Lights... camera... action! But not in a good way.

My Christmas kitchen (homemade mince pies etc sadly just out of shot.)

Last week, I made cranberry-studded mincemeat for mince pies and crab cakes following Nigella recipes (for the record, the mincemeat's yum and the crab cakes need a couple of egg yolks to stop them completely falling apart in the pan) and today I got my fairy lights up in the kitchen. Yaysies!

I used Command Strips Decorating Clips, the packaging and leftover bits of which are ably demonstrated here by my glamorous and recently groomed assistant:


I'd none of the isopropyl alcohol mcsomething something that they recommend wiping surfaces with before getting busy with Command Strip products, but sure I slung them up on top of the cornicing anyway - they've worked grand for me before without using it, like.

I left the strips to cure for an hour and a half, admiring how blinvisible they were from the ground and thinking that I'd be able to leave them up all year, before carefully clipping the lights onto them. Everything was lovely and twinkly for about 10 minutes or thereabouts while I took a photee and thought about having some mulled wine. Then I started to hear little "ping!" noises and, sure enough, half the Command Strips had gone AWOL and the fecking lights were hanging down the fronts of the cabinets. (Not quite as disastrous as my first attempt to hang them last week, when I thought that I'd just need double-sided sticky tape to hold them up and they ended up in the middle of the dinner.)

Le sigh.

Night night.

Oh man, I so need to go to bed. Two & A Half Men repeats are the height of the good telly, and the house is getting cold so rapidly that the heat from my laptop is no longer sufficient to keep me toasty.

Oh, and I'm knackered.

But tomorrow I'll hopefully be putting up a made-by-my-own-fair-hands blind on the kitchen window as part of the drive to get the house in some kind of order this week. Himself's birthday is on the 22^nd and I've set it up in my head as a deadline of sorts. It'll be a roll-up blind constructed from the offcuts of the panel blinds in the dining room and things like dowelling and battens and made by following these instructions.

Mostly I'm mentioning this here because it's been a work in progress pretty much since we got the dining room blinds, which was neither today nor yesterday, and maybe a mention on le blog will spur me on to complete it.

Yeh. Maybe.

Brace(let) yourself Betty!

At my leaving work do a couple of weeks ago, one of the girls was wearing a wristful of two or three lovely identikit chunky pearl-n-bling bracelets with her LBD. I forgot to ask where she'd gotten them on the day/night and then sort of forgot about them altogether, but they're back on my radar because I've quite accidentally tracked them down.

I've just stumbled across them on the Miss Selfridge website, £10, and yup, me definitely likey:


However, today I bought a pair of tan slouchy ankle boots with side ties, almond shaped toes and 2" walkable innable heels (€21, Penneys, my dressy alternative to the fake Uggs which are oh so comfy but always make me feel chronically underdressed) as well as some snazzy new underwears (€2 each, Penneys again), so I'm pretty much all spent out on the frivoulous buys front for this month!

Of decorations and doormats and round brackets...

Well, we might not have a tree yet (Himself has promised that we will procure the perfect specimen tomorrow) but two Christmas cards have arrived already (people are so organised!), there are twinkly warm white LED fairy lights in a vase on the hall table (they'll eventually live in the kitchen à la Nigella), our wreath's on the front door, and today, I picked up this snazzy new doormat (with 25% off) from a little shop called House & Home in Newbridge. The previous incumbent (Paul Smith-esque swirling multi-coloured stripes from Heatons, no less) recently celebrated its 3^rd birthday and was looking more than a little tired.

I like that the new mat's not overtly Christmassy but still feels (well, to me at least) festive. Maybe it's the red. Or the white. Or the red and white.

(Or the way the white polka dots kinda remind me of snow!)

It's beginning to look a lot like you-know-what...

I have a big issue with the way the Christmas madness seems to start earlier and earlier every year.

Yeh, I'm one of those people who gets cross when the back to school ads start appearing at the beginning of the summer and the plastic pumpkins and bats start appearing before the kids have actually gone back to school.

In the last couple of years, though, the shops were inclined to completely take the mick and have the festive cards and wrapping paper and jingle bell musak out before Halloween had actually passed, which really drove me (Christmas) crackers.

