.... random rants and rambles. no agenda. yet.

First up, in answer to questions in the comments:

1) The baby's room is green; after mixing the below colour

with some white and another similar shade of green, we got... over 5 litres of a colour that is almost exactly the same as the one above. Uncanny (and please don't make me relive the whole confusing story!).

And no, this is not because we do not know if our offspring is a boy or a girl. It is because we'd like to have a nice, calm green haven in which a purple-faced screaming baby can be brought and lulled into a deep and peaceful sleep. That is the idea, anyway. In practice, it will probably be me who rushes into the nice, calm green haven with a purple face, because it is the only room in the house that is not populated with an animal, or a computer, or another source of purple-facedness. We'll see.

2) I am not allergic to our house, don't worry, Kathy. Unfortunately, I appear to be allergic to being married, but have no plans to stop being married, so I'll just have to stay ill.

It's not all doom and gloom in these parts, of course. This afternoon we skipped off work early - come on, who doesn't have post-Xmas blues? - and went to pick up a pile of Freecycled cloth nappies from a nice lady who lives up the hill. Even further up the hill, we decided to give the dog a quick spin so parked up and clambered up a hilly field. About halfway up, I realised there is nothing you can say to your almost 8 month pregnant companion that won't be annoying, because she is wearing the wrong boots and is not at all impressed by the fact that you have a sore finger after you burnt it on a piece of toast that day, BECAUSE THAT IS BEING FLIPPANT AND YOU DON'T HAVE TO CARRY A BABY AROUND (yet). So anyway, she made me run up the hill (because, ha, I can still run up hills!) and check what was on the other side of the wall, because it wasn't the road that we thought it was, which made her even more annoyed.

Luckily, it was one of those fantastic old walled footpaths that's covered in leaves, with neatly laid cobbled stones along the bottom. Quite fascinatingly, actually, there appeared to be a whole network of these paths hidden away at the top of the random hill that we were on. And all of them were encased by dry stone walls, covered in moss and leaning at weird angles.

They definitely don't make them like that any more... which is kind of the point of me mentioning this: Does anyone know why dry stone walls manage to lean at scary angles and not fall down?! Seriously?

That's enough waffle now. And without further ado, I can reveal the winner of the caption competition which was held an embarrassingly long time ago is SAM, for her caption, "But I wanted to be Rudolph!" which was both Christmassy and funny at the same time. Sam, your prize will arrive soooon.