Christmas Squared Part 2

Lots of pictures of our second Christmas Day in Canada.

 

Yes, this is our tree and these are our presents and I'm soooooooooooo  excited!

 

I'm really not at all camera shy, unlike my Dad and I wanna be in this pic of the tree too!

 

This is  heavy and really too unwieldy for me but it's a train set and I am not gonna let anyone else touch it

 

Next time that thing goes past I'm going to cause carnage. You Do Not Mess With  The Cat!

 

Three generations of train nuts - one small supervisor and two engineers

 

I've warned it. Any minute now, it's curtains for that thing

 

Christmas lunch: turkey, home made cranberry sauce, and the rest. So nice to have it made by someone else.

 

Dessert - Son No 1's version of cassata.

 

Post lunch chaos - but a happy lad and his Dad

Christmas Squared - Part 1

So, there we were, planning to go to Canada for Christmas and the question arose; what to do about presents? Quite early on we rejected the idea of taking a lot of wrapped presents over to Canada to open them and then bring them back again.  So we took them to Glasgow instead.

 

We couldn't just unceremoniously get all the gifts out of our bags and rip off the paper at some random time, so we had two Christmases this year; a pre-Christmas one in Glasgow before we flew to Ontario and another one in Canada on the right day. 

 

We bought a tree and a set of decorations on our way to Glasgow and Son No 2 and I put it up.

 

 

At home we have a very eclectic set of decorations for our tree; some that I made, some that the kids made, things we've picked up on our travels, and the occasional baubles that we have bought just because we saw and liked them. It's a wonderful record of our time together and full of memories and I love it. But every Christmas when I see trees in shops and magazines decorated in lights and baubles all in one colour I allow myself a little sigh of, well, not quite envy, but longing.

 

 

 

But look! the Glasgow tree almost qualifies as monochrome, as the decorations were all black and gold. And very fine it looks too

 

 

 

We had a mini Christmas dinner - chicken, not turkey

 

 

and this is Son No 2 opening a present. I think it must be something he had expressed a passing interest in having...!

 

It was fun, if a little low key, and  set us up nicely for the adventure which was Christmas in Another Country. 

 

Project 60 Number Four

And that was Going Away for Christmas.

I've always fancied doing this. The OH however has not. 'I like to be at home at Christmas. I don't like leaving the cats. It's not a time to be on the roads/railways/in airports....' and so it went on.

This year was different though. It was the first Christmas that Son No 1 and his family would be spending in Canada and the first chance that we would have to spend Christmas with them, as for the previous nine years they have been snapped up/coerced by the in-laws to spend Christmas with them.

I have found this upsetting and annoying in equal measure. Partly because I know the kids would occasionally have liked a Christmas on their own. Partly because I could never be so selfish as to deprive someone else of the chance to spend Christmas with their child and grandchild for so long. The daughter-in-law's parents seem to have no qualms about this. They want their children at their house for Christmas and there is no argument, or ever any suggestion that perhaps it might be 'our turn'.

Families, eh? Recipe for disaster.

Anyway although it wasn't quite the Caribbean idyll  that I have always envisaged when I have used the phrase 'going away for Christmas', we did go away and have Christmas in Canada. It was wonderful. It was in fact a bit like the credit card advert. 'Flights to Toronto £X. Hotel in Windsor £X. Meals out and presents $CX. Spending Christmas with the family Priceless.

Pics aplenty over the next few days.....

Happy New Year!

We've been away, hence the silence. Post and pictures to follow shortly - as in, not today but sometime this week.

I was very pleased to say goodbye to 2014 which was a rubbish year for us and I'm hoping that 2015 will be a huge improvement.

It almost got off to a bad start. When we got back to Orkney  on New Years Eve we discovered that in our absence the decorator had been in and painted the new room. Which should have been good news, right? And it would have been if he hadn't painted the walls the wrong way round. Honestly how tricky is 'This wall is to be this light green, and the other three walls are to be this cream, and that's why there's a small tin of green paint and a bigger one of cream'. Not very, I wouldn't have thought. Until I came home to three green walls and a cream one.

 

I have tried for several days to convince myself that I can live with it, but at the end of the day I just can't. So I've written to the decorators asking them to come back and put it right. The OH seems very antsy about this. Not sure why. He is convinced that they will a) run out of paint b) charge twice for the work and c) never come back to do any more work for us.

 

I said to him that if he got something totally wrong for work  would he not a) expect to be asked to redo it b) not expect to be able to charge for it twice and c) worry about not being asked to do any more work, rather than decide he could afford to take home his bat and ball. All of which he is in agreement with. Even so, he wasn't happy when I posted the letter this morning. 

 

At the end of the day this new room has cost us a small fortune, and I don't see why I should be asked to live with something that isn't  quite right. It's not as though I waved in the direction of the paint tins and said 'Two colours, four walls, take your pick'.

 

The only slight consolation is that it was done in old rubbish 2014 and hasn't blotted the fresh copybook that is 2015. Yet. I'll keep you up to date with developments.

What are we calling it this week?

