Moving at the speed of life

Barely back at work, and off on holiday again. We are off up North for a week, to a nice lodge with jacuzzi, sauna etc (in the lodge), and all the other amenities in the main complex. No snow, so probably no skiing, but looking forward to a week of R+R. Although having a bit of a breakdown tonight, as my parents are coming to dog-sit, so attempting to conceal the muck of months for my mother’s benefit. I really wish we could take Maisie, but no dogs allowed, but we will miss her a lot, and it would really be dog paradise.

Hannah hasn’t been well, but feeling a lot better on some anti-virals.

Today we walked the dog for about 6 miles, as my mum won’t let her off the lead in case she won’t come back and then Hannah bathed her, so is looking very cute. Her coat is quite shaggy just now, as we let it grown a bit for winter. Bob has been going through a process of having to re-apply for jobs, and has just been made an offer, so that is a relief – very much the same as he is doing, and it isn’t going to require him to go back on shifts, which we had been worried about, and also means I am spared from having to go back to work full time. The business isn’t really relaible enough to sustain us without one of us working full time, so that was a relief, as its just really starting to take off, and I would have been gutted to leave it to go back to full time employment.

So – I have a dongle, but can’t guarantee it will work in the Cairngorm National Park, so if not, back in a week

Hannah in the woods

An altar to Dell?Just because I like it.

I'm much younger than HIM

Bob says he find it hard to believe he is above the dog, but certainly believes he is below the computer!

Hannah and I were up at the crack of dawn to blag a GP appointment today. Given they’ve been closed for 5 days, I thought it may be impossible, but I finally got past the engaged tone at 8.10, and got offered an appointment at 8.25. This has happened to us before, so I was already prepared with us both dressed, dog crated, car defrosted etc, so we made it.

Wandered into town afterwards, and Hannah spent some book tokens in Waterstones. Annoyingly, two of the three books she wanted had a buy two get one free sticker on it, so I chose one for myself to make up the third, and told her I would give her the money. I sent her off to pay herself, and it turned out that all of hers were on offer, even though one didn’t have a sticker, so I ended up buying something I hadn’t been desperate for rather needlessly. Oh well.

Came home, and took down the tree etc. I always feel ridiculously maudlin taking down the tree, and wondering what we’ll all be doing by the time it goes back up again. Maybe a hangover from pre-Hannah days when every Xmas, we would say “maybe next xmas, we’ll have a baby”. Anyway, sniffed my way through that, and it’s all waiting upstairs for Bob to put in the loft when he gets home. Realised we had some chicken in the fridge that wasn’t really enough for dinner for three, but had to be eaten, so we had cold chicken, with olives, cherry tomatoes and brocilli stirred through it for lunch. Hannah asked if I wanted wine since we were having a posh lunch, lol. (I declined, in case you are wondering!)

Hannah curled up on the sofa, and I took the dog for a woodland walk, which was lovely. We saw several herons, and a funny bird I haven’t seen on the river before. It looked like a huge duck, with a white body, and a black head. Came home, realised that the last place we had photos lurking was on the cameras, which I had forgotton about, so dealt with that, did some business paperwork – I’m thinking about running a course in Aberdeen, so needed to find suitable venues to look at when we are up north on holiday next week. Tackled the ironing basket, and Hannah listened to some music on her ipod.

And its only 5pm, and everything is done, AND I’ve blogged. PLUS I’ve taken down the blog tree as well , and replaced with something to match the weather. What a difference getting up early makes.

I rarely use flickr, as it has always seemed a huge faff (which may indicate I’m not doing it right), but I realised that all our photos were scattered all over the place, and not backed up. So today I went round all the computers in the house, and gathered them all onto an external drive, and have set them up to upload to flickr -there wasn’t as many as I thought, (about 1000, maybe), but they are taking forever, its been three hours already, and only 17% are done. I suspect it’s going to be a long evening!

We’ve done the usual beach walk, gathered up (a theme developing), all the food that was lying about in various fridges, cooked it all, and froze what we won’t use quickly.

