*yawns* Eee I'm tired this evening. I had a good lie in again this morning although I had to get up due to immense back pain but this afternoon I've been very busy baking with my mum so I guess it tired me out. Between us we've decorated the Christmas cake and made mince pies, sausage rolls, coconut tarts, and fairy cakes, which I have to ice later on when mum's finished in the kitchen.

We always make the same sort of things but this year I know that mum hasn't been on top form and I think she saw most of today as being a bit of a chore. Hopefully, it wasn't too bad for her and she can feel relieved that her work is done for today and most of the bits and bobs for tomorrow's Christmas dinner are sorted.

Today is also my nana Joan's 81st birthday so mum brought her breakfast in bed this morning and I brought her cards for her. She also opened one of her presents from me and Chris, which was a little pink rosette with Birthday Girl on it. She usually opens her birthday presents along with her Xmas pressies on Christmas day but I thought it was more appropriate for her to open her "bit of silly" today.

I don't know whether I'll be writing tomorrow and then on Boxing Day we'll be staying over at nana's before driving down to Chris' house in Essex so I shall wish anyone and everyone that casts their eyes over this blog a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Tomorrow will be my last shift at work for the year. I can't say I'm looking forward to it either. For starters it's been bloody freezing here these past couple of days and the roads are rather dodgy so I won't be enjoying the drive to and from Durham and negotiating the car park with its 1 in 4 gradient. Then there's the fact that the whole building is closing for Xmas at 1pm apart from the library and the security guy so there'll be three of us in library and most likely the powers that be will have forgotten about this and will turn the heating off (again). Dicing with death, freezing and being bored to tears, oooh luvverly.

At least this morning I got to see a happy Chrimble baby :D I went to Vickie's new house to drop off their pressies and she let me have cuddles with Evie then she opened her pressie so we could see what Evie made of it. She seems pretty intrigued, talks to it a lot and gets narked when she can't grab the bit that she wants or make it jingle. The seal of approval was given though when she managed to get a teething ring straight in her mouth so I am a happy godmother :)

Work was an absolute sod this morning. It was my penultimate shift of the year and thankfully most of the students have gone home for Xmas otherwise I'd have given up and gone home early. When we got in first thing this morning there were strange messages on out computers saying something about the programmes having to shut down so I clicked OK and restarted them... and they shut down. We rebooted the computers and as we were trying to get our system online I noticed that our machines for the online catalogue were all off as well so I went into the office and saw the computer that controls the networking and possibly the server for our building had been switched off despite a huge note on it saying not to. I went up to the department's computer room to get the out of hours ITS number only to find that all the computers there were buggered too.

I rang Main Library and, of course, everything was peachy there so I rang the only ITS number I had, which thankfully gave me two other numbers (for the same person, it turned out) to ring. I ended up talking to some bloke called Robert who is responsible for university systems across the whole of the North East (he thought I was at Northumbria uni) and eventually he said that he'd put us on priority status and someone should be coming out to fix the problem. That someone never came so we had to tell all the library users that any books they returned wouldn't come off their accounts until Monday although they would then be backdated so that no fines would be incurred and that any books they took out today would also not go onto their accounts until Monday but that they were OK to have them once we'd filled in the emergency back-up forms *rolleyes*

As I said before, thankfully we didn't have many people in and we hadn't been left a great deal to do so we ended up sat in the back room drinking tea and opening our Xmas pressies to each other for about an hour. We still got everything done that we had to do though and got out on time for once. So, it could have been better but it so easily could have been worse. Let's hope that my last shift next Thursday goes a bit more smoothly.

I have had another very productive day in the kitchen today; I maded 60 pepperkaker biscuits. I couldn't scale down the recipe to make less because of the weird measurements and the fact that they wouldn't taste right without the correct amount of spices in them so I made a whole new batch. The intention was to make a load for my parents to take to my grandparents in Leeds tomorrow but as it ended up making so many biscuits it looks like we'll end up eating most of them. That's no bad thing though cos they're very tasty and this time Chris helped me decorate them with writable icing that I bought (I couldn't be fussed with getting green food dye everywhere from making glacé icing again).

