Christmas Preparation

It’s been very christmassy as we enter December here in Great Yarmouth. Kim and I went to the Yarmouth Christmas Market that was on in town. They had a large snow globe that gave off an air of suffocation and people were having photos taken inside of it.

And there were different market stalls which we browsed around.

We got some tasty spiced apple juice to keep us warm.

The Minister was full of stalls and children singing carols which was sweet.

Then Kim went ice skating and I cheered her on. I’m dreadful at skating and have a fear that I’ll break a bone ice skating and won’t be able to work or do anything. Anyway Kimberly survived intact and as she was the first person on the skating rink got a little video of herself put onto BBC Radio Norfolk’s Facebook page.

Our tree is up in pride of place and the kitties love scratching their faces against the prickles.

We also went for a big Christmas shop with a festive afternoon tea at the Assembly Rooms in Norwich (with a voucher my lovely friends got me for my birthday). I’m almost all shopped out… just a few more last bits to do.

And to top it all off the Christmas off duty on my ward says I have Christmas and Boxing day off, hurrah!

My First Thanksgiving

I had my first Thanksgiving on Thursday, Kim’s American and it would be her first Thanksgiving out of country so we made a day of it and stocked up on tasty bits and bobs.

We watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade which I found so bizarre, their product placement was just shameless! Also afterwards for some odd reason they had a dog show… but I quite liked that.

Then we got the house ready and cooked up a storm for our guests about to come over, we also broke out the turkey hat which as you can see is reluctantly modelled by Barclay my cat.

   And then our friends popped over, it was a Thanksgiving potluck. For those of you not familiar with a potluck it’s basically where every guest brings a different dish. Sarah made us personalised sausage rolls, Nancy made pies, Joy made cheese biscuits etc.

I made a turkey fruit platter

And Kim made pumpkin pie which turned out very nicely, her friend (also called Kim) very kindly sent over a pumpkin care package including canned pumpkin.

Anyway I had a jolly nice first Thanksgiving

My Birthday

It was my 27th birthday yesterday, I can’t believe it was but it really was. I don’t feel as though I’m almost 30, yet here I am. As with most birthdays (as I was assured by my mother) when you get older, it was rather bad. It started off well with a nice omelette in bed and tea in a tiny mug.

And progressed to some nice gifts that I opened.

But then it sort of went down hill from there. I popped out to the shops to buy a nice dinner and wine for later only to come back from the shops and the post be delivered containing a birthday card that had a voucher in it for the exact same shop I had just been to and bought my goodies, typical! Then the plan after that was to pop into town and have a spot of afternoon tea, we looked at two places online on the same street and reasoned we’d have a look in both and pick the better one. One was closed when we got there, the other said they required 24 hours notice before making afternoon tea. They served cream tea, sandwiches and cakes… why they needed 24 hours notice to put all those things on a tiered cake plate is beyond me. So then we walked a few streets over to find that the third option for afternoon tea only served salmon sandwiches.

I don’t understand the world’s love of salmon. Especially smoked salmon in a sandwich, yeuch. The only advantage to eating a cold slab of fleshy pink raw fish in a sandwich, so far as I can see it, is that afterwards less of it exists in the world. And even that is not a good enough reason. So after this disappointment we went to Sainsburys and decided to buy all the components of afternoon tea for a carpet picnic. But when we got there they had no clotted cream as they had replaced it with 3 different kinds of brandy butter for Christmas… it’s November! So that was all extremely disappointing and in the end for my birthday we did absolutely nothing and it was fairly crap.

In other news though I got a Jurassic Park birthday cake… no really it’s Jurassic Park.

And enjoyed a nice M&S dinner which I bought.

And after the couple of bottles of Cava I bought were gone, Kim and I became the UK champions of Connecticut in the quiz app I downloaded. So there was that.  I can hardly wait for my next birthday.

Belated Halloween

I never posted about Halloween! So this is a belated post, Kim and I started off the Halloween festivities with a PSL (pumpkin spiced latte, duh!). And we carved some pumpkins too, I created a lovely slightly wonky owl.

And Kim butchered Harry Potter/a Minion.

 But we put the pumpkins out on Halloween and bought in sweets and only got one trick or treater, a little boy dressed as a skeleton who was extremely enthusiastic. I don’t know whether the parents of Great Yarmouth couldn’t be bothered to take their kids out but I do know that my packed lunches were very sugary for days after at work.

   The day before Halloween we went on a strange Norwich Ghostwalk with some of our friends after I found a Groupon offer online. It was a bit odd, I was thinking it’d be a bit more about historic parts of Norwich City but it was a bit more comical than that with ghost stories and re-enactments. It was a laugh though. And now that Halloween has been and gone and there are no more PSLs at Starbucks it’s onto the Christmas drinks.