Addicted to Christmas

The last couple of weeks have been a whirl wind of activity. The snow has dampened alot of things but not my Christmas good cheer. I've managed to get to work cross country every day and though I had to dress like the Pillsbury Dough Boy to keep warm, we had a great time selling our Christmas Trees in the snow. Not sure everyone liked it though. Cadi rolled around in the new snow so much that her ears were caked!


Some things look beautiful in the snow. Our river was nearly frozen over and icicles where hanging from the roof. The roses that I forgot to dead head, cristalized. Our road was hardly driven on and looked magical, Christmas trees with white fluffy boughs, Christmas lights twinkling in the evening. 
Some things don't look so hot, cars in ditches, empty runways, burst pipes.

I have cooked and decorated gingerbread houses and gingerbread cookies, decorated our house top to bottom, made Christmas Panattone Bombs and done the Christmas food shop all in good faith for the big day. But, our big day was nearly postponed due to the weather. 


The Rooster went off to NewYork City for a funeral of all things and got stuck there! Try as he could, BA thought sending him home Christmas day would be fine! Well, not fine in our book. Heathrow was  useless. He made it home after 5 days of waiting poor thing but he missed so much fun while he was gone.


My house has some water on the property, under the property really and under our kitchen to be more exact. There are also some pretty old pipes, water mains actually. See where I'm going with this? Now I am not the only person to have had plumbing problems when the temperature drops to minus double didgets but I didn't really like to have to deal with the hassles by myself while Rooster was shopping in NYC to pass the time. Four hot water bottles and lagging from Travis Perkins solved one problem. It's amazing what you can learn on YouTube. But the water tank was completely empty and I couldn't figure out why. Four days later, all with out water, a kindly plumber, the 5th I tried, showed up at my door at 6:45 Monday night. After discovering that yes, there was a burst pipe somewhere under my house and that if he ripped up floor boards he could probably find it, I casually mentioned a funny hanging icicle that I noticed under the house. I noticed it only because I had spent so much time under the house warming and lagging exposed mains! The icicle was sure to be the problem but getting to it meant putting on the Wellies, plumber borrowed The Roosters, and slogging through freezing cold river to the trap door under the house! I was willing to help if it meant he could fix it that night. What a star he was. Freezing cold, in the dark, standing in the river, magic. When he turned the stop-cock back on, we could hear the pipes rumble back into life and when he stuck his head back into the water tank four stories up in the rafters, it was filling. Yah!


So today is Christmas Eve. The sun is shinning, it's freezing cold, we're making soup and shortbread. We'll walk the dogs in a little while and put some pressies under the tree. We'll light the fire and break out the port and watch A White Christmas. All is good in the world.


Happy Holidays.