I got two suprising communications today regarding jobs I've applied for. The first arrived in the post and was about the casual work available at the County Record Office. I'd totally given up on this job because it's been so long since I applied so getting an interview for it was a nice suprise. The second was about the Extended Hours Supervisor post at the university. I was astounded to get a reply to this so quickly as I only emailed my letter and CV off yesterday but I've got an interview for that one too. I had a feeling that I might get one for that anyway as there's no real reason for them not too and at the moment the job's only available in house. However, I get a feeling that some of my colleagues may have also applied for it so whether I will be successful remains to be seen. So if everything goes we'll I may have three part time jobs on my hands next year and that's not counting the fact that I'm meant to be employed by the County Council already to work in their public libraries although they've never actually called for me to come in (their loss LOL).

I have just realised that sixteen years ago today I took my Brownie Guide Promise. I don't know why this date always sticks in my mind other than the fact that it was exactly six months after my seventh birthday and the number 13 is my lucky number due to alarming regularity with which it crops up in my life (I was 13th on the class register in Years 7-9).

Also, I have just ended a massive philosophical debate with my co-worker for the evening. It started off as a sort of argument as to whether cynicism and scepticism could be considered to be the same (I won that one, they aren't the same) and ended up with Ocham's Razor, at which point I annouced that I was going to the toilet and then for a cuppa. I can't understand why whenever I work with this particular person we end up having some sort of mental conversation and I wonder whether he's like this with everyone LOL He's just coming back from his break now so au revoir.

I baked today :D I got all domestic and made a batch of pepperkaker biscuits (Swedish gignerbread, apparently) in the shape of stars, Xmas tress, and holly leaves. The recipe said it made 38 biscuits but somehow I ended up with over 50 and had to throw some of the dough away cos I didn't have any more room for cookies and it was getting too dry from being rerolled and floured. However, they are bloody lovely and I've iced them now so they're all pretty. Chris is gonna make me some little boxes to put them in and I'm going to take them into work as my Christmas treat instead of getting shop bought biccies.

Finally we made the bloody Christmas Cake! I've only had the dry ingredients weighed out for oooh three or four weeks *rolls eyes* Mum and me usually make the cake at some point during October week because when I was at uni in Manchester, this was reading week for me and I'd come home. However, this year, despite my best efforts, things got in the way and it's been put back further and further to the point that I thought it was gonna end up as a Simnel Cake instead. How it is made, I just took it out of the oven and it smells lovely. Mum's gonna give it a good dousing in rum tomorrow when it's nice and cooled so hopefully it'll be good and marinaded by the time it's marzipaned and iced on Christmas Eve.

Today also marked the annual argument over the Christmas decorations. Every year mum tries to get the whole family involved in decorating the house and my dad always finds some excuse to not join in or annoys everyone so much that he gets sent away. He tried his damnedest to piss everyone off but mum wouldn't let him leave so he sat and "directed" until mum press-ganged him into hoovering up the fallen bits of Christmas tree, glitter and tinsel, and putting all the empty boxes away in safe places whilst Chris made us a cuppa and we decided which ornaments should go where. It could have been worse; Jamie could have stolen the tree chocolates and mum could have garotted dad with some fairy lights.

Gotta love that festive family spirit LOL

So it looks like I wasn't the only one unhappy with Northumbria's marking system. One of my friends' dissertation was mysteriously lost so she's unsure whether she's actually passed the course or not and she didn't receive any information about graduation through the post so she had to email and ask what the hell was going on. Another girl had to hand in an essay late because she had an accident and broke a couple of ribs so missed a fair bit of the second semester but although the essay was marked and she was emailed the grade, it wasn't tallyed onto her module marks resulting in a score of 11% for one class!
Conclusion: UNN couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery.

Yesterday was graduation, which is how I came to see these people and find out about their mental situations. The ceremony was good although it was amazingly windy in Newcastle so I had to fight to keep hold of my mortarboard. The hood on the robe was also really heavy and kept trying to make a break for it so I spent a lot of time fighting with it to keep it in place and not strangle me. Then there was the fact that loads of peolle weren't down on the seating plan so had to sit seperately and be filtered into the line as we went onto the stage. There were obviously a lot of people whose names weren't on the order of service booklet either, which must be a real kick in the face when it's your special day.
Conclusion: UNN couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery.

The strangest part of the day was that we had some special guests at the graduation. Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, famous for 'Porridge', 'The Likely Lads', and 'Auf Wiedersehen, Pet" amongst others, were there to be awarded with honorary doctorates along with all the rest of us. It was a bit weird but so cool to be on stage with them... it was a bit awe inspiring LOL
Conclusion: I bet they're pleased they didn't have to study at UNN.