...and to all a good night. :D

My neighbours are really annoying me lately. When we first moved into this house, the house next door to ours (it shares our building... We're in a semi-detached, see) was vacant. We had no idea if the house was for sale or what, but it was very quiet :P

Anyway, while we were in Vegas, it seems the house was sold and since then there has been non-stop noise coming from it >:( The walls are paper-thin so we can hear them speaking and hear their TV and everything. However, that's not the most annoying part... The most annoying part is that they are renovating the house. So from approximately 7am in the morning until 10 at night every day all we hear is banging, drilling, thumping, etc. GAH. This morning we were awoken to them sawing something on the other side of our bedroom wall, which meant all attempts at a lie-in could be forgotten. Grrr.

In other news, it seems to be Christmas in 4 days, and 2009 in 11. Who let that happen? Who?

Las Vegas was really good! Because I'm lazy and can't be bothered to write big long paragraphs about it, here's a handy bulleted list:

• The Grand Canyon was very strange, one of those things you can't quite take in all at once, so you tend to just stare at it... It was really something.
• I thought Hoover Dam was oddly fascinating.
• Penn&Teller were absolutely fantastic.
• We didn't win any money.
• Everything was very expensive. They exploit the fact that people can't really go anywhere other than The Strip so they mark up the prices. $30 for breakfast?! No thank you.
• The famous "Welcome to fabulous Las Vegas" sign had moved! I didn't know, but apparently it gets moved more and more to the south as Vegas expands. The map showed it as being right next to the Mandalay Bay hotel, but in fact it was about a mile south, nearer to the airport.
• We got to see the famous Bellagio fountains at work :D
• The weather started off really nice - we had sun, temperatures of around 25°C (73°F) and beautiful blue skies. Then towards the end of last week, it started raining and everything sort of ground to a halt :(
• We went to the top of the (replica) Eiffel Tower.

And with that, have some pictures:

The famous sign. It was raining and nasty when this was taken.

View of The Strip from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

The Grand Canyon