Happy Christmas

It's Boxing Day and I'm still in bed, albeit with a nighty and an apron on, as I make sporadic attempts at tidying up the hellhole that is downstairs. I'm reading one of my Christmas presents (Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking) catcing up on emails and Face Book and the world and chatting to my Ma and others on the phone. Tyler is, of course, working. The boys are charging around with walkie talkies shouting things like "send the full army NOW" and "turn DOWN THE VOLUME on your walkie talkie to SURPRISE THEM' and such like. We even have some neighbourhood kids as well, wading through about 2 weeks worth of washing (on the floor) and making more mess.

Someone once mentioned that South Africans generally stop whining about housework after about a year. She said she wasn't sure whether it was because they just got use to it or if their standards radically dropped. It's most definetly the latter. It would never be the former!

Christmas day was lovely. We went to midnight mass on Christmas Eve at our local St Georges (just keeping the continuity with St Georges Cape Town, St Georges Parktown and now St Georges Road Town!). A lovely service, all 2.5 hours of it (!) which saw us stagger out of church at 12:30am. We still managed to fit in some midnight shopping to top up with a few things (like presents...) and Tyler put the ham in the oven when he went to bed at 2am and took it out of the oven when he got up at 4;30am. Extreme cooking, or what?
We had our neighbours in for drinks at 1pm with lots of smoked salmon and champagne and we finally ate lunch at about 5:30pm, after Tyler got home from Scrub Island. We then went next door for pudding and more champagne and then collapsed into bed around 9 and slept like the dead.

To say that the last 2 weeks has been a bit of a marathon is to put it mildly. I honestly dont know how Tyler has kept going, but he has. We've been thrilled with the response to our first efforts and now are champing at the bit to bring in our big ovens and get the factory up and running.

2012 is going to a beeeegg year for us. We're going to try and buy a house, start the business and keep standing. There are also a few over sideshows happening, but we wont dwell on those just yet!

We're off to the Blakes for a mid-afternoon barbecur/braai (can't get use to saying barbecue but no-one knows what we are talking about when we say 'braai') and more eating and drinking.

Hope everyone, everywhere had a lovely day yesterday and are enjoying their holidays. I'm certainly looking forward to mine.

In the meantime there's a few hours of washing up to get through!