I hope everyone who reads this had a wonderful warm Christmas.
Our oven door broke off on Christmas Eve with an agonized squeal, and we had to cook our turkey in the oven of Bella across the road. Our house didn’t smell like Christmas without that steaming aroma of roasting fowl.
We were watching Christmas dinner tips on TV the night before, and one of them was that roast potatoes could be done in the turkey fat. I don’t think they stopped to remind us “don’t do that if you have a vegetarian coming for dinner”… we didn’t make such a mistake, as my vegetarian sister was coming, but I suspect it would be too easy for someone to exclaim “that sounds a good idea!” and completely forget that their vegetarian guests would disagree. The ‘joining up all the dots’ process doesn’t always work if we dash off in too much of an impulse… anyway, Mum said she followed the tip for roasting the potatoes in quite a lot of NON-TURKEY fat (almost deep frying them) and they were very nice indeed.
A few of the gifts I got:
- (from a cat client): some turkey-flavoured snacks for Sharky and a booklet entitled The London Cat II (Plus: By Public Demand, Return of the Cat-Sitter)
- Vinegar: 1001 Practical Uses by Margaret Briggs
- 3 hardback and dust-jacketed Anne of Avonlea volumes by L.M. Montgomery: 1941 copies with a very 20s looking Anne on the cover. Of course she was a 20s heroine, at any rate it was a 20s series of books. I think of her in 70s/80s terms, so that’s a fascinating new view of her (for me).
- various cookbooks
- Jesus Christ Superstar CD (Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber)
- framed tapestry of a fantastic wizard
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The tapestry came from a coffee morning – the lady who made it used to hang it on her wall, but she got rid of it when she changed her decor. I wouldn’t have, especially if I’d stitched the picture myself. I possess one framed cross stitch of my own… sat up till 4 in the morning to finish it for a competition, burning my hands under the standard lamp. It was worth it in the end as it came third out of around 30 entries. It had small stitching, which might have been a factor in its success. I can’t imagine letting it go just because I’ve changed the decor.
Oh, it’s true that we can’t take it with us… and possibly the wizard was stitched by a prolific embroiderer; always another picture being completed and framed – maybe she just got tired of it. We think it’s lovely.
If I put the wizard in my room somewhere, he might zap any evil spirits who try to enter. I also have a soft ‘cuddly’ Hagrid from Harry Potter (not a Christmas present) – he is standing square, with a stern and forbidding expression, so I think of him as a kind of bodyguard! It crossed my mind after I had been reading the feng shui books. Modern symbols of safe-guarding…
Mum said as my PC is so old and uncertain, she would get me a new one! (Jumps for joy). But have you looked at the PC market recently?? It’s confusing. I’m studying it carefully, finding out what I need to look for, but that oven was an unexpected casualty and we need to replace it. Mum’s found that the oven world is pretty confusing as well, and nothing she likes is under £600. I said I won’t be in a big hurry to choose a PC; I’ll just watch the market for a while and hope the old PC doesn’t collapse. The oven is more urgent – and getting my house on the rental market. After that, if I have any money coming in at all, maybe I could club together with Mum to get a slightly nicer PC than I might otherwise have looked at.
We’ll go with the flow…
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