Smells Like Christmas.

Back to warmer temperatures with no rain today and quite a few long sunny spells. I see daffodil shoots in our and other people's front gardens and some of the celandines have been fooled into thinking it's time to flower. Even the cats went out to enjoy the nice weather.

The house has been filled with Christmassy smells as I got on with baking the first of the Christmas biscuits. Oh the lovely scent of cinnamon, nutmeg and mixed spice. I held back from sneaky 'tasting' helped by singing along to songs on my MP4, can't sing and eat at the same time though the smell of butter and golden syrup melted together was so tempting. About 2 dozen each of chocolate biscuits and heart shaped lebukchen done today. I'll be adding chocolate to make them extra special  in a separate session as last year I struggled with melting the chocolate in the old fashioned way over a bowl of hot water, our microwave is too basic to use anyway. 

When I took the shopping out of the back of the car yesterday I noticed the floor of the boot (trunk) was very wet. Peter puts his shopping on the passenger seat so hadn't noticed. I kept an old dust sheet in the boot to protect the carpet when I carry bags of garden waste to the dump and that had soaked up a lot of the water but the leak needed to be found and sorted. Peter took the car down to our local garage in the afternoon where they found and fixed the leak by the boot's latch. And then wouldn't charge for the work. We'll have to take in a bottle of something as a thank you.

The Christmas cakes got another feed of whiskey tonight. The tiny syringe that comes with Patch's medicine is perfect for that job. There's a new syringe in each box of the medicine so I end up with spares. Last summer I gave what I had to the hedgehog charity for feeding any rescue hedgehogs.