It's beginning to look a lot like...

Yeah. Early exposure to Christmas has spilled out of the malls and department stores and infected commercial radio. Friday night we're listening to Smooth FM and here comes Bing bending our ears with his 1951 Christmas number, and it's still only November 26th.

It' s felt like a quiet couple of weeks but although at the time nothing seemed worthy of blogging, or I couldn't muster up the enthusiasm, looking back there's been quite a bit going on.

The big news is that Nikki decided she wanted livestock again this Christmas, after having plumped for tropical fish last year, so a week ago last Friday I took off for Yorkshire and left a deposit (in the nicest possible way) on this little guy.

He's about six weeks old here, and won't be ready to come "home" until a couple of days before Christmas, but we've been promised more photos between now and then, and the hunt is now on for a name. It's been a while since we last owned a cat, so his impending arrival prompted a trip to Pets At Home to stock up on supplies (a bed, scratching post, bowls, etc).

On the kitchen front, the news is that there's no news. No recurrence of the leak problem, granite guys haven't said when they'll be coming to fit that last short bit of upstand, electricians haven't said when they'll be coming to fix the intermittent fault on the lighting transformer. Only the flooring guy has come up smelling of roses, having said he'd pop round to add beading to those few places where we thought we were going to replace the skirting board but later decided it wouldn't look right, he DID pop round, exactly when he said he would, beaded as necessary and refused all payment. Top bloke.