Christmas Eve was spent making mulled wine both alcoholic and non-alcoholic even though it did mean sending someone to the shops on an emergancy tour! I also decorated the christmas cake I'd got dad to bake back at the Mill. I went for christmas trees on the snowy tundra (it would have been spikey but this was my first time using the instant royal icing mix rather than making it up myself). Becuase I am me and was thus unprepared I ended up having to improvise an icing bag out of greese proof paper and everything. You may have noticed from the picture that I have some little creatures that should not be there - my little family of marzipan hedghogs - these are special hedghogs who have awoken for the Snow Ball and it has nother NOTHING to do with the fact my brother loves marzipan and hedghogs - I didnt then refused to let anyone else have a hedghog honest!
Cooking wise we also roped peeps who'd come for mulled wine - namely Clair into helping us prepare the leopard pie which is Alarics traditional veggi christmas dinner as we where going to be spending christmas day at my perants we where preparing the pie to take with us and cook once there. I have only one thing to say at this juncture - 'Mmmmm Pie!'
Of corse the Christmas clock made an earlier appearance and after about three hours had everybody wanting to kill me or the clock or both - I still think its cute with its flashing lights and five minutes of tinny out of tune christmas carols, Jean loves it too with its riendeer going rouw rouw - tick tock rouw rouw mummy! Snowman! Snowman! Daddy lookit Snowman!
As the day progressed there where lightsaber fights with bits of cardboard!
Mucho mucho playing with the remote control darleck I got Al an eon or three ago!
There might also have been some dancing but I have acidently forgotton to upload the photos with this one being the least embaressing 🙂
We finished the day off by watching Jack's (whos office we're currently in) friend doing the christmas lectures which included inflatible real lungs on a resirator etc... It was fun 🙂
On New Years Eve clair came round to where we are staying in Highgate and painted my nails for me including putting on nial gems which took a while and for me has resulted in self control in trying not to pick at them!
We then headed out to Burgess Hill for a geology party (well a party hosted by geologists). Sarah and Simon where in disgrace as they went and got marraide with out telling me! In fact scarily I realised I hadn't seen any of them since Flos wedding just before the birth 🙁
It was great catching up and their tree looked fab 🙂
Midnight came with a pop by which time me and clair where horse from having sung along to about three cds worth of power ballards 
As you have probably noticed Neil sprouted some facial hair during the night! He then proceeded to dance badly 🙂
Sarah and Simon had made mulled wine with chillies in! I'd not come across this concept before - the verticts ranged from wow! To arg my mouth and throat are blistering - I was a chicken and avoided it.
Here are some general picks of party randomness 🙂
Alaric decided to a) design chocolate bars and draw pianos becuase Jules Holland was excited on TV with a piano and to general amusement he decided to do impressions of Wallace and Gromite for which he has the perfect teeth!
Some time around 3 am we decided that it was time for cups of tea having all stuffed our faces with warm minni jam filled doughnuts, chocolate brownies (made by one of the Clairs), out cookies (made by one of the Sarahs) and other sundry yummyness! Did I mention that most people at this party where called Clair (sorry probably different spellings I know!) or Sarah! this can only mean one thing! - Clearly they are the best two names in the whole universe 😉
Coming soon to a blog near you - What else we did over Christmas - as some of you may have noticed the blog was actually broken there for a while hence I am only writing the posts now. It felt disheartening to write the posts when I knew people couldnt get at them to read :/
Again Happy New Year 🙂
Jeany-bow was at a family party creating havoc with two contemperies the three of whom where dressed in identical little fairy outfits! I'm hoping someone took pictures for me 🙂
I'd always been vaguely aware that Phil Gyford, an interesting fellow I had the pleasure of meeting through my time with UpMyStreet.com nearly a decade ago, ran a web site that told you what the famous diarist Samuel Pepys was doing three hundred and forty three years ago today.
However, it wasn't until I saw his blog posting about it today that I realised just how much work he's put into it.
WOW.
Well worth a visit, even if you're not into history...
It is the shiny new beginning of 2008 and we are hoping (desperatly) that it is going to be a bit better than 2007 and that we will soon be back in our own home with a shiny new kitchen and nice effective flood defenses etc...
For 2008 i am hoping to loose the last 2 stone of the pregnancy weight (I doubled in weight actually doubled during the pregnancy which wasnt good), we have budgeted in gym membership for me as I need to up my aerobic excersise. your probably all wondering why I dont just do some gardening or somehting but my joints etc... are unstable and I have to be very careful - loading the joints is bad so gentle swims are good digging wholes bad. I will also be starting physio therapy again so that I have some direction inwhat excersises are good for me and which ones will cripple me.
I also hope to actually star a hobby I've been dreaming off and trying half heartedly to do for a few years - I've been interested in it every since my dad carried me into my nans garden when I was a toddler to show me a lunar eclipse. During my GSCE's there was Hale Bop which had me late in to physics as I'd gone round my uncles to look through his telescope the night before.
I've also been reading Astronomy Now off and on since I was working at the museum on meteorites - I cant right now get back to those pieces of sky rock so I will be attempting to consol myself with star gazing. Our binoculars where distroyed in the flood unfortunatly and I dont have the money to buy any equipement at the moment but my bro has lent me his ickle telescope which I am looking forward to actually using. 2008 is going to be a year of astronomy for me 🙂
I shall also be consolidating my webstuff into a proper business of its own. I will have servers and we have nominet registration and as purple cloud is no longer James I can quite happily become a comercial ISP without competing with my friend. We will be doing hosting and domain registration I will also be building websites and setting up blogs, mailing lists and forums for people. I've had a few customers so far so am confident that if I actually advertise and stuff there should be a nice organic growth.
You may have noticed that since the flood the other blogs - Salaric and wigglypets have been a bit neglected - I hope to remedy this asap. So 2008 is also going to be the year of the pooter for Sarah.
Who knows I might even get that noval typed up and published 🙂
Here's hoping every body had a great night last night and an even better year to come!
HAPPY NEW YEAR from the family Snell-Pym 🙂
I've been taking advantage of some Christmas downtime to bring the Warhead mail system up to scratch.
We now have many layers of defence.
- When a remote mail server tries to connect to us to send email, if they are a known blacklisted spammer or have a wrongly configured mail server, we reject them up front.
- If they get through that, then unless they are a known good mail server, they are told to go away and come back later. Many spammers don't bother retrying mails if asked to, so this cuts out a lot of spam.
- If they are a known good mail server or they do come back later to redeliver the email, then the message is accepted.
- It's then sent through a content filter, which checks it for known bad signatures (viruses, scams, some spam, and phishing attempts). If it matches any, it's bounced back to the sender.
- The content filter then runs it through SpamAssassin's battery of message scoring tests, which rate the chances of the message being spam. If it looks spammy, it's marked as looking spammy with
***SPAM*** in the subject line, but still delivered (since SpamAssassin's tests are statistical in nature, they can snag false positives)
- Finally, the message is forwarded on, or delivered to a local mailbox, depending on the recipient.
From my existing statistics, I know that of about 15,000 messages a day, 13,000 are stopped by the first step alone (which is good, since blocking at this stage saves a whole lot of resources on our mail servers).
I'm looking forward to seeing how many of the surviving 2,000 make it past the rest of the filters 😉
Recipies, The Family | sarah | 
Fri 4th Jan 2008 11:31 am | 
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