Hannah has been excited all day waiting to the announcement about the new Dr Who, we’ve been talking about the kinds of things she might want to do over the next few months, thinking about MOTB (Ros, are your lot going this year?), planning where we might go in the caravan, and generally waiting for real life to re-start on Monday.Its been a lovely couple of weeks

Today for the first time ever I made the highly recommended Nigella Ham in Coke. I’m sure I have eaten something as disgusting before, but I would be hard pushed to name it. It was sweet, revolting and had a horrible chemical aftertaste. What a complete waste of time, money and effort that was. In the end, none of us could eat it, and we zapped some frozen chili in the microwave instead.

Culinary disasters aside, we’ve had a nice few days. Weather has been fantastic – rarely above -5c, and really still and sunny. So although its been FREEZING, there has been enough light to make this time of year bearable, and already the light is begining to creep forwards in the evenings. I sometimes can’t bear the greyness in mid winter. So we’ve done lots of walking, relaxing, wii playing and dvd watching (still don’t have a tv). Having heating again is such a novelty though, that sometimes I just go and watch the lights flashing on the new boiler

Today we drove to Carlisle to get me a new laptop. My desktop is about 10 years old, and is really unstable now, and needs regular tlc. My laptop, although newer (about 5 years), was fairly low spec, as it was what I could afford at the time, and it was never intended to be the main PC in the house. With the desk top being unreliable, and us only having heat in the living room for the last few months, its been used more and more and had ground to a halt. It also doesn’t like working with the projector, which isn’t ideal when I’m doing pitches. Hannah does have her own, and I’ve been mainly using that, but its not really fair, and I’m scrupulous about not using my work one for the business.

So, I decided what I wanted and was about to order it direct from Dell, when I quick google showed it was £150 cheaper in PC World. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a line they were doing in Scotland, nor were they selling in online, but they had them in Carlisle, so I ordered it for Collect in Store, and off we went. Had a good drive down, just over two hours, went for lunch, then picked it up, and stopped in Dumfries on the way home to let the dog run about for a while.

So now I’m setting it all up It’s FAST.

Today at the beach even the rock pools were frozen. (Must check the freezing point of salt water.) Maisie loves running through the rock pools, so today she set off at speed ….. and skidded across on her belly, with all four lags splayed out, her chin on the ice, and a VERY surprised expression on her face. Anyway, taking back what I said in my last post about her being bright, she continued to do it on just about every pool she found. It was hysterical, and she was looked at askance by all the more senior and sensible dogs on the beach.

Came home, made hot chocolate and mallows for Hannah and me, and then she curled up on the sofa (she’s been feeling a bit poorly for the last few days), while I rushed round with the vacuum cleaner, flicked a duster over the place, and stuck dinner in a casserole on the hob.

Bob did a Tesco run when he came home, (still need to get cream and courgettes, both of which were finished in two different supermarkets), but otherwise that’s us sorted for the next half of the holidays. I sort of miss the festive season of my childhood, when there was no obvious signs of Xmas till the 23rd, when the village decorations were switched on, the tree went up on Xmas Eve, and then it was non-stop celebrations for 12 nights. Now it all seems to start at the begining of December, and people are taking the tree down from the 26th.

Rather glad I took leave over the holidays though. With the public holidays being on Thursday and Friday, and with them normally being working days for me, I had to take annual leave to cover them, as of course as a part-timer, I don’t have a public holiday entitlement as such – the public holidays are pro-rated onto my annual leave. I toyed with the idea of working on the Mondays and Tuesdays of each week instead, but decided against it, and it’s been lovely to be off. Bob has also had to take some annual leave to cover the holiday closure at his work (24th and 31st, as well as the PH), so it’s been lovely to have us all here. Its nice to be at home without any pressure to “be on holiday” or go anywhere.

The turkey has reached the final stage, and will be finished tonight, with rostis made from leftover sprouts and potatoes. We’ve yet to tackle the Xmas pudding, but may manage it tonight.

