It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dS0UOy7PeQ&feature=related

This week was quite quiet apart from Wednesday morning when I fell down the basement stairs. What with me bouncing down the wooden stairs and then howling in pain Helen had no problem waking up and getting out of bed. I'm still suffering from the bruising but luckily no bones were broken and I won't be riding my bike for a while.

We picked up our Christmas tree this week and decided to go for a different style tree which looks a bit like cousin It from the Addams family. The drawback is that it is difficult to hang decorations (or chocolates) from the branches, but is is very pretty.

I took the opportunity to buy the last (I hope) Christmas presents this weekend, so with the tree up it should only be a case of delivering the last few presents, buying some stocking fillers and eating some mince pies before Christmas morning.

This weekend we popped round the corner to a party at Charles, Alex and Edward's house. It was great to meet a different group of people, even if a lot of them were pongos, and indeed such a varied group of people since I've been here, Brits, Aussies, Americans and French! The drink was great and the food was delicious especially the various pies, cakes and biscuits; I'm hoping that Alex will foist off some of the leftovers on Helen next time she goes round. It seemed that everybody had brought at least one child and it was quite hectic at times with children of various energy levels ran, crawled or sat around the house; my favourite (other than Edward of course) was Hector who was totally unfazed by all the activity around him and moved from crawling to guiding a push-a-long in patient circuits of the living room, dining room and kitchen.

Despite surviving the recent wet weather one of our sump pumps has failed and we are having to use our submersible pump to pump water from the defunct sump to the working one. This is working so far, I just hope this spell of relatively dry weather lasts!

Thanksgiving

The big news is that after baking a pumpkin pie, making pumpkin soup and giving a bag of pumpkin flesh to a friend we have now run out of pumpkin!

I took thanksgiving week off to recharge my batteries and use some leave up. I had a lazy time playing on the computer, editing videos and uploading them to YouTube. For my birthday we went to the cinema and then to one of our favourite restaurants for dinner and proper beer.

On Thanksgiving day we got up early for Helen to run in a 10k event and then after freshening up at home we went into DC. Unfortunately pretty much everything in DC closed but we did manage to find lunch at Baja Fresh a Mexican takeaway. After lunch we went to the National Geographic Museum for the terracotta army exhibition which was smaller than I was expecting but sill remarkable and impressive. In the evening we had our own version of Thanksgiving dinner and collapsed on the sofa after our busy day.

This week just gone saw me abandoning Helen and heading back to the UK for a few days. I didn't manage to get any decent rest on the plane or during the week I was away and on top of that I had the beginning of a cold. On the bright side though I managed to see Judy and the kids for one evening which although brief was fun. We exchanged Christmas presents and I got to see Paul do his karate although I think I may have been a bit of a distraction.

As I type this it has started snowing but is yet too damp and warm to pitch on the swamp.

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