A perfect ending to a wonderful day

I left the house yesterday at 5 am and took a cab to Paddington station. Winter is still here with a vengeance, outside it was cold, dark and wet but that didn't dampen my mood for one bit. I was picking up my best friend. We came here together but she left to work in the pastry section of a big hotel chain in Hong Kong. I was standing at the platform waiting for the heathrow express to come in. I was pacing up and down the platform in excitement; and then there was screaming, and tears. We stayed at her place, and talked nonstop from paddington until midnight. I am so so happy she is back, my friend from childhood; the woman that I consider as one of my closest relatives. London has become brighter; even the weather didn't get me down today. It is a great day.

Funny enough, this city has loads of surprises in store. After spending the night at Winnie's place, my husband went home early morning to get ready for work as I chatted away with my bestfriend. When I called him up to ask him to take some things to oxfam, he got really snippy. I thought it was because he missed watching *one of the best football games that I ever watched in my entire life* as my cab driver put it. I can understand my husband's frustration with having missed watching Chelsea vs. Barcelona as I wanted to see it too. I don't like arguments being a protector guardian (i'm full of these today), so this dampened my mood a bit. My mood worsened when my cabbie told me how a chelsea player got kicked off, kind of a deja vu for them since they got Liverpool's goalkeeper sent off a week ago (booooo).

I came home tonight to find a bicycle chained to our gate. Some idiot (there is no other way to describe this person) thought our gate would be the best place to secure it with a thick chain and heavy duty padlock. I wouldn't really mind in normal circumstances, except this moron chained it where the gate normally opens, and now it's stuck halfway. I (and the people living upstairs in my building, which includes a very pregnant woman on the top floor) have to squeeze through the gap, step on the bike (it's impossible to step over it, unless you're all legs and no body) to get to our front door. Not cool at all. At first I thought it was a prank, the back wheel was missing, and the front wheel was all bent; this is London afterall. My nice-guy-living-upstairs neighbor said it was probably one of the people living next door who chained it there(obviously no one in our building would be dim enough to inconvenience us and themselves by chaining their mode of transportation to the part of the gate where we usually pass to get to our front door). They obviously did not notice the keypad, or were so brainless that they think it normal to chain someone else's front gate. Nice-guy-living-upstairs, who is usually docile, also told me that if *that darned thing* is still there by tomorrow morning, *I'm going to rip it apart.* Ahhh, I get the feeling that the front wheel was probably in good condition when *that darned thing* was first chained there, and then proceeded to get more bent as my upstairs neighbors let their frustration out on the unsuspecting wheel, only because they couldn't wring the neck of the person who actually put it there. I called my husband at work (very rare occasion as chefs hate being interrupted at work, they get grumpier than usual), I found out that he had to climb over the gate to get out of the house; the bike was in perfect condition when he last saw it. It was spanking brand new, had both wheels and was chained perfectly to the gate (which wouldn't open at all). This is a fire hazard!!! Uh-huh, now I get why he was so grumpy. I should probably tell my neighbors that if the bike is still there when my husband gets home, then nothing's going to be left of the bike when the owner picks it up tomorrow morning. I don't like vandals, and this counts as trashing someone else's property, but in this case I'm all for it.

It could have been a crappy ending to a really good day, but as I got in the house, this man was waiting for me. This is why I got married. Enough said.




This time I called my bestfriend, told her all about the bike and had a laugh. All in realtime. Life is getting better by the minute.