A Sunny Christmas Day.

May peace and joy be upon you this Christmas.

It's been a mild and sunny day with the rain waiting until sunset to return. There's even been some wind and as this was the first decent drying day for weeks I got some washing out on the line. Half dry is better than nothing.

This is the print I got Peter (okay so it's for both of us but I did get him other things). It's going to look lovely in our living space. (What are you supposed to call an open plan living/dining/kitchen?) Peter gave me about a million calories worth of chocolatey goodies which will test my will power to the limit.

After breakfast and housework the sunny day tempted me out for another beach walk. A lot more people out on the beach today, at one point I did a count and got to almost 30 with surfers and swimmers in the sea too.

We've had long phone calls with the boys and it was lovely to talk to them both. 

There wasn't a lot of preparation to do for our meal which I planned for 5.00. (We had porridge and croissants for breakfast and I may have had a Lint d'Or or three in the morning which kept us going through the day.) The spare ribs simply needed half an hour in the oven, the carrot and swede mash only needed heating up and the new potatoes and petit pois cooked together in the same saucepan. That all made for a tasty meal which didn't need a dessert though I did have chocolates later in the evening. 

I've been looking on-line to see which camera would suit me best. That has been a real roller coaster ride. I began by looking at the Nikon b500 which has 40x optical zoom and the b600 which has 60x optical zoom. Both looked like good options as all the buttons and dials seem the same as my current camera. I was leaning towards the b600 until I found the b500 on clearance for less than half price at Argos. But no, not a single one to be found in any branch in the whole of Wales maybe not even the UK. Blast. But then I spotted a single vital difference. Neither of them has a small viewfinder that you put your eye to. Only a large viewfinder which my eyes can't focus on unless I hold the camera away from me. I'll try using the large viewfinder on my current camera to see if I could cope with it but I doubt it. On to the next range of Nikons. Yup, they had both viewfinders and optical zoom of 85x and 125x but also correspondingly bigger price tags and more telling longer lenses and are bulkier and twice as heavy. Next step is to look at alternative makes of camera, either Canon or Olympus.