Christmas Hamper Day

I was still feeling crap and tired this morning. This bug really doesn’t want to leave my poor, wrecked, shell of a body. However, there was no way I was staying home today – Christmas Hamper Day – wahaay – the most exciting day of my working year! Every December my company gives its employees a nice big box of goodies… chocolate, wine, all sorts of things. Most people are very restrained (for ‘restrained’ read ‘boring’!) and wait until they get home to unpack their box and see what they have been given. But bugger restraint, that’s for wussies, I have to open the box immediately … got to try out the chocolates! Today I was stood with my car boot open eagerly ripping open the box and pulling out the contents when, one by one, three of my work colleagues came past, guffawing at me because I couldn’t wait. Ha! Fools! Who was the one who had posh chocolates for brekky then – moi!

I did some wheeler-dealering with Pete, who had also opened his hamper, trading the things I didn’t want with the things he didn't want. We seem to have fairly opposing tastes so it worked out well… my alcohol traded for his non-alcoholic fizz, my Christmas pudding traded for his mustard and biscuits! Fab! I didn’t do too badly out of Pete today. In the afternoon I wandered downstairs to find him, sleeves rolled up to his armpits, spraying aftershaves and perfumes onto every square inch of exposed skin and sniffing them. I joined in:

Me - “Poo, that smells like disinfectant!”

Pete - “Oh, I’ll give that one to my brother for Christmas then.”

He had one really fabulous scent on his upper arm. “Wow, I like that one!” “That’s a woman’s perfume, would you like one?” he asked. Coo, would I! It smelled expensive and sexy! I nodded eagerly and he disappeared out of the door, reappearing thirty seconds later with a box of a fragrance called Sira des Indes. “That’s worth £85 in the shops,” he said matter-of-factly. Then, tapping his nose, “I have my sources!”

Charles is going to be coming to stay with me for a bit! Wheee, that will be brilliant! He’s been having problems with the noisy, thumpy-on-the-ceiling yobs upstairs from his flat and has finally given up and sent notice to his landlord. He’s only planning on staying with me for a week or two while he looks for somewhere else to live, which is a shame, I wish he would stay longer…. and I'm hoping when he gets here he will realise how nice it is to have company, and how much work he can get done with a girl to do all the girly household things for him, and decide to stay! But anyway, I’m excited! It will be so cool to have him here! Happy!

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I’ve been doing some bodge-it DIY. The curtain rail in the sitting room of my flat is always coming away from the wall which has made pulling the curtains in the mornings a bit of a scary exercise. A couple of weeks ago I thought I had managed to fix it up properly and, with a bit of judicial cutting and sewing of the curtains, I had reduced their weight by about half too, so I thought this should suffice to keep the curtains up. This was not to be, however. The last couple of days I have noticed one end coming away again, so tonight I grabbed a hammer and whacked it… only for the entire rail to bounce off the wall and clatter to the ground, shedding curtain rings and curtains as it went. Hmm, not the result I had quite intended! There then followed a half hour of hammer wielding, screwdriver turning, and lots of climbing around on the back of the sofa to reach the top of the wall, and now I finally have everything back up again. Sitting here looking at it now, though, I’m wondering whether it was such a good idea to put big rawlplugs in the wall, and then little rawlplugs inside the big rawlplugs…!