you may be wondering who brother edd is. well he’s my brother and his name is edd. esther calls him brother edd too which is quite funny (in the same way that kezia calling me dave is quite funny).
here is esther and edd both wearing the blue wig. esther looks very shifty. brother edd looks normal.
well, i’ve opened my first christmas present and it was a good one. it’s from my grandma and is a pair of my grandfather’s old shoes. he never wore these shoes and one look will reveal why. they are white leather with a green and yellow trim, and a red tongue.
kezia said “look, daddy, christmas shoes” which is a nice concept. i look forward to dazzling people with them over the next few days.
a new photo for davescollections. i spent ages picking up the bits in marylebone high street yesterday evening. unfortunately i must have missed a piece !
here is kezia in her new coat, and later with an inflatable santa
day twenty three of the advent calendar picture challenge – it’s a pudding
here is my photo of a christmas pudding. it’s a satsuma. a festive fruit eaten here as a dessert:
crackers means crazy. all we really want from a cracker is the paper hat.
the bang, joke and toy are usually a dissapointment. i think crackers might be a peculiarly british thing. perhaps people will let me know.
jane sends some to france each year so a french family somewhere can enjoy the fun UK-style. it’s part of the EU’s crackers-for-foreigners campaign.
there is a competitive element to crackers of course. and we can all learn from this study.
here are our christmas crackers in a box. we can only dream of what might be in them. we’ll find out on thursday of course …
day twenty two of the advent calendar picture challenge – it’s a penguin (or maybe a duck)
and here are the pictures of a penguin by our christmas tree. the penguin has a ball bearing under it so it can mooth (a word i invented which is a combination of smooth and move) around in a non-penguin way.
you wouldn’t know to look at it which is why i mention it here.
ah – but now i discover the word mooth has already been used before
troubled with spam ? want to complain to the official body responsible for policing spam in the UK ?
if so, then you’ll want to print off this massive form and post it to them.
like how long is that going to take ? good to see they’ve got the hang of this modern technology thing.
there were no cups in the drinks machine this morning so it wouldn’t dispense. a very nice man came along and it turns out there were cups in there, but just not in the right place. these things happen occasionally apparently.
i complimented the man on his machine, because it’s the first drinks machine i’ve found which dispenses drinks of hot water which actually tastes nice. Usually selecting ‘hot water’ is just a pipe cleaning option which ends up tasting like old tea/coffee.
“how so” ? i asked. “here so” he replied and pointed to the dedicated hot water pipe (the white one on the right)
pete has featured widely just recently. the reason, of course, is because he is so blog worthy. he also enjoys seeing himself on the internet (he’s of that generation). hello pete !
i spotted him coming out the equipment room this morning wearing his blue house coat with pen in top pocket and a clip board. you don’t get much better than that.
i’m hoping he’ll get a pair of safety glasses for christmas to set the whole look off
yesterday was the shortest day. which is great if you are short. but why do we call it the shortest day ? it’s because the 21st December is traditionally the coldest day of the year and, as we all know – heat expands, cold shrinks. doorways everwhere will have reduced in size favouring the smaller in stature.
here is santa in a moses basket. kezia believes that if you look after santa on the run up to christmas then he’ll look after you on christmas day.
i got an email from Annie of the Going Underground Blog.
If you travel around london (or if you don’t) then you might enjoy her site
here is a Venn Diagram explaining this:
where area A is those that travel around london and area B is those that don’t travel around london.
i might have a new years’ resolution to do more venn diagrams.
kezia (aged 1 and ten 12ths) decided she wanted to decorate her own little tree. whilst we got on doing the main tree she carefully selected and installed a small set of decorations on our cheapy tinsel tree. she was really concentrating and in her own little world. it was really very very sweet !
what a fantastic day !
we started off with an excellent service at church (we were playing and i don’t think we stuffed up too much). there was a nice kids song to wig out to which is always handy for a bass player. there was also a massive party for the kids so they had a great time too (and one of our friend’s children got baptised)
then we were invited round for lunch spontaneously at some friends house which was fantastic. the unplanned nature of it made it even better ! whilst there we saw some friends we see about twice a year who have just popped back to see their folks over christmas.
after that we came home, dropped off the music kit and went out to the Christingle service with some other friends. i was asked at the last minute to light a few christingles during the service and given a box of cooks matches. however, when my moment came i was trumped by a man with an automatic gas cooker lighter thing. he went whizzing up and down the church before i had even lit my first one. it was SO unfair !
after tea, coffee, cake, biscuits etc we headed off to some other friends from church’s house for a party. this was really nice too. especially this table decoration which is a melting skull candle adjacent to a couple of butter knives ! very festive. they also have a knitted nativity.
finally it was back to our house to put some decorations up, kids to bed. jane’s gone off to sing in another carol service and i’m about to tidy up the house !
today’s been a great start to christmas, covering all the main themes. friends, family, church and melting skulls.
day twenty one of the advent calendar picture challenge – it’s a stocking i think
here is esther and kezia wearing their christmas stockings. they are actually bags for christmas presents, but i think that’s about the same thing.
they are obviously not for wearing which makes wearing them all the more obvious (if you are a kid).
yet another photo for davescollections. we had a family outing to london today. we were very tired by the time we got to westminster, but i was keen we walked up whitehall to trafalgar square. it also meant we passed horseguard parade so i would get a photo of a horse for today’s advent calendar picture.
Just next to horseguards parade, jane spotted the top of this bloke’s head on a teeny piece of photo on the floor. we then spent the next five minutes on a family hunt for other bits of the photo. we only managed to find 3 pieces. I suspect they may actually belong to two seperate photos because the bottom two bits overlap slightly.
so how fantastic is that ! a family lost photo find. i would definately have walked past this one. esther was very pleased.
here is a sign of someone getting clonked by a stick. the photo didn’t come out very well, so i will revisit it another day. this will do you for now.
we took esther and kezia to london today. we were going to do the george w bush memorial walk, but it was chucking it down with rain, so we went to the Tate Modern instead. After much fun there we walked down the south bank to trafalgar square via westminster (so esther could see big ben).
fun on the bakerloo line:
I’ve mentioned the installation before, but here are some new pictures:
sleepy kezia (and blanket) and esther
kezia looking at the ceiling and jane looking cute:
esther took this photo of me unhelped (not bad for a 4 year old):
on the way back we saw Big Ben:
