Happy birthday to you...

...Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday dear Lissa,
Happy birthday dear you!

It's Lissa's bday (we won't mention which one), and I'm so sad because my baby sister is so far away. Boo hoo hoo, waaah. I hope she's enjoying her new fridge. I didn't get her a fridge for her birthday, but managed to break hers while I was staying at her house last week (was it last week? No, a week and a half ago... further and further in the past...). Leave it to me to figure out how to break an expensive major appliance whose only movement is via a couple of door hinges. She says it was on its last legs, but we all know the jinx that follows me.

Today I invested in the "get fit" program. I got a set of 6 weights (2x 1.5, 3, and 5 kg) and a jumprope. I also picked up D's bday gift, a blender to cater to his addiction to smoothies... yum (as well as his aspirations to partake in vegetable smoothies... yuck). I got into weights via the aerobics class I've been taking on Sunday nights with my friend Liesbeth. I also finally formalised my membership at the university club yesterday (I had been using Dave's free card, but I got busted last term--oops), so I can now start up with the aerobics classes again, starting this Wednesday. Ha!

Let me tell you how comical it must've been seeing me pedal home with 6.5kg of weights stuffed into my little backpack and 12.5kg hanging precariously out of my piddly little wire bike basket. Groceries have broken this basket before. One guy actually laughed at me as I was arranging things and getting ready to go--some people are so pessimistic. I reinforced the basket with the plastic straps from the box that the weights came in, and set off for home-- VEEEERRYYY slowly. And I made sure to get off and walk, not ride, over the two cattle grates on either side of the "mesopotamia path" that runs between the university and our house. Poor little Emma (that's my bike's name... and yes, I am aware of the silliness of naming a bicycle).

I was also inspired because I think I gained about ten pounds on our holiday in the States. Between exchanging my bicycle (the only way to get around Oxford) for a car (the only way to get around in the States) and eating celebratory cake and cookies and lovely huge dinners hosted by our various generous parental and grandparental and other familial units everywhere we showed up begging for sustenance... it wasn't good for the old tushie. I had to squeeze into my jeans on the night before we left to come back home. Bad news.