White space needed here!

We attended the Aquabats Christmas dinner last night at the Irish Centre in
Queens Park. What a spread it was too. Loads of the usual Christmas fare,
and cooked to perfection.

We had a lovely New York Irish woman serve us; who, on seeing Lynn’s skin,
complimented her on her freckles. This woman had been voted the Coney Island
"Queen of Freckles, 1973". Lynn, whose nicknames include Dots, Frex,
LadyDots, Tidge (LenTIDGEini, Italian for…you’ve guessed) it has now been
given a new name.

Work hasn’t been as bad as I thought it would be this week; the usual
combination of mailing production and assisting users. This week’s feature:
how to produce letters using Alms as a mailmerge source. Several minor
crises with users being locked out and yours truly having to reboot the
server remotely, something I’ve never tried before. My stress levels were
phenomenal on Wednesday evening.

The weekend trip to Liverpool and Manchester with Tomsk has been cancelled.
The official reason is that Lynn’s brother has a ‘crisis’ going on in his
life at the moment, and is coming over tomorrow. Not quite true, he’s
coming over on Sunday and he does indeed have a ‘crisis’ though I suspect
this means he wants to get busy with a new guy he’s met in Forest Gate. A
long way from Blackpool where he lives, but convenient for our house. I
really like Lee – he’s been a good support to Lynn and more of a brother
than any of her blood ones, even though he was adopted by Lynn’s mum in the
70s. He’s a truly sleazy character and I’m sure we’ll have some fun over
the next week. I am one poor liar, and don’t like lying on principal, so
feel a touch guilty about this, but all to the best. I know Lynn didn’t
want to go and I was only 25 percent into it, so as there are only 52
weekends a year, so be it. The main reason we didn’t want to go up north
was simply because we don’t have a spare weekend before Christmas and so we
are both creaming ourselves for white space.

Angus and Corie were over on Wednesday’s "evening of stress" after we
threatened to teach Lottie, Core’s guide woofer how to ‘do’ escalators at
West Ham tube, the shortest escalator in London, and quite near us. This
turned into a longer-than-expected drinking session at the Barking Dog, so
teaching the dog the art of the moving stairs wasn’t an option. Instad we
returned here at 11 for a lasagne which Lynn made – (beautiful thing,
bricklike in consistency, tastes out of this world). However, we were too
lazy to make them up a bed so they ended up sleeping on our spare double. I
hope they didn’t get up to anything involving exchanging bodily fluids
without protection: our house has already been branded the conception zone,
and one baby at least has been squirted into existence by two friends who I
shan’t name.

I am doing a lot of imports tomorrow, so intend to knock off work early and
get something special to eat tonight.

Mood: Not bad. Could do with giving up the cigs again though. Patches this
evening I reckon. After a week of returning to them after mainly an 8 month
absence, I’m now sounding ten years older than my kid-like 35.

Moozik: Lots of random CD plays on Weds, but other than this, am looking
for silence.

Book: Bits and pieces from the Best New Horror compilation. I think I’ll be
ready to tackle something more intense come Monday.
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