Happy New Year?

Well I suppose so ;-) I must be one of the few people in this country who've come out of the holiday period weighing less than when I started. Yep wasn't too well last week.



Anyway Christmas Day with my aunt and cousin etc. went fine, we had a laugh because dinner was running very late and they ran out of cutlery so our starter knife and fork served for our main course too. Sadly Devil Child wasn't feeling very well and didn't eat much. She ended up asleep under the main table and stayed that way for several hours. On the plus side it meant her parents could spend a little more quiet time with the new arrival OTD now to be called Chewie as it seems she's started teething already.

Prior to dinner I had a shy-ish DC sidle up and tell me she wanted me to sit next to her as I was her best friend; this meant going to the table right now despite the delay in dinner; so we ended up sitting alone and I reduced her to giggles.

Boxing Day the Bratii came over and due to the reduced room we couldn't play either Arkham Horror, or Munchkin Quest so I pushed a pack of cards on them with a simple game of Go Fish. Neither had ever heard of it nor played it. Both Major and myself kept teasing Minor because he would forget to say Go Fish. Seriously though such simple rules and I even simplified matters by having consecutive turns regardless of response yet still they'd forget. "Have you got any threes?" asked Major "Who are you asking?" I would reply for the umpteenth time.

Surprisingly though they enjoyed that and we ended up playing for around three hours.

Then I got ill, I do seem to after a visit from the kids. So that kiboshed most of my plans for the week. I ended up catching up with Merlin, Paradox, and Trinity on the PVR well not as if there was anything actually worth watching over this period. Otherwise I polished off a few extra trophies in Assassin's Creed, continued from where I'd stopped so long ago in F.E.A.R and finished that, and got my arse kicked a few times in Dragon Age.

New Year's Day the family joined up again although The Artist etc. had been taken back home and we all moaned about that. As you may recall due to not taking his medication Artist had a seizure and had his licence removed. Likewise they're trying to sell their house to move up here and are having trouble. A story was told about how a prospective buyer had wanted to see the house on a Saturday and they'd turned them down because they had "other plans". Look do you want to sell the place or not? Ah well.

I also retold the story of my credit card and my suggestions to prevent such online fraud - designated delivery address, transactions put on hold pending authorisation. My uncle pointed out that would mean constant phone-calls to confirm things "No, only if you're in the habit of having goods delivered to lots of different places" which he conceded. I ranted (as I do) that the credit card companies had taken the same mechanisms that were in place for 'in person' transactions and passed them over to online retail they were still in the "phone age" rather than the computer age. My father pointed out that none of my suggestions were likely to come to pass as those at the top probably "still had trouble accessing the address book on their mobile phones".

Anyway I'm feeling better if not tip-top, so hopefully I can do some leisurely shopping at the weekend.