So when the UK sleeps, we know you other MNers are out there part II

[tadjennyp]

I was looking for thumbwitch's recipe for that cake and found the old thread has disappeared so Linzer and I thought we'd resurrect it!

I hope all goes well at your next antenatal appointment, jenny - what a worry for you. DS was born by emergency C section after it was picked up that his heart rate was speeding up whenever I had a contraction (possibly Braxton Hicks; I wasn't actually in labour anyway), but I was already 38 weeks by that stage so they didn't think twice about it. At least the outlook for babies born prematurely is so much better these days - one of my friends here had her baby at 28 weeks and he was/is absolutely fine.

Am impressed with you managing to get forty people in the house for Thanksgiving, maren - we only invited that many to our wedding! The pie sounds nice. I'm not sure we can buy baked pie shells here, though (I know I could make one myself, but it's that much more work...), which always puts me off making pies. I remember how easy it was to make pumpkin pie in the US, where you could buy canned pumpkin and the pie shell and just had to put them together with a few other bits and pieces!

We managed to get a turkey at a specialist poultry shop last year; you might find the odd one at a larger supermarket, but they're not standard Christmas fare here. DH laughed at me the other day when I asked him whether you can get lamb shanks here (have heard they're good in the slow cooker) and said I would be lucky to get lamb at all. It's true, actually - I don't think I've ever seen a sheep in Austria, which is why it's always such a novelty for the DC to see fields full of them when we go back to Wales.

It's a long weekend here, as it's Austria's national holiday on Tuesday and school is closed on Monday (and was closed yesterday too). We're going to Carinthia (southern Austria) for a few days, so I must go and finish off my packing now as we want to leave in the next few hours.

Linzer we cram everyone in and at night the floor is littered with bodies . Adults sleep in beds or on the couch, kids sleep in sleeping bags on the floor (we always tell them it's actually a sleepover ).

I never buy baked pie shells. We live in the sticks, so it's way more trouble to bundle up my 20-month-old and make her behave herself in a store than it is to just make the crust myself. At least then I can giver her a little ball of dough to smash into the carpet play with . I once found canned pumpkin at the Whole Foods on Kensignton High Street, but most of the time we just baked and pureed the jack 'o lanterns from halloween and used that [hgrin]

Sheep are a novelty here too. I loved driving by fields of them in New Zealand and was slightly horrified at lamb dishes in all the restaurants, until I realized how many sheep there are

Reporting back: I think I can technically call the orange meringue pie a success because between DH and DD they ate half of it in one sitting. HOWEVER, for Thanksgiving I will make it with unsweetened cranberry juice instead of orange juice concentrate and will zest an orange or two into the mix as well. It was nice, but tasted very much of cooked OJ and didn't have much sour bite to the custard, and I think I can do better. Plus a red and meringue pie would be very pretty

Sounds great! A red meringue pie will look gorgeous! It's been snowing here today with a foot and a half over the mountain passes. I think we will have to get our winter tyres very soon.

ok, haven't had a chance to read back yet but I will - been away for a week and couldn't log on to MN the whole time! [serious withdrawal emoticon]

hope you're all well [hsmile]

Hope you had a lovely time thumb!

I had heard about the snow! It's been storming up and down the West apparently. Probably a good time for winter tires. I've had several family in very serious accidents driving over Donner Pass.

Welcome back, thumb!

I did indeed have a lovely time, thank you! It was great meeting up with my two English friends in Brisbane - one has lived there for 15 years now and the other was in NZ for 5y until she moved to Cairns last year. Most odd, 3 of us being in Oz! But brilliant fun.

Have read back over all your posts now and am impressed with the level of linguistics on this thread!
I could have gone that route, did 4 language O levels (French, German, Latin and Russian) but was crap at the vocab. Have since learnt conversational Italian, whilst au pairing in Taranto for 6 weeks but "ho dimenticato tutti" since then.[hgrin]

Science was that much easier for me and therefore that's what I did.

