Monday, December 12, 2011

Tis the season to be silly

What is going on in Latvia ?? - First of all the weather, when I first arrived in Riga in November 1995, it was -25 degrees and a thick covering of ice and snow blanketed the streets, but today it is +2 degrees with a weather forecast of 5 degrees and Sunny towards the end of the week.


It has tried once or twice to snow - but to no avail - so if this continues we are likely to have a snowless Christmas for the first time in 16 years - weird !

And speaking of the silly season, last night with a little help from Twitter, a rumour spread like wildfire that Swedbank was in trouble, which led to queues of people at ATM's getting there money out. Now I can understand the nervousness of Latvians about banks, given the history here, but as Swedbank are one of best capitalised banks in Europe, it was hard to give any creditabilty to these rumours. But it just shows the power of social networks such as Twitter - maybe that the reason they are called Tweets or should it be Twits !

On a more cheerful note this week, 14th December, sees our annual Christmas Charity dinner in aid of the Zvannieki Childrens home. This year it is being hosted at the FG Royal Hotel ( Which some of you will have known as the Hotel de Rome) - with Scott again as our chef.

This will be largest ever gathering of Smiley Fund supporters, with some 62 partipants - so it should be record in our annual fund raising efforts - I will update the blog with full details after the dinner.

For those interested in statistics, this year the dinner will consume 54 kg of turkey, 120 bottles of wine, 8 kg of Cristmas Pudding, 2 Kg of Mincemeat plus untold amounts of Potatoes, Carrotts, Brussell Sprouts - it all has the makings of a Grand Dinner !

Despite a lack of snow Riga has once again put on its finest Winter face, with decorated Christmas Trees spread across town, and the streets decorated with Christmas lights - all it needs now is a little snow - but that seems a little way off - pity !

So there you have it for this time - enjoy your week

1 Comments:

Blogger Sac Hermes Kelly said...

I really can't handle how sad I am over him dying. On the bright side, I can always drown my sorrows in fan fiction.

Also, I just read this article in Wired magazine & this quote made me happy.

'Harry Potter revealed a mass audience for fantasy that nobody was aware of, not even the people who were part of it. We were legion, and we didn’t even know it. Dostoevsky once said, “We all crawled out from under Gogol’s ‘Overcoat,’” and it’s just as true to say that we all crawled out from under Harry’s cloak of invisibility. He made being a fantasy nerd cool. Or, no, that’s not quite right. We didn’t change. The world changed around us: Harry Potter made everyone a little bit uncool.'

6:00 am  

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