It's snowing!

Greetings from snowy London!


How good can this get, listening to Take That and drinking hot chocolate while it snows outside!


Famous Abbey Road....


Long may it snow!

A Face Only a Mother Could Love?

For those of you who just assume our baby will be cute because of her mixed heritage, I thought I'd see if your optimism was justified. So after extensive studies of our faces, features and backgrounds a company (that only cost us 10,000 GBP to do) came up with this rendition of our soon-to-be member of our family.

And all I can say is...yikes!



What do you think about my little new baby Baby Ngai?
MakeMeBabies.com - What will your baby look like?


While I dig the curly hair, I'm not sure how much I like the fact that my daughter has a five o'clock shadow in that picture. Nor the uneven skin tone...hmmm...

What do you think? Is there any hope for our spawn?

I Have A Vision...And It's In Euro!

Last night, Matt and I had the opportunity to go to a live television extravaganza at the BBC studios. Our friends had two extra tickets to this live extravaganza and we couldn't resist the pull of the bright lights and glamor of show business. It's always fun to see how things work on tv, and yes, we do sound very cool when we casually mention our night out at the Beeb. But there was another reason we were excited. Well, at least why Matt was excited. See, the live televised extravaganza wasn't just any ordinary show...oh no...it was to narrow down with act would represent the UK in the Eurovision competition.

Eurovision? You're thinking to yourself. That sounds like a 3D show you'd see at Disneyland or something! Trust me, I know. Before moving here, I'd never heard of it either. And since moving here, I'd heard of it, but kind of thought it was cheesy and a really weird waste of time and money. Let me give you a little history, Eurovision has been going on for years, like since 1956 and is one of the longest running programs in the world. It's also one of the highest watched non sporting events in the world (thank you wikipedia). Traditionally, the acts are kind of cheesy and usually the winner might do okay in their country and in some areas around Europe, but rarely do they make it really 'big'. the most notable Eurovision winners who have won are Abba, and Celine Dion (who interestingly enough was representing Switzerland, not sure why since she's French Canadian). And that's it. Like I said, in recent years, the Eurovision contestants have been kind of cheesy and laughable (in my opinion, Matt completely disagrees).

The UK hasn't won a Eurovision contest since 1976...at least that's the impression they gave us last night at the live extravaganza, but according to wikipedia and the official Eurovision website, the UK actually took first in 1981 and 1997...so I'm not sure what's up with the lies we were led to believe.

Anyway, no matter when the UK last won, they are determined to win it again (which made much more sense if they hadn't won for 30 years, not so much now). Andrew Lloyd Webber the musical genius who wrote Phantom of the Opera, Evita, Cats, Jesus Christ Superstar and a whole bunch of other musicals, is writing the song that the winning act will perform at Eurovision. He's teamed up with a really talented (American) lyricist who's name I can't remember, but has written a bunch of songs we've all heard of (Rhythm of the night, Nothing's going to stop us now etc).

The live extravaganza is called "Your Country Needs You" and consists of six acts total, one is eliminated each week. The public votes for who they like and the lowest two are in the 'danger zone' and ALW gets to save one of the acts. So yeah, it's like American Idol or X factor...except the voting lines are only open for about 20 minutes and you know that same night who will get sent home. Last night narrowed the acts down from five to four.

So yeah, that's how we spent our Saturday night. It was fun to see all the behind the scenes moments of a live broadcast. We didn't realize that our tickets were just for standing room. We'd already been standing in line and whatnot for about 2 hours and to stand for another 2 hours and dance or whatever (right by the stage) was not ideal for an almost 6 month pregnant woman. Matt flagged an official person and asked if there was a spare chair available (which were reserved for friends and family and people who know important people) and they were able find an empty seat for just me. So I sat with the cool kids, while Matt and our friends hung out down below and danced the night away. It suited all of us just fine!

So because of last night we can add to our list of celebrities we've actually seen with our own eyes and in Matt's case, he was literally two or three feet from them (since he was right between the stage and the judges area).

We have Andrew Lloyd Webber:

Graham Norton (he hosted):

Duncan (from the defunct group Blue, he's a UK celeb):

And of course, one of the potential Eurovision winners. Maybe they'll make it huge and we can say we knew them when...

Jealous? It's okay...you can live vicariously through us.

Overheard...

Matt is playing FIFA '08 right now and apparently in a very tough match. A referee made a call he didn't agree with and this is what I heard exclaim loudly from the living room (in all seriousness):

"Man! That is unfair to the max!"

I love that he's stuck in the 80's. To the max.

You can thank me later

Tonight I stumbled upon this...it can only be described as a jewel of a website. And I thought the three of you who are my sisters and mom who read this blog would get a kick out of it. The website is called 'cake wrecks' and that's exactly what the site features...cakes that for one reason or another could be construed as wrecks. There are lots of different categories, and I encourage you to head over there if you'd like to kill some time and have a laugh.

