Simon Rules!

Hooray for 8ft trees and LED lights! Happy Christmas!

I was given orders to take a week off, so I decided to see my family in England. So far I have gone for a bike ride and slightly cheated because I rode an electric bike, which helps you up hills. It was a lot of fun, and really fast! I also found some trolls at a nearby pub and a duck crossing sign.

More pics to come soon!

We finally rounded up all of our wedding photos, and they all came out beautifully. I’ve also started work on a new online photo gallery tool, tentatively called “Snaps”. You can see the pics here.

One thing I love about digital cameras is that almost all tag pictures with EXIF data, which contains the date and time each photo was taken, along with the focal length, ISO, shutter speed and other information. In the future when cameras are available with GPS, the precise location will be tagged too. That will have the added effect of tagging each photo with the correct date and time. What I noticed from the wedding photos given to us is that only one person out of five who sent me photos had the correct date and time programmed into their camera. Two of those were from different time zones, and one person had got confused between 12 hour and 24 hour formats. Another had probably forgotten to change the clock for daylight savings time. It wasn’t a big deal because I corrected all the times with a nifty utility called PhotoInfo, because I like looking at all my photos in chronological order.

I’m back, and I’m a happily married man! The wedding was utterly amazing; Amber was beautiful, the weather was perfect, and it was amazing to see all the people who had travelled so far to wish us the best on our special day. Gavin’s best man speech was absolutely hilarious – it was like every sentence he spoke was a punchline, and he quickly had the entire room in stitches. Cheers Gav, you did a blinding job! Going back to the weather, we were extremely lucky because there had been a week of thunderstorms before the day, and there was a week of storms after.

I have been asked many times if we celebrate Christmas in England. I have also been asked if we have dogs, are connected to the Internet, and celebrate Thanksgiving, but that’s a different matter.

In the USA, people typically put up their Christmas trees in November right after Thanksgiving (the fourth Thursday of the month). In England, without Thanksgiving celebrations, people wait until the first week of December. However, shops in England tend to start their Christmas displays a lot earlier than shops in the USA. It’s common for shops to start selling Christmas items in late September.

Mince Pies are about the size of a cupcake (in England we’d say “fairy cake”) and are made of pastry with a fruit and spice filling. Hundreds of years ago they were made with meat, but the poor couldn’t afford that luxury at Christmas, so they filled them with fruit instead. In the end, the tradition of the poor won out. They taste great warm or cold, and with cream on. We usually use liquid cream rather than squirty cream.

Father Christmas is the same as Santa Claus, a magical person who comes down the chimney of every child’s house and puts presents under the tree. As a kid, I was encouraged to leave Father Christmas a glass of sherry for the ride. I wonder who drank it.

Christmas Pudding is rarely made at home because it is so complex and takes a long time to cook. It is flammable, and people usually douse them with sherry before lighting them on fire.

The Pub on Christmas morning: For people who live in small villages, it is a tradition to go to the pub for an hour on Christmas morning, usually from 11am till midday. It’s a way to wish everyone in the village a Merry Christmas. The whole family is welcome, including young children.

Christmas crackers are tubes about the diameter of toilet rolls and contain a small toy, paper crown (which must be worn) and a joke. They also contain a small gunpowder charge, so they snap when pulled! You always pull them with someone else at the dinner table, never yourself, unless you are lonely.

Presents are opened on the morning of the 25th, usually right when the family wakes up.

Twiglets: Twiglets are knobbly things that taste like Marmite. If you don’t know what Marmite is, it’s yeast extract. You either love it or hate it. At christmas, it’s common to have a tub of Twiglets on the coffee table, along with other snacks like nuts to crack.

Boxing Day is a holiday on the 26th. No one knows the exact origin of Boxing Day, but it is thought to stem from the rich putting unused food and other items into boxes for donation to the poor the day after Christmas day. They don’t do that any more, but we still get a day off!

Chocolates: In an English living room at Christmas, you will usually find a metal tin of chocolates. Nestle make Quality Streets, and Cadbury’s make Roses. As you know, chocolate is very popular in Europe, and no Christmas is complete without a tin of these. Quality Streets tend to have more toffees, and Roses tend to have more chocolates. I grew up preferring Quality Streets, but switched to Roses a few years ago!

Roast turkey is served at the dinner table of every English household on Christmas day, except perhaps vegetarian ones. You can even buy meatless turkey substitute if you can’t kill a bird for Christmas.

We put our Christmas tree up tonight! It’s an eight foot tree with 300 twinkling lights. The present under the tree on the far right is actually a water tank! It siphons water into the bowl at the base of the tree, meaning I don’t have to crawl under the tree with a watering can every day and get pine needles in my back!

Two updates in less than a week! What is the world coming to? On Friday we got a new kitten, called Oscar. He doesn’t look very kitteny because he is five months old. He is larger than our first (female) cat, but she’s definitely still the boss. I call this picture “The Staredown”. Locked in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse, who will be the first to give in? This must be the only literal use of the phrase “cat-and-mouse”, ever.

The fence building is going OK, I put some of our new tools to use by cutting fence slats into complex shapes needed to fill the weird gaps we left. My idea to make a simple rectangular deck has inflated after seeing Amber’s aunt’s two-level deck with stairs, railings and 45 degree corners, made from “Trex”, a wood substitute. I now need to put the engineer in me to good use and design and build a great deck! The best part is that since it is under 30 inches off the ground, I don’t need a permit!

I was right about Nelly Furtado’s “Maneater”, it went to number one in the UK this weekend. My next prediction is for Lily Allen’s “Smile” to make number one also.

I have finally updated my page! I have put lots of new pics up, and some more old ones too. In December, Amber and I went to England for Christmas and the New Year. We had a great time and went to see my grandparents in Hull, and on the way I took Amber to Sherwood Forest. We didn’t see as many sights as last time we went to the UK, but we got to see all of my family at least. It was great seeing my cousins Sarah, Gemma and Andrew in Hull.

I also managed to go to Milton Keynes without ending up in hospital! For those who don’t know, there is a curse attached to me when Milton Keynes is involved. Once I went to buy some new trousers and a shirt and got involved in an accident with a bus – a bus hit my car and I ended up bleeding all over my old trousers and shirt. Then another time I went snowboarding on the dry ski slope and fell down, and ended up in casualty (ER) again!

Some kind person left a shopping trolley (cart) to go astray in the King Soopers near where I work, and the strong winds that day carried it right into the side of my car. I am getting it out of the body shop tomorrow, and I have got new BBS wheels from the Evo MR to go on it this weekend. Pics to follow!

I’m officially engaged now…as of a couple of weeks ago! I finally picked a ring after looking literally everywhere. I picked a 0.73ct diamond with a white gold setting that kind of wraps around the diamond (see it below). It looks great! Oh, and Amber was really pleased with it! We have our engagement party planned for the 26th of March (our 6 month anniversary) and my parents will be there because they are flying over from England that week.

I’ve just got engaged to my gorgeous girlfriend, Amber! Actually, the funny thing is that I did the traditional thing and asked her parents for permission to get engaged to their daughter, and they took that as us getting engaged. Soon everyone was congratulating us so we decided to be engaged first and have me propose later when I actually have the ring! I went ring shopping this week and found some great ones, but I am still picking. I have no idea how the people at work figured it out but everyone was congratulating me on Monday morning! So, Amber is my fiancee! It sounds great to say it!