Minor Updates

So Martin and Margaret are going home tomorrow, they've lost a bit of blood (Margaret on a broken cup and Martin on our vicious and ugly chandelier) but gained a few pounds (thank-you Denny's and Baker's Square) so pretty much all even then.

We've had a fun few days with them, I took an afternoon off work last week and we went to the funfair at the Mall of America
Then on Saturday we went to Albertville, an out of town mall until we could take no more (which wasn't long) and then went to Big Lake, the weather was brilliant for the end of September.
We found out that Dan has super-powers and can crush clumps of sand with his bare hands


Sadly our time at the beach was spoiled by some reprobates.
They turned up out of nowhere and then tried to make friends with us

We finally managed to get the best of them though and bribed them with bagels to babysit for us.

The weather isn't always great though, earlier in the week I cycled to work and then had to get a lift back from Andy iin the car as it was spitting outside.

Check out the amount of rainwater coming down from the rooftop drains!

We had our anniversary on Sunday, Martin and Margaret babysat for us on the Saturday night so Andy and I went out for meal and tiny bit of shopping too - having the shops all open until 9pm or 10pm is really handy as I managed to get myself a new wedding ring - somehow I lost my old one in the first couple of weeks of being here. The new one is real boy's wedding ring - it's made of Tungsten Carbide mmmmmmm, so its quite heavy and pretty much unscratchable, only Wolverine's adamantium claws can really mark it. I mention Wolverine as for the last month or more I've been telling Dan an extended story about Wolverine's life story. For the uninitiated Wolverine is the Marvel character with an adamantium skeleton, healing powers and extendable claws, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolverine_(comics). Andy did well too and got a ball dress, I'm guessing that people will want to see the new wedding ring rather than the dress so here is a picture of it.
We've been out to few nice restaurants as well, all the restaurants here are very child friendly, which is fortunate as Dan and Becky are not particularly restaurant friendly.
Its not just us that seem to think that Dan is somewhat loud either, his school teacher said to Andy 'that Dan was rather loud and that they were trying to get him to moderate his volume switch' - he certainly goes up to 11.