That time of year again

Once more winter has come; once more the solstice is past; once more I have almost completely failed to be even remotely organised. But stripey_cat got some (gluten-free) cooking done earlier, so we are able to greet the season with appropriately excessive quantities of baked goods!


There are giant-sized portions for all, even those who are not giant themselves!


Pico seems not to have learned that while tigers may safely break the rule about not eating anything larger than your head, it's unwise to try and eat something larger than your entire body in a single sitting. Still, he's had a lot of (chocolate and peanut) cookie, and there's more for later, so he's definitely happy!

(As usual, larger versions of the photos on click-through)

Anyway, happy holidays, everybody, and have fun but try not to make yourselves ill doing so!

Power corrupts, but we need electricity

On the whole, the last few weeks have been pretty good (by our standards) in terms of stuff actually getting done. There are more shelves in the living room than there were a week ago (although most of them are as-yet unfilled), and the piles of boxes are starting to show further shrinkage. We've also switched over to our new electricity supplier (British Gas, basically because we had to go to one of the big - is it six? - and our gas supply was already with them), who rang up to apologise for the fact they wouldn't be able to switch our prey-pay[1] meter to a proper one until mid-January. They contacted us, the day after they became our supplier, to confirm that the meter change would happen, and apologise for not getting it done sooner. Makes a nice change after a year of nPower's delay and denial tactics. (Sure, I'd rather not have the six-week wait, and in the longer run we'll probably want to switch to one of the co-ops or other more eco-friendly groups, but by comparison this is pretty d*mn amazing.)

[1] this was a typo, but is sufficiently accurate I'm going to let it stay!