well into 2025 already

It's obviously been cloudy here for ages as yesterday was the first day in forever that the sun was shining in my eyes while I sipped my afternoon tea on the sofa. Yes, full blazing sun! It's fantastic :-) And here we are, well into 2025 already!

We celebrated the arrival of the new year in traditional fashion. Cathey, Jim, Trudie, Leo, and Pat, joined us for an evening of eating and laughing. It was subdued compared to some of our more recent NYE, as we were without Olaf & Steph to liven up the party. As usual, I made too much food. 

I made the fig & caramelised onion goat cheese dip with focaccia again. We had wings, roasted carrots wrapped in prosciutto, stuffed mushrooms, lots of veggies & dips. I made a ‘dirty martini’ dip with blue cheese & gin soaked olives which was good. We made food that never got served! No complaints though - it was great to have leftovers for 2 nights!

Last Saturday we made the trek into town to celebrate Stephanie's birthday. We couldn't remember the last time that we had driven into the city at night - it was probably years! Of course it was snowing… But we did it, and it was nice, although we probably won't return to the same restaurant - it was easily a 1 star meal!

Aside from all of that, there's been an awful lot of malingering on the sofa… I tried fasting two days ago but only made it to the 24 hour mark before binging on all sorts of unhealthy foods - I just can't seem to get back on track no matter what I tell myself…

My energy has not returned, but I have been forcing myself to walk on the treadmill or ride the bike… I've not been going hard at it yet… I'm wearing a holter monitor for 2 weeks so I have (!) to cut back on some of my plank exercises as the monitor and wires get all tangled up! Or that's my excuse…

I never did get much ‘Christmas’ distributed around the house this year so it was a simple task to wrap the tree in its sheet and get Carm to carry it back down to the basement and voila! most of the cleanup was done… oh, there are a few tiny trees left which will only take a few minutes to put away but I'll wait till February or March. 

I would really like to ‘care’ again…

Last night we had a lovely winter dinner at Trudie & Leo's. In years past this would have been a weekly occurrence and the nights would have been late with more than one bottle of wine emptied. Now it's much less frequent and not even half a bottle gets consumed. 

Today, after a quick haircut in the village, we dashed to liquidation. I picked up a few random things, and Carm got a solar light, but honestly, there's not much interesting… HOWEVER on the way home we saw a wolf on the side of the road. Carm stopped and backed up - we stared at each other for quite a while before it ambled off.

Awesome!

“a bit of sunshine”

“dogs asleep in a sun spot”

“welcoming in the new year with friends”

“getting home after a snowy drive”

“a wolf!”