I'm ready to go home and be done with this blog. I spent most of the day yesterday at home. In the afternoon I got an unexpected text from my friend Jo from Manchester who was in town for the day, wanting to know if I could meet her for coffee/tea. Gord wanted to take a break from marking papers or writing or whatever he was doing on his laptop, so the two of us walked over to the British Library to meet her. It was supposed to be a quick cuppa as she had some work to do, but we spent a good 2.5 hours catching up (we hadn't seen her since October) and getting her perspective on the election (she and Mark were in the US for the first two weeks of November).

For dinner, we tried Vinoteca behind the two train stations. It was decent, though expensive, but the best thing about it was their extensive wine list whose wines are also available in the wine shop attached to the restaurant. I wish we had known about it months ago, because it's a little late now.

Today we worked on filling and then weighing the boxes we will be shipping home. We then went for dim sum before embarking on a search for a specific gift for Gord's mum. I tried ordering it online yesterday, but delivery wouldn't be until the middle of January. So I went on their website to see if there was a list of retailers that carried the product. There was, except they called them stockists. Armed with my phone bearing the stockists in the area, with three of them in the general direction of home, we started our walk. The map was not detailed enough, and the first two stores turned out to be duds, one being in a building under renovation and the other was not a retail business. The third store used to carry the product but no longer does. I'll continue the quest Monday. We walked the rest of the way home, for a total of just over three miles.

Along the way we ran into the SantaCon folks in front of Euston Station. I didn't really know anything about SantaCon except that I read that there was going to be one here today. Apparently it began in the US and seems to be a big deal. As if people need an excuse to get drunk and unruly.

And we also passed these window washers. We've seen this on other buildings. They just rappel down the buildings, washing as they go, like it's no big deal.