Monthly Archives: December 2014

So 2014 is drawing to a close and I know that many people will be glad to see the back of it, but then every year will be a challenge for someone and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are always out and about, which is probably why they ride rather than walking. That’s Life…and Death.

Personally, it hasn’t been that bad a year for me. We had a lot of stress trying to get DD a place at the same Secondary school as DS and ultimately failed, but she aced her SATs and has settled into the other school quite happily, coming top of her class in every subject in the assessment tests. DS also had a good year, winning a photography competition and making a good start on his GCSE courses.

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I hope you all had a lovely Christmas. I could write volumes about mine, but that would probably bore you rigid, so I’ll just do my top hits and misses (in no particular order) 🙂

Top Ten Hits: (more…)

This is it, the last post of the Advent Calendar! There won’t be a post tomorrow on this theme since, for us, Christmas starts this evening, though I will be posting again soon, if only to review the reality vs prediction of my Advent series 🙂

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Eek! It’s almost Christmas and I still have so much to do! Yesterday’s bugger-it-and-drink-Champagne-instead just didn’t happen. DD and I were hacking away at the cooking rock-face for the whole afternoon.

The final tally was 101 pierogi, a dozen mince pies (more to do today, but there’s only so much dough you can roll in one day) and an orange and almond cake, which was almost burnt because I forgot all about it in utter exhaustion and the smell* was masked by the rather good chicken and butternut curry I’d dragged myself back into the kitchen to make for dinner. (more…)

It’s beginning to smell a lot like Christmas. The fridges are groaning with food and we have enough food to withstand a fairly lengthy siege. Early this morning was my final foray to the supermarket to buy a whole salmon* for Christmas Eve. This is my contribution to the family gathering is a whole salmon, but this forms only one small course in the feast.

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Nothing much to say today. Only a few more days to go and this is getting to be a challenge, especially today.

Today’s deck is RWS. It was going to be Joie de Vivre, but I haven’t got any today so the card is 10 of Wands. That’s all.

Normal service will be resumed tomorrow.

It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas, to coin a jingle. I woke up this morning with Polish carols going around in my head. Given that the likelihood of having heard these amongst the interminably repetitive festive tunes blaring out of every shop is less than zero, this is a strong indicator that I may just be getting into the spirit of the season, ever so slightly.

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Morning, peeps. I must admit to being slightly the worse for wear this morning. It wasn’t so much the quantity of beer I consumed last night, as my utter failure to remember to rehydrate before going to bed. Hence, a broken night’s sleep due to several awakenings during the night needing to stop my mouth feeling like the bottom of a parrot’s cage.

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The postman brought an unexpected surprise yesterday in the form of a letter from DD’s school. Nothing bad, in fact, quite the reverse. It seems that she’s been “identified as the most focussed learner in the Maths lesson on Friday” for which she has been awarded 2 house points.

Just to be clear here, this doesn’t mean that she’s a bit slow-but-trying-hard and they are giving her a bit of encouragement. No, she is very good at Maths (so much so that her Maths teacher was almost bouncing up and down with excitement at Parents’ Evening) and rather ahead of the level of most of her peers, so this is genuine recognition of her skillz – she haz them 🙂

Anyway, we aren’t going to say anything until we’ve had a chance to get her a little something by way of our own recognition of the school’s recognition of her achievements 😀

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Yay! Only a week to go, well, for us at any rate, since we celebrate Wigilia (Christmas Eve) 😀

The repaired glass is holding up, but still has an aroma of Araldite that is not entirely compatible with the bouquet of the wine and leaves a slightly headache-y tang 😛 I think perhaps I will have to leave it to one side for a few more days.

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