Nearly Christmas. Well it’s about that time again and quick glance at my retirement life will tell me things are a little bit different this Christmas. Probably not with the actual Christmas bit itself but rather in the general context and lead up to it. I’ll let you know next time about actual Christmas.
As to the context, there’s the on-going challenges to my health, for example. This includes another MRI scan on Tuesday (today). But I’m not writing about this side of retirement in this blog, you might say I’m saving this for a grand exposition. We’ll see.
My music is different in the sense that there hasn’t been any this last couple of weeks, not since my on-stage mayhem at the last Baildon gig. And I hate to say this but I haven’t missed either the folk fiddle or the jazz. Maybe it will be different in the New Year.
What I have done is venture into our attic and mess about with the recording equipment (as in photo above, not a Christmas present though)I bought several months ago during Covid and when I thought I might never play in public, even rehearsals, again. I bought it way back when, and to cut a long story short, I haven’t used it. Until now. I’m not sure what this tells me but it must mean something. It’s quite a complicated piece of equipment as you may see and I’ve forgotten everything I learned when I bought it. Have to start from scratch.
As I have written before, I’ve cut down on writing this blog to one a week. This has worked out well from the point of view of reducing the pressure on me so definitely more relaxing. Bizarrely from a Google ranking perspective it’s also been a positive. Which is weird because since writing only one blog a week, as opposed to three and a podcast, I’ve moved up the rankings. I was in first place and at the moment I’m second which makes no sense to my non IT mind. If anybody can explain I’d welcome a better understanding of my blogging.
Which leaves my wine-making. I already wrote last week about what was happening in this part of my retirement world. So just a quick update. I’ve been putting off racking / filtering the white wine because I really wasn’t sure how to do it. But now with a little moral support from my son-in-law we got it done. We racked the white wine from the plastic barrel into demijohns (so I can see what’s happening to the wine as time goes on). We had a little taste while we were doing so. So far so good we think.
We haven’t travelled anywhere (in the past we might have spent a couple of days in that London or even the Yorkshire Dales) but what with the weather, the strikes and the general pre-Christmas madness, we’ve been jolly glad to stay at home. We’ve had a couple of meals out with friends and a return to an old eating ground for Mrs Summerhouse’s birthday. But that’s about as adventurous as we’ve got but that suits me fine.
Nearly Christmas summary
So here we are hurtling towards another Christmas. I don’t want to appear complacent but I feel we’ve just about got in knocked into some kind of reasonable (i.e. selfish) shape. Just about how we like it. But I’ve also learned not to be too smug about these things, after all there’s plenty that can go wrong (burst pipes seems popular in the family at the moment).
PS. Incidentally this weekend in the paper was an article about grape growing / wine making in Sweden. Quite the coming thing apparently and the article told us they are picking now (i.e. December if you hadn’t noticed). And I worry about picking late. Probably the most gratifying bit in the article was the part telling the reader what grapes they grew – Solaris and Rondo – the very varieties we grow. If they work in Sweden’s climate they should produce for us. Nuff said.