Kicking off the new year...

 I bought this Sissix die at a craft fair at the NEC, it's a cut and stamp set, lying unused until now, so in my new year zeal for using supplies, here it is.....

You get the butterfly dies and the stamps for the wings and sentiments....cute, I'll use them again

So here we are, back in the swing, and as always there are some things about this festive time of year that I am glad to see the back of:

1.That awkward moment when someone unwraps a gift and says 'ah, it needs batteries........not the round AA or AAA ones that we have a zillion of, but some strange little lithium battery used to power hearing aids. Ooops, sorry!

2. The supermarkets. Especially women (always women, men don't care) picking out fruit, examining each one for bruises. For heavens sake, how much bruising can there be on a single satsuma. It's got peel, you throw that away. The whole process takes forever, then when they move, so that you can grab a bag of satsumas, they move on to the grapes and the whole process of searching for perfection starts again. Then there are the  trolley (cart) road hogs. Why do they put those totally redundant bits on the bottom of shopping trolleys that give you huge shin bruises?
 Let's not get into the queues at the checkouts which stretch halfway around the shop. I was standing behind a woman at the speedy checkout (ten items or less). She had a trolley piled high with stuff, about six loaves of bread, three pounds of butter, six litres of milk....you get the picture. 'Excuse me' I said timidly 'this is the speedy checkout lane'.She honestly thought that as she had only ten different TYPES of items in her cart (bread, milk, butter, biscuits etc) it didn't matter that she had a total of about fifty items. I am such a weakling, I didn't dare say anything else and to my chagrin, the sales assistant let her get away with it
I suppose I could avoid this trauma by ordering online for delivery, but I have only tried that once and I wasn't very good at it. You have to say what size joint of beef/pork/lamb you want and I got hopelessly muddled and ended up with half a cow. I also ordered ingredients that I had never noticed in the supermarket but which sounded a lot of fun - a strange pot of caramel con leche lurks to this day in my cupboard, I haven't a clue what it is or what I can do with it

3. The January sales.where the clothes are starting to look a bit sad and tired (a bit like me). I could save these stores a fortune if only someone was bright enough to employ me. I could tell them that it was highly likely that if they ordered thousands of micro mini skirts in a rather bright tartan pattern and all a size 22 or 24 (USA size about 40), that in January there would be thousands of large tartan micro mini skirts hanging forlornly on the rails with 70% off - and still nobody buys them.

It will be so nice to get back to normal, spaces in the car parks, empty tables in the coffee shops, bikinis in the shops (yes, when the large tartan micro mini skirts have disappeared and it is probably snowing outside, they replace them with bikinis...). Still at least the craft table is back in production, which is a tiny step towards normality..see you tomorrow x