Birthday and stuff

It's been an interesting week.  My birthday was on Tuesday, and I had a great day!  The weather was beautiful and most of my students canceled their lessons.  I only taught one lesson in the morning and then met up with my friend Jasmin who also had a lot of canceled lessons.  We had planned to go for a birthday drink and then she was supposed to go give her last lesson of the day.  But when her lesson was canceled, we ended up spending the entire afternoon drinking.

We started on a terrasse, taking advantage of the sun and sharing a pichet of wine.  Then we decided to head to the Thanksgiving Store and pick up a Dr. Pepper and some ingredients she needed.  We then stumbled upon a little Scottish pub where we grabbed a beer on their terrasse.  Then, when Jasmin found out her lesson was canceled we decided to head to a supermarket and pick up a half bottle of wine (we were trying to be sage) and head to the quais to enjoy it in the sun along the Seine.  Finally we headed to a little Irish pub in St. Michel for a drink before I met up with Lionel for dinner at my favorite Thai restaurant, the Lao-Thai on Rue de Tolbiac.  He took me to dinner, then we stopped at a little traiteur italien at Tolbiac called Freddo-Caldo and grabbed some Italian pastries for dessert at the house.  He bought me a nice basket of flowers that can later be replanted in our garden to enjoy every year.  Still waiting for news on my real birthday present though - a kitten!

I also got my birthday package from my parents.  It arrived on Monday, but since we don't have a gardienne in our new building and we weren't home when they came to deliver the package, I had to drag myself to La Poste yesterday to go pick it up.  The post office in the KB is horribly located and inconvenient for just about everyone who lives in this city.  I ended up having to do a 40 minute round trip walk to the post office to get the package.  On top of that I had to wait in line.  But I had the chance to see the horribly reorganization of our post office since they finished remodeling.  They decided to make it bigger and nicer and then to have only one window for postal transactions and everything else for the bank.  Very irritating since it is the POST OFFICE.  But at least I have my package!  My parents sent me some books I've been wanting, some American food and best of all, Girl Scout Cookies!!!

Other than that I spent the week battling with my computer which has once again decided to stop working.  I'm spending the afternoon today trying to save all my files (we finally managed to get the computer to start in safe mode) and then we are removing everything and starting again in hopes that it can fix the problem itself.  Otherwise I'll have to go buy a new hard drive this week and hope that that is the problem since I really don't want to have to buy a new computer.

I've had a few very calm weeks at work only working between 15 and 20 hours per week.  But in the next two weeks I'm starting a bunch of new groups and so I'm going to be very busy again.  But it was nice to have a little break, even if my paycheck isn't going to be too pretty.

Well, I hope that the next time I post I'll have some good news about my computer!  Happy Spring everyone!