Christmas and ah' that.

I hope everyone had a great Christmas!

Thanks, Rockster, for the cards! They are terribly cute! Crocky and I love them a lot! I hope our cards will not be too late. But then, always remember, members of the Russian Orthodox Church celebrate Christmas on the 7th of January, sooo...  

I did not not have internet connection last week, so I'll just backdate a few entries now. Not stunningly interesting ones, just one about Christmas shopping and another with two sonnets I've written for the annual sonnet competition.

So, did everyone have a good Christmas?
We definitely did. It was one of the best Christmases I ever had, although it had the potential to become one of the worst in some very minor ways. That I was not home seems to be one, but that somehow did not matter much.

It began, very promisingly, on the morning of the 24 by finding a drowned beetle in my cappuccino, and it would have been nice only to "find" it by seeing it. Yuck. Sorry for that, I am still traumatised, but fighting against it by drinking as much cappuccino as I can.

It continued by receiving a card from count_tygath! Thank you so much! We loved it a lot!

Since we have no decoration for a tree, we did not have a tree. That is to say, we did have one, but it was rather self-made, consisting of the picture of a tree which I blue tacked to the wall. Not too impressive, but we felt a lot better for having it.

We did not do anything on the 24th itself, apart from stunning things like taking the DVDs back to Blockbuster's and me wrapping up the presents for Crocky and putting them under our tree.

In the evening, we had a great time opening the presents, having dinner and calling or being called by our families. We also played the game which Crocky and I have invented just a few days before and to which I had given her additional cards. All tremendous fun.

Apart from that, I have fallen in love on Christmas Eve.
Not with Crocky, but with my *drum roll* new camera.
My parents gave me a wonderful digital camera for Christmas, which is one of the best presents I have ever received. I have been bouncing around the flat like a child with a lovely toy for hours after I opened it. Hold on. I am a child with a new toy. I love taking pictures, but the things on the pictures I take so often are just not what I saw when I took the picture.
So often the colours are wrong, so often I mess them up because I am apparently unable to see properly through one eye, or they are blurry because there is something wrong with my glasses, or they are blurry for reasons unknown… and that kind of thing just does not happen with this camera. There are of course pictures which are blurry, because untalented picture takers like me occasionally even manage to mess up pictures with a shutter speed of 1/2000, but the colours are what they ought to be, they are just what they looked like in real life. Since Christmas Eve I haven't gone anywhere without the camera, and my computer tells me that I have taken 211 pictures, which is an absurd mass. Some of them are even good. I ought to stop that, though. I guess it'll get on Crocky's nerves sooner or later that she is being followed around by me with the camera all the time.

A huge part of the 25th went by by trying to cook our dinner, and I solemnly swear that if I have to cook next year, it will be salad. For reasons not altogether clear to me we have decided to have a gammon joint. Probably because the duck was too large, too complicated and too expensive and there was just nothing else we could find in our frantic search for Christmas dinner on our shopping tour the days before.

So, there it sat, huge and menacing.
"Preheat oven at 180°", it said. Easy enough. "Place on baking tray, cover loosely with foil and cook, allowing 35 min for each 500g. After cooking, remove plastic sleeve and…" do something else, I can't remember. Cook joint… in oven… in plastic? I could hear my mother telling me off for putting plastic in an oven. Eventually we decided that the guys who wrote it on the joint knew what they were doing and did what it said. The sleeve removed itself and the thing actually tasted fantastic. We still have left-overs of it, though. This is the first time we have ever cooked anything that big, apart from all kinds of soup, which hardly counts. I guess I'll not do it again too soon. It takes ages.

The other thing apart from the premature death of the tragic beetle came yesterday evening. We decided to have a bath and I was bright enough to get my back under the scalding water coming from the tap.
I have never seen water from any tap in the world get that hot, especially in a British bathroom. Even though I was under it for only a few seconds, even though I cooled the afflicted skin immediately, I still have a 10x10 cm area of skin which is now red and very sensitive, plus a painful huge blister in the centre where the water hit my back.
I spent yesterday evening on the stomach with a package of frozen cauliflower florets on my back.

Although, my whiny self was reminded again at how wonderful Crocky is, who stayed next to me all the time and did what she could to help me, and how wonderful angel_21_237  is, because she replied to my "*whine* I need your sympathy" sms within a minute.

So, the best Christmas ever, because I got to spend it with Crocky, who was the true present, and every hour and minute spent with her is. The best because the friends I have are as great as they are. The best also because I received the best present in the world, and the worst because there is something on my back which resembles a fried egg. Doesn't hurt, but I am scared of that blister. I hope the gel will do it's work, otherwise I'll have to see a doctor about it tomorrow…