Babynames -
Frakkin - what about Lydie-Anne? Lydie-Emilie?
Also, I know it only means "sweet" but I have a bit of a thing for Mignonne as a name

Osborn seems like a great name; or you could have Orson (also means Bear)
Astrid instead of Astra, maybe?

Cecily is one of my long-term choices for a girl but I don't have a DD - and I can't believe that it's suddenly got so popular again!

Cranberry and orange meringue pie sounds delish! Sadly meringue and I do not get on so I won't be making it...they all seem to go flat and uncooperative on me [hsad]

Fingers crossed for your next antenatal appointment jenny - as horrid as it is being monitored at least they're aware of it.

Glad you had a fab time, thumb, even if the MN withdrawal was tough! I refuse to use Anne - it's DH's mother's name and I'm avoiding family names because otherwise we'll be obliged to have about 5 of them. Plus the family names for boys are really, really horrid. I can't believe how popular Cecily is either, I keep seeing it all the flippin time on MN and wanting to scream 'noooooo that's myyyyyy name that I've had lined up since I could remember!'.

Hope you're having/have had a lovely break linzer

Thumb I like those names, I will keep them up my sleeve for the next time DH tries to nominate Wolfgang [hgrin]

frakkin I have been celebrating. DH gave me a v nice stand mixer for my birthday this year, so I have been making all the things I could never manage before - like meringues

YES, Anne is out for us too (DH's sister is Anne Estelle). And honestly their naming convention for boys is truly terrible. All the men are 'Don' followed by a name that starts with a 'C'. Some of them go by Don and some go by their middle names and some go by 'DC' but I hate it. I feel like I've wandered into a bad mafia film, but they've been doing it for generations so can't really snort at it openly, just quietly not use any of those names.

To be fair, I can't really laugh too hard at DH's family. My mother's family has really unusual names and most of them go by their middle names because those are somehow less strange than their first names. I have an aunt named Meta for example, and an uncle named Sig.

maren A lot of my family, including my dad, are known by their middle names - I've never quite been able to work out why, as their first names aren't particularly unusual. My mother's parents both changed their names as my grandmother didn't like them - she just changed hers from Olive to Olivia, but also insisted that my grandfather changed his name to something completely different despite the fact that he'd been known as Joe for 20-odd years!

frakkin We had a lovely four days away, thanks. It's definitely getting quite wintery here now, and we woke up to a view of snow on our last morning (covering the top half of the mountain on the other side of the lake). We also saw snow on the side of the road on our journey back and were glad we already have the winter tyres on (we have to have them on by 1st November).

thumb I would have loved to do four language GCSEs, but I wasn't even allowed to do three because of timetable constraints so had to give up Welsh - I did manage to do Spanish GCSE in the 6th form, however. I think that, after German, conversational Italian would probably be of most use to me here (or rather, when we go on holiday). We've just booked our summer holiday in fact, so I have nine months to work on it!

my family all have utterly tedious "middle" name names. Long surname, so Dad insisted we all had short first names - fair enough concept. When I was around 10, I used to long for a name like Georgina (Famous 5, anyone?) but in hindsight, my name is ok.

Linzer - can you still get the Hugo "Italian in 3 months" books? If you can, that is pretty good (well it's what I used when I was out there and it got me through!)

Am a bit concerned that DS appears to be getting more snivelly and sneezy again - a cold on top of the Evil Virus from Hell would be a bit tragic. We need the weather here to pick up a bit so we can get outside a bit more, blow the bugs away. Need to ventilate the house a bit more too (without letting the flipping flies/mozzies in - I swear they queue up along the door jamb, waiting until I open it and then just zoom in!) We have screen doors and screens on all the windows but still they get in.

I wanted a Famous Five name too thumb, but it was Anne in my case - which I decided to have as a second middle name (to go with my probably-most-common-middle-name-of-the-1970s, Jane)! My mum wanted us to have first names that were a bit different (although my brother's got more popular not longer after he was born), but we do have a very common surname - or rather, I did before I got married.

