A Trip Across the Pond : A Week in the Life

What have we been up to?! Here's a look at a typical week in the life of Kat and Gabel in good old Southampton.

Monday:

We get up at 6:00am and go to work.

We catch the 6:53 train to Portsmouth and Southsea. Take a taxi to the Hovercraft. Hover over the Solent to The Isle of Wight and then taxi to Ryde Academy.

We get home from work exhausted from the kidlings who resist Mondays just as much as we do.

Make a quick dinner while watching a show (most likely Sons of Anarchy to which Gabel does a fantastic sing a long of the opening credits).

Then Gabel heads off to German lessons at the University of Southampton and I sink into lesson planning, marking, and falling asleep while doing both.

Living the dream really.

Tuesday:

It's really imperative we get home quickly from teaching on Tuesdays because we have soccer training at 6:00pm. So we rush home, make dinner and then our lovely friend Louise comes and picks us up and brings us to training. It's only an hour and we usually do a skills type warmup and then split into a few different teams and play 5 versus 5 games in a mini tournament style. It's pretty fun and a great workout. We've met tons of really great girls at football.

Tuesday is also grocery night. The reason that this is worth mentioning is because I dare you to try and do your weekly groceries without a car. Especially when you love food as much as Gabel and I do. So before we go out we have to plan out every meal we want for the week and then turn that into a food list that we strictly stick to so as to avoid going nuts at the store and buying more than we can carry. We always bring backpacks and a suitcase with us. I'm not joking. Tuesday nights at 8pm you can find us roaming the aisles of ASDA with a rolly suitcase and backpacks. We then have to cart everything back to our place. Luckily it's only a 5-7 minute walk but I can't tell you how many times I've broken my back on that walk with a backpack loaded with 10 cans of soup and multiple jugs of water.

Wednesday:

Wednesday can go one of two ways. Its either the best night of the week when we have nothing. Or once a month we play in our women's 11 a side league for the Chamberlayne FC. This is a lot of fun but very time consuming. We usually have to leave around 5:30 (so only 45 minutes after getting home from work) and don't get home until just after 10pm. By the time we shower and make our lunches for the next day, there goes the whole night. We always carpool with our lovely teammates whom we've started to get to know pretty well.

Thursday:

This is our regular football game night for our 5 a side league. Gabel and I play with Louise on a team called The Black Swans and we're really good! We score lots of goals and our keeper Katy is brilliant. She's hurt right now though so hopefully she makes a speedy recovery for our first week back in January. The games last 45 minutes and are usually after 7:30pm.

Friday:

This is known as pigout night. When we come home on Fridays it's bust out the beers, wine, vodka, etc and we order as much crappy food as we can. It's usually some sort of pizza deal with garlic bread and chicken wings and then our own homemade poutine. I'd like to say that we party on Fridays but usually we just go to a movie or put on a movie in one of our beds and get cozy watching TV all night until we fall asleep. I remember the first Friday back after half term (so the first full week in November) we got into Gabel's bed to put on a movie and we fell asleep at 7:30pm and that was it for us. We were so wiped from that stressful first week back! But it's not always that sad I promise.

Saturday:

After sleeping in finally, we party on Saturday nights. Our club of choice is Oceana because its massive and only a 5 minute walk from our place and we really love the music.

Sunday:

I look forward to Sunday morning breakfast alllllll week. Its our tradition to make our home fries and poached eggs with hollandaise sauce on english muffins with ham and spinach. And then we always make a hungover trip to Shakeaway to get a large chocolate raspberry shake.

A big part of november was also my illness. I'm still sick. It's getting ridiculous. I got sick the first week of October and I'm still trying to fight the remnants. I have tried every single drug store cold medicine available but I just have not been able to kick it. . After I got over the laryngitis, it seemed like I just had a mild cough left over. However by mid November, the cough had flared up again and was quite disruptive to my teaching. Then added to the mix was severe lung pain in my right lung. It was unbearable to cough, I couldn't laugh or sneeze without being in pain, breathing deeply was a no no and I couldn't prop myself up at all or lean on anything. Gabel finally insisted on bringing me to the hospital one weekend and they gave me antibiotics but it didn't do anything. Eventually after a couple weeks the lung pain kept gradually subsiding. Right now at the end of December I'm just down to a mild cough again but I'm hoping a return home to the Canadian climate clears it up!

Another facet of November life was our heating debacle. As it was so mild here for so long Gabel and I never really made it a priority to figure out the heating. Once November hit we realized our flat was quite freezing and especially upstairs. The floor heating seemed to always be on and working on the main floor but you could quite literally feel a temperature change of a few degrees as you start walking to the upstairs. All of our windows let in a noticeable draft. My room is pretty bad but Gabel's is definitely the worst and of course she put her bed right against the window. We tried calling our landlord to inform him that we didn't have any working heaters in the flat and especially nothing upstairs but he was unreachable for about two weeks. It therefore became quite funny to watch our nightly routine of getting ready for bed. Gabel fashioned herself a turban out of a small blanket to stop the heat from escaping through her head. She also bundled up every sweater she owned and lined the windowsill with it to try and act like a barrier. My routine involved spreading out one of my two blankets flat on my bed and then lying one the very edge of one side of it. I would then roll myself down the blanket while holding the edge so I effectively became some sort of mummy/sausage thing. I would then have to slither my way like a worm back to the top of my bed and under the other cover and thereby achieved the result of sealing in as much heat as possible. Taking a shower was even more unappealing now because besides the slow and unimpressive water pressure, we now faced the instant freeze that happened coming out of the shower as our hair almost became icicles. Finally our landlord came through one day and had four heater delivered to our place!! We instantly put one in each of our rooms and life has been a lot better since! We'll have to see what our resulting electrical bill is but it's going to be worth it.

No matter what day of the week it is, we're basically inseparable. We do everything together, tell each other everything. If theres a day where Gabel doesn't come into Ryde with me, we can't watch TV while we eat dinner because we spend the whole time catching each other up on what we missed in the mere 9 hours we were apart. We sleep with our doors open at night so we can call out to each other across the hall. We have so many inside jokes and we've basically developed our own language. A really funny thing I did in November was take a picture of each of us on the train ride to Ryde in the mornings. Gabel always passed out hard in the first 15 minutes of the train taking off and I could never sleep. She has that conditions that babies have where they fall asleep in moving vehicles. So I took a picture every single work day of November of Gabel sleeping on the train in her various different poses and positions (leaning forward, leaning sideways, mouth wide open, furrowed brow, etc) and then took a funny picture of myself. I've been sending the pics to Jen (her sister) for a good laugh and I just revealed all the pics to Gabel herself. I said to her, "That's what November looked like from my perspective!"

So thats an average week in the life for Gabel and myself in November. It's not all glitz and glamour. Sure some weekends we're jetting off to London or Scotland or Switzerland or something but if it makes everyone feel better we have fairly average lives most of the time!

Getting ready for football!