shopping strategy

Other than midnight, I suspect that, for non followers, this evening whilst "Strictly Come Dancing" is on television is an ideal time to visit M&S for Christmas Shopping.

C'mon Alesha.

alesha's lofi lipstick and agent x'd

Technorati Tags: rashbre, alesha, lipstick, come+dancing, strictly, misteeq, , bruce, forsythe, agentx, rumours, heat, film, movie, ballroom, latin, cloverfield,

gas

I stopped for some F-yu-ooo-el yesterday and overheard a rather intriguing conversation in the filling station. It went along the lines:

"How many boxes?"
"Six thousand I think"
"Already?"
"Yeah, I know, but I think they got a deal on them"
"What - and they say 'easter' on them?
"Yep"
"We'll have to store them in the car wash".

cue an xmas tune

yule

I started today pretty early with a multi national conference meeting and call at about 0800 and then a morning of what I call 'hurdles' which is lots of short meetings one after another. There was one 'water jump' when one of the hurdle meetings was cancelled about five minutes before the start and thet gave me a few moments to recover my pace. The other amusing thing today was that everyone had thoughtfully provided breakfasts with their meetings, so the first one at 08:00 has bacon-filled baps with brown sauce, the next one had a trolley of fruit and pastries and then the third meeting (it was nine o'clock' by this time) has a combination of rolls, pastries, fruit, juices as well as the usual coffees and teas. To be honest I refrained from all of these options because at lunch time I had a team Christmas Lunch at a posh tudor building.

I was getting peckish by 12:00 and we set off in convoys of one sort or another to the venue where we had a champagne reception followed by a glorious lunch for our fairly diverse gang of people. Lots of talk, and even a short out break of carols, before we started to drift away in the late afternoon. I had one more meeting with Italy, but was able to do this as a conference call on my way home, so pleasingly, for me, the Holiday starts...

Here.

So

"Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas" and any other variants according to your nature and custom.

rashbre

office party time

nuff said.

scooby snacks

By the end of this week, the combination of work, extra errands, shopping, evening drinks and the occasional party mean that it will be quite good to be able to flop for a few minutes during the main Christmas period.

In addition to family time and further entertaining events, it will also be good to have a few quiet minutes to pause and think anew about the forthcoming year. There's been that inevitable acceleration from mid November towards Christmas and from having seemingly oodles of time to prepare and be organised, suddenly its almost upon us.

So as I speed around London on foot, in cars, on the tube and trains for the next few days, I know that I then have a few days at home to at least partially unwind. That's before the New Year starts and all the counters get reset for another dash. I'm already getting double booked during January.

claret

In the City, the week before the Christmas holidays and it is extremely noticeable that many folk are extending their lunch times. My rendezvous before a meeting was difficult to reach because of the sheer number of people walking along the street, all intent on shopping or lunchtime revelry.

Our purpose was more sober although afterwards we pitched out into the busy streets and headed for a nearby wine-bar. Most areas of the city are well provided often with large subterranean bars, like the numerous Balls Brothers (described as a Wicked Club in one guide to London) and Davy's with sawdust floors and "Wallop" served in large metal jugs.

In London tradition, we wanted the finest wines available to humanity, we wanted them here, and we wanted them now. In the end we settled for a simple claret in the Lime Street Balls Bros still thoroughly in keeping with the ambiance of the area. Later, and suitably lubricated we wandered the few steps back to Bank station before heading our separate ways home.

pogued

As a footnote to my recent post about the song "Fairy Tale of New York", which is the well known (in Britain) Christmas song about (amongst other things) the 'drunk tank' featuring a few choice words, it seems that a mere two or three days later the original song has been back in the news because of BBC censorship.

For politically correct reasons the BBC decided to fade down a few of the words in the lyrics but it all seems to have backfired and consequently the song has now been featured on the News, Newsnight and various other programmes intacto.

Considering only a couple of years ago, the BBC actually used it as a charity item sung by the cast of EastEnders (part of my previous post), then it does all seem somewhat volte-face to remonstrate about the lyrics.

L Plate Government?

Oops. After the recent loss of 23 million names and addresses by one government department, we seem to have another slightly similar situation. This is 'only' three million missing UK records which have been lost on a hard drive in Iowa in the mid-West of the USA.

Hmm. So we put the disaster recovery for UK driving test records near des Moines so that if something goes wrong with the system in the UK we still have a backup of everyone's names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses. Lucky the British main system is still working, so the 'safety copy' isn't needed at the moment. Iowa is the Hawkeye State so with a bit of luck someone will spot the missing records and return them.

Its easy enough to fix though, just pop another copy in the post.

Technorati Tags: rashbre, missing, driving, test, records, Iowa, Des+Moines, Hawkeye

corny holiday movies

I just have to watch a couple of 'holiday movies' during the season. This is probably the prime week. They are great in the build up but somehow don't seem as good after Christmas Day.

So 'scuse me tonight, I'm watching something with snow in it.

Santa Claus, North Pole and NORAD tracking

Looking for Santa info...Here's the 2010 link

A family occasion yesterday and amongst other topics we touched briefly upon Santa Claus and I was explaining about the NORAD Santa tracking system. I'll be honest, not everyone believed me and I had to spend some time explaining that both Santa and Rudolph are real and that the North Pole is quite a cool place to hang out at this time of year.

An ideal gift this year is, of course, this.

NORAD uses 47 radar installations to track Santa once he has lifted off and then uses geo-synchronous satellites with infra-red sensors to detect Rudolph's nose's unique I/R signature. Santa Cams were added a few years ago and capture images of Santa and the Reindeer as they make their journey around the world. And a particularly fast plane takes off out of Newfoundland to escorts Santa. Of course the reindeer Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen and Rudolph are pretty used to all of this nowadays.

Check out how things are shaping up via the 2009 post here.

Technorati Tags: rashbre, santa, santa+claus, NORAD, North+Pole, Rudolph, Reindeer, Dancer, Prancer, Dasher

tree time

To my slight surprise, rashbre central is gradually becoming ready for the festive season. No great day of decorating, but rather more small movements which add together to create the effect.

The little red christmas trees along the top of the fireplace (and in the blog header) started the process and a couple of nights ago I threw a bundle of lights across the outdoor foliage to start the illuminations. I did forget to check them before I threw them into position and had to retrieve one set which was somehow multi coloured and looked a little out of place with the rest.

I've even managed to get the tree which is still wrapped in that netting at the moment (took me two attempts though because the normal place has somehow closed down without me noticing) and the boxes of decorations have been waiting to be opened for a couple of weeks.

I have a feeling that the full effect will be in place by the end of the weekend after I've gathered together some presents and maybe wrapped the wine flavoured Kit-Kats.

fun with Qlympic trademarks

I noticed diamond geezer is trying to get some folk to help raise a bid about the upgrade of the area leading to the Olympic&trade site for 2012&trade. Unfortunately, the name for the road was to be Olympic&trade something but it can't be because the Olympic&trade Committee have Trademarked the word Olympic&trade and the use of London 2012&trade.

I thought it would be fun to trademark the common mis-spellings so we now have a selection of rashbre central&trade reserved words too...

Qlympic&trade Oljmpic&trade Olympjc&trade Qlympjc&trade Olympac&trade Olymp.c&trade Olimpic&trade Olimpjc&trade and a couple more which I'll keep secret until I see if anyone uses them.

Some of this legal stuff is all greek to me.