I've had a quick look at Italian courses on Amazon; I'd like to get one that includes a CD and am quite tempted by Teach Yourself Italian (I did the Norwegian one, which was good - and written by my old Norwegian teacher). The Italian in 3 Months book has good reviews too, but the book/CD course hasn't (only one review, though) - I'll have to have a closer look.

hugo's plus CD for you Linzer! From Amazon as well. :)

Thanks, thumb - now why didn~t I find that? The only Hugo CD course I found (a newer edition, I think) had a different cover and a one-star review, which put me off a bit - this one has better reviews than Teach Yourself Italian, though.

Both my dh and his elder brother are known by their middle names, as was my ex East German boyfriend and both his brothers. I used to want to be called by most of the names in the Chalet School Series! I quite fancied being a Mary-Lou Trelawney!

The snow has melted from our back garden now Linzer but they have already closed a couple of the higher mountain roads for the season (till the end of May!) as they have over 60cm of snow! Will have to get our winter tyres on shortly, though we don't have to, just not allowed studded tyres before Nov 1st. Good luck with the Italian.

Have we had the CS conversation, Jenny? I loved those books as a child.

I'm resisting the temptation of Marie-Constance....

Try to talk DH round to Marie-Temperance but Ma-REE-TEM-per-ance aka the way anglophones would say it is ugly and Mary-Temperance just doesn't exist for the French.

I don't think so Frakkin - they really made me want to go to boarding school when I was younger! Never happened though, bog-standard comp a la Grange Hill for me instead! Marie-Constance is a beautiful name, why resist?

Cos Constance is getting v popular and my mother would be onto me in a flash. She named me after the author of said books....

If we haven't had a conversation about it have you heard of the wonder that is the CBB?

I used to love the Chalet School books too; I had virtually the whole set and really regret getting rid of them. I read on another thread that they're being reissued; is that what CBB is about?

They are - have been in reprinting for a few year by GGBP! I am slowly replacing my motley collection of Mummy's hardbacks and my Armada paperbacks with shiny unedited GGBP editions.

The CBB is a message board/community with loads of fanfic and discussion about the books. I mostly read the fanfic on it - some of it's really good!

Must definitely have a look at that site. I'm really hoping that at least one of the DDs will get into the Chalet School books; I don't think I was much older than DD1 when I started reading them, but she's not really at that stage yet - and I think they may be more DD2's thing anyway.

I love your name if it's what I think it is, frakkin - it was on my list for DD1 and I'm sure that's partly down to the influence of the Chalet School books! I was just put off using it by the fact that I have a friend with the same name - oh, and it would have annoyed me that no one would have pronounced it properly here!

I had a couple of the Chalet School books; I did like them but never really got into having them all. I remember really loving the sound of the Tyrol valley and wanting to visit - still do!

The only series I ended up with all the books from was Anne of Green Gables. I might have had all of the Malory Towers books but I can't remember, I think I had to borrow a couple. I had to collect them from jumble sales and library sell-offs, that kind of thing - didn't have the money to buy them new.

I also have the entire Georgette Heyer collection now - took a while (and someone to reprint the murder mysteries!) but it's done; and I have the full Terry Pratchett collection too. Apart from that, I don't have any others, I don't think!

Tis my middle name actually. Starts with E, slightly unusual spelling. I wish it were my first name as no-one can pronounce that and the other woukd be much easier!

hi again, i pop off for a few days & all the threads i'm on disappear!

how's jenny doing? any updates anywhere?

i am v jealous of the mixer stand - i long for one, but they're so expensive. i sort of have a plan to combine lots of christmas & birthday money to make it manageable. but then i get struck by indecision - brevile have rbought out one that rivals the kitchen aid, but kitchen aid comes in pretty colours, so which colour?

if i'm this indecisive about a mixer, imagine what i was like about a baby name - except the name isn't just for a baby, is it? the person has to live with it.

dd lost her first tooth today AND the halloween celebrations start tomorrow - she's going to a total of FIVE different parties/parades/candy scrounges. whe is very excited.

her tooth fell out in school so she was sent to the office, where they have a supply of tiny plastic 'treasure boxes' with 'tooth saver' on the lid - how cute.