Confetti Flurry :)

Thanks to James Walker for the first digital photo to makes its way onto the blog. Lots more to come - will upload all of them to the website eventually.

Married, Honeymooned, and Back again!

Wow.

So much to say, so little time. Hopefully all read our lil blog from Bangkok, but we'll be blogging all about Koh Samui, and the wedding day itself just as soon as I can sit down and get it all sorted.

In the meantime, I leave you with the following highlights: Elephant Trekking in The Jungle, Zip wire/Flying Foxes in the Jungle Canopies just for fun follwed by showers in waterfalls, being taught how to make Thai curry in the jungle by locals, Kayaking through Angthong National Marine Park and visiting the Emerald Lake, Eating like kings in loads of amazing restaurants with gorgeous views whilst we ate.

Mrs Gillett is making herself at home properly in the flat, and we up at 6am yesterday putting more shelves up in the office/second bedroom to help accomodate all the stuff lying around the place in piles. Kat's off to change her name on bank accounts etc. today, and will be applying for her new passport and driving license etc.

Other exciting stuff which almost gets caught up in all the post wedding fun (presents, photos and videos galore!), is I'm off to see the Pixies play at Ally Pally tomorrow night!! Oh yeah! They rocked at Reading festival apparently, so I'm really looking forward to it - should be awesome.

Will blog wedding and honeymoon in detail later, but for now ... enjoy the view from the pool - loads more to come when I post them all elsewhere!

Blogging from Bangkok!

Hi all :)

Kat and Ed here (or Mr and Mrs Gillett!), blogging from an internet cafe in the Asia Hotel in Bangkok just before we head off to the airport to go to Koh Samui for the rest of our honeymoon. Nothing to do until our transfer gets here, already checked out, so we thought we'd blog!

Good news. Wedding ring doesn't appear to be affecting typing performance. Bonus. Thai symbols in addition to slightly odd layout on keyboard are however :)

So, what have we been up to. Well we had a traditional thai "brunch" out on the street the first morning we were here with the locals at a street stall, noodles and soup and dim sum. Lovely! We then proceeded to take our lives in our hands by taking a tuk tuk around town for most of the day, with our friendly tuk tuk driver Leo ("like the lion!"). Leo didn't rip us off as much as he could have done, and much to his credit appeared to take us to some of the better places where he could get his commission!! (even to a very good jewellery store where he didn't get any commission - very impressive!). So we went over to the river for a private cruise in a long boat, and saw some traditional bangkok houses by the river, we went to a tailor to get the seemingly mandatory tailor made suit (Yup - Ed got a new Cashmere suit, three silk shirts and a silk tie thrown in for good measure - all for <200 Pounds sterling!). In the jewellery store Kat got yet more bling bought for her with a perfect fire blue Thai sapphire with two mini diamonds either side (like a smaller - much smaller! - version of her mum's).

We've been quite lazy in the evenings for food (and why not - we're on honeymoon!), and have been trying the 4 different restaurants in the hotel. We started off with what seemed to be the feast of a thousand animals in the Brazilian restaurant (they just kept on producing more skewers with different meats on!!), Chinese next night and a really lovely Vietnamese restaurant the next.

Quick dash round as many temples as we could cram in on Wednesday (since we overslept! Doh!) which included the Marlbe Temple and Golden Buddah (it's big ... and Gold!). Evening found us wandering around the night market in Patpong with all it's "novelty" value :D

Yesterday - Day trip to the original floating market and rose garden. We also stopped in on a crocodile farm where we saw an excellent elephant show as well. We fed all the elephants and Kat was very happy she got to say hello to all the heffalumps at the end :) Emily - we've got lots of pics and videos for you, and we fed when just for you! (it's was the cute baby one!).

Right - gotta sign off now. May blog again - but if not, we lazed by the pool lots!!

See you all soon!

Mr and Mrs G.

Kat's still feeling under the weather

Where does that come from I wonder "under the weather". Surely we're all "under the weather" most of the time, whether it be sunny, rainy or what not.

Anywho, Kat's doc reckons she may have the start of a viral throat infection, and she's generally feeling a bit ropey. Lots of rest, lots of fluids, and a load of anti-biotics to take on honeymoon just in case it turns nasty.

Don't think our Osteo Donna made her feel much better with the cracking of the bones and "deep muscle manipulation" on top of her feeling grim anyway.

Oh hoorah! (Fragile lil thing I'm marrying!)

I think this is just Kat's way of proving that she feels so much better after she has holidays, and that just to reinforce this theory, she must get ill before going on holiday! Get well soon honey :)

I for one am looking forward to taking 2 weeks off work for the first time in ... erm .. a very long time. Had the odd week off abroad, but have not been for a holiday abroad for longer than a week since I was a kid. Pics of Koh Samui look awesome - it should be excellent!

2 days, 21 hours, 29 mins, 39 seconds.

Yup - less than 3 days away now.

Order of services printed, folded, stapled and being decorated :)

Table Plan done!

At work today and tomorrow, then Friday off to prepare for the big day. But now, of all things, I need to take Rav in for his MOT Friday morning, having realised that my tax disc will expire at the end of this month, and funnily enough, I'm not around for the rest of the month.

But hey, God bless KwikFit - www.kwikfit.com. Arrange MOT online, and got 40% discount on statutory MOT fee, so only pay £25! Hooray :).

Hop into Guildford afterwards to pay for another tax disc and then I can head over to the Church to install the MiniDisc recorder to record the ceremony and then over to the Reception venue to help out there!

Busy busy :)

Speaking of which, back to work!

Getting Married on Saturday!

Yup. The big day approaches - 3 days, 20 hours, 3 minutes, 40 seconds ...

