Blwyddyn Newydd Dda!

2010 - Make it a Good One!

Christmas Cake and Catastrophe!

Well another Christmas has come and gone . . .

This year's cake came out well - decoration courtesy of two snowflake cutters and those little silver sugar balls that break your teeth. Tried out frangipane mince pies as well - a bit different from the traditional variety, and very nice too.

All that food (and drink!) serves as a fitting precursor of course to the annual New Year's resolution to lose weight and eat more healthily . . .

The rest of Christmas followed the traditional pattern - meeting up with family, presents under the tree, the occasional bit of TV gold among the Christmas dross. Most of the Christmas food has been eaten or given away now (just a quarter of the cake left), although still enjoying the chocolate, particularly the 'volcanic' chocolate orange (think chocolate with 'space dust' - I quite liked it anyway!).

Then came Boxing Day and our very own minor catastrophe, courtesy of the fish tank, which managed to empty itself (bar a couple of inches or so, which preserved the fish) onto the carpet. Cue a morning of mopping up - it's drying out now, but the dehumidifier is still running, and the room is still in relative chaos:

So that's it for another year - hopefully next year's effort will be a little less wet!

White (Week Before) Christmas!

Picture the scene, it's a Saturday morning, the day stretches ahead, lots of Christmas preparation things to do, a bare few flakes of snow drift down . . . half an hour later . . .

We did make it to the top of the road, but cancelled plans to go further, got some essentials from the nearest shop, and just made it home while the road was passable. By early afternoon it had stopped snowing and it was time to take advantage of the resulting photo opportunities:

The sun even came out for a few minutes . . .

It didn't really last the night, but who knows there may be more to come yet . . .

Somewhere Under the Rainbow . . .

. . . it's still raining. Nice rainbow though!

Could have been Worse!

Well November's weather (see below) was what might be conservatively referred to as 'wet and windy'. Thus far the effects haven't been quite as bad as the end of October last year, although the garden was approaching saturation point by the end of last week.

Compared with my former stomping ground in the Lake District we appear to have got off very lightly though. The effect on the towns and villages of the North Lakes (some of which I know very well having lived in the Buttermere, Cockermouth and Keswick areas during the early-mid 1990s) has been really devastating.

Here in Wales it's now feeling distinctly cooler (there was actually a frost this morning) - and the last couple of days have been dryish with a brisk breeze, so the garden is gradually becoming a little less sodden. Here's hoping for more dry weather to come, and a few sunny days wouldn't come amiss!

Stop Press: Met Office declares November 2009 as the wettest month on record!

All the Fun of the Fair

After this morning's spooky encounter with the sheep from hell on my walk into work, I felt a little light relief was in order - so after work I headed of fair-wards.

This is something of an annual tradition for us - walking round the stalls of the roadside market that visits traffic chaos on Aber for the last three Mondays of November, and then moving on to the fun fair which inhabits one of the car parks for much the same period.

For once we didn't actually make it all the way round - there was nevertheless the usual sense of deja-vu (it doesn't change - stalls offering cheap goods / clothes - we rarely buy anything), and the increasing sense of time passing (how many years have we done this now?).

Quite sorry to have missed the fun fair - got some photos from the outside looking in - but that brief wander through the rides, candyfloss and hoop-la is very evocative, if only from the perspective of nostalgia for fairs past (and on the other side of the country, although all fairs feel the same somehow!).

The Fun of the Fair (age 6) was really quite something . . .

Be Afraid; Be Very Afraid

'nuff said: