Counting down the hours…

Predictably my parents rang earlier and have invited themselves over this evening. Hopefully their mood will be cheery rather than maudlin.

In the style of people using up food before lent we have a huge amount of eggs about to go out of date, so we used up some sausages and bacon too and had a lovely cooked breakfast this morning – I’m planning on doing pancakes tomorrow to use up some more eggs. No point in baking this time of year, we are already brimming with mince pies, Christmas cake and tins of chocolates so cakes wouldn’t get eaten.

After a hearty breakfast we joined the neighbours gathered in our road gossiping about a fire in the block of flats on the next corner – it had totally burnt out a whole flat, which must have been a really crap end to someone’s year :-(. Did get to find out the name of hunky builder neighbour though, he’s called Keith. This has put me right off him! 😆 I just don’t buy that whole ‘that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’ stuff. There wouldn’t be anywhere near so many baby name books on the market if that were true!

We drove to Highdown Gardens for our planned meet up with Chris and Julie for a walk only to find it all locked up and closed. 🙁 Fortunately Highdown is perched atop the downs so there was plenty of open space behind it to walk about on instead. We were far from alone up there and bumped into loads of people walking their dogs and children! The children were desperate to run in open spaces rather than into the sofas and shout into the wind rather than each others faces so it did them the world of good. It was very windy and very cold but the rain held off so we considered it bracing rather than miserable :lol:. Loads of photos on flickr but a couple of my faves here:

An hour or so was long enough so we wished each other Happy New Year and headed home for hot chocolate and toasted muffins.

The wind and rain is set in for the night now so we’ve drawn the curtains, lit the fire and I’m about to mix my first snowball. Davies is looking forward to Christmas You’ve Been Framed and is sitting predicting what ‘hilarious’ clips might be shown (‘Mummy, I bet there is one with a Christmas tree that falls down, one where a Christmas decoration falls from the ceiling onto someone’s head and maybe one to do with lights on a roof’). We’ve told them they can stay up as late as they like tonight – be very interesting to see how long they last. 🙂 We’ve got loads of picky food we picked up reduced to clear from Sainsburys and Tescos the day after Boxing Day because dates were up and we filled our freezer and we’re expecting my parents very soon.

Happy New Year to you all 🙂