The bride is under the weather today, poor girl. I maintain that IKEA has finally taken its toll - too many late nights with furniture have certainly not done me any favours, but Mr. Berocca and Miss Evian are doing all they can to make my haggard visage look presentable for the weekend.

We had our rehearsal last Saturday. Then it starts to become very real - when Andrew had to use the words "etc etc etc" in the vows we were saying to prevent us being legally married then and there, it suddenly dawned what we were doing. Not in an "ARGH! Oh my God, what are doing?!" way, but in an "Oh yes ... now I remember what all the planning has been for way".

We managed to get my future Mother in Law in floods of tears. She assures me it's nothing to do with her disappointment in her daughters choice of husband, which is reassuring :)

Order of Services printed (hooray!).

In other news - Ikea - damn you just one last time. My "MALM" chest of drawers was one lot of drawer rails short, and I have precious little time to deal with you right now!

Motivation ... waning ...

I knew two pints for lunch was a bad idea. Motivation severely compromised. Oh well.

Wedding rehearsal tomorrow. You know, check when to say "I will" etc. - Oh yes. No "I do"'s here. Terribly British!

But before then I must finish building Ikea furniture (damn you Sweden), build shelves in the office, sort out the mountains of crap (I mean valuable stuff that you own and have just moved in, thanks honey ... welcome to the bachelor pad!) that has just descended in piles. I think the piles are breeding .. must separate them before we reach epidemic levels.

Picking up honeymoon tickets 2moro! Hooray!

Speaking of tickets, Pixies tickets arrived today :)



Kat's hen night tonight - enjoy honey :)

James and I are climbing again tonight. Osteopath in the morning, rock climbing in the afternoon - oh yes!

7 days, 19 hours, 42 minutes, 45 seconds ...

9 days, 22 hours, 58 minutes, 34 seconds - Less than 10 days before Miss Kathryn Matthews becomes Mrs Kathryn Gillett :) 

My beautiful fiancee! Reposting via "Hello" 

New Pixies Album in the pipeline?

As reported on NME:

"Reformed alt-rock legends PIXIES are planning to record their first album in 14 years.

The band’s frontman Black Francis has confirmed the band, who got back together last year to huge acclaim, are preparing to make their first studio album since 1991’s ’Trompe Le Monde’.

He told The Sun: “It's all hugs and kisses, I'm pleased to report.

"We have been discussing recording a new album lately. As happy as we are with the success of the reunion tour, we really want to make a record for the right reasons, whether it is successful commercially or not."

He added: "We would be satisfied if it played like our other records, never chart-topping but always in print.""

Sweet ...

Comedy Links

Pictures from "Team Badger Racing" which had the dubious honour of sharing road space with Chuck and Geoff on the Plymouth Dakar. Click here

Dear God boys, those were some bad beards.

Amusing entries for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Bad first lines of novels competition. My favourite thus far:

"For the fifteenth time that evening my narcoleptic lover opened his eyes, smiled at me, and said, "Good morning!""

Whenever Mark and Geoff finally get around to sorting their website out with some new content and all those pics from the Dakar trip - http://www.sonsofhasselhoff.co.uk.

10 days, 1 hour, 7mins, 15 seconds until the wedding begins!!

:D

Pixies!

Almost forgot - I got tickets to see the Pixies play live at Alexandra Palace in London on Wed 31st August! Woohoo! :)

So, that'll be Ally, Liam, Mark, Geoff with Kat and I.

That said, Kat may not actually decide to come (having listened to some Pixies over the weekend, she was less than impressed. The wedding was nearly off for a minute, but we agreed to differ in a calm fashion), so I could be putting that 6th ticket up on eBay ;)

Photo Blogging Screwed

Hmmm ... Blogger's photo blogging appears to be screwed, either on BlogSpot or on my own server via FTP. Oh well. Will sort something out if it's not fixed in the next few days.

News - 10 days, 23 hours, 9 minutes, 20 seconds until we get married :)

edgillett.com maybe getting more updates soon since I've just updated my hosting to a paid ASP.Net host (1&1), so I can put more play things online. Also means I can put around some better URLs like "blog.edgillett.com" rather than relying on forwarding from domain manager to freebie website.

NTL were going to discontinue access to the server I'm on months and months ago, but they just let me keep on using it. The new FTP server didn't allow remote access (only on local cable network , so that was no fun any more ...).

IKEA furniture - we're both physically exhausted and we're still building the damn things! It'll look good when we're finished (And we may actually have SPARE storage. Shocker there.) Various injuries to hands along the way. Rav did a stand up job of shifting boxes back from Croydon, but we were asking 3 boxes too much of it, so we ended up doing a very quick round trip back to Ikea to pickup the last 3, Got home and unpacked the last of the boxes into the garage about 11:45 pm on the Saturday night.

Built units all day Sunday, and Kat did some during the day yesterday. I helped her to finish one of the middle units in the lounge last night. We gave up about 2am when we were really tired and grumpy and I didn't want to play with cables and furniture any more.

Oh, and the order of construction as specified in the instructions is normally right. It may seem more convenient at the time to construct the top part of the unit independently from the base, so you don't have to stretch, but, as it turns out, it's a real pain in the ass to attempt to LIFT the heavy top onto the bottom. Hence we had to disassemble and then reassemble again in the correct order. Always read the readme I guess. Damn the readme - damn all the readme's!!!

Order of service needs to be finished in next few days - will hack around with the layout, margins and guide lines for guillotining tonight and then start the next epic personal print run (HP LaserJet 2100 - 3 years with the same toner cartridge and still going strong! It's a lil diamond of a workhorse).

Anywho .. I have work to do - lunch break is over.

"Worky worky time, not shirky shirky time Gentlemen" - Mike Wheeler