Not A Guinea Pig Blog: An abundance of visitors

It's been a busy few weeks for us in the Adams-Bennett-Haldane household!

Last weekend Mark's friend Evo (a nickname, but still weird to hear his girlfriend calling him 'Matt') and his girlfriend visited us. It was lovely to see them, and we went for a climb with them on Sunday with Mark's other friend David - 3/4 of the Liverpudlian quartet. Later that day we bought our Christmas tree - the last day of November still felt too early, but as our week ahead was full up, I didn't want to wait any longer! I love my tree 😊

This week also involved my first and only Christmas meal this year, which I engineered by organising myself. I require 1 Christmas 'do' per year to keep myself feeling lovely and seasonal. We had a great turnout of 14 climbing ladies, and I had a lovely time, although next time I'll have to invent a scheme to get us all rotating for more chats.

This weekend mum & JC visited us. On Saturday mum & I started with 2 free hot drinks in the John Lewis cafe (not sure how I managed to get that random voucher seeing as I rarely shop there), before heading to the National Museum Cardiff and meeting up with Mark. We were glad to leave the heaving city centre for a bit - it's a Saturday in December! I've actually never been to either of the museums in Cardiff centre (the other being Museum of Cardiff) despite living here for over 3 years now. It felt quite like Exeter Museum with it's exhibit of stuffed animals and naff cafe, but we probably didn't give it enough of a chance as by then we were all thinking about lunch! We were impressed to see some Monets and a Van Gogh however.

Mum spotted some shiny gold markers on the floor (always looking for survey markers, I'm not sure how she doesn't bump into people more). She'd discovered the Cardiff Centenary Walk, and is now insisting we start from number 1 and complete it in order next time. Fine. Lunch at a busy but yummy Crumbs cafe before heading home to start our first jigsaw of the weekend. We finished it just in time before our chinese delivery came - yum! Mum very graciously acquiesced to my request of a caterpillar cake (well, she asked me if I wanted her to bring any food!), so we scoffed on that too.

On Sunday mum persuaded me to go out for a run in the rain - I've been slacking/busy with work and life/not liking the dark, so haven't been out to run recently. I'm glad I did! Or I was glad until 15 minutes into the promised only 20 minutes run she asked if we could do 5km - maybe not. Once dry, we completed a quick second jigsaw and I made dad his birthday card. We waved them off in the wind back to Ottery just as the F1 final race concluded - congrats Norris.