Christmas!

And Christmas is over.
Phew!
Until next year when we do it all again.
Why is that every year I end up doing my shopping on Christmas eve?
I can't seem to face the crowds and the mania until my back is truly and firmly up against that wall.

The kids were happy with their gifts and seemed very contented - bickering at an all time low!
Hubster was pleased with his gift too.
All good no?

No actually.

Got the dinner cooked and nobody was poisoned by the 'frozen' turkey which refused to cook through in the allotted time.
Hmmmm
I took it out the day before and left it in the kitchen to defrost.
I expected one day (24 hours ) to be enough ........
however when I went to carve up it was raw so
We had everything else instead.
and a few slices off the outside of the bird where it was cooked perfectly.
So I re-wrapped her in her magic cooking bag and banged her back in the oven for another hour and she was cooked fine .
Only now everyone was stuffed to the gills
What am I going to do with 4 lbs of turkey?
Cold cuts to the visitors and spaghetti with meatballs for lunch yesterday and its gone!
just like that.
It was an uneventful Christmas
and that's how I like it.
Hope yours was deadly boring too.
Without drama.
We don't need drama.

The 'flu laid me low

And because of it I want to cancel Christmas.
I haven't gone shopping, I haven't sent cards and I have no appetite so Christmas dinner is looking dodgy at best.

In an attempt to get the old creative juices flowing I did a bit of surfing and came accross this article in 'Galley Cat' from 2009. So its 2 years old but I thought relevant.
The article that lead me to this one was a Bloomberg one called 'getting dirty in dutch'and was about the rise of Amish Romance fiction http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_31/b4189069953563.htm
While the article is judgemental and condesending (I kind of expected that) what I didn't expect was the analysis of each genre and how the interests (quilting and knitting ) contributed to the way the books were categorised.
What ever happened to saying 'I enjoyed that. It was a good story with characters I cared about'


10 Most Popular Professions for Romance Novel Heroes
In the upcoming book A Billion Wicked Thoughts, neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam studied thousands of romance novels looking for clues about social expectations.
After analyzing 15,000 Harlequin books, they came up with the most popular professions for heroes in romance novels. The complete list follows below–

what do you think?
1. Doctor
2. Cowboy
3. Boss
4. Prince
5. Rancher
6. Knight
7. Surgeon
8. King
9. Bodyguard
10. Sheriff

I think I like the idea of a doctor cowboy who is the boss on the ranch!