Week 166: Glory Hole

A week of Christmas dinners, multiple spreadsheets, selection box ratings, sickness, lots of driving, canceled plans, innocent Grandmas, Brighton hotels, and a restful few days.

Posted on by Rowan Manning.
Tagged with ChristmasFoodFamilyGamesHealth

  • Christmas day was nice and relaxed. Charlotte and I broke out the Christmas Dinner timing spreadsheet and it didn’t let us down – dinner was great. We played a few games, exchanged gifts, and ate a lot of chocolate.

  • We managed to complete the selection box rating, the raw data is available in this spreadsheet. Unexpectedly the clear winner was Celebrations, and Quality Street is really carried by a couple of heavy-hitters.

  • Charlotte started feeling sick towards the end of Christmas day, which meant we had to quickly adapt our busy schedule.

  • On Boxing Day we still drove down from Hull towards Bedfordshire to see my family. The drive was quite chilled and we got there in time for lunch. Charlotte got put in the box room to sleep and not infect everyone. We learned a fun fact.

    As we were ushering Charlotte upstairs, my 90-year-old Grandma kept saying things along the lines of “we’ll put you in the small room, I’m sorry but it’s such a glory hole in there”. Cue lots of confused glances between me, my sister, and Charlotte.

    It turns out that Glory Hole has a more innocent earlier meaning that we didn’t know: a room, cupboard, or other storage space that contains an untidy and miscellaneous collection of objects. I let Grandma know the more modern meaning.

  • After Bedfordshire, we drove my sister down to Brighton. We changed our plan and stayed in a nearby hotel instead of on the sofa in her living room.

  • The next day we drove back to London, dropped off the hire car, and sensibly cancelled many of our further plans. I was not-so-secretly happy about all the cancellations because it meant I got to rest; I spent a lot of time playing Cities: Skylines II.

  • The one plan we didn’t cancel was cooking another Christmas dinner (thanks again, spreadsheet) for Charlotte’s brother and his girlfriend – they’d been in Australia on Christmas day and were craving a colder more festive Christmas.

  • This brings us up to New Year’s Eve, with Charlotte feeling better and ready to go and have unlimited drinks until 3 am 👍