Happy New Year

Yesterday was a hive of activity, as we wanted to have time to slob around and do nothing this evening and tomorrow, to savour what remains of the holiday. We set to with a vengeance to generally tidy up as well as taking down the Christmas decorations.

The hall looks very bare without the tree (why, when a tree decoration breaks, is it always one of your favourites? We'll be looking for another glass angel next Christmas) but the rest of the house looks just...normal. We never go in for vast quantities of danglies or tinsel anywhere, although now we're in a bigger place we really should invest in a few more bits and pieces. The overall effect of our deccies this year was quite muted. Having to take boxes of tinsel up to the attic room prompted us to have a look around for other things that could be moved up there out of the way and in the course of doing this we uncovered the kitchen curtains we'd brought with us from the old place.

Nikki realised they would match the new décor in spare room perfectly. Down came the original green ones, to be replaced with these rather fine terracotta alternatives, which have a literary theme (they're printed with various latin phrases).

We also cleaned behind cooker - Nikki being embarrassed by the large collection of food droppings, grease, dust, insects and old bottle tops in the gap between the cooker and the wall, and very conscious that the "cooker man" should be arriving one day this week to fix the problem with the oven.

With these and several other small jobs taken care of we were all set to settle down for a quiet evening in when an email arrived from Jamie and Lise urging us to come to their NYE party. We ummed and ahhed for a while but in the end decided to go and are we glad we did - they laid on a fabulous spread AND a quiz in the pub-stylee and we had a totally top night. Happy New Year to them, to all our friends and family and to anyone else who happens to be reading this!