quizcustodiet

I moved all the shelves around in the spare CD rack and have turned it into a dedicated shrine to Sir David Attenborough *g*. My entire Attenborough DVD collection in one place, except for my Christmas present of "Asia" (currently by my bed because I'm watching it).

It snowed on Thursday night; about a centimetre lying everywhere when I went out at half six on Friday morning, and about half of that had melted by the time I left the pool to go up to the office, but most of that is still lying now. I had very little trouble getting in, but it sounds like most of my colleagues struggled; my oldest colleague broke her shoulder very badly ice-skating a few years ago (was off work for months) and she's really nervous about ice now - she'd clearly freaked herself out quite badly by the time she got in on Friday. I did look at the trampled and half-melted station car park on my way home and think "this is going to be lethal once it refreezes" but the round trip to church on Saturday was fine. And the bus driver saw me coming and waited as I "ran" for the bus (half the pavement was clear, but I was tiptoeing very carefully over the other half...).

It's mostly stayed below freezing, occasional spikes up to 1 or 2C. And more snow due tonight, although the forecast is no longer saying "bits of snow every day for the next week", and it's going to get warm enough (four or five whole degrees!!!) that it ought to melt by midweek.

First day back at work was noisier than I expected; there were half-a-dozen people in on my team, although we were the only ones on the whole floor! The one manager who was in brought a giant tin of fancy M&S biscuits, on the basis that if we all had to be in we deserved something nice. Monday will be back to full normality, though. I'm consoling myself with the fact that I have a day off later this month; I'm going to a Thursday night concert (Mahler 1), and decided to treat myself to not having to get up at six the next morning!

I have a bunch of game codes going spare for anyone who wants them! We don't have to be mutuals or anything, and feel free to pass them along to other friends etc. Please take them! Some of these games are great, but I can't play two copies.
( list of games )

Happy new year! I was thinking about doing some sort of year-in-summary thing but it just seemed much too exhausting. I still have November and December booklog plus the year in review for that and honestly I've spent most of the past week lying around limply reading Yuletide stories. I was going to post about that also but again with the too much effort.

However, tragically tomorrow I have to go back to work, so I am having to bestir myself to prepare for that.

In the meantime, my washing machine broke on Monday, with a load of laundry inside it, and apparently all the washing machine repair people are off until next Monday. Dad very kindly came over today and wrestled it out of the slot, which allowed us to revive it for long enough to finish the last few minutes of the cycle it was doing; we still don't know why it started erroring, and I don't trust it enough to wash anything else, but I no longer have a pile of clothes festering in there and I'm taking that as enough victory for now.

I also finally built the bookcase I bought on my November IKEA trip, and while Dad was here he volunteered to rearrange it and the CD racks I was using it to supplement. I have reshelved everything, with gaps for future acquisitions, and it all looks very beautiful; I have one CD rack left which will need rehoming, but I haven't worked out what to do with it yet. Possibly overflow DVDs, but there's no room for it in the spare room with the rest of the DVD storage. ETA: have just tucked it in the corner by the door and will work out what to put in it later.

And now, time to make packed lunch for tomorrow and go to BED.

Christmas was good but also SO MUCH. By the end of Boxing Day lunch I was trying to work out how much longer I had to stay in company, but I ended up in my mother's living room where she was silently playing a game on her new tablet and my sister's fiance was silently playing a game on his phone, and I just sat there silently reading on my phone for an hour and felt much better.

Family updates:

• my sister is engaged! this came as a surprise to me and the brother who doesn't live near her, although mostly because we thought they were already engaged (there have been casual discussions about weddings going back some years)
• my sister's endometriosis op in the autumn revealed that she does not in fact have endometriosis, but she did have a nasty tumour-y thing which was not cancer but apparently also not not cancer and now she is down one ovary and fallopian tube, which is particularly upsetting for her because all of this was part of the fertility investigations they've been working on
• my middle nephew is dating a boy! He is definitely the least surprising candidate for this out of my niblings. Apparently he is not presently interested in labels, only in dating the person he likes, which seems perfectly reasonable to me, particularly since he's fourteen

Apparently I made a good decision to leave when I did on Christmas Day since several family members were already pretty drunk, and it sounds like it got significantly worse after I left! Not in a bad way - my family are generally very well-behaved drunks, they just enjoy themselves - but at least one person apparently needed considerable help to get upstairs to bed. Mum said "they were singing all sorts of things to Dad's guitar! Oasis and Simon & Garfunkel and lots of things!"; I said that sounded nice and she said "IT WASN'T" (I gather they were fairly raucous...)

Both my parents stayed home from the Boxing Day walk this year, which meant that for the first time in years I was not solely responsible for the cooking, and was surprisingly stressful (Dad: "Oh yes we can cook all six of those things in the last half hour before lunch!" Me, silently: YOU CAN FIT A MAXIMUM OF TWO THINGS INTO THE OVEN, AND I DON'T BELIEVE YOU HAVE ACCESS TO TIME TRAVEL). However my mildly panicked promptings did cause enough things to happen early that it wasn't a disaster (three or four things were cooked while we were eating and brought up as additional items, but that's fine). They didn't want to cook things early and let them get cold waiting around, which is very reasonable, but also if you are trying to cook:

• three trays of sausage rolls (vegetarian spanakopita; sage and onion; cheese; chorizo; black pudding; "Chinese takeaway" (with five-spice, hoisin and soy sauces); homemade by my sister's fiance and apparently all very delicious - obviously I only had the spanakopita ones)
• two trays of cheese potatoes
• two sticks of garlic bread
• a tray of pigs in blankets
• three small trays of brie and cranberry parcels
• a pack of chicken goujons
• a small tray of beef and stuffing Yorkshire puddings(?!?)
• a Greek omelette / fritatta thing

you cannot in fact do them all at once even if you have a four-oven Aga. Something is going to be lukewarm and this is simply a fact of reality. Particularly since the temperature starts dropping when you keep opening and closing the door, cooking lots of frozen items in it, etc etc, so the cooking times on the packaging become more and more distant from reality (the 17-minute brie and cranberry parcels had I think 35 minutes in the end and were only barely beginning to brown then).

Mum was pretty down about food things because - well, ok, she has pretty much spent six months during her chemo eating the exact same meals every day at the exact same times, which has been working for her, but means she does not yet have any real idea how to calculate the appropriate medication for meals with different food in them, or how to arrange them around eating at different times, or how to schedule everything so that she can still eat her before-bed weetabix to prevent any overnight hypos. I'm fairly sure this is a one-time problem, because by next year she'll have varied her diet and activity sufficiently to be able to work it out better. But right now she's feeling very confronted by how not-"normal" her life is, and it's been no fun for her.

But everyone had enough to eat and there were left-overs, so it was a success. Then I came home and did nothing and talked to no one and hopefully tomorrow I will have energy to start on my to-do list backlog.