Humble Bumblings

My Christmas was very happy. Thank you. I hope yours were too. As usual, Birthday and Christmas rolled into one as birthday cards continued to pour into Christmas and New Year weeks.

Christmas eve was a tough ski day as the new snow was getting a little clumpy and Christmas day came with the customary wander around the village, up hill and down dale. We walked past the big stone house on Old Main Road which has the lake at the foot of its forested front garden and is extremely Coniston. We pretended. Then we realised there was no-one home so have decided to squat there next year for Christmas.

Boxing day was spent recovering from Ski and Hiking leg-wobbles and Christmas shopping for the things we really wanted for ourselves. Hubby exchanged his gift from me for an LCD TV box and I bought myself a Pianner to join the musical bloggers. It’s not a real pianner but a very good electric one with hammer-weighted keys and pressure reactive volume so it feels real, sounds real but accepts headphones (to protect Hubby’s sanity) and we never have to tune it (to protect my wallet).

Purchase of the pianner took two days of driving to the big city to cruise around music (and computer) stores, listening to sales people and politely declining the offer of “trying” the pianner because I know I haven’t played a complete tune since 1994. I shrivelled at the sound of others “trying” out other pianners. People that were obviously music teachers or child prodigies, but I was brave and haughtily bought my pianner because I’ve saved hard and can afford it. Thankfully it fitted in the car (another joy of electric) but there was no promised “bench” (that’s Canadian for “stool”) in the bottom of the box so I have to wait for that to arrive on the bus-post this week.

We erected curtain rails and completed curtains and hung them all over the house. Oh how private we are now! Hubby finally installed his car stereo (two years old and still in the box) in the toad and I created a sanctum of peace and tranquility now to be called A’s Den in the little purple room. It is complete with Pianner, desk & to be finished with grandad’s rocking chair and moving the laudry into the other spare room – once the aroma of cat pee is gone, now that Andrew has been moved into the basement to stink that out instead.

With all good intentions to go skiing in fresh pow (sorry to rub-in our SNOW situation, JAG) on Friday 30th December I woke up with stinking flu. No sneezes (which I cope with OK) but a rauciously sore throat, fever and extreme fatigue which knocked me for six, just walking up stairs. Grrrr. So we went and bought a new dining table. It’s a scary dining table with a glass-top. Ha! In my house! No one will go near it for fear of breaking it. Even the cats avoid it, but that’s because they can’t quite *get* walking on an invisible surface. They hop between the place-mats, keeping to something solid that they can see. Still, it looks very nice and in my new rush of domestic goddessness (induced by illness) I have bought brown tweed fabric to make the old chairs match the new-colour legs. Well there was a 50% off deal at the fabric store. The old workbench dining table of hubby’s batchelor days has been relegated to desk on the gallery for his computer-time.

So, no. I did not get a computer for Christmas. I was going to buy a cheap tinny keyboard for $300 and a computer with the rest of my “savings-allocated-to-fun” but instead I spent it all on a decent pianner, and, though I have missed you all, I have also had great fun realising that I don’t remember how to read left-hand music and re-learning it all over again.

Questions are:

What did your Christmas bring you?
And
How many cat photos can you stand?