We're having a new room built on the front of our house. We've been intending to do this for a long time, but for many reasons, mainly to do with the availability of builders and the weather it's being done now. It's almost finished which is a good thing as I am sick of it not being finished, but I am at the 'It will all be worth it in the end' stage.

Originally it was going to be a small sun porch. Lots of houses on Orkney have small sun porches/tiny conservatories on the front. This is partly to do with enjoying views and sunshine and long summer days in the summer, and partly for catching and using what little light there is in the winter. Traditional Orkney houses, like ours, have thick walls and small windows. This is very good for heat conservation, but tends to make the interiors dark.

Several years ago we enquired of a local firm about putting on a conservatory. They came and talked to us, took details, said they would send a builder round to discuss siting and size and they never did. I chased them up twice and got 'I'm very surprised the builder hasn't been in touch Mrs A, I'll chase him up' twice, after which I decided that they weren't going to be coming and wrote them off as a bad job. Which is a good thing because if I had been waiting with bated breath for them to contact me I'd be dead now,  because they never did.

Anyway then we had the new kitchen, and some expensive holidays and a bad year  and then we did the bathroom and bedroom and now the new room is taking shape at last. Because the builder decided it was best to do a pitched roof tied into the roof we already have rather than a flat one we decided that rather than have a measly little conservatory we would make the new room a reasonable size - a size worth building really, which is what we've done. As a result we could no longer call it the sun porch or the conservatory and I call it inter alia the sun room or the garden room and everybody else, when they're asking about progress call it Your Extension.

It's almost done and once it's finished I'll doubtless come on here and shout hurray. Meanwhile here is the story of the whatever room, so far, in pictures.

 

digging foundations (not us the builder!)

 

the slab - which I was sure was too small

 

 

look at the size of those windows - who's going to clean them?

 

going up....

 

lots of storage - those boxes go round two walls. And it's not too small at all.It's bigger than it looks in  this picture.

 

 

We still need the outside rendering finished and the decorator to come back and put some colour on the walls and the electrician to wire in the lights and the sockets properly. But we're almost there.....



Project 60: Number Three.

Baking Muffins.

It's a sad fact that a lot of the things I've thought about doing for Project 60 are food related. Especially since as I've said previously I am not a foodie in any shape or form. Mind you at least these food related things are  relatively cheap and easily achievable. A lot of the other things I've thought of doing involve travel and lots of expense. And some of the others require preparation,  of the losing some weight first variety. Hence Number 3, like numbers 1 and 2 is all to do with food.

 

I'd never made muffins. I quite like muffins. Ergo I made some.

 

There are photos. (I did the muffins ages ago, but I've only just uploaded the photos onto the laptop, hence the delay).

 

 

 

Half were chocolate chip, on the left, obviously, and the other half were lemon curd. Those whose memories stretch back a while will remember that making lemon curd was the second new thing I did. I bought a little gadget in a shop designed to take cores out of cup cakes and muffins, and although it didn't work brilliantly, it worked well enough to allow me to pop some lemon curd in the middle of the muffin and then pop a top back on.

 

Close ups

 



they were delicious and I can quite see making muffins becoming a bit of a fixture. I did some lemon and blueberry ones only this morning and popped a little muffin recipe book onto my Amazon wish list so that I can ring the changes.

A Bijou Rant-ette

Many years ago when I was first, a teenager, and later a young woman looking to establish myself in a career I, along with the rest of my generation, was fed an insidious myth about gender difference in the work place.

It ran along these lines. Men could compartmentalise, women couldn't. This meant that when men went to work, whatever was happening in their lives elsewhere was left at the door. They came into work, shed all their non-work problems and agendas and were able to apply themselves 100% to work without anything else affecting either their work performance or their relationships with co-workers. Women on the other hand, brought all their problems to work with them. They got distracted. They couldn't concentrate on their work or what people were saying. They cried or lashed out or drew all the other women in the workplace into their little whirlpool of worry or misery thus spreading the non-working infection beyond their own desk or section of the conveyor belt or whatever.

 

This is cobblers. It worked for a long time to keep women out of workplaces and later boardrooms, but there is no woman of my acquaintance who hasn't worked with a man who all too obviously has brought his outside problems into work with him on a regular basis. In fact a boss once complained to me about the rudeness of his staff in not greeting him with a 'Good Morning' when they met him for the first time each day. I gently explained that  the reason no-one ever said Good Morning to him before he had greeted them was that they never knew whether they would be rewarded with a smile, a grunt, or a comment along the lines of 'Well it might be a good morning for you but some of us have things to worry about.....'

 

Last week I was with a man who very obviously has something bad on his mind. It was  pre-occupying him to the exclusion of just about everything else. The something can have had nothing to do with me, and I rather resent the way that whatever it was, was taken out on me regardless. Here was someone who obviously couldn't compartmentalise and I suffered because of it. Strangely enough even when my mother was dying which is, you know, quite a preoccupying thing, I never lost my good manners. I carried on saying please and thank you and listening to what other people had to say to me. I didn't sigh heavily at them, get defensive with them or give voice to gnomic utterances which would have done nothing except make them feel inadequate, uncomfortable and in the way.

 

Funny that. You might almost have said I was compartmentalising.  But that can't be right can it? 'Cos after all only men  can do that.