Well that was a lovely Christmas Day. Lovely sunny day, walk with doggo and spending the day drinking wine with good friends.

Delicious lamb roast dinner (which Penny also enjoyed, cleaning the meat off the bone)

After that we had a choice of Kiwi favourite Pav but also a delicious yule log!

We also refrained from wasting money on buying each other crap we don’t need.

Been to the local 10 pin bowling club for our works Christmas event and shamefully failed to get out of double figures in either game. Sorry Dad!

Even worse a 4 year old at the next lane scored higher (though he did have the gutter rail up)

The Duchess had an epic memory fail tonight, unable to recall the word “composter” and instead coming up with “gunge box” for it.

So I guess my tumbler has a new name …

… it’s too damn warm.

27 degrees and little breeze today made it very stuffy round the house.

Bloody typical, been cursing the wind and rain all through the Winter and now it’s Summer it’s gone too far the other way!

Typical Brit, never happy.

Something that gets me steamed up worse than my specs on opening the oven door is trying to pick things up while wearing oven gloves. Every time they make me think “surely this isn’t the best solution to this problem?'”

As another birthday treat I’ve bought some Weber BBQ Gloves which, on first test at least, work a treat! Nice grip, goes well past the wrist and fend off the heat well for a quick lift in or out of a hot oven.

Easily pleased eh?! Now to sort out that shitty rotary washing line that keeps smacking me in the head ….

Surprising how many famous people have died this year (so far) – as shown on this impressive montage art by @ChrisTheBarker

Key to people here : https://twitter.com/christhebarker/status/1598621837281337344?s=46&t=AMUi-SD-qKbs4m7rGSJP_w

Source: b3ta.com

Had the best birthday in years – driven down for a meal at Brewtown so I could enjoy a drink, then home to enjoy a home made peanut butter chocolate cake and bottle of veeery nice wine.

My present, another small step towards being eco-friendly, is a compost tumbler that turns garden and food waste into mulch you can put on the garden. Looking forward to giving it a go!

Perhaps the best part of the day is having The Duchess back to good health, able to do a 10km walk with ease today. Seeing her full of energy again is a great end to a pretty tough year.

The last day before I hit 52 spurred me into making an impulse buy at the Supermarket.

It would have to be miracle cream to sort out the bags under my eyes at this point, which are more like a matching set of luggage these days, but it’s worth a go.

A knock-on effect of the Covid border closures has been a labour shortage, which has led to a new frustrating phenomenon – Teenage Worker Syndrome.

Every few days now I will enter a shop to be confronted by a shiny young person, all smiley and uncynical, and my expectations will immediately drop.

I will then brace myself for 5 minutes of “how do you select soy?” type questions of older colleagues and cancelled eftpos transactions as they fight the till system.

Or a 15 minute wait for them to make a coffee in agonising slow motion, if it arrives at the table at all and not sit on the counter going cold. Or wait while they ignore you to shout across the store to their mate.

It’s all quite exasperating until I remember what a gormless tit I was as a teenager, and accept that I can always catch the next train, or have another coffee made for me (in another 15 minutes). Which, if I’m lucky, may even use soy milk.

Our friend and keen baker Holly gave us one of her recent batch of pork pies, which was so tasty I was inspired to write a haiku to fully honour it.

Oh poor Mince Piggy

Hiding in your pastry yurt

I chew your house down