Looking Out To Sea

My mum gave us a Euro Chopper for Christmas. I don’t know why either. The packaging blurb includes:

Well known chef Arnold Morris of Arnold’s Gourmet Kitchen says, “What a time-saver The Euro Chopper is, especially for chopping onions, garlic or parsley. Makes the tastiest coleslaw you’ll ever eat in less than a minute.”

Who is Arnold Morris? Google searches reveal he is “well known” from appearing on shopping channels selling products as a representative of Arnold’s Gourmet Kitchen. So, well-known among a select group of invalids and bored housewives with Sky TV.

What is Arnold’s Gourmet Kitchen? I’m not sure, but if you search for that phrase, the only results are people on eBay and similar auction sites, selling… The Euro Chopper.

Today we’re back in Edinburgh, back in the flat. So, what’s been happening? What have we been up to?

Well, obviously, we’ve been up to Christmas, and it was good. This was the first time we’d ever had a Christmas which wasn’t like the ones we’d had when growing up. All the way through university we’d just pile off home and spent a fortnight or however long living with our parents again.

This time Helen and I have our own flat and it seemed right that we should do things differently. We weren’t willing to have Christmas in the flat — that would have been quiet and lonely, and ultimately too much like a long weekend with nothing to do but watch television and eat chocolates off the tree. (Not that I suggest tree-chocolates are a bad thing. Just that there’s often more to life.)

So, we needed to start a “new tradition”. Something that seemed equitable to both our parents but also meant we were doing it differently from before. In short, a grown up Christmas (gasp).

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I’ve not updated in a few days because I can’t get my laptop to connect to the wireless setup here at Helen’s parents’ house. I know what the password is, but there seems to be some painful problem with DHCP and Network Manager, where the latter ignores the former. Either way, I haven’t been able to work around the problem so I’m using Helen’s laptop instead.

I am still full of the cold. Every day when I wake up I have to empty my head of snot anew. I bet you’re happy I told you that.

And while I’m on the topic of computing complaints, I’m annoyed at ISPs for obfuscating the settings they require to get email working. They seem to think a series of screenshots showing the configuration procedure on a 7-year-old version of Outlook Express would be useful. It is not. Even if they do provide a “at a glance” page of login requirements, they always euphemise the actual requirements, so that none of the settings match up with the hundreds of options in your mail client.

At the moment I’m listening to Alison Krauss and Robert Plant covering Tom Waits’ Trampled Rose. Very nice album.

I’m further behind in my Christmas shopping than I wanted to be… there’s some stuff I am very happy with but other aspects are a bit lacking (or, in fact, completely lacking). I should really be out scouring the shops right this minute, but I have pounding headache and a dribbling nose so I don’t feel up to it. I was out earlier this afternoon and just couldn’t stay the course.

Where did my cold come from? Well, I’m blaming my work mate, Colin. He was off work last week but came to the work night out on Friday with symptoms galore.

But there’s nothing I can really do about that. Colds during winter are just something we have to get used to. I just hope I’ll be better by Christmas, if not tomorrow. This evening we’ll be preparing stuff for our visit to our parents’ houses on the twenty-fifth. There’s a few nice recipes we’re going to have a look at this evening.

Fugly trees for the win!

We fetched our first ever Christmas tree yesterday. We got down to the decoration job this afternoon. First thing: the trunk was too damn big for the stand. And we have no saw, so we ended up borrowing a piddling little thing from a neighbour. In future we need a real saw. And some foresight. We’ve run the borrowed saw down to the nub — luckily the tree had been sitting in water overnight, so it wasn’t dry and tough.

Once we passed that obstacle and the tree would stand mostly-vertical of its own accord, it was decoratin’ time. Yay fairy lights! Boo fairy lights. Fairy lights not work.

We had to abandon the proper lights and use a small string of “pink heart fairy lights”. We now have the campest Christmas tree in the street. By quite some margin, I’ll bet. The pink lights also clash hideously with the red tinsel (one piece) and the decorations (four pieces).

This is a really poor show, and we’ll need to try a bit harder in future. I’ll be looking for better stuff tomorrow.

Helen and I went back to our home town at the weekend. (The place where the masthead photo was taken.)

On Friday night we went to a preview of Philip Revell’s new work (I warn you, that’s an appalling website he has there and it may not work for you at all). So we’ve got a new casserole dish and a wee jug. We’re putting together quite a nice collection now, as Helen received a set of bowls on her birthday.

We played Trivial Pursuit with Helen’s parents. And Helen’s mum and I soundly thrashed the other two (well, it was actually pretty close, but that doesn’t sound so impressive). My impressive computing knowledge won through in the end, though only because I could remember what COBOL stood for. Damn you Grace!

On Saturday I tried to fix my parents computer. That wasn’t very fun. In the words of that great orator, Ripley, “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure”. I honestly don’t understand how using such infested machines can be better than going without. I’m sure it’s more productive to just pull out the quill pen and the carrier pigeons than fight with Windows spyware one more time.

We went to see The Golden Compass also, which I thoroughly enjoyed. More on that later. I tried again to fix my parents computer on the Sunday but failed, again. I hate that machine.

On Sunday night we went to Haddington to see the Garleton singers do a Christmas concert. It was pretty much all over my head though.

I’ve not long finished a call to my brother in China. He’s just got Skype set up so could call long-distance for ε pennies. He obviously knew exactly where I was calling from, so I made it my task to find out exactly (or as near as I could manage) where he was.

He’s in China, at a university, teaching English. This also means he’s stuck behind the Great Firewall and so his access to the wider internet is a bit restricted. Anonymous proxies are only for the extremely patient. So he might not even be able to access this blog entry while he’s away!

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