Really frosty here today, it almost looked as if it had been snowing. So we all wrapped up and walked for miles along the beach. Maisie’s recall is getting pretty reliable, so it’s nice that she can get off the lead for long stretches, I hated keeping her on the lead all the time. I wouldn’t trust her in traffic, or near farm animals, but she is fine on beaches/in parks etc. Hannah got a book on agility training in her stocking, and she’s keen to start that with her. I don’t know why I’m vaguely surprised at how bright she (the dog!) is. As we always had guide dogs for their first year when I was growing up, I was used to dogs being highly trainable, and also being working animals, but somehow I didn’t expect it of a POODLE!!  It’s funny as she was really a dog of last resort for us because of Bob’s allergies, and not one I would ever have chosen, but she is such a non-stereotypical poodle. Or maybe I was unfairly predjudiced against them. I suspect that last sentence is tautology. Can one be fairly predjudiced? Anyway, the dog is lovely

We had a great evening skiing on the wii fit last night,  but I was mightly pissed off when we switched it on for the first time. It told Hannah (5 foot 7, size 8 feet, perfect size 10, competitive athlete), that she is “overweight” based on her BMI. Not even a mention that BMI is not a good measure for athletes. She’s robust enough just to laugh it off, and she understands enough about physiology to know that she has pretty significant muscle development for a 12 year old, and also that the muscle weighs a lot, but its the last thing a pre-teen needs to be told. The fitness goals that they are asked for are all based on weight change as well, rather than on performance. At the end of the day, ffs, its a GAME, surely it doesn’t need any quasi-scientific crap? Once I got over my rant about that though, it was fun

And then Bob and I watched another 4 episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, while I had Patrick Dempsey fantasies. Yum.

Bob goes back to work tomorrow for a few days, so we may get back to more normal hours.

We’ve had a rather lovely few days. On Tuesday (23rd), Hannah and I went to John Lewis and had a Bobbi Brown make-over, came away with lots of samples, (although I could never really justify spending money like that on make-up) and then we went to Pizza Express and chattted for a couple of hours. Bob picked us up at the station, and then he and Hannah went off to see his dad, while I did present wrapping.

Xmas Eve we went for a long walk and had hot cohcolate in Beanscene, and really just lazed around. I think Christmas Eve is my favourite time. Hannah sent off to bed around 10pm, and Bob and I stayed up till around midnight. Around 3am the dog went mad barking, which is really unusual for her, and we decided it must be Santa We all slept in till about 9am, and discovered that there were presents

Hannah has wanted a DS lite for ages, and I had been reluctant as her other DS was still in good nick. However, we wanted to give my dad a special present this year as a thank you for doing all the work on the kitchen, so we gave him Hannah’s DS, with Big Brain Academy, Sudoko and Tetris, and Hannah got a pink DS lite She also got a wii fit, and loads of books. She also got a lump of PMC, to have a go at making silver jewellery and an encaustic art set. She had also bought presents for us, without any help, and was SO excited about these. And we loved them Hannah tends to open her presents very slowly over a few days. Its not that she gets masses, its just that she likes to savour it. So the DS did get unwrapped on Xmas day, yesterday was books, and today was the wii fit.

We did have a turkey crown for Xmas day, but around 3pm, after we’d been for a long walk, we decided we couldn’t be bothered cooking, so we had some party food from the freezer, bucks fizz, and later on, bacon rolls. Unconventional, but lovely. So on Boxing Day we had the full works, and watched about 5 hours of Grey’s Anatomy, series 4, which I had ordered from the US for Bob.

Today is really frosty, and we’ve been looking to see if we can get booked into a carvan site for new year, without luck so far, but it would be nice to do something different. The dog has had another long walk, and we are about to do some more chocolate clearing

Because I got a box of chocolate liquers from Secret Santa. I LOVE these, and they just somehow spell 70s Christmas. Oh, and I’m on holiday