And a merry Boxing Day
Had a splendid Christmas, thank you. Hope you did too. Now comes the Week of Turkey.
December 26, 2025 — 4:37 pm
Comments: 1
We wish you a merry…
Cold, sunny and windy. I’ll take it after weeks of relentless gray.
Our tree always looks like it was decorated by 8-year-olds.
December 25, 2025 — 6:00 pm
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‘Twas the afternoon before Christmas
Fire in the daytime! What Christmas luxury. Also, swiss roll for breakfast.
Not this fire, though – this is AI slop.
December 24, 2025 — 6:00 pm
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Hmmm…not bad
The prompt was “black and white cat gnawing roast beef.” It looks amazingly like our actual cat, except our actual cat doesn’t eat people food of any kind (nor even Dreamies).
We did have roast beef for Sunday roast this week. It was very expensive and terrible. I’ve made the remnants into beef stew, though, which is excellent.
Did our last bits of shopping today, picked up the turkey (£93.89 if you please), ready to rock and roll.
December 23, 2025 — 6:13 pm
Comments: 10
Just the thing…
We watched Lucy Worsley’s Tudor Christmas last night, just to jiggle the mood. Mucho recommendo.
If you don’t know Lucy, she was a curator for Historic Royal Palaces for twenty years and does a lot of historical programs on the BBC. We call her Loopy Lucy. Any excuse to dress up in period costume. Slight speech impediment. Amusing and harmless.
Turns out it’s from 2024. BBC’s iPlayer is here, but you might have to set your VPN to England and swear you’re a loyal subject of Good King Booboo. It looks like several people have put it on YouTube. I wonder how that works.
December 22, 2025 — 6:08 pm
Comments: 3
Here we go…!
That’s it – I’ve done all my Christmas prep! I have no definite plans between now and Friday, January 2. Hoorah!
If you thought posting was lame before – back up! Have a good weekend…
December 19, 2025 — 5:04 pm
Comments: 6
Everything’s better with googly eyes
I shoved Uncle B’s Christmas cards into the maw of this cheery beast (I don’t send any). Amazon recommends this 600 pack of googly eyes for only £4.79.
December 18, 2025 — 6:06 pm
Comments: 3
Your wish is my command
All the MidJourney pirate weasels were good, but this one was the jauntiest. And check out the animated version.
Hey, I learned something neat today. If you take a picture of some text – phone pic is fine – upload it to your Google Drive and then open it with Google Docs, it automatically OCRs it. Does a pretty good job, too!
December 17, 2025 — 3:52 pm
Comments: 4
It ain’t natural
Some clever bugger has worked out how to grow strawberries in Sussex all year long: 36,000 square yards of greenhouses full of bees and LED lights. I bet they’re expensive.
I’m recovering nicely, thank you. No pain and just a few more floaters than usual in that eye. But I’ll use any excuse to languish on the couch all day.
December 16, 2025 — 7:35 pm
Comments: 5
Adventure, and not the good kind
Long story short, I got hustled into the hospital over the weekend to fix a possible detached retina. A nice Romanian ophthalmologist stitched a ring around my retina with a laser. No loss of vision, very little pain. Should work out.
I can’t fault the quality of the treatment or the promptness of it. If anything let the process down, it was the bureaucracy. For example, I wandered lonely as a cloud through a completely empty hospital on a Sunday morning, begging to check in with someone. In the end, I stumbled on a surgical team waiting to perform an emergency surgery and whimpered until someone took pity and led me away.
I’m fine, thankee.
The not-very-good picture is one I took out the train window. It was a stand of trees, and every one of them was laden with multiple balls of mistletoe. Never seen anything like it.
We’ll do the tree now.
December 15, 2025 — 4:22 pm
Comments: 13
