baratron | I'm still alive here.

Christmas Day chez nous was surprisingly unstressful. We went to the vegetarian restaurant in Kingston, and ate. Lots. My parents actually found food they wanted to eat, and it all got eaten! My mum even said how much she enjoyed the nut roast, and the only thing my dad moaned about was that the curry came with brown rice! I'm impressed.

Mostly, I think, they appreciated the fact that we got to the restaurant at 3.30pm, and just sat there eating and talking until we were finished (at about 6pm). No one had to jump up halfway through a conversation to check on a boiling pan, or get food out of the oven. Food came when we were ready to eat it without any effort on our part. And best of all, there weren't piles and piles of pans to be washed up afterwards! You never know, we might have convinced them to do this again next year :)

Some presents have been achieved. Richard & I have both mostly received books, which is a good result :) Tim & Peter gave me Pokemon XD, and a Magical Trevor toy. If you don't know who Magical Trevor is, check the cartoon. Unless you're at work, and not allowed to play loud, silly songs over your speakers. (Also Magical Trevor 2, with delightfully bleepy synthpop intro, and Magical Trevor 3, which is less-immediately funny, but more surreal).

You can see how long my hair's got in the past 2 years (haven't had it cut since November 2003). The dress is from Hot Topic, and I'm wearing it because I Can. (Wanted to wear *some* kind of party dress, but most of the dresses I have are black, and I thought a black dress over a black meshy top wouldn't be "festive" enough. I need to get some non-black meshy tops). Richard is also wearing PVC, but his trousers are much more faded than the PVC of that dress ;)

The reason you can't see my feet, btw, is that by the time we got round to taking photos, we were back at home and I was wearing some decidedly non-gothic lilac slippers.

2 more photos here & here.