christmas

I thought I'd give a bit of a wrap-up of the Christmas holiday.

We had the company christmas lunch quite late this year, but then the positioning of Christmas Day is a little unusual, so it wasn't as late as it seemed in terms fo the acual date.  If I hadn't had quite so much leave left over I'd have had to work some odd random days or bring them forward from next year.  I guess the flip-side was that I got over two weeks leave and have only used up 3 days of my 2014 leave.

I had so much leave left over for several reasons - one was that I carried a couple of days over from the previous year, but the other was that I kinda saved it up with the anticipation that I might be attending interviews, but in the end it was quite late before I properly went back on the job market and then had to effectively stop looking a long way before Christmas.  Anyway, I'm goign to need that leave this year, but more on that another day.

We used to spend Christmas at my Dads, down in Deveon, but he seems to have decided that he doesn't like doing this anymore, and my sister hosts.  I find this really quite unsatisfactory, particularly as she lives ina tiny flat, which she shares with her flatmate, so it also becomes a double-Christmas thing with the flat-mates family too.

I don't really like Christmas, and spending it with someone else's family makes it quite uninteresting.  The biggest problem is that they all know each other - the flatmate is a long term friend fo my sister, and my dad knows her and her family quite well as well.  This leads to long periods of them rabbitting on about people I don't know "Did you hear Fred has moved in with Brenda?" "I have no idea who Fred and Brenda are, and care even less."

It would be far easier if they just put the telly on and then I could watch that and they could natter.

It doesn't help - and I'll be upfront that this is not a nice thing - that they're not my sort of people.  I mean, I'm a nerd.  They're not.  I wouldn't have anything to talk to them about, even if they weren't twittering on about people I've never even heard of.

My hope is that by next year my life will be sorted out and I'll have moved somewhere where I can play host to my family.

Having said that, there is another less-outspoken reason why my sister hosts, which is that she's tight.  By hosting she doesn't have spend the petrol money to drive down.  Instead my Dad pays for a hotel for me and him (her place is too small for us all to stay and he knows I would refuse to pay for a hotel) and we both drive to her.  There's even a bizarre situation each year where he then takes her to one of her friends "on the way back" (it's nothign fo the sort as it's at least 100 miles out of his way).. and then a few days later drives her home again.

She kinda has him wrapped around her finger, as she's always been his favourite.  Note that I don't care as such, but ti woudl be nice if he at least realised she was doing it because she's tight - Indeed, I think he'd be pleased, as he's of the "careful with money" persuassion himself.

Well this wasn't so much a round-up of Christmas as a moan about the day itself!

I'll try to cover the rest in another post (if I can be arsed), although one thing just to note - the joruney down to my sister has been horrendous both years.  Last year it was because it was on Christmas morning and kinda poxed up the day, but this time it was because of the horrible weather.

The A31 was closed on one part as a river had burst its banks, so they sent us down a diversion to rejoin it about 2 miles further down.  This distance took me 3 hours.  The whole journey took me 5 and a half hours.  Not fun.