Days 2225 - 2231

 Aka Monday 21^st December - Sunday 27^th December 2020

Tier 4 is well underway and it’s CHRISTMASSSSSSSS!!! (as Slade would say). This week was spent working in the office and it was pretty relaxed, helped by the work load being a little lighter and Christmas Day falling on the Friday, so it felt like the week was leading up to four days off (Christmas Day, the weekend and the Monday). And, of course, the fact that it was Christmas Week meant that most people were laidback as well. As Tier 4 was in effect we couldn’t have a team outing, but we did get together online and played bingo, which was fun and just nice to see/hear everyone. And on Christmas Eve we had Christmas songs playing and a few cheeky drinks. So, under the circumstances, it was a pretty good build up to Christmas, although when one took a moment to contrast it to previous Christmas’s the difference was stark and at times it felt like we were at the start of December rather than a day or two before Christmas. But some things remained the same, like chaotic scenes in supermarkets. I did a food shop on Monday and it was very busy in the meat, fresh food, fruit & veg, snacks/chocolates and drinks aisles, but the rest of the supermarket was dead…you could tell that things were a bit frantic by how the shopping trolleys were put away:

On Christmas Eve, at home, I treated myself to a couple of fancy sausage baps and Blue Lagoons:

…and retired to bed earlyish (helped by the Blue Lagoons). On Christmas Day some things remained the same and many things didn’t. Opening our Christmas Presents was a bit odd as there was just me and Mum in the morning and some more presents scattered throughout the day as people visited the house. One of my sisters cooked and brought us Christmas lunch/dinner, but that was the only difference, the rest, eating to much, drinks, crackers and paper hats was the same:

…and I watched the Die Hards (are nearly watched the Die Hards, my copy of Die Hard 4.0 stopped working after an hour or so and Die Hard 5 doesn’t exist) as the first two are set at Christmas time/are Christmas films (delete as appropriate):

…and these are my Christmas presents:

…on Boxing Day I went for a Long Walk (hoping to burn off some of the Christmas lunch/dinner overindulgence!):

 

…with a possible Witching Tree sacrifice, with a kid giving up their transport for something greater…

  

…I also caught up with some comics reading, all good reads:

  

…and watched ‘Escape Room’, which was a bit meh.

…and I did this week’s G2 Crosswords:

…and Monday’s crossword gets the week off to a flying start as we only had to cheat on a twelfth of the clues (two out of 24). The little grey cells knocked down the clues like bad guys at Nakatomi Plaza. And we learnt that ‘Yogi’ was the first name of ‘____ Berra, much quoted baseball player, d.2015’, and I assume he was an inspiration for Yogi Bear (although Hanna-Barbera said that this was just a coincidence) and we got a little stuck of ‘feverish’, thinking of word away illness and high temperature, when the clue was a tad tricker than that and the answer was ‘hectic’…

…and Tuesday is a bit of a Groundhog Day as again we had to cheat on a twelfth of the clues (two out of 24). Yippee-ki-yay! The little grey cells are on a bit of a hot streak, but can this streak continue for the rest of Christmas week? Fingers crossed it does. And we learnt that ‘noisome’ means ‘nauseating’ and that ‘evince’ means ‘indicate’…

…things dip down a little with Wednesday’s crossword, as we had to cheat on a seventh of the clues (three out of 21), which was a better score that we first thought we would get. The first pass of the grid left a lot of blank spaces, but the little grey cells knuckled down and ground out the answers. Like John McClane working his way through the bad guys! And we learnt that ‘Junket’ is a ‘dessert of sweetened milk coagulated with rennet’, that ‘mendacious’ means ‘lying’ and that ‘Isis’ is the ‘Egyptian goddess of fertility’ (we had gone for ‘Iris’, which is a Greek goddess, not an Egyptian goddess! D’oh!)…

…and the excellence continues with Thursday’s crossword, we only had to cheat on one of the 23 clues  - ‘creed’, we got stuck around ‘belief’ and ‘manifesto’ but couldn’t get to ‘doctrine’, but aside from that the little grey cells just knocked the clues outta the park…

…and I didn’t do today’s G2 Crossword, as it’s Christmas Day and the paper isn’t published today.

…and Saturday’s crossword ends the week on a very decent note, as we only had to cheat on a tenth of the clues (two out of 21). We learnt that the ‘Greek mandolin’ is called a ‘bouzouki’ and we should have gotten ‘terribly’ from ‘very much’, especially with the intersecting letters. But aside from a few hiccups the little grey cells have kicked arse this week, and last week, which probably means that next week’s crosswords are going to be nightmares 😊