{"id":5262,"date":"2015-12-24T19:49:36","date_gmt":"2015-12-24T19:49:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=5262"},"modified":"2015-12-24T19:49:36","modified_gmt":"2015-12-24T19:49:36","slug":"thursday-24th-december-2015-its-christmas-eve","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/?p=5262","title":{"rendered":"Thursday 24th December 2015 &#8211; IT&#8217;S CHRISTMAS EVE"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>And I hope that you are all ready for the festive season. I know that I&#8217;m not.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, I&#8217;ve never felt less festive in my life, which is hardly surprising. It&#8217;s not the illness and it&#8217;s not the thought of major surgery but this relentless 07:45 start that&#8217;s doing my head in. Especially today because it&#8217;s blood test day so I have to be <em>\u00e0 jeune<\/em> &#8211; no breakfast for me until he&#8217;s been.<\/p>\n<p>And I had the results too this evening thanks to this e-mail subscription thing. My blood count has gone up, but a mere 0.4 to 8.1. When it was that low 2 weeks ago, they called me in for a transfusion and it went up to 9.0. I&#8217;m dismayed that my count only went up that little bit, I really was. Hence the lack of festive spirit from that point of view.<\/p>\n<p>I was on my travels last night too. I was in Canada, although a more un-Canada-like Canada I have ever seen. I was with George, a former employee of the tyre depot and we were driving around looking for something in the middle of winter with bright sunlight everywhere and not a trace of snow to be seen. We were trying to make for a town that we could see in the distance and as we approached, we ended up in a different town and this necessitated a hard-left turn right in the town centre. George told me where to turn and, much to my surprise, it was a turning into a field, right in this town centre. There were hordes of pedestrians walking along this footpath and in a complete departure from tradition, a policeman stopped the pedestrians so I could drive into this field. Here, I misjudged the entrance and ended up clouting the right-hand wing of the vehicle, which was actually a right-hand drive Hillman Imp, dark green in colour. I made the excuse that I must have slipped into some cart ruts that had pulled me out of position.<\/p>\n<p>So after starving myself until the nurse had been, I had a leisurely morning &#8211; in fact a leisurely day doing very little except write up my notes from Canada. <\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.lesguis.com\/images\/1512\/1512007.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/www.lesguis.com\/images\/1512\/1512007.jpg\" alt=\"strawberry moose trampoline sauret besserve puy de dome france\" width=\"300\" height=\"204\"\/><\/a>I was alone, though, in not doing very much today. Everyone else was at it, and in spades too.<\/p>\n<p>The trampoline is still outside and so the kids and mummy went to play on it. And, surprise surprise, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/pages\/The-one-and-only-Strawberry-Moose\/146696445365437?ref=ts\" target=\"_blank\">Strawberry Moose<\/a> went to join in all of the fun. A very gregarious moose, His Nibs has loads of fun outside playing with the youngsters and also with Violet and Sebastian, the sock-sloths. It&#8217;s all one big happy family here and everyone is enjoying himself as much as possible.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, Strawberry Moose was quite exhausted when he came back in.<br \/>\n<br clear=\"both\"><\/p>\n<p>After tea it was bedtime for the little ones, ready for when Father Christmas comes with the parcels. Of course we had to lay out some stuff for him &#8211; milk and mince pies, together with a carrot and some reindeer food.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.lesguis.com\/images\/1512\/1512008.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/www.lesguis.com\/images\/1512\/1512008.jpg\" alt=\"strawberry moose liz messenger story time sauret besserve puy de dome france\" width=\"300\" height=\"204\"\/><\/a>But no bedtime is complete without a good story, especially on Christmas Eve.<\/p>\n<p>Liz read &#8220;A Night Before Christmas&#8221; to everyone, including <a href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/pages\/The-one-and-only-Strawberry-Moose\/146696445365437?ref=ts\" target=\"_blank\">Strawberry Moose<\/a> who enjoys a good story as much as anyone else. <\/p>\n<p>Of course he&#8217;ll be up and about waiting for the arrival of the reindeer, but for reasons of his own which are entirely different from those of everyone else.<br \/>\n<br clear=\"both\"><\/p>\n<p>And so now he and I have some work to do, but we are not going to be up for long. Regardless of whatever time it might be, he and I (especially me) are wasted and I for one will be having an early night. It doesn&#8217;t matter what time I go to bed, I still have to get up flaming well early at blasted 07:45. <\/p>\n<div class='watch-action'><div class='watch-position align-left'><div class='action-like'><a class='lbg-style1 like-5262 jlk' href='javascript:void(0)' data-task='like' data-post_id='5262' data-nonce='f2107dae3b' rel='nofollow'><img class='wti-pixel' src='https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/wp-content\/plugins\/wti-like-post\/images\/pixel.gif' title='Like' \/><span class='lc-5262 lc'>0<\/span><\/a><\/div><div class='action-unlike'><a class='unlbg-style1 unlike-5262 jlk' href='javascript:void(0)' data-task='unlike' data-post_id='5262' data-nonce='f2107dae3b' rel='nofollow'><img class='wti-pixel' src='https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/wp-content\/plugins\/wti-like-post\/images\/pixel.gif' title='Unlike' \/><span class='unlc-5262 unlc'>0<\/span><\/a><\/div> <\/div> <div class='status-5262 status align-left'><\/div><\/div><div class='wti-clear'><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>And I hope that you are all ready for the festive season. I know that I&#8217;m not. In fact, I&#8217;ve never felt less festive in my life, which is hardly surprising. It&#8217;s not the illness and it&#8217;s not the thought of major surgery but this relentless 07:45 start that&#8217;s doing my head in. Especially today [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,4507,1616,330,307,21],"tags":[5222,5181,1624,5253,212,1712,2560,5565,261,5377,5245,5274],"class_list":["post-5262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dream","category-eric-hall-2","category-france","category-liz_terry-messenger","category-sauret-besserve","category-strawberry-moose","tag-blood-count","tag-blood-test","tag-canada-2","tag-christmas-eve","tag-dream","tag-early-night","tag-eric-hall","tag-france","tag-liz-terry-messenger","tag-sauret-besserve","tag-story-time","tag-strawberry-moose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5262"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5263,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5262\/revisions\/5263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lesguis.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}