Merry Boxing Day ;)

[davidgillon]

It's been surprisingly mild up here in the North East, in fact I've traded back down from the duffel coat I've been wearing to the much lighter jacket I travelled up in as the temperatures have peeked/peaked up into double figures. While it's been intermittently damp and drizzly, the only really bad day we've had was when Storm Deidre blew through weekend before last, which had the interesting phenomenon of rain freezing into pebble-like lumps as it hit the ground. Crunch. Fortunately that quickly progressed from ice to snow to rain and was gone by morning.

Not being able to get online after Amazon stuffed up my data SIM order combined unfortunately with Office deciding to throw a wobbly over whether I had a license or not, which meant I couldn't work on any of the projects I might have put time into instead, I thought maybe I'd messed up the license renewal (i.e. forgotten it), but getting online at my sister's confirmed it's on auto-renew. I'd just given up on an hour of trying to sort it out when it decided to spontaneously resolve itself. Grrrr.

Since having got Word back I've reworked one short story, written about 80% of another, which has been a first couple of lines hovering about in the back of my head for months, and an idea for a third has popped up - though that one may come under character background rather than being a viable story idea, we'll see. Plus I've done some work on a hobby Excel project I largely save for when I'm up here.

My sister and I did the local pub quiz on Sunday. We didn't win, but we did respectably. Andrea took great pleasure in pointing out we'd have been much closer to winning but for going with my (wrong) choices rather than hers on four questions. Of course we would have been rather less close if we hadn't gone with my choice on others - one or two of which were surprisingly hard for what's billed as a fun quiz- "Who preceded Geoffrey Howe as Chancellor?" Seriously? That's pre-Thatcher - {smug}and it was Denis Healey {/smug}.

I was back in the pub for a quiet drink on Christmas Eve with Andrea and her husband (after Not-Midnight Mass), which was a pleasant evening, though I was quite surprised to see the extended family (three,maybe even four generations) at the next table over whip out a pack of "Cards Against Humanity" and start having great fun, it was noticeable it was the c70-ish grandparents/pub regulars cackling loudest at the lewdest cards/plays.

Christmas Day was pleasantly quiet,with the added advantage of no one in the family being ill on the day for about the first time in three years. We kept to our now tradition of having Christmas dinner at Dad's care home,which was perfectly presentable - prawn cocktail or tomato soup followed by turkey, pigs in blankets, roasted potatoes, mashed potatoes, baby carrots and brussels - they had slightly drowned mine in gravy, but it was good gravy, and either Christmas pud or Black Forest gateau (yum) to finish. The glass of white wine they served first was a bit ordinary, but the bottle of rose they brought around to follow was incredibly smooth and decidedly drinkable. Our server, Victoria, one of Dad's regular carers, was dressed head to foot as one of Santa's elves - hat with pointy ears, green tunic, multi-coloured tights, and it was just as well she had the pointy shoes with the bell on the end as it meant I missed her toes when I accidentally trod on her foot at the end of the meal! The only downside was Dad was having one of his 'today I shall mostly be sleeping' days, but he surfaced enough to smile at everyone every now and then and he's been sharper on other days.

Amazon have now compounded the SIM package without the SIM by delivering my sister's Christmas present to her husband, which I'd ordered for her as I have Prime, to my house in Kent, rather than to my mother's house here. I rang my sister twice to confirm whether to get it sent to her house or Mam's, chances of me not remembering to set the delivery address after that seem remote. The order states 'Handed to resident', which seems rather dubious given I'm three hundred miles away, so I'm just hoping it's with one of the neighbours. Not impressed (and my sister is even less impressed).

Recent reading: Ben Aaronovitch's The Hanging Tree (Rivers of London/PC Peter Grant book 6), good, and some major series arc developments, though I still hate what he's done with Lesley May's character arc, which compounds 'being facially disfigured turns you evil', with 'disabled people will betray everything they stand for for the chance of a cure'. I'm probably going to reread the entire series, and have already re-read Rivers of London, but I've run into the Kindle DRM bug with the later books and will have to delete and re-download them. In the meantime I've been reading From Russia With Claws, by "Molly Harper writing as Jacey Conrad and  Gia Corona" (seriously, and is that one author or two?) which has been sitting unread on my Kindle for several years - Russian mafiya werewolves in Seattle, it's practically required research given the overlap with my Graveyard Shift. It's surprisingly good, though the heroine bonking the Rom werewolf alpha at every opportunity doesn't really do anything for me (not that there's anything actually wrong with the writing of the sex scenes, they're just not my thing). Worth a look if you like Supernatural Romance. And I bought myself a couple of Norman Friedman magnum opuses (opi? opii?) to sustain my naval history habit over the holidays. The one I bought on the Kindle (Naval Weapons of WWI) shows signs of being OCRd - badly - from a printout, which given the first edition, from the same publisher, is only seven years old is pretty unforgivable. The one I bought in hardcopy is one of his early works (US Battleships, 1985) and shows he was actually once capable of writing a book without it being a third footnotes. I'm more and more confirmed in my opinion his research is immaculate, but that he desperately needs a better editor, because his sentence-level micro-writing is sloppy as hell.