What with drinking and houseguest sleeping with the computer it has been difficult to get online at all, let alone update. So there goes the hit rate.

Christmas day was a success, up until about nine, I think. It started early enough for me, and would have been earlier if I hadn't been able to wrestle Paddy back to bed at 5:15am (Anna had mis-read the clock and thought it was later). There was much unwrapping and handing around of presents. Paddy loves the whole unwrapping thing -- a lot -- and if I'd known just how much, I'd have given him loads more little things.

Anna did well on the presents front, as did I. Sally did the traditional thing of trumping me in the presents department by giving me a digital camera (a Nikon Coolpix 2100) so expect more pictures in the future.

Houseguest and I cooked dinner which was yum, and then after some of us went to bed the rest of us watched The Two Towers. I didn't see it in its entirety as there was a phone call from my sister in New Zealand during it, but my god it's long!

It's been really restful, despite having guests in the 28th (and more tonight), we've just been taking it really easy and I'll be really pissed off to go back to work. Spoiled rotten I am.

One of our guests the other night was a little puppy called Monty, who is a sweet little thing that chewed slippers and trouser cuffs and caused the children present to crawl around the floor barking. He didn't thaw my cold, cold heart though and we will remain pet-less. This was re-enforced when I was wandering around the house barefoot last night and I stepped in a little pile of dogshit. I wonder how many times that will happen before the week is out? (This also caused me to lie awake last night wondering what the effects of dogshit on athletes foot are.)

We've also been playing games. Operation (Paddy's bedside manner needs improving), Who's in the Bag?,Yahtzee and (adults only) Scrabble. (By that I mean that only the adults played Scrabble, not that it was adults only Scrabble). In one game of Scrabble we had a spell of I can cram more letters into that space than you can, giving rise to this:

Like I said, expect more pictures in the future.

The new computer arrived a while back, but it was only recently that I had the time and opportunity to copy stuff off the old machine, clear and clean the desk, (finally) mount the router and phone on the wall and set up the printer etc. all neat and tidy.

It's done now and I'm happy. I have a bit of software installing to do and general stuff to check before I format the old machine for Anna's use. She asked for it, but I don't think that she has the room for it. We'll see.

I am surprised that my internet experience is improved by the new machine. I always thought that the speed of the dialup would be the overriding factor in the speed of things, but everything seems very nippy now. I am using Firebird again, not IE so that might be another factor. But either way I'm not lamenting some much the lack of broadband in my area. 64K is enough for most things. Who knew?