18 February 2008

Family Day

We arrived in Ontario in time for a new public holiday (announced last October) - today is Family Day, which owes its existence to a guy with a cocaine addiction. So perhaps not the most auspicious of holidays. We had a friend of child #2's over for much of the day and I made pizza and cookies to keep them sustained, in between trying to do some work. Working remotely on UK projects is fine, but it gets slightly peculiar when there's a public holiday here that isn't celebrated in the UK. We've decided that the noise made by children is equal to the number of children squared. One is fine (lovely and quiet, in fact); two make the noise of four and that's bad enough, but three create a noise equivalent to nine and that makes it extremely hard to concentrate.

In the evening we belatedly celebrated Chinese New Year with crispy duck and pancakes. This was an occasional treat when we lived in Sale (where we lived a five-minute walk from a Chinese take-away). There are Chinese restaurants around here (by that I mean within a half-hour drive), but we've yet to go into one. I found a good recipe for the pancakes online and, in a spirit of self-sufficiency, made it all from scratch (apart from the hoisin sauce). The pancakes don't look as round and purely white as the ones we got in England, but they're not as hard to make as they sound.

We finally exchanged contracts on the house in Sale today, so that was another reason to celebrate.

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