Dinner on Friday was delightful. Because he loves me and, clearly, we are made of money, Mr. Waffle had tried to book Comme Chez Soi (much posher and more exclusive than its, frankly alarming, website makes it seem) but it was closed for the holidays – as he pointed out, July 28th is a great day to get married but not a fantastic date for restaurant reservations. Fortunately, Brussels abounds in opportunities to spend all your money on excellent food and he opted for L’Ecailler du Palais Royal where we lowered the average age in the restaurant considerably, which, let’s face it, doesn’t happen to us so much any more, and were the only people there who a) were not Belgian and b) did not have fat bank accounts in Luxembourg. The food was fabulous and we had a delightful evening even allowing for a little embarrassment about the bill.  It’s hard to know who was more embarrassed, Mr. Waffle for pointing out that they had inadvertently charged €111 euros rather than 11 for my dessert or the waiter who was absolutely mortified and entered into detailed explanations about how their bill totter had knocked off for the night and someone else was adding up etc. etc.
It was as well that we had a lovely evening on Friday, because we needed that rosy glow to sustain us over the weekend.  Daniel was awake all Saturday night with a temperature (cheering thought – start of chicken pox perhaps?). Michael was awake all Sunday night for the hell of it.  The Princess wet the bed on Saturday and Sunday night (having been accident free for weeks) and refused to nap on Sunday when we really, really needed her to have a nap. And Bill Gates is torturing us. His latest update says that we may be a victim of illegal counterfeiting. We are not. Our installation disk, however, which will allow Bill to check that this is really the case, in 14 simple steps, is in the cellar under mounds of baby rubbish. Bill will not let us deinstall our latest update and nor will he stop annoying us with little windows telling us that we may be victims of fraud. I suppose we’ll have to set aside a couple of hours to dig out his bloody disk.  Time when we could be SLEEPING.
And I am seriously beginning to wonder whether exhaustion is making me lose my mind.  I cannot remember anything for more than two seconds. Sample conversation with my spouse:
Him (to Michael): Voilà un beau papillon.
Me (a little later): Michael has dropped the whatchamacallit.
Him (tending to Daniel): Eh?
Me (tending to Princess): Can you give Michael the yokeemebob, the er, the umbrella.
Him: What?
Me: It’s all your fault you said papillon and that made me think of parapluie and that made me think of umbrella.
Him: Do you want me to give Michael back the butterfly?
At least the weather has broken.
ha – when ZoneAlarm started telling me that something called ‘Windows Genuine Advantage Notification’ wanted access to the internet I decided that was clearly some sort of spyware trojan and denied it. So I don’t get any annoying messages about illegal software (how could it be illegal, I bought it in John Lewis?) and I have the nice warm tingly feeling that I’m annoying Bill Gates every time it asks to get onto the internet and I won’t let it …
Wow – 11 euro for dessert seems kinda reasonable. But the fact that 100 euro could be added and nobody notice makes me think it’s just as well that you are made of money and that anniversaries only come once a year.
you’re not losing your mind – French vocab is always hard to remember 🙂
Disg, we have, you will be delighted to hear, resolved our differences with Mr. Gates.
Thanks sis.