(last night, whilst playing "game of life" with matt and phil, phil lands on the "it's twins!" square. you get to choose the gender of your twins.)

phil: i'll have two boys.
alicey: would you really have two boys? if you were having twins and you could choose?
phil: yes, of course. i'm sure they'd know where they were going in life right from the start, with names like hrothgar and smackdown.

a christmas video from isabel (nearly 8MB so be patient)

yes, i had to bribe her with chocolate to sing this so nicely.
we didn't actually teach her how to sing this - she must've learned it at preschool. still, you have to admit it's pretty cute. she always gets the last line wrong.

merry christmas everybody! we're enjoying our holidays, hope you are too.

i am playing a new game called world of warcraft. it's not released in the uk until the end of february, but an old friend from asheron's call has hooked us up with a copy.

i say "us", but i have totally hogged it so far. i don't even like to admit it, but my god i'm addicted to this game. it has all the great things about asherons and none of the downsides.

more to come. first i have to stop feeling slightly drunk and jolly and start feeling like father christmas. somebody has got to do some sneaking tonight.

i finished work today. i've been there ten years. finally the day has come where i walk out and don't come back.

it was pretty disappointing actually. my leaving presentation didn't include any mention of my first nine years at the university. it was kind of like having my reference read out loud. they bought me some crappy presents. i had two meetings and worked like a bitch from 7.45am to get all my work finished.

i put "i'm free" by the violent femmes on the car stereo and drove out of there with a big grin on my face. i stopped by the entrance to take today's picture of the day. enjoy it while you can because it's not going to be public for long!

i also tore up my car parking permit. that felt good.



so long, suckers!!

this morning at 7.41am, driving between brackley and bicester, i saw a guy hitchhiking. he was walking along the grass on the side of a country road sticking his thumb out. he was wearing a flat cap and a big coat.

i drove past, instantly feeling guilty. i reckon i hitchhiked about 10,000 miles between 1991 and 1995. if it weren't for the kindness of others, that would never have been possible.

sensible alicey kicked in at this point. "alicey, you know, you have a young daughter. do you want to get stabbed and murdered? you never know what sort of nutter you're picking up. is it really worth the risk?"

i drive through a village. there are multiple opportunities to turn round. i ignore them.

voices in my head start shouting, "alicey, for fuck's sake. it's -3 outside. it's 7.45am. people don't hitchhike in these conditions for fun, you know. remember that time in bridgnorth?"

enough's enough. i stop the car, take off my ipod headphones, throw my bag in the back, move my work stuff out of the way. i turn the car round and head back to get him.

at 7.50am i go past the section of road where i saw him. he's gone. in the last nine minutes some other kind soul has picked him up. that was a nice thought to start the day with.

this morning i was in the kitchen rolling out marzipan for our christmas cake.
isabel asked if the marzipan was playdoh. when i said it wasn't, she went and got her yellow playdoh out and started rolling that out.

we were listening to her christmas tape, which is a mix of kids christmas songs, happy clappy christian songs and proper carols. rudolph the red-nosed reindeer came on. i was listening to the words and said to mattgreen, "this song has pretty much the same moral values as the rainbow fish! essentially all the reindeer hate you, then all of a sudden once you're picked for the team they start wanting to be your mates!"

mattgreen replied, "the moral of the story is if you suck up to your boss, all your colleagues will suddenly start giving you some respect. maybe it should be called rudolph the brown-nosed reindeer instead?"

can i just say good and i hope she gets what's coming to her.

tonight is matt's company's work christmas dinner. i start work for his company on 4th january and it would be a really good idea to make a good impression.

unfortunately i'm in one of those moods where basically i can't wait to get riotously pissed. you know when you're going to a party and you're really excited and you get there and drink 10 cocktails and throw up all over your dress? you don't? errrr... forget i said anything.

i've had a large glass of port already and i have so got to be careful. cross your fingers for me. i will try not to do anything stupid. no, really.

i like billboards. i think it's because i grew up in milton keynes, which doesn't have a single one of them. when i went to big cities like london and manchester for the first time, i was always wowed by the billboards.

i'm not easily swayed by the advertising - i'm much more susceptible to magazine adverts. i just like the hugeness of them and the way they change so often. the walk to isabel's nursery is pretty boring and everytime the billboards change it's like the landscape has shifted. i really like that.

at the moment there is a huge smirnoff advert up, which i've posted in today's picture of the day. it's got the united kingdom thrown out into the middle of the atlantic, and the tagline reads, "sea breeze". i like living on an island and i think i'd like it even more if we actually were in the middle of the atlantic. everytime i see that billboard it makes me smile. it doesn't make me want to drink vodka though.

last night, mattgreen and i were chatting just before we went to sleep. here's how the conversation went:

alicey: my back itches! can you scratch there, just below my fingers please?
mattgreen: you need a gold-plated back-scratcher, like mr uppity. for the man who has everything.
alicey: my dad has everything. maybe he'd like a gold-plated back-scratcher for christmas.
mattgreen: your dad doesn't strike me as being like mr uppity. mr fussy, maybe...
alicey: or mr grumpy! no... how about mr smoky?!
(this is a thinly-veiled reference to the fact that my dad has recently started smoking again. he's still at the pretending-he-doesn't-smoke stage, and my mum is still at the pretending-she-hasn't-noticed-he's-started-smoking stage)
mattgreen: i know... mr chimney!
alicey: (laughing)
mattgreen: (pretending to read from a book) somewhere out in denial-land, mr chimney's alarm clock goes off in the middle of the night. mr chimney leaps out of bed and rushes off to work!
(this is a thinly-veiled reference to the fact that my dad gets up at an ungodly hour to drive to work every day)

ten minutes later i was still having fits of giggles, followed by periods of silence, followed by outbursts of further sniggering.

this year, mattgreen and i appear to have more christmas cards to write than ever before. we've sent out a dozen or so to relatives already and i counted up tonight and we have 39 more to go.

i'm one of those people who likes to write a proper message to each person, but after writing about 10 or so, i had the following conversation with mattgreen:

alicey: god! this is a nightmare. i'm going to have to start writing 'dear x. love alice, matt and isabel' in every card.
mattgreen: you could do with a stamp. KUNGG! (matt bangs his fist on the table in a stamping motion) you could have one of those tick boxes, that say, "dear friend/relative/person i vaguely know"; "merry christmas/happy new year/see you in 2005" and so on.
alicey: excellent! i could have one of those ones you can move the letters round, like the date stamp at the library...
mattgreen: 'to friend. merry christmas. love green family' or 'dear close relative. generic seasons greetings to you and your family unit'

by the way, if you get a christmas card from us in the next few days, it wasn't your card that was annoying. honest.

well - here it is - i have finally made good on my threats to sort out shades of green.

the whole weblog has moved lock stock and barrel to blogger, which hopefully will be a bit more reliable than pmachine. i have been having trouble with spam comments - i learned things i never wanted to know about sql today whilst attempting to delete 90-odd comments about poker.

blogger also allows me to include a daily picture from flickr, who are now hosting all my baby pictures (contact me if i haven't sent you an invite and you want one). hopefully this will encourage me to take more pictures and post them more often.

the downside is: all the archives are gone. actually that's not such a big downside. they were getting a bit incriminating, if you know what i'm saying.

so - new banner, new pictures, slightly changed slinky look (and god you would not believe how many hours it has taken me to get it looking so similar to the last site)... hope you like it.