Christmas Shopping in London

[lillibet]

We've been here for a month now and it's starting to feel like we live
here. I made Jason breakfast in bed this morning to celebrate our first
month in England.

Let's see...we spent Thursday back over at Barbara's, moving her furniture
back to its previous configuration and taking advantage of her phone line.
I left Jason there and made a stop in Oxford Circus to buy a few more useful
items at John Lewis. There was a sign at the tube station for the local
Charity Aid card stand in the University of Westminster main building just
down the road, so I stopped in there and got 200 cards of assorted types.

Once home, I made dinner...Sainsbury's has a very convenient "Quarter
Pounders for Two" pack, consisting of two beef patties, two buns, two slices
of cheese and two packets of hamburger relish. I made those for dinner with
some frozen "fry crisps."

On Friday, Jason went to work and I went to tea at Leah's dorm, in honor of
her 32nd birthday. She had Branderburg cake and crumpets and scones and
little mini mince pies, with honey and brandy butter and clotted cream and
jam to go on them. I'd made cucumber sandwiches (feeling very English) and
was in a mood for devilled eggs, so I made some of those, too. Besides
myself and Leah's friend Mark, from Cambridge (whom we'd met at The Mystery
of Charles Dickens, tho' he didn't remember me--what is it that makes me so
unmemorable?), the rest of the guests were all students from Leah's course.
They were very interesting and friendly and it was a real treat to talk to
other people.

As I was leaving, Barbara called to say that the deal she's
been working on at Ford for ages finally happened and her promotion went
through, so she was bubbling over. I came home and made lamb steaks with
sauteed mushrooms and roasted root vegetables for dinner and we worked on
our Christmas letter.

On Saturday we went to Camden Market, in the hopes of doing some Christmas
shopping. We failed utterly on that front, but found four items of
furniture for ourselves (as well as possibly finding the oak swivel desk
chair that Barbara's been searching for): a lined wicker laundry hamper, a
large wine rack built into a free-standing pine cabinet with a drawer, a
standing full-length oval mirror for our bedroom and this marvelous piece of
furniture that I will use as a desk. It's somewhat hard to describe: it's
perhaps six feet high, with a chest of drawers on the bottom and then
another chest of drawers on top, but with shelves in the middle of the top
part. No good, I'll just have to get Jason to take a picture of it and put
it up on the website. Anyway, it's lovely and we got it for a very good
price (60% off the price listed and very reasonable compared to other things
we looked at). It won't do for sitting at, really, but since I tend not to
sit at my desk, but rather to use it for storing office supplies and sprawl
on a couch to work, I think it will be very functional for me. And if I
decide, at some point in the future, that I want a more standard desk, the
piece would be useful for any other storing-lots-of-things-in-drawers
purpose you can think of.

Jason was really struck with the vitality of the market. It's an incredibly
varied crowd, everything from punks to suburban tourists, of all ages,
buying everything from antique oak furniture to joke cards. We got bowls of
fried rice and noodles and sat in the middle of the Stables for a while,
just watching the world go by.

We came home and curled up together on the couch and fell asleep for over
two hours! Jason went out and got us pizza and while he was gone, the guy
came with all but the desk-thing (that's from another stall). We ate and
finished our Christmas letter and went through the list figuring out who
gets what card. We were very impressed with ourselves: there were ten of
each of the cards and we went through without keeping track of how many of
each we were assigning, but when we tallied it up, we only went over on
three of the cards, and most of them we'd assigned nine. I began addressing
them and Jason finished playing Balder's Gate II on the computer.

This morning, as I mentioned, I did the breakfast-in-bed thing and we made
it out of the house before noon. We'd decided to go back down to Greenwich,
since the crafts there had seemed to be of higher quality and more plausible
as gifts for our family. We got there about one and wandered through the
market for a couple of hours, then stopped into the Admiral Hardy pub and
had bangers & mash and soup & sandwich. We went back through the market to
make previously considered purchases and then headed home. We curled up on
the couch again and suddenly it was two hours later! It's an amazingly
comfortable couch for the two of us.

Jason had picked a galangal & lemongrass sauce out at Sainsbury's as
something he'd like to try, so I made a stir-fry with that over chicken,
broccoli, carrots, mangetout, mushrooms, courgettes and baby corn. The corn
was incredibly flavorful, but the sauce was so delicate as to be
unnoticeable. We added some soy and chili powder to it and it was fine and
the texture of it was very good, but I don't think we'll use this sauce
again.

We've spent the rest of the evening working on Christmas cards and puttering
about. We got a notice yesterday that there's a special delivery package
waiting for us at the post office, so we'll pick that up tomorrow and my
desk-thing is supposed to be delivered in the afternoon. There's a
possibility that JR will show up here on Wednesday and John & Mike are
arriving on Thursday, so it should be a busy, fun week.

Hope y'all are well and that your December is off to a good start. What's
your weather like? It's been drier this week, but still threatening rain
most of the time. It's in the 40's to low 50's during the day, so
reasonably pleasant to be out & about in. I read an article in a magazine
about English Christmas traditions in which they pointed out that while
Dickens popularized the ideal of the white Christmas, they've actually been
incredibly rare since the 18th century.