But I couldn't resist putting some of my favorites on here though.

Although there are all kinds of cakewrecks on the site, I mostly got a kick out of the ones featuring literal translations. For example:

Apparently the recipient was having triplets and the instructions were to write 'congratulations' three times. But it gets better, check this one out:

Obviously the instructions were to write 'welcome' on the cake. I especially love the attention to detail the decorator has, they even included the quotation marks!

I don't think this one needs any further explanation!

I love it, rather than taking the time to actually create firework explosions, they just wrote it. But it still gets even better, this is my second favorite one:

What a way to celebrate the Olympics, eh? But it's not my favorite one, this one really does, if I may, take the cake:

Apparently the person requesting the cake was having a Wizard of Oz theme party. She didn't want to over complicate things by requesting a cake with a yellow brick road or anything like that, so she just instructed the cake designer to write 'Somewhere over the rainbow' except that was taken a bit too literally! And they didn't even spell 'somewhere right'.

Of course it's not all about literal translations. Apparently, misspellings are very common as well. And I didn't realize this before, but apparently the most misspelled word in the English language is 'Congratulations'. Here are some prime examples:


Awesome, right? But these cakes aren't all about what's written on them. Nope, some of them are just funny in their own right. Like this one.

I'm sure Jerry's friends are really wishing him luck, look how happy they are for him! Or how about one which is a minimalist's dream.

You know it's a winter cake because it says 'winter' at the top and there's a snowman at the bottom.

Of course some cakes are just not right.

I mean, it's impressive that it's an actual cake, but could you imagine taking a big knife to that thing? It's just a little too life like for my tastes (pun totally intended).

And this one I couldn't not post. Sorry if some on here find it offensive, I found it very funny. Apparently this cake was actually brought to an actual office. I assume it was the Scranton branch at Dunder Mifflin.

And now a few bonus cakes...here are some more funny ones.

I wonder what Libby does to be so close to death. And their birthdays are so close! Cool or scary? You decide.

I love the literal translation of this one. I'm guessing it was supposed to be Aunt/Mom, but they've spelled out slash. Or it's one twisted family and they're encouraging their aunt to flash their mom. Who knows?

Anyway, head over to the site, you'll laugh, you'll cry and you'll be glad you did. And yeah, you're welcome.

I Don't Get It.

As I (Matt) was enjoying Christmas, I discovered a little present Santa left for me. It was a tasty treat, a Reese's peanut butter cup, flown in all the way from the US. I happily unwrapped the foil and popped it straight into my mouth, savouring the rich, peanut butter chocolatey taste. As I was enjoying it, I suddenly became aware of an unusual texture. Trying to decipher what it was, I internally deconstructed the assortment of flavours in my mouth. Upon separating the unusual texture, I hastily spat it out of my mouth. To my chagrin, I discovered I had been eating what turned out to be the internal wrapping of the peanut butter cup!

I don't get it. Why are there two wrappings?

Happy Holidays!

We could give Charlie Brown a run for his money...

Wow, it's been so long since we've updated, I'm truly sorry. But we've been traveling for what feels like forever and only just returned last week. And trust me, it takes that long to recover from jet lag in Australia. And because of our being out of the country, we're a little behind on our Christmas decorating. Which brings me to the main subject about this blog.

One of the few...what's the word...flaws that Matt has, is that he is lacking a little bit in the Christmas spirit department. He's a very practical person, and sometimes he can't understand why do something like decorate or wrap presents to be opened on Christmas when he can just give me the present as he buys it. And don't even get me started on his belief (or lack thereof) in Santa Claus. Now I'm totally a Christmasaholic. I love this time of year, I love the music, the lights, the feeling of goodwill toward men and the slight nip in the air. I love the food, and sitting in the living room with the lights off looking at the twinkling Christmas tree. I love shopping and getting the perfect gift for some one, and yeah I like getting gifts too (most people do, come on admit it).

Well, since we got back we haven't really done much as far as decorating. Matt is currently not working (his contract expired at the end of November and he's unlikely to pick up work again until January) we knew this was coming and we planned for it. But also with a baby on the way and mucho bucks having been spent on providing for said baby, we just don't have a whole lot left over for grand decorations. Which is fine with Scrooge McMatt, but not so much for me.

I have been teasing Matt about his lack of Christmas spirit and how it is not something that will continue too be acceptable in our house, especially next year when the baby comes. He's been taking it all in good humor, but that hasn't stopped him from trying to lure me over to the dark side. "Bah humbug" he tells me! Believe me he's got a long road ahead of him on that one. However I'd pretty much resigned myself to the fact that this year, Christmas would have to primarily be in my heart.

