Previously, on but she's a girl...

· life ·

I thought that I might do a quick round up of the past week or so. Mr. Bsag and I went to my parents' place for Christmas, and we're off to Mr. Bsag's parents are next weekend. Such is the cost of marriage: two sets of parents to keep happy over the holidays. Anyway, we had a very cheery time, even though it was a bit of a brief visit.

We visited a local pub which Mr. Bsag had seen advertised in the CAMRA newsletter, and we thought was a Belgian beer bar. It turned out that — in a slightly hurried reading — we had mistaken 'Belgian-style beer menu' for 'Belgian beer bar'. So it wasn't quite what we were expecting, but with a wide range of Harvey's ales on tap and in bottles, and with a very friendly publican (who gave us an unsolicted free diary when we left), we had a good time. A group at a table across from us were making good use of the jukebox, but the results weren't always to our liking. Mr. Bsag decided that he would choose a few tracks to redress the balance, so we waited for his selections to come around. As soon as the first bars of that 1980's hit "Down Under" by Men At Work came on, an extensively tattooed member of this group yelled out, "Who put this bollocks on? Wasn't me!" We tried to arrange our faces into convincing 'we didn't put it on' expressions, and slid down under the table slightly. Mr. Bsag claimed that he must have hit the wrong number. Likely story...

We all spent countless hours trying to solve a wooden puzzle that Mr. Bsag got as a stocking filler. It consisted of 9 wooden bricks, some of which had variable numbers of dots on one or more faces. The idea was to assemble to bricks to form a die, with the dots forming the correct configuration of spots on each face. "Easy!" we thought. We know what a dice looks like, so how hard can it be? After a couple of hours, getting more and more frustrated with this easy puzzle, my dad worked out that there are 9! = 362880 possible combinations. It's like a Rubik's cube; you can get about 4 or 5 faces, but the last one eludes you. I still haven't done it.

The Christmas TV was particularly poor this year, so we only watched three programmes: 'The Young Visters' (sic — written by a 9 year old, and very funny), 'Belleville Rendez-Vous' (second time for us, first time for everyone else), and 'Mrs. Quinn' (as the Queen's speech is always known en famille). The latter has to be made fun of, and there is a competition every year for the best impression of her rather strained smile at the end — my Dad wins every year.

A lot of eating and even more laughing was done, which is exactly as it should be.