Baubles

One victim of the spring clean this year was my red tinsel Christmas tree. It was bought four years ago tomorrow, when Mum and Dad came for the Beige Towers Christmas Experience. For an outlay of perhaps $20, it had served its time well, if not more than a little garishly. 

Reflecting last Saturday in the pub that I'd thrown out the red tinsel tree (also known as the "BCFC Christmas Tree" when you added yellow tinsel to it) and had done nothing about a new one, my friends said "oh, you can borrow our old one if you". So they dropped it off this afternoon on their way back from the dog park (dogs still need walking when it's -15 degrees). On the way home from the pub this morning I went in search of baubles, and in the process scored maximum Yorkshire points for getting them in a 70% off-all-Christmas-decorations sale in the Bay; who needs to buy baubles next week, after all? I'd been having a conversation during the week with L. about baubles; she didn't believe me that such a word existed, but then again, she's never heard the phrase "a spanner in the works" either. Apparently one alternative Canadian phrase is "balls". "Christmas balls"? "Tree balls"? About five orders of magnitude less nice. Much Canadian-English language hilarity is going to ensue, I think.

Still, at least I've now somewhere to put my presents. If Canada Post could actually get them to Beige Towers.....

Practice

Christmas has sort of snuck up on me this year. Though the plan has been for several months to go back home for a couple of weeks (and the tickets were booked in June), the fact that work's been a bit of a slog of late has meant that I've not paid it much attention till the weekend. So for another year, my sorry excuse for a tree is up, and there was a christmas house party at one of my labmates houses on Saturday night, complete with one of these. It was delicious, but the strength of the absurdly strong (75% by volume) rum was only partially diluted by the wine. Terrible headache yesterday.

The journal article that I've been working on is nearly done and I'll send that off to the boss man at the end of the week. It'll almost certainly be the last one ever. And to round off the week, it's the lab Christmas party at the boss man's house on Saturday evening, so as per usual it's a 'pot luck' style affair, that's to say you bring something with you. Only rule is you have to make it yourself, and not cheat and buy it from the supermarket and pass it off as your own. I decided that this year I'd do mince pies and so tonight was a trial run. Great success as it turned out. They are - if I say so myself - very very nice. Will make some more batches later on in the week. I've just got to make sure I don't eat them all...

Christmas!

So here we are at Beige Towers at Christmas. Work is finished, food-and-drink shopping is done, and the presents have either arrived by post or been bought here and wrapped and are now residing under the BCFC christmas tree.

One present not wrapped is the work permit extension letter from my boss, who has to decided to extend me at work after all, and so a good amount of the waiting time for permanent residence will now be spent working. There will probably be a wait at the end, but not nearly as damaging to the personal finances. It's nice that things have worked out.

All that remains are phone calls tonight, and then a lengthy webcam appearance tomorrow, which has been militarily scheduled. In the meantime, it's party time at a workmate's house. Happy Christmas everyone!

Not My Favourite Airline

So from the post below you'll gather I'm now back from the frozen Great White North. Sunday/Monday's journey went reasonably well, excepting the aircraft flying us back to the UK was 30 minutes late arriving from the UK on the reverse journey. In the time it took for the aircraft to be refuelled/cleaned/restocked it started snowing; it's not good for the nerves of someone who's not particularly relaxed on a plane to look out of the window to see the wings/flaps/ailerons covered in snow. De-icing was thorough, and added another 40-50 minutes to the delay. In that time the taxiways were covered in snow, and presumably the runway too (though you couldn't see it). Cue much throttling up and down of the engines before takeoff, which was very odd in the sense that once the aircraft was a few hundred feet in the air the ground instantly disappeared due to the weather and wasn't to be seen again till we were over Scotland 8 hours later.

It was my first time on British Airways, and I've got to say I was disappointed with the world's favourite airline. It was a tired looking aircraft inside, nor was it particularly big; the legroom suggested the plane was designed for people 5'6" or something. My seat was not that comfortable. When the seat in front of me was fully reclined it was impossible to reach my bag on the floor. Not that you could read anything from said bag as the lights went out pretty much the instant the meal had finished. The meal was not that good either, and we were plunged into darkness halfway through it. The captain came on the public address and said "those of you sitting on the left of the plane will be able to see the aurora borealis shortly, and we'll get the cabin crew to cut the lights at that point". Whoever was in charge of the lights clearly missed the last three words of that, seeing as there was more than a bit of cursing (probably the British half of the passengers) due to the spilling of meals/drinks all over themselves. Cabin crew had seemingly taken general demeanour lessons from Air Canada as well by the lack of smiling....I've now travelled on several major airlines; United Airlines stand head and shoulders above everyone else from my experience.

The only thing I can thank BA for was the in-seat entertainment, as I finally got to see The Dark Knight. Almost worth forgiving everything else for...

You Know You've Been Away from Home Too Long When...

...you set off for PC World to buy a modem cable and when you drive to where you think it is, it's now a furniture shop. And then drive to Staples for the same thing instead and find it is now a PC World. And when there are traffic lights at the end of your street when residents have been petitioning for them for 20 years. And when Sheila from Shameless is in EastEnders. And when driving on the left makes you stop and hesitate. It's all a bit confusing. At least Bradford City Council are still on the scene to keep some things familiar; a large part of the city centre is still an undeveloped crater. It's been there five years!

They couldn't run a bath.