Christmas Shopping

I remember back to when I was a Saturday girl at our deli - I worked mornings and Janey did afternoons - and around Christmas time, we used to marvel at just how much food people used to order. We'd know, for example, that their weekly bread order was a vienna loaf and 6 white batch [1] and then on Christmas Eve, the order would be 15 vienna and 30 batch - or something equally ridiculous. Similarly, people used to order pizzas like they were going out of fashion. Why pizzas at Christmas? We didn't know! 10, 15 large pizzas - each different. Hundreds and hundreds of them on Christmas Eve. Mum would have to get extra 'pizza girls' in just to keep the production line going in Christmas week, with grated cheese, chopped ham, and all the trimmings!

Still, I've never really got it.

We have had 2 'at home' Christmases these past 2 years. One with Dan's family, and one with mine. It's been really lovely. But, although I know we had a few extra bits we wouldn't normally buy (eg extra puddings for the Aldridges, or extra wine for the Rossis) it wasn't an order of magnitude bigger than our normal shop for that week - maybe an extra 50 quid. On one shop. The one before they came.

So, I was rather dismayed to pitch up to Sainsblobs one night after work over a month ago - it was the 2nd week in November - to find that I couldn't get a parking space. The cars were actually parked all over on the pavement in spots not normally allocated to parking.

"What's going on?" I thought to myself. Was it a special event on at the White Rose shopping centre? Then I realised - it was a Thursday 'late night'. The first in the run up to Christmas. I couldn't believe it. 6 weeks before Xmas and already the shops were overflowing. Aren't we supposed to be in a recession?

So, we've not been anywhere near a supermarket since then. We've shopped for milk/bread/eggs at the local convenience market - they even do a line in fresh salad items and wine too. We've done one delivery order from the aforementioned supermarket chain (loads of fizzy water, bottles and tins, poor guy) but mostly we've been eating what's been stored in the freezer. I refuse to jump on the consumer bandwagon!


[1] That's "bap" for the southerners and "breadcake" for the Yorkshire folk

 

It's enough to tip you over the edge.

So, as mentioned in my Facebook status yesterday, Dan went all Percy Thrower on me. [1] He was hacking around at the tree in front of the front door which had got so big you could hardly get in!

Needless to say, after a couple of hours there were 7 bags of foliage needing to be disposed of down the tip. We don't have a brown bin scheme here. Usually stuff like that does my head in. Especially as our nearest tip, at Jn27 doesn't actually allow us in to it. (It's for Kirklees council, not Leeds, and we're an LS postcode). So we have to traipse off to the one near the bowling alley on Kirkstall Rd.

We get there and there's a queue. The guy is at the gate stopping people coming in. Apparently they're emptying the skips and it's going to take half an hour. Poo. We went back home.

Half an hour later we traipse out again. We arrive at the gate and it's closed. Again. They're emptying out the skips. Again. This time we hang on a bit and 10 mins later, we're the 2nd in!

I drive over to the garden waste area, and start emptying my bags. The skip is HUGE and so I walk right in to empty my stuff at the back. Unfortunately Dan starts emptying his bags right in the doorway. All the other lazy folks follow suit. No wonder they have to close every hour if people are this inconsiderate, the entrance to the skip would be blocked in 10 minutes with a huge space behind. Sheesh.

As we go to leave, I realised that although I'd parked facing the skip, thinking that the cars would park either side of me, car park stylie, a woman had just parked right accross me. I asked if there was any way she could shove along a bit. She just muttered, avoided eye contact and continued to empty her van.

Stupid, selifish, people.

Even through the descending red mist, with my superior manoevring skills, I was able to effect a 457-point turn and get out without ramming her, even though I wanted to.

[1] Quick update - Michelle, Dan's mum, has just informed us she went to college with Percy Thrower's daughter Margaret! How cool is that???

You have received a new message

What is wrong with the vodafone mms service? All I want to do is post to my moblog from the phone but the MMS to email 'service' insists on adding spurious text....'you have received a message..' errrr, yeah, I have received a message....I can tell that by the fact that um, I'VE RECEIVED A MESSAGE!!!! Not only that but it insists on putting a BIG header through your mail ' you have received a message from +440xxxxxxxxxx' which is never a good idea to have posted all over your blog. On top of ALL that - they insist on imbedding a whole load of adverts and Vodafone headers and graphics into the mail. (Whatever happened to plain text guys?) so that appears in the blog entry too. How crap is that?

No mobile blogging from the UK?

It can't be true. This excellent website doesn't seem to support mobile blogging in the UK. Only certain carriers (US ones) are set up to provide this service. Damn! I wish I hadn't started looking at what the possibilities were. I thought that text based blogging from a computer or phone which supports e-mail was going to be the best I could do. Now I WANT TO DO MOBILE PICTURE BLOGGING TOO. It's like seeing the cake through the window, but knowing you can't get at it! Obviously further investigation is required....

• Are there any UK based blog sites which I can blog from?
  

• Is there a 3rd party website that I can send my texts/pictures to who will then update to blogger for me?

Pah! Tecnology.