That didn't seem to be the case this year, however, so sure maybe the R******** is good for something.

Don't get me wrong, now. I love Christmas. I love the boxes of Celebrations and Roses and even Black Magic. I love the tins of biscuits. I love the mince pies. I love the Baileys coffees. And obviously I love The Christmas Feed itself. Although this year, we will be having dinner in Himself's mam's gaff - it'll be my first Christmas away from home and I'm considering bringing an emergency stash of Mammy's stuffing with me, just incase. It will also be my first Christmas Day in a long time to be spent in the company of childer, which I know some people think is the essence of Christmas but I have mixed feelings about it. Himself's nephew is four-and-a-half and his niece is two-and-a-half, and the last time I saw them I spent the day trying to be cool but actually getting a headache from the squealing and the fighting and the noise.

Maybe I'll learn how to mix Christmas cocktails and offer to be drinks monitor for the day so I can make sure my own glass is always topped up without looking like a total alco.

Today, I heard Fairytale of New York for the first time and got to the second layer of our first tin of USA biccies of the season. And only a day before December 8^th, which is when I personally feel it's acceptable for the festive season to kick off in earnest, whatever the shopkeepers think.

So I am now primed and ready for Christmas. And hey, at least dinner's not in my house on Christmas Day, so I won't have to be freaking out about indelible marker ending up on my white dining room chairs or my lovely Laura Ashley wallpaper or fruit juice winding up smeared across my TV.

Bring it, baby!

Fairy lights in Nigella's Christmas kitchen - *totally* stealing this idea!

Sure what's 45 days between friends?

It's now 45 days since I left work.

Jesus, that seems like a scarily long time ago.

*Goes back over to calendar.*

Ok, it's been 30 working days.

That's not much better.

Anyway, not a day - working or otherwise - has gone by that someone hasn't asked me what I'm planning to do or what I'm up to or what's next or have I applied for a job yet or would I not think about teaching.

The latter is Mam, apparantly refusing to give up on the dream of having one daughter on the wards (my sister's a nurse) and one in the classroom (yeh, I've been a huge disappointment since 2000 in that respect).

The truth is, I'm mostly just enjoying not having to travel up and down to work everyday, and playing with the dog, and doing house-y (but never housewife-y, got it?) things. The week before last, I painted the hall, stairs and landing, we got carpet on the stairs (I wanted a runner, but the dog likes to descend the steps hugging the wall and wasn't able to manage on the bare wood), landing and bedrooms, and Dad came down to give me a hand with getting lining paper up on the wall in the dining room. Last week, I finished painting the kitchen cupboards. Over the weekend, once Himself recovered from his Christmas party, we did a load of gardening.

Sure it's pure hectic around here.

When I initially decided to take the time off, my half-baked idea was to try and do some more writing. Apart from the occassional update here and my bit of work for Beaut.ie, that hasn't quite got off the ground yet.

Hmmm.

Maybe I should put that desk together...

Problem with Plan Pom Pom

Have found the perfect mini multi-coloured pom poms for my spare room curtain madness project. It's harder than you might think to find mixed coloured pom poms in one size and decent, non-glittery, non-pastel colours. And although they're a bit of a steal at only €1.99, I haven't put in an order yet.

That's because the company who supply them, EdQuip in Arkleh, charge a standard €7.50 for delivery. That, by the by, is what An Post would charge for parcels up to 1.5 metres long and up to 2kg in weight. When I emailed to explain that I'm only looking to purchase one packet of these (not very heavy, not very big) and could they give me a better price on delivery, I got no response.

So I've just put in a call to EdQuip, explained the situation, and the very nice lady I spoke to told me that they could waive the delivery charge - deadly! - if I was ordering goods worth more than €50.

Ah. Genius.

It'd almost be cheaper for me to drive to Arkleh, stop somewhere nice for lunch along the way, and feckin' buy the things in person.

Me hick.

Ugh.

Dying of a sinus-y cold.

Or swine flu.

Or - God forbid! - man flu.

Or maybe I'm just smothering because I've spent the last two days painting the kitchen cabinets (exciting news - they're finito!!!) with very little ventilation, because it's too bloody cold to have windows and vents open.

Oops.