Merry Christmas

I'm about twelve hours ahead of you guys, but its Christmas Eve here so I want to wish everyone a very happy holiday, hopefully spent with loved ones :)

I've had the longest day, running around Pokhara like a madwoman, preparing for tomorrow's festivities. I am making Christmas breakfast and lunch tomorrow, so went to the supermarket and bought a feast of foods the kids don't normally eat. Bread with nutella in the morning, mango juice, coloured bowtie pasta, cookies, and candies, all imported goodness for which I have to apologize to the locavore in me. Just once a year! They eat all local and seasonal food the rest of the time... this will be an exception.

Oh, then the worst thing possible happened to me... I took my compact flash card from my Nikon D70 to a studio to be developed. The guy inserted the card into his computer for me to point out the pictures I want, but failed to tell me there was a virus on his computer. It shut down halfway through, and started dumping its contents, whatever that means. I didn't think anything of it, the computer restarted, and we waited for the card to load again. You probably already figured it out by now, the virus killed my memory card. At the time I thought it was just his computer that was messed, but when I brought it home to put in my camera again, it no longer read it. I lost more than 900 photos from the last month, the only memories of which are left are on this blog. But worse, all the portraits of the kids were gone! My pictures mean everything to me, so you can imagine my distress. I sat in my room for quite a while, just thinking. I keep telling myself it could be worse. I could have lost more memories if this happened later, at least my camera is ok, by the laws of probability, this probbbably won't happen again to me, so I learn my lesson to never take a memory card to sketchy third world photo studios.

No use crying over spilled milk, so I went back out to the market, bought a new card for an exorbitant price, and resolved to take the portraits again when they come home from school today and rush it back to a more legit studio tonight to print. Fingers crossed!

I got them a few play things as well, and combined with their secret santa warm fuzzies tomorrow should be good. I read a couple of the notes, lol very funny. "Nawarj Bhai (big brother) I like you because you are very fat but have very good behaviour." "Bikal, I like you because you look like monkey."
They are all off from school tomorrow so I think we'll wake up a little later, have some food, exchange gifts, and go on a day trip. There are a few temples of note around here, and a bat cave! I'm pretty excited...

I hope everyone has a fantastic time with your families, I hear its a White Christmas in Canada. Enjoy it!