Nothing daunted, having come to the end of the Advent calendars, this evening I have started on the Christmas cards.
I have had their design forming vaguely in my mind for some time now, and it is not giving away too many secrets to say that I had planned to make them feel special by using sealing wax on the envelopes, and so this evening I thought I might give it an experimental try, and dug out the sealing wax.
You will not be surprised to learn that I have now got sealing wax absolutely everywhere. It has splodged all over my desk, set fire to some Christmas decorations, stuck to everything and burned my fingers.The result does not look like something that you might find on a Royal declaration, but looks rather like one of the poopies’ accidents.
I might have to wait for sealing wax until Mark comes home. He is rather better co-ordinated than I am. Alternatively, and looking rather more probable at the moment, I might just have to stick to the usual lick-it-and-stick-it sort of envelopes.
Ah well.
I was rather surprised to learn this afternoon that some of the Advent calendars had actually arrived. Having posted them I had instantly forgotten all about them, and the possibility of them subsequently appearing on people’s doormats had not actually occurred to me. There is a name for this forgetting at the last fence, but I have forgotten what it is. It happens to us with taxi MOTs as well, indeed, it happened to Mark yesterday. He was so pleased to have completed the job and got the taxi through its MOT that he forgot to collect the certificate and it is still at the garage, waiting for one of us to trail back into Kendal to pick it up.
It is not the first time we have done this.
He has been faffing about with his taxi all day today. He has changed the oil. He does not do this very often but surprisingly, they still seem to keep going. He has also, for the purposes of the MOT, switched off all of the fault lights with his electronic fault detectoring gadget, and now the taxi has become unbelievably irritating, doing things like turning itself off whenever you stop at traffic lights. It is an infuriating car. It also – although it has always done this – makes a tiresome noise when you are reversing. When you have almost got to the point where you want to stop the noise becomes deafening and continuous, as if you couldn’t see that you are a quarter of an inch away from the wall, because that is exactly where you want to be. I do not know how he puts up with it. If you need a noise to encourage you to stop, the sound of the mirror scraping along the wall usually works perfectly well.
When he had finished faffing about with his taxi he went to look at a trailer that he is going to fix for somebody. This will help our Christmas budget along a bit. He says they have thoroughly bashed it about, and it is going to take some hammering and sawing to get it back into shape.
I have every confidence in him. Also it gives him something useful to do instead of hanging about the kitchen eating things that I have just baked.
I have not been doing anything outside, at least not after my walk, which was jolly chilly. I stayed in the kitchen and baked things, because that was a warm and comforting sort of thing to do when the mercury has dropped to a number closely resembling the one on my bank statement.
I made biscuits and pancakes and an apple cake and sushi. I cooked chicken and sausages and lamb, roasted potatoes and sweet potatoes and had a very contented day. It is nice to have plenty of dinners, even if I am not going to eat much of them in case of getting pre-emptively fat before Christmas.
I am going to wait until then.
I am going to go and carry on experimenting with my Christmas card.
LATER NOTE. Mark laughed a very lot when he saw the mess with the wax, I am afraid. I do not think he is going to encourage me to do any more.
