It may be snowing outside, but I have not felt so warm in ages… After three long years of fitting in evening and weekend studies around a full time job, I have done it!

Tonight, Denty and I will open the bottle of wine from Stoneridge Estate, where we got married. We have been saving that wine for a special occassion and Denty decided that this is pretty special.

This is the weather forecast from 6pm today…

Me thinks this will definitely be a night of stew and hot chocolate.

Due to the tunneling effect cause by my office building, no where else did this morning’s snow settle in London except on this weird ball-shaped sculpture…

Can this be true?

What can be better than a fully homemade burger, other than a fully homemade Swiss cheese mushroom burger?

Denty and I made the buns and beef patties from scratch… flour, yeast, lean mince… etc. Well, that’s technically true, even if we didn’t grow the cow ourselves.

For my burger, I dressed it with a generous amount of Swiss cheese (holes included, but optional) and lightly sauteed mushrooms in extra virgin olive oil.

I’ve just looked at my local weather forecast for the next five days…

Should I take in the outdoor pond fishies?

sMitch drank a little too much and fell asleep…

… so a concerned sMuks covered her up, in case sMitch got cold.

I had a really good weekend. How can a weekend that started off with a homemade pizza with mushrooms and olives piled onto it not be a good weekend?

In response to Ruth’s query about the lack of vegetable on Denty’s pizza, he made a very conscious effort to show her the pineapples pinepples pine apples pinapples in his latest pizza.

My weekends (and weekdays as well, I guess) are all about food, whether I was making it, growing it or eating it… I made wor tip (pork dumplings) and kon loh mee foon for lunch today. For the wor tip, it was mince pork, shiitake mushroom, ginger, spring onion, garlic,  soy sauce, cornflour, Chinese cooking wine, salt and pepper wrapped up in shop-bought gyoza wrappers. Mmmm… delicious, I tell yous!

Lastly, I also made one non-edible item… a stone cottage with Santa climbing down the chimney for the Christmas tree.

It was a good weekend.

I started this list off as a top ten, but had to shorten it to eight as I can’t make up my mind for the last two. I have excluded entries like the pyramids and Pompeii because they are either affordable or “been there”.

So, as at today, these are the top eight places (not in any order) I would like to see… I totally reserve the right to change my mind, of course.

Autumn in Canada

Greenland and the ancient Viking ruins

Macchu Picchu

Easter Island

Galapagos

Ice-breaker cruise

Silk road by train

Northern lights

In preparation for tomorrow, we spent a soggy hour sawing the bottom off (Denty having learnt the lesson two years ago) the soggy tree…

With nice Christmassy jazz music in the background, we set to work… It was light outside when we started, but by the time we finish (the dog dogs put up the star), it was dark.

Very tired, but very happy, I present to you…. our tree.