I much prefer when it's around 26°C on Christmas Day... especially because Ma has no air-conditioning, just the evaporative cooler.
But we did struggle through. And the cool change finally hit as I was on my way home, so that was good.
I really should have dragged the mattress out into the lounge room last night and slept under my air-con, but I foolishly though I would be okay... which meant that I had the worst night of sleep I've had in a while.
I woke up more than a few times, and finally gave up at some point and put the air-con on in the living room. Not sure how much it helped, but it kind of felt like it did. And then when my alarm went off at it's usual time of 5am I gave up on trying to pretend to sleep... granted I didn't get up for another hour, but still.
When I finally got up, I jumped in the shower and then got ready. While I was putting moisturiser on my tattoo, my brain did a series of mental jumps from one related thought to another until they landed on Lownee... I'd already thought about her earlier in the week because it was her birthday... and I'll admit, I got a little weepy-eyed staring at myself in the mirror.
But then I realised that my hair is the same colour as the Listerine that I use and I stopped being all nostalgic and mopey.
When I went to get dressed in my new Christmas tee from Tee Fury... it has Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas on it, wearing his Santa suit. But when I put it on I discovered that although it was supposedly the same size that I always buy from them, and it also had the size printed inside the neck of the tee, it was actually at least one if not two sizes bigger.
Very, very annoying.
So instead I had to dip into my wardrobe for something much less Christmasy, but that matched my blue hair. Luckily I have a lot of cute tees. But I'll be complaining to Tee Fury in the next day or so.
I also wore my new Andrew Christian thong underwear and a pair of shorts that I bought last year some time but never got around to wearing. And the new thongs I bought the other week when I had to make a run to the supermarket when we were making Christmas goodies at Ma's place.
Then it was time to load up the car and head off... and it hadn't even hit 7am yet.
I had a pretty good run up the road to be honest, the traffic was (unsurprisingly) very light and the traffic lights were definitely in my favour... and I got to Ma's place just before 7:30.
And when I arrived Ma had just come out to open the gate for me, so that was good timing.
We fudged about a bit as we generally do on Christmas morning but eventually settled down for our usual Christmas breakfast of croissants.
After breakfast we headed off to see La Cousina and Co...
All in all it wasn't a bad visit... it felt a little less hectic than usual, possibly because Princess T wasn't there, I really don't know.
But once again, La Cousina has absolutely no idea how to buy gifts for me. She did alright for a little while there with movie vouchers... but yeah, we're back to random crap, at least this year. I mean a candle and some off-brand cologne... I can't remember the last time I used either.
Like I said though, it was fairly painless and we were only there for about an hour or so.
When we got back we get up the Weber, after double-checking that there wasn't a total fire ban thing... which it wasn't unless I massively misread the warning on the BOM website.
While we haven't had a lot of luck the last couple of years with the Weber lighting properly, the barbecue gods were smiling on us today and it all worked out.
Then as usual, once the Weber was well underway, we settled down to unwrap our presents.
It turned out that most of the stuff I got this year was stuff that I bought myself and then Ma gave me money towards, so there really weren't any major surprises, and what was a surprise was food related.
Essentially everything boiled down to video games, Lego, naked men and food.
- PS4 (500GB in black)
- Lego Dimensions starter pack
- Lego Dimensions Doctor Who level pack
- Lego Dimensions Portal 2 level pack
- Assassin's Creed Syndicate - Charing Cross edition
- Assassin's Creed Unity
- Little Big Planet 3 (came with the PS4)
- inFamous Second Son (came with the PS4)
- Driveclub (came with the PS4)
- Warwick Rowers 2016 Calendar
- The Art of Alfredo Roagui 2016 Calendar and art print
- Lego Scooby Doo Mystery Machine set
- Haighs toy soldier tin with milk chocolate freckles
- Sour cream and onion Pringles
- Bassetts Jelly Babies
- Aeroplane Create-a-jelly
- Adventure Time cookies
I ended up setting a bunch of alarms on my photo to remind us to do all the things we needed to do... although I will say that I think we cooked the potatoes a little too long. And while cooking haloumi over the coals worked pretty well, it was a little too well done by the time we took it out.
Like last year we were putting together the big fat Christmas salad... basil leaves, cherry tomatoes, shelled edamame (to replace the beans Ma forgot to buy), some parmesan, the haloumi and potatoes... and bacon, turkey and our usual sausage meat.
And I dressed it with some of the very tasty Beerenberg mango and chili salad dressing.
We paired it with a nice Rekorderlig Mango and Raspberry cider and it was very nice. I did make entirely too much of it for the amount we ended up eating, but it was pretty good. Even if some of the potato and haloumi were overdone.
After we tidied up a bit we sat down to watch The Holiday... which I haven't seen in a while and do enjoy. And part way through once lunch had been sufficiently digested we put together our Christmas/ice cream version of Eton Mess with the mince pie ice cream, meringue, fresh blueberries, raspberries and blackberries, some chocolate shards and some crushed candy canes (both left over from the Christmas goodies).
Once the movie was done I figured that I should probably take myself home, open up the house and get it cooled down... besides neither of us really wanted any dinner. So we packed up the leftovers I was bringing home, I packed up my presents and took my tired and well fed butt home.
And it took my tired butt three tips from the car to the apartment to unload everything (granted without the PS4 it would have been one less trip) and it took until the wind really got gusty and cool before my place really cooled off.
So that's it, another Christmas done and dusted... to paraphrase Shakespeare, as always, it's a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing much when all is said and done.
Hopefully all my readers had themselves a pleasant day... and now we just have to wait for 2016.
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