Birthday and Moving Weekend

We are now mostly settled in at our new place so I'm finally able to get around to a little blogging. Despite all the work involved with moving, I had a really nice birthday weekend.

On Friday after my defense, I stopped by the Covered Market to pick up my birthday cake, which was ordered by Dad over the phone! Technology is wonderful, and so was the cake. It was chocolate with a berry jam filling and very delicious.




After picking up the cake, it was raining hard and I was getting very wet. I had just missed the last Wolfson bus and taxis were nowhere to be found, so I walked all the way down to the taxi rank by the bus station, where there are always a ton of taxis waiting. Well, apparently not always. I had to wait a good 10 minutes for one, which seemed like forever when I was so worn out from the defense, quite wet, and just very ready to be home. I waited with a family who had just arrived with their suitcases and they gave me and my silly outfit plenty of curious looks!

Things improved greatly after I got home, exchanged sub fusc for sweats, and had a piece of my cake! David got home at around 5:30 like usual, but he spent some time doing mysterious things in the trunk of the car before coming in. :) Eventually he knocked on the door, because his hands were full of a beautiful bouquet of flowers and a bag of goodies from M&S! Yay! I got a lovely card, all kinds of delicious chocolates, and a Grazia magazine wrapped in beautiful silvery paper. I loved it.

At 7:00 we headed over to dinner at Gee's, which is only about halfway down Banbury Road towards town but we drove anyway. :) The restaurant is very pretty and we had a great time.



It was very empty when we first arrived but it filled in pretty well by the time we were done. The food was very good.



For a starter, David had gazpacho (cold tomato soup with an ice cube) with a side of crab, and I had an artichoke and parmesan salad. My salad was great except that it had a lot of rocket, which is hugely popular in the UK but I can't stand it. It looks like dandelion leaves and is very bitter.



For dinner we both had the fillet of beef, which came with pan-fried foie gras and of course chips. David tried the foie gras (duck liver for the uninitiated) and didn't like it; I didn't try it at all. Yew. The beef was good but not as tender as it should have been for the price, but the chips were super fantastic. For dessert I had pannacotta, one of my favorite desserts. It was so very delicious. And over dinner David told me about another present I had to look forward to: a spa treatment of my choice at the place of my choice! Woo-hoo!

Back at home, we rested our full tummies for a bit, then filled the car with another load of stuff and headed over to the new place for the night. Saturday morning, we came back over to Wolfson for the final trip. We said goodbye to the modern beauty and cramped conditions of M Block, handed in our keys at the lodge at the stroke of noon when they were due, and made it back to the new place just in time for the Formula 1 qualifying race at 12:35.

Sunday evening we continued the birthday fun with dinner and a movie out. There is a nice big cinema on the outskirts of Oxford called the Vue, which just happens to be on our side of town. The 20-minute drive took us through several villages and single-track roads and was gorgeous.

The best part was the village of Cuddesdon, which is about a mile from us and has a fine-looking church we will certainly investigate later, wonderful stone houses and a beautiful old college. The rest was just quiet countryside, and it made us very happy to have moved out here.

We saw Ocean's 13 and thoroughly enjoyed it. George Clooney and Brad Pitt are so hilarious together, and Matt Damon does such a good job playing a dork - a fun contrast with his super-coolness in the Bourne movies. After the movie we decided on a whim to try an Oriental buffet that was in the same complex as the cinema. It was fun and the food was okay, but as usual we regretted it afterwards. I think it's about time to ban buffets from our lives.

More pics from the weekend can be seen in my Birthday & Moving set over at Flickr.