December 30th

I have been working on my new website today. I am trying to decide how to handle out of stock products. I can either display a message for the customer to click on to be notified when the item is back in stock or I can allow back orders or I can simply have an out of stock message. If I go for back orders the system is sophisticated enough to allow shipment of part orders. By this I mean if someone ordered 2 balls KSH Smoke ( in stock ) and 1 ball of KSH Fern ( out of stock ), it would print an invoice showing the Smoke is to be shipped now and the Fern to ship when back in stock! Sorry this is hard to explain! Any thoughts, anyone?

Tomorrow I am having my hair done and doing some grocery shopping. We may go out to eat and we have a bottle of Champagne for midnight. I doubt if we will stay up til then….we can drink it earlier!

No other news today. I shall be pleased when things are back to normal! Back tomorrow.

December 29th

Sorry, I have not written recently.  John suddenly decided he wanted to sell a lot of his fishing tackle on eBay.  As he has not got a clue about how to list items, I have had to doit all for him. I have been photographing fishing reels and rods non-stop.Then I had to sign him up for a Paypal account. We sold 3 of the reels within 5 minutes of listing them. John immediately then said that we had sold them too cheap!  Honestly….he set the prices and then blames me!!   I had forgotten how time consuming it is listing on eBay.  He has gone shooting today and so I have a break from all things fishy!

My Kidsilk Haze Ash cardigan is coming along – I am now doing the back which is knitted downwards from the tops of the left and right fronts – no sewing up!!  I have got used to the KSH and the lace pattern and am no longer finding it difficult.

We took Jackson to have the second booster injection yesterday.  He was very aggressive in the waiting room – ears back, hissing and trying to claw any passing dogs!  He is good in the car now and does not cry at all – I think he likes motoring.

I am making a cottage pie with Quorn, I have never used it before but John said he would like to try it.  I have fried Quorn mince, onions, carrots, peas, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce and tomato puree together,mixed in some beef stock, put it all  in a dish and covered  with mashed potato. It smells OK – the proof will be in the eating!

Going out in the cold now to pack more parcels ……..back tomorrow.

December 26th

The turkey was not a great success yesterday. It was tasteless in spite of my stuffing it with sage, chestnut and onion stuffing.  We did not enjoy it and wished we had had beef instead.  I am going to make a curry with some of it today and Slip can eat her way though the rest!  I had my mojitos and ended up with a headache!

The answer to the contest is that they were 4 shades of Cotton Glace:

A sort of mustard: Dijon
A jewel: Garnet
A fruit: Persimmon or Blood Orange
A mollusc: Oyster

Jacki and Susan both send in correct answers – I did not hear from Kessa, but if you did send an answer, please forward it to me.  Now we will have another jigsaw – go here!  Susan is visiting relatives until the 28th and has no computer access and so I am setting the closing date as December 31st to give her time to get home and answer.

Jackson is still being very naughty.  He went out when we went to bed and woke us up at 4.0am. He was sitting on the bedroom window and yelling and when I did not let him in, he started banging on the glass.  I did not let him in because once I start, he will have me up and down all night. Eventually he went away, only to return an hour later and start banging again!

I am going to cook lunch now – sausages wrapped in bacon!  Back tomorrow

December 25th

Merry Christmas to everyone and many thanks for all the cards!

I am taking the day off today and am not updating my shop.  We are having turkey and it will only just fit in the oven!  We are having drinks at 1.0pm and eating at 2.0pm.  I have a bottle of ready mixed Mojitos!

My Christmas present

My present was two intertwined Tiffany bracelets that were nestling in the blue Tiffany box tied up with white satin ribbon.  They will need to go back to be made smaller but it is not a problem.

Jackson has been very naughty this morning. Absailing up and down the hall curtains!  Slip has cut her paw and so is being good and staying in her basket. It is cut right between two of her paw pads. We have bathed it with disinfectant and think it will heal up.

Now I am going to switch on the oven and get the turkey going!  Back tomorrow.

Phew! What a …

Phew!  What a day!

We went to Smiths last night. When we were half way there we realised we had not brought the map with us!!  Luckily it was easy to find.  John had a dressed crab to start with and I had avocado, crab and prawn salad. They were big portions and it really would have been enough for me! For the main course, John had Surf and Turf and I had jumbo prawns in a chilli dressing.  It was all delicious and we shall certainly go again.

I went shopping at the crack of dawn today thinking it would not be busy. Was I wrong? The supermarket was heaving and the queues to check out were so long that they stretched back into where people were trying to get at things to put in their trollies  I was longer standing waiting to pay than I was getting the groceries.

I have to pay the balance of our holiday on 28th of this month and so decided I would have to tell John!!  At lunchtime he was talking about booking some fishing in Scotland and so I took the bull by the horns and told him that I had put a deposit on the trip to Jamaica and either had to cancel or pay the balance.  He was OK about it and said we can go………so, I am pleased!

Then, this afternoon, I put my camera memory card in my iMac’s CD drive. There was already a CD in the drive!  The memory card vanished. I tried to eject the CD – no go. I told John who was not best pleased as I have done this before and it is very hard to get the card out, let alone with a CD in the drive too.  He vanished into his work shop and made some sort of hooky thing and, after a lot of trial and error, was able to hook the memory card out.  We then turned the iMac back on and I was able to eject the CD.  However, I think it has damaged the drive as I can no longer play CDs. It is not the end of the world as I have a CD drive on my MacBook.

Let’s hope this is the end of today’s drama!  Back tomorrow