Back after Xmas

Back again now :-) I went back up to my parents' house for the Xmas break, as per usual :-) It was a bit hairy making the decision of when to travel due to all the snow. Think my sister and I judged it about right, the roads were clear for us. Apart from slow people that is ...

Perversely again, I appear to have lost a little weight up there despite eating everything in sight :-) Could be due to healthy eating but probably more to being disciplined with what and when I eat stuff. Will have to break that habit later in the week with another pizza but not tonight as I'd drown while collecting it.

What did we all get ? I have an iPod upgrade, it's a 5th Gen iPod Nano so as well as holding all of my iTunes library (3650 songs of which 3350 are on the iPod) it also has curiosities of an FM radio, video camera, pedometer and a couple more features I'll probably never use. My sister got a compact Nikon camera, will be very curious as to how she gets on with that :-) Nan got a bracket for her telly which is now on the wall and my parents will be switching to a rather special telly soon.

We downscaled Xmas this year, think we've kinda got tired of it. Plus we all have the habit of buying what we want instead of keeping things in reserve for Xmas & Birthday :-) Or the toys that we do want are a leetle too expensive for presents.

Great food as always, with me fixing the techie stuff along the way to get the great music too :-) (dodgy headphones connector needed a fix ...) The telly bracket was "fun" to put up. We resorted to Power Tools. It should be a lot more stable now than it was on its stand, I nearly pushed it over a few times putting cables in ...

Back on Sunday, which gave a bit of time before Crazie Xmas Part-a-y on Monday evening :-) All the gang were there, RCA, Craziequeen, Cyberkitten, Family Aginoth and BionicDwarf. We operate a Secret Santa nowadays (to keep the cost and complexity down), with me getting the dvds of Star Trek (new one), Moon and Demolition Man. I'll be watching those sometime over this week while I'm away from work :-)

And I have something new to watch them on ! Been spending a little too much money over the past week and a bit. New laptop to replace the old HP I wasn't too happy with. Today saw the arrival of a Sony Blu-Ray player and a Samsung 32" LCD telly. Early days for those, especially as I'm waiting for a couple of leads to come through the post. I won't get the full benefit of the new stuff until the better leads arrive. I even have a bit of a cobbled together scroungy lead arrangement for the Blu-ray player. Looks good so far :-)

Will wait until the good leads arrive until I watch the first HD thing I've recorded on my V+ cable TV box (Day Of The Triffids). In the meantime, I've been enjoying watching England well and truly get on top of South Africa in the cricket. Will be recording the coverage tomorrow in anticipation of a Big Win :-)

Watching Avatar tomorrow with the Crazies, really looking forward to that :-)

PS I have pictures of the Before, During and 1st stage After with the telly stuff, it'll come on here at some stage :-) I have a bit more room rearrangement to do first though. As the LCD telly is much thinner, it gives me some good scope for moving things around a bit. I'm hoping it will let me put my 2 comfy chairs in usable positions :-)

Additional - I just put an entry on the techie blog about today's connecting up exploits :-)