Another busy week for Tricia and me. Tricia can now see the wood for the trees though, and has broken the back of all her Christmas orders. She has a few cakes to finish off and batches of mince pies to do, and an order for the ‘coffee man’ Elliot, but she isn’t working flat out as such now, and actually believes next week will be a quieter week (Warning: a ‘quieter week’ for Tricia, is a full on busy week for normal people). This week she processed the dreaded ‘Medlars’ and made Medlar jelly. Like a lot of fruits, the crop of medlar’s was down on last year. You have to wait until the fruit has become quite soft, so they have been sat in storage in the garage for many weeks, then you boil them and strain them… Tricia puts them into jelly bags and leave them to drain out. She then produces the jelly. Which is a wonderful ruby colour, and is great with cold meats. So a good product to produce this time of year. The downside, when the medlars are being boiled they really smell rather unpleasant. So we are all glad Tricia mainly does this during the day when we are not around!

I was out at my works Christmas do on Thursday evening, at a Chinese just off Regent Street. It was an ok evening out, but the Chinese food, which I normlly like, I can only describe as ‘Chinese nouveau cuisine’…. there wasn’t a lot of it, and some of it looked like it might be served up on a trial in ‘I’m a Celebrity get me out of here’. Also they didn’t serve Guinness, which is normally my preferred drink of choice, but Chinese lager….. blurgh. Thankfully it wasn’t a late night, so I wasn’t too tired on Friday.

Nikki was due to be competing in a Europa Cup race on Saturday. She has spent the last two weeks in France preparing for it. Training was going really well, and in the final training runs they knew they were very close to the Germans and fancied beating them… then on Friday afternoon, a bug that had been going round the GB team finally caught up with Nikki. It was a 24 hour sickness bug, and it meant Nikki missed the race. She was very disappointed, all that prep and hard work for nothing. The team went down with a replacement brakeman, and crashed out… so not a good weekend for any of them. She is feeling better now, and on Sunday travelled out to Igls, in Austria where she is competing in the Junior World Champs on Thursday. She has been told she is first choice for brakeman, and there will be no race off to put the quickest brakeman in, so she is pleased with that. She will then arrive back home late on Sunday, early hours of Monday morning. A couple of pictues… Nikki knee deep in the snow in France last week, and then a nice one of her with some bloke called Sascha… which I thought  was a girls name… but I’m not going to tell him that

Tricia and Ellie went up to London on Saturday with Sara and Jess, Tricia and Ellie’s friends. They went to Hyde Park to visit the ‘German Christmas Market’ that was supposed to be there, but they all concluded that it wasn’t a proper German market, more of a fun fair, so went and saw the lights on Oxford St, and went to Selfridges etc. But they enjoyed their day out, Ellie certainly did. Here are Tricia and Ellie on the train, and then one of Ellie with Jess at Oxford Circus.

On Sunday afternoon we went and visited a garden centre over in Bicester, and spent perhaps a bit more than we should have done on some plants and decorations and a Xmas tree. We haven’t had a real one in the house for many many years, and decided we would this year. The tree is presently at the end of the garden enjoying a bucket of water and the freezing cold. It can come in next week some time. We lit the second advent candle on Sunday evening, but then I took a funny turn, whether it was the chill from outside, or just a virus, I couldn’t get warm and was literally shivering, teeth chattering, and shaking… ibuprofen helped, but once that had worn off I was back to where I started. 48 hours on I feel much better. I missed work on Monday, and worked from home today. Back to the office tomorrow. But it wasn’t a pleasant experience.

Not only did I go to the garden centre with Tricia on Sunday, we also sat and wrote out our Christmas cards together last night…. odd behaviour, just like an old married couple…. hang on a minute, that’s what we must be . We had the first snow of the winter last week… it wasn’t forecast, and surprised me when I opened the front door to this…

I have a speech to write for next week, I have been asked to give out the A Level certificates at the school next week, and give a little speecch with a few pearls of wisdom… er, excuse me, me with pearls of wisdom ? I have also been asked to be Joseph at the church carol concert on Christmas Eve. This is me giving out Joseph’s view on events. Four passages, which I could read, but would probably be better if I learned. It will be a challenge for my old brain as there isn’t much time… but then again I always leave line learning to the last minute.

Today I succesfully backed out iTunes v11, back to iTunes v10.7. Now normally you can’t backtrack on software once you have upgraded, but I have to say I was so disappointed with the new version of iTunes I managed to find a way. A bit of nonsense renaming libraries and Bob is your proverbial Uncle. It seems all the good things in ITunes were collectively removed and replaced with crap things. Apple, hang your head in shame. I have also ordered a new home computer, and now wait with eager anticipation to see if the new one will arrive before Christmas. It would be good to have the time between Christmas and the New Year to get it set up how I wanted. We will see. My old computer has been going for about 7-8 years, I have loved it, cherished it, nursed it, fixed it, upgraded it and at various times cursed it. But it has got to a point where it won’t do all I want it to do, and so a new one is on it’s way. The old computer, well I am going to turn that into a Linux pc, and have some fun learning about Linux.

As for the rest of this week. ELlie is out bowling with the Guides tonight, Tricia goes out with her girly friends tomorrow night, Rob comes home Thursday evening.