I had a Merry Cribo and all that

I had a very nice Christmas & took a few well earned days off work. We
started off by visiting Jo's family in Devon. One day, Jo went into
Exeter to meet up with her friend Mel & they went for a sauna session. I
had a few hours to kill, and so went to watch Disney's latest offering,
"Brother Bear". It was early afternoon on a weekday, and I was the only
adult not to be accompanied by a gaggle of small children. It really
was a very weak film, combining all of the clichés of previous films into
an uninspiring, obvious plot.

On Christmas Eve went home to Dulwich. Jo's mum stayed at my parents
for 4 days as well. It sounds like a premise for one of those family
disaster movies, but was actually no bother at all. On Christmas Eve we
went to midnight mass, and my brother contemplated joining the choir, as
he thought some of the choirgirls were quite fit. Cheeky monkey. On
Christmas in the evening we played Risk, and my dad, brother &
brother-in-law stayed up until about 3am battling it out. We all went to go see
the Chinese state circus on Boxing day. We had front row seats and saw
all manner of human dexterity. Those Chinese will bend over backwards to
impress you, literally.

For new years we were in Brighton. An Italian girl from Jo's
work invited us over and did some really nice food. Some cookoo-brain
thought it would be a good idea to go down to the beach, which was
absolutely freeeezing. We had a duvet with us, and wrapped ourselves in
that, as we walked along, looking like a pair of complete muppets.

On 2nd January, as I was about to leave for work, I was surprised to
not
find my car. I was like "hmm, I'm sure we parked it around here
somewhere". It had been parked at a bus stop on New Years eve, but we
didn't realise, because cars had parked either side of where we parked.
So my car had been towed away. D'Oh! I had to go pick it up in my lunch
break & pay a stupid great fine. At any rate, it helped me with my new
years resolution: don't get the car towed away again.

We've now got a nice digital camera - its a Cannon Ixus, with 4 million
mega pixels (or something), 3 x optical zoom, and you can do mini film
clips with sound so we're pretty pleased with that.

Favourite website of the moment: making faces. You upload a jpeg
picture, and then this site animates it and allows you to make it talk, save
it and send it to your friends. Brilliant stuff.