Christmas Tales

So anyway, Christmas...

Family came round - one uncle, one aunt and two cousins - which meant that I had to spend Christmas night on a mattress in my parents' room. Come on, sympathy needed! For the last few years with the family coming round on Christmas Day we've been opening presents on Christmas Eve, which I used to find sort of anti-climactic but now I appreciate it since, not only do I get to open my presents early, but it leaves Christmas Day free from all of that and means we can concentrate on family-type stuff. So we had the obligatory huge Christmas lunch (turkey, ham, all the trimmings) and subsided gently onto sofas in the evening to watch my extended edition of Fellowship Of The Ring, which occupied us for the next three and a half hours! And I now have a really, really long list of books to read, which now looks like this (in no particular order):

• Foundation - Isaac Asimov
• Look To Windward - Iain M. Banks
• Coraline - Neil Gaiman
• Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
• The Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake
• The Eyre Affair - Jasper Fforde
• 253 - Geoff Ryman
• Spellsinger - Alan Dean Foster
• The Silmarillion - JRR Tolkien
• Dune - Frank Herbert
• Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
• The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
• American Gods - Neil Gaiman
• The Dispossessed - Ursula le Guin
• Dragonflight - Anne McCaffrey
• House Of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski
• The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster
• The Beach - Alex Garland
• The Dice Man - Luke Rhinehart
• The Quantity Theory Of Insanity - Will Self
• Jingo - Terry Pratchett
• Carpe Jugulum - Terry Pratchett
• The Fifth Elephant - Terry Pratchett
• The Truth - Terry Pratchett
• Thief Of Time - Terry Pratchett
• Night Watch - Terry Pratchett

Should keep me going for a few months at least :)

And as I said, I was ill on Boxing Day and got up at 7.30 in time for dinner. Consequently I've been sleeping at odd hours ever since, which means that last night I really couldn't get to sleep. So I got up at 4am and watched one of the DVD audio commentaries for FOTR. Went back to bed at about 8am, got up three hours later. Bleurgh.

The gap year job-hunting saga goes on... it turns out that Year in Industry haven't deleted me from their database after I turned down one of their top (physics) placements without an interview, and have even amended their database to show that I'm looking for an IT placement rather than a physics one; I was offered an interview for a job with HTA Architects Ltd in London, working for their IT director. Yay! The interview's going to be scheduled for the end of January sometime, so if I get the job then my life's going to be sorted for the next four years. Scary...

And congrats to my friend Missiedith, who got into Oxford University to study Maths and Computer Science! Yay her!

Links:

• the Very Secret Diary of Théoden has now been written
• Here's a nice little Dialectizer - click to see this page in redneck, jive, and cockney dialect...