liv | Break

I had a really good festive season, plague notwithstanding.

I worked up to Christmas Eve; the last few days were fairly low key as most people I interact with started to send their out-of-offices. So I finished at lunchtime, and enjoyed a real proper Friday afternoon, lots of relaxing and reading, and we visited the newly opened cycle bridge.

And then we got started on making Christmas dinner. We've got veggie Christmas dinner for two down to a fine art; we basically skip the main course (not being that interested in nut roast) and make loads of sides. This year the centrepiece was baked brie, and we made roast potatoes and parsnips and yorkshire puddings and some random 'party snacks'. So by evening, we lit Friday night candles and made kiddush over pink prosecco and tucked in to our dinner. We were almost not hungry enough for dessert, even though shopping substitutions had landed us with profiteroles and raspberries.

We usually have Christmas dinner on 25^th in the afternoon; this year, we agreed to move our dinner to Christmas Eve so that we could spend Christmas Day itself with Other Significant Others meaning that they wouldn't be completely alone due to pandemic restrictions. This actually worked out really well and I think we might keep that tradition.

jack and I got our time for focusing on each other with no distractions, but not at the expense of missing out on family Christmas. So we headed over to OSOs' house and added our contribution to the huge mountain of presents. And

ghoti_mhic_uait made the most amazing Christmas dinner including lots of really awesome veggie options.

The only part that was slightly less than perfect was that Andreas managed to catch chicken pox; we decided we'd risk keeping our planned two household Christmas since everybody had already had the virus. And given the Covid situation we were all effectively in quarantine over the break anyway. He coped admirably and recovered within a few days.

Boxing day, which I am attempting to rename as 'unboxing day'

jack and played some of our new Scythe expansions; we have the full set now including the airships, and it's amazing. The next day was my birthday, and thanks to the good advice here, I managed to come up with some kind of enjoyable but not too effortful celebration. We met up in Milton Park, and were joined by

rmc28 and

kht, and it was a bit grey and damp but not too unpleasant.

cjwatson and

ghoti_mhic_uait were able to join us with the girls, while afflicted Andreas stayed home with

fivemack. We had an excellent time building dens and getting covered in mud!

My parents and brother were supposed to come along but they were a bit mixed up on the timing, so didn't arrive until it was nearly dark and didn't really overlap with most of the other guests. Then we headed home and T and A joined us. My attempt to order pancakes didn't go quite as well I'd hoped, as the order was cancelled at the last minute, but luckily the actual restaurant called me to query it and it was apparently a problem with the delivery company, which we were able to resolve by sending someone to pick up the food which had already been prepared. So we ended up eating later than I'd hoped but it was still really nice. In the later evening

Then I had a day of talking to friends, lots of lovely phonecalls from friends I haven't spoken too in too long. I got blocked on feeling guilty that I never really followed up with individual conversations with the people who came to my virtual 42^nd birthday, but I think that really acted as a reset.

The outdoor event we'd hoped to go to as a Covid-friendly celebration got cancelled. Which was fortunate since we were leaning towards cancelling anyway given omicron, and then the chicken pox case would've made it impossible anyway. So we replaced that with an afternoon of making music together, which was absolutely wonderful. Chaotic, maybe another time we'll actually plan what we're going to play, but it was awesome fun just grabbing whatever music we could lay hands on. Judith and I played recorders,

cjwatson played cello and even taught us non-string players a bit, Andreas played his new Christmas present ukelele,

fivemack played oboe and

ghoti_mhic_uait played euphonium.

New Years Eve was lovely because I had a Friday with no other commitments when I could do Shabbat prep properly for once. I made real challah from scratch, and

jack made

hilarita's LEMON cake. I hadn't originally planned to stay up but then

sfred organized a midnight Zoom call and we admired the fireworks in from his friend's high up flat with a view over London.

I led the service on Saturday, and tempted

cjwatson and

ghoti_mhic_uait with homebaked challah, so they came over to mine and we Zoomed from the same place. That left us with a nice long weekend of relaxing.

jack has been trying geocaching and with significant effort we managed to find one of the ones in OSOs' village. Board games like Flashpoint, lots of just chilling. We watched Pride en famille; it still makes me very weepy though I've seen it several times. This time it was particularly poignant because the children were with us and we had to explain lots of the context.

The first week back at work was not as calm as I'd usually expect for the first week in January. as we had a bit of a crunch situation with the introductory Covid course (more on this later). Then

jack's birthday; he's 40, but there's also a plague, so we opted for a quiet day with OSOs playing party games, Just One and Apples to Apples, and we're postponing the big celebration for a while. We segued into a really successful game of Mysterium which is a bit more thinky, but is always a treat.

Obviously I wouldn't choose to be stuck at home due to a 700 day pandemic, but having a year end of just being cosy and relaxing with my loved ones was actually quite nice, and I'm pretty certain that getting a proper rest before going back to work was really good for me.