Out with the old, in with the new

Our holiday season was littered with the following :
- lots of food. Lots and lots and lots of food. And wine to go with it. Oh, and a few bottles of champagne. And a couple of bottles of my most recent favourite discovery, Clairette de Die. My delightful father-in-law continues to surprise me with new things to try.
- an emergency trip to the vet following a bad decision when Symphony decided to play with The Grey Cat (my in-laws cat, who has no other name), but The Grey Cat didn't want anything to do with the situation and there was a ball of cat rolling around on the floor and much hissing then quite a bit of shouting in English and in French by the Aussie Lass then rather a lot of blood. 2mm difference and Symphony would have lost her eye entirely. She is ok now, but it was touch and go there for awhile, and was a permanent and demure fixture on our laps for the few days after. Anyone who has met Symphony will know that demure is not one of her primary characteristics. It was somewhat traumatic for all parties. The worst thing is that the silly creature continued to try to play with The Grey Cat in the days that followed.
- a lot of time spent working on some mysterious and exciting projects that will shortly be unveiled.
- long afternoons of the most fascinating and frustrating of card games, Tarot. As a young initiate of this classic French card game, it's quite different from other games I'm used to, but I can see why it becomes incredibly addictive. I also began to see a different side of my husband - I'd suspected as much when he started being cheeky at Canasta, but in his own realm, he's a lethal card player. Yet another thing I love about him. Except when he does sneaky things to me.
- playing lego with my nephews, and "shop" with my neice. Always entertaining.
- phone calls, emails and twitters from the other side of the world. It's always hard being so far away at this time of the year, especially because traditionally this is when summer really sets in, everyone starts slowing down, and the days are long and lazy. But the internet makes the distance just a little less drastic. The best bit was the call from Australia on Christmas Day. After a couple of minutes of chatting to everyone down under (in English, obviously), I turned around to see my 4 year old neice sitting beside me on the couch, staring at me with wide eyes and grinning from ear to ear. I can only imagine that, because she couldn't understand a word I was saying, she thought I was talking the same sort of gobbledygook that I'd heard her speaking with her dolls.
- a return to work, surrounded by a fog of flu, culminating in a visit to the doctor and five days of being sick, including New Years Eve, forcing us to cancel all our plans and hibernate. I'm now struggling with the damn cold sitting in my chest (already fragile in the aftermath of the whooping cough episode), but at least my croaky voice is gleaning sympathy from the people around me. And it's a wee bit sexier than dripping snot all over the keyboard like I was last week.
So begins 2008.