But, my parents happen to be the coolest people in the world and sent us a package. Inside the package were some much loved and craved s'mores poptarts (its not me, its the baby who wants them) as well as a mini Christmas tree complete with 'lights' and ornaments that can actually be hung on the tree. They also sent stockings for Santa to fill (because despite Matt's Grinch attitude, he has been a good boy this year). I set up the Christmas tree and half heartedly put some ornaments on. And sighed to myself more than once how challenging it is to be married to a grinch whose heart is three sizes to small. Once the tree was semi set up, we weren't sure where to display it. We have such a small flat with limited space there's just not much room.

This is where the Christmas miracle comes to play. After having only a half decorated tree for a few days, Matt somewhat grudgingly helped me finish putting the ornaments on the tree (I had all my best Christmas songs playing in the background, he was powerless to resist) and try to find a home for it. We finished the tree and it looked fine, but a little empty. We decided that it needed a star. But what could we use? I grabbed some notebook paper and hesitantly started thinking about how I was going to go about making a star (for those who know me, I'm so not good with things like this, it seems simple, but to me it's not) Matt seeing my distress, agreed to cut out the star (I am 5 months pregnant after all and supposed to stay away from unnecessary stress). He cut it out and to our delight, it actually resembled a star! However we couldn't have the star on lined notebook paper, so I looked for something to color it with. Matt produced a highlighter, but it didn't really do much. So Matt came up with the idea of cutting out yellow post it notes to be taped onto the notepaper star. He carefully measured and cut and taped various bits of post it notes until we finally had a beautiful yellow star to top off our tree. Then he suggested that we wrap our Christmas presents (we each got one small gift for the other) and put them under the tree. Or in this case under the chair that the tree was sitting on. Then Matt thought it would be cool to place the ornaments for a real tree (that were too heavy for our little one) around the base of the tree. See, we stole my sister Cyndi's idea and have tried to purchase an ornament from every country we've visited.

We got a package from my Aunt and that was placed under the tree. Our only two Christmas cards were placed around it and we were feeling pretty festive. For the rest of the night we admired our little Tree on a Chair and talked about how nice it was.

Here was its first home, on what we like to call the 'eatin' chair. Notice our American bough Xbox, to convert the voltage we have to use that large bulky transformer sitting next to it. Attractive eh?

Today, Matt woke up and decided that the chair was not an appropriate place for our tree. Nope, our little Christmas tree deserved its own place of honor. In our living room we have a book case. Only one of the shelves actually has books on it. The rest are papers (important and not) and over all junk that has collected on the shelves simply by nature of being a convenient place to put things. Well, Matt in his quest to create the perfect space cleaned off the shelves (I did help, but even I thought his ideas were getting a bit grand for the situation), moved things from the bottom shelves to the not used top shelf and then completely removed one shelf to create a large area of space. Then he painstakingly moved the (kind of unsteady) Christmas tree, all the ornaments, cards, presents etc into its new home. I pointed out that while it was a good space, our little one bulb light in our living room didn't really reach there very well and now the tree was in the shadow. We tried to come up with a solution, we don't have a lamp that we could place over there to shine on it...but as Matt pointed out, we do have a flashlight!

I have to admit, I was a little skeptical, a flashlight? How would that work? Its not a very big one, it was a stocking stuffer from my dad from last year and laying it on the ground wouldn't be very effective. But my cute husband, now bursting with the Christmas spirit, and humming 'Winter Wonderland' to himself would not be deterred. He rigged it so that the tiny flashlight could hang from the top shelf and when turned on, shine down onto the tree.

I have to admit. I was impressed and it works very well.

So where I thought it would take me a few years and a few kids to bring Scrooge McMatt over to the fairy light side, I was very impressed that he was able to get into the spirit so readily this year. Not only that, but he's been on the look out for me for candy canes everywhere he's been. He doesn't like them, but I love them. Who would've thought that London would be sold out of candy canes? We can't find them anywhere. Not in stores big or small, retail or grocery. It's a little worrying to me that the great candy cane shortage of '08 is not being picked up by every media outlet in the country. Ah well.

This is Matt working the tree's new home:


Take note of the suspended flashlight hanging from the next shelf:


And finally the finished product!


And a farther away shot:


So now the Ngai household is brimming with the Christmas spirit! Music is constantly hummed, stockings have been hung by the calendar with care and we look forward to spending our first Christmas as a family together.

I hope you all have wonderful Christmases as well. Oh, and tomorrow we (hopefully) find out what gender we're having baby-wise. My sister Cyndi, who is due a month after me, just found out she's having a girl, so we'll see. Watch this space!

Merry Christmas!