Christmas

Well, Christmas is over and done with. The weekend was good, it was round to Andy and Maz's for the Christmas Eve Eve bash, which took place a day earlier this year. It was really good, lots of food, party games and random gossip, and a curiously hard quiz.

Yesterday was a good day. Went to my Dad's as usual for Christmas lunch and hung out for a bit before I came home again. I had got the stuff to make a Christmas pizza but I ended up having that today as I was too full. Basically a turkey and stuffing pizza. It turned out I'd accidentally picked up tikka flavoured turkey, which made it more interesting.

Spent today starting to clear out the room downstairs which is full of crap going back years. I found all sorts of things, such as my membership card and badges for the Dennis the Menace fan club and lots of invoices for repairs to my old Fiat Cinquecento which seems to have broken a lot more than I remember it doing. Also some random stuff from college and a couple of letters from my brother from when he'd just moved to Berlin.

There was also loads of tapes for the old Amstrad CPC, which I really didn't want to keep so I made a list of them. There's also a fair bit of old hardware that can go on Ebay, for examples a couple of Atari STs that I'd forgotten about, a couple of old Macs and things like that.

So basically at the moment there's a big pile of stuff to be burnt, a pile to be chucked, and so-on.

The dog hasn't had a good Christmas. He's scared of flies for some reason, which is ridiculous for a large greyhound. Somehow there's been an outbreak of big bluebottles, and so he's spent much of the last 48 hours as a shivering drooling wreck and trying to hide in the most peculiar places. I managed to squish at least six of the damn things this evening but there are still a couple more. I don't know where they're coming from.

In the time before Christmas, spent some time fooling around with the CPC emulator, playing some old games. I always seem to do this around this time of year, not really sure why. Some games are still fun, but some are truly terrible. I think the best game I ever played on the CPC was Stunt Car Racer, which was a 3D racing game that despite the track being barely there, still managed to have actual physics and was really good fun. Unlike Hard Drivin, which also had 3D graphics but had impossible steering and was monumentally unfair as other cars could just drive through you and cause a crash.

Work tomorrow. Hopefully it'll be nice and quiet.