Nice people thread part 4 - sugar and spice and all things

misskool

We have it easy as the boys arrive on Boxing day so we do presents and roast tomorrow.

Today is the most relaxing day of the year. No shops open, nothing to do except laugh at Gordon's cook-a-long on channel 4. I'm going to knit and read and watch crap tv.

No mince pies here till yesterday. All shops out so we ended up with 6 of Duchy Organic finest ones from Waitrose. They are LUSH, super shortcrust pastry and mincemeat with cranberries and stem ginger

sss555s

silvercar wrote: »

The holiday was our silver wedding anniversary treat, so justified -ish.

Well done on reaching your Silver wedding anniversary.

You could have been out for less

silvercar

GDB2222 wrote: »

Gratz on silver wedding anniversary. I hadn't spotted that.

Didn't mention it on the date for fear if identification in the real world.:rotfl:

For our honeymoon, convention / tradition dictates that you go on honeymoon after your wedding, so Xmas prices and the fact we were young and had no savings dictated that we only got as far as the Canaries.

For our SWA we could go before The Date, so take advantage of off season prices and go for more luxury.

Note we are still relatively young.

sss555s

silvercar wrote: »

Didn't mention it on the date for fear if identification in the real world.:rotfl:

There's not much secret on here Silvercar, I can assure you of that.

silvercar wrote: »

Note we are still relatively young.

That's twice you said that which is the first signs of feeling old

Your barely in your prime yet

misskool

oooo...pubs are open on christmas day

tomterm8

Rubbish christmas here... my mum had a mini-stroke yesterday (the kind where almost all the symptoms go away within 24 hours), so in and out of hospital today to visit her. She's scared but seems basically OK, although they will probably keep her in hospital for a while to be safe.

silvercar

misskool wrote: »

oooo...pubs are open on christmas day

Went for a walk around st. Albans lake and couldn't find an open pub. Not as good as last year when the lake was frozen.

misskool

tomterm8 wrote: »

Rubbish christmas here... my mum had a mini-stroke yesterday (the kind where almost all the symptoms go away within 24 hours), so in and out of hospital today to visit her. She's scared but seems basically OK, although they will probably keep her in hospital for a while to be safe.

best wishes, it's not a great time of the year for all this.

LydiaJ

tomterm8 wrote: »

Rubbish christmas here... my mum had a mini-stroke yesterday (the kind where almost all the symptoms go away within 24 hours), so in and out of hospital today to visit her. She's scared but seems basically OK, although they will probably keep her in hospital for a while to be safe.

That sounds rubbish indeed. So sorry to hear that. Hope she's back home soon.

We went for a walk in the woods this afternoon. Left it a bit later than we intended. Got up to the top of the hill as it was beginning to get dark, and decided to come down the other way (fields instead of woodland) - I thought it might be less uneven underfoot for my dad. Then we went the wrong way and got a bit lost - not seriously lost but not sure where the path was. By this time, it was pitch dark, very steep, and extremely muddy and slippery underfoot. I felt responsible for two overexcited and overactive children who kept dashing ahead in the wrong direction, and an 85-year-old gent with two recently replaced knees and two walking sticks. (He doesn't use them for every day any more, but brought them for the wood walk.) Mercifully my phone has a torch app that uses the LED from the camera flash. I spent quite a lot of the time going backwards to make sure my dad had light where he was treading even if the rest of us didn't.

The worst bit was when he slid down a muddy bit (looking as though he was ski-ing with his sticks as poles) and fell over. I thought his knee would be wrecked and it would all be my fault. However, although it hurt him as he fell, and again the first time we tried to get him back up, there don't seem to be any lasting effects, and 5 minutes later he couldn't remember which knee had been the one that hurt really badly. Phew.

He was lovely about it and remained cheerful and non-blaming throughout. We found the path (it turned out we were one field too far over along the side of the hill) and got home without further incident, although all four of us were very very muddy. I've packed him off to have a bath and am just about to have one myself. Then he and I will start seeing about roasting the chicken - DS and DD don't like turkey. I know we planned to have the dinner in the evening rather than at lunchtime, but I think it's now going to be stupidly late. Never mind. We built a memory we can laugh about in the future. I did so much want to phone Mum and tell her about it, though.

Edit: Actually we'll probably be able to eat by about 8.30, so not too bad after all.

silvercar

Sounds like you had a lovely day LydiaJ.

Hope everyone's day is going well, or as well as can be expected if in difficult circumstances.

I've just discovered that Sunday Times has an iPad edition for today.