~ ANNE! ~

Did I mention I'm going to Sweden?

Yeah, Shannon has a friend out there that she's going to visit for a while over Easter. Seeing as I have four days off (apparently I get the full contingent of usual bank holidays - SWEET!!) I figured I'd tag along for a few days, never having been to Scandinavia. I leave the Thursday before Good Friday after work and return on the Sunday. The flights were reasonably cheap but it would have been prohibitively expensive to come back Monday rather than Sunday (�50 difference, which is certainly prohibitive to me!) Maybe I'll do a daytrip to a castle or something on Monday (or, more likely, I'll sleep).

So only a week before I leave and I haven't done much planning at all. Will have to remedy that. Valerie, teach me Swedish!

Anyway, I'm quite excited about that (and hoping I don't spend too much... still, even for an expensive country, hopefully I can't do too much damage in three days.) Got lots of planning to do of hostels and things. I'm not really expecting to see much more than Stockholm in three days, but I am hoping to get out of the city to a country hostel for one of the nights. Will have to get together with Shannon and make plans.

In other news, half the walls in the hotel are gone.

We've started our refurbishment and there are builders everywhere. They have me coming in every morning at 7 am, basically just to keep an eye on things and let people in the front door (can't leave it open for security purposes). I've started to make friends with Andy the foreman (or Undae, as he's usually called in a very thick Scottish accent). He reminds me very strongly of Mike Black from Ricinus. Nice guy, hard worker.

So Andy and his guys have taken down many of the walls on the first floor where the reception used to be. They'll be putting in a new reception and an office for me. They've also taken out BOTH sets of stairs, leaving the only access to the upstairs a narrow tiny fire-exit set of stairs that goes through to the kitchen. It's kind of interesting working in a building site, and climbing through what is basically a secret passage to get to work lends a sort of mystery-story feeling to the day.

They've also accidentally cut through wires to my fax machine, phone and the buzzer/doorbell from the front door on Tuesday, Thursday and today respectively. We've managed to divert the phone so we do have one line coming into the hotel, but my poor fax is lost forever (or at least until the telecom guys get back next week).

So work has been a little crazy. I hate getting up at 5:45 to get there by 7 am, but man do I like being off work at 3 pm. It means I'm really having trouble getting enough sleep, though.

I went to see Chicago with Jen, Shannon and Beth on Wednesday. It was good fun, though a little light in the lyrics department (I thought). Then again, I like Phantom, which is hardly Shakespeare, so maybe I just need to watch it more than once. I loved the dancing and really enjoyed the show. The male lead was Marti Pellow, a Glaswegen, so he got a huge ovation from the (more-or-less) hometown crowd.

Bee is coming to visit today. Very pleased about that. We're going to a party tonight (I think) and the lacrosse ceilidh tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing her, so should be a good weekend.