Christmas is coming...

And I had the pleasure of spending most of the weekend shopping in various guises. On Saturday I relented away from my "I'm not going shopping at weekends between now and Christmas" stand that I took about a month ago, and regretted it the second that Lorraine and I were walking the streets in Glasgow. Ugh, just horrible.

On Sunday we got the bulk of our food shopping, plus we paid a quick trip into Pets At Home to get presents for Cookie. The price of dog beds now is phenomenal in my opinion, but we put money aside for him to cover him for presents/vet visits/etc. so it is covered. Plus he's eleven now and we want to enjoy him while we have him. Chloe's starting to really enjoy him, getting to be more and more gentle with him and giving him hugs. Pretty cute really.

I've got lots of photos I need to upload to Flickr at some point. I think when I do I'll try and put in a post here to give some background on them.

Happy New Year!

I've been quite good in updating this recently, until I realised that I haven't written anything since before Christmas. Not good - let's rectify that now.

Christmas - Santa (not to mention my wife, friends and family) were very good to me. Got just about everything I wanted, including the Palace away shirt and Madden 2004 (sleeping is over-rated, especially late at night).

New Year's Eve was quite quiet, but enjoyable. We started the evening round at Lucy's before making the customary annual visit to John and Liz Phillips (hospitality superb as always).

Lorraine and I both managed to pick up a horrible cold though. It has been really hurting my throat since New Year's Day. Being woken up after three and a half hours' sleep by the on-call phone didn't help either!

Happy New Year everyone!

Random notes on a Saturday night

Just a few notes for the time being.

• As we speak it is the Pop Idol final. I like Mark, Lorraine likes Michelle - at least one of us wins!
• Both Lorraine and I had our Christmas work "do" yesterday. Lorraine got in from her night out just before 1am, I got back from my lunch at 8.30pm (yes, it was a lunch). Nothing too dramatic or funny happened this year, just one instance of someone referring to their George Foreman grill as a "George Formby".
• Palace's game with Reading has just finished, with Palace winning 3-0. The game was live on Sky, and when Andy Johnson scored Palace's first goal I let out an enormous shout of "Yes!" Unfortunately Cookie was alongside me on the sofa at the time, and he got a bit frightened. I gave him enough of a fuss to earn forgiveness, but when I slid onto the floor to celebrate Wayne Routledge scoring the second Cookie also went onto the floor, not to return! Oops...

A late addition to the Christmas list

This week I've been starting work at 9.30am. The problem has been that Lorraine has been starting at 7.30am, and as a result I've been getting into Glasgow at about 8.15am (there's nowt to do in Motherwell before 9am, so you're best off commuting on one of the really early, quiet trains).

Reverting to old habits I've been in Borders for opening time, and have taken myself up to the second floor. On Monday I found out that their sports department has multiple copies of "Moneyball" by Michael Lewis in stock. I picked up a copy and started flicking through it. It was hard to put it down!

It looks at the Oakland Athletics and how they go about their Baseball business. It reads very easily and if you like Baseball (like moi) it is absolutely compelling.

Hinting over!