So, not much in the way of posting at the moment, perhaps because life has fallen into a holding pattern, waiting for a baby appointment, waiting for a baby before we try for the US, and I’ve taken the Christmas period off from working on the house (I know, I only just restarted, but hey). Despite the holding pattern, we’ve had a delightful Christmas here, with incredibly Kathryn and I both being off for both Christmas and Boxing day, which was utterly fantastic.
Despite our usual failure to coordinate well enough to get presents and cards off to people (there’s still, shamefully, a pile of cards sat on the table (sporting stamps) that we failed to actually even send. They’ll go in the post…err, so sorry if yours is one of them. We actually carried them to my mum’s before Christmas, and back, and still forgot to send them).
We were late getting the tree – despite wanting it up earlier we just couldn’t fit in buying it with our other things, like, y’know, work. It ended up only going up a week or so before Christmas, which given the poor dry state of the thing is probably a good thing. The places we normally look were all out of trees, or only had the most bizzarely shaped sad things, or massive room-engulfing trees. A random spot I’d noticed selling trees locally had some nice looking but quite dry ones left, and we ended up getting one of theirs. It did look pretty when we got it, if a little sheddy.
And even on the day, it was still looking fairly okay:
But it now looks rather brown. :(
We had a deliciously chilled out morning, pancakes for breakfast, opening presents from our far-too-generous family, friends, and each other. Kathryn got me some guitar learning software, so if I’m not raving out learning guitar, then poke me and ask why!* :)
Then we curled up together and watched White Christmas**. Then it was time for dinner!
We cooked Guinea Fowl on a bed of cabbage with wild-rice stuffing, accompanied by Yorkshire pudding, roasted potatoes, sweet potato & Jerusalem artichokes. It tasted fantastic. Yay for us.
Oh, and of course there was Mulled wine, Christmas Pudding and Eggnog.
Yum. :)
Oh, and we had the fire going, obviously!
Then we curled up again and watched the Doctor Who Xmas Special, which was okay***, Call the Midwife, which was lovely, and err, I failed to catch the IT Crowd on the day, but I’ve got it queued ready to watch as soon as the media server is working again (because I don’t want to watch it on my laptop).
And that was it.
The next day we took ourselves out for a little wander down the river, in the process getting incredibly wet feet because the river, it turns out, has flooded in a few areas. But the sun was gorgeous and the weather was kind to us, and it was all in all a beautiful walk. Then we headed home and curled up with Northern Exposure, which I remember staying up late to watch, originally on my little 12″ black-and-white telly (bought for I think £1 from a jumble sale) and then later on my old Ferguson Colourstar. Anyhow, that was our Christmas.
* Yesterday I picked up the adaptor to connect my guitar to the computer, which is terribly exciting, because until now I’ve not been able to actually try it.
** Unfortunately, the media server is still not fixed, although I think we’re pretty much there. The night before Christmas I managed to get the Films drive back up and shared. I don’t know exactly what happened to the main disk to make it so very, very unhappy but I’m in the process today of moving all the data off the disk so that I can format it, then move it back on again.
What’s more annoying is Eclipse Computer’s utter failure to ship the fans for the case before Christmas. They’re now apparently closed until the new-year with no sign of having sent things yet. Not a happy bunny on that front, given they were ordered on the 16th December.
*** Someone I know rated it as 6/10, a rating I’d agree with. The next day I devised the plan to fix Doctor Who. See, I love Who, but I find Moffat has not the ability to write him well enough. Also, he’s a misogynistic dinosaur, so my plan is this: Give really excellent fantasy/sci-fi authors a season each. Give them also the script team that currently exists, less Moffat, and a really excellent director/producer. Look at Neil Gaiman’s Who episodes, imagine what it, as a show, could be. Anyway.
