Me as Santa, jolly old elf? I was quite sorry to turn down Mom's request for me to play the role traditionally played every year by 1st uncle. The Christmas Event with my maternal clan is starting in a couple of hours but, really, I don't want to be Santa.

All year long, I've kept kids at arm's length or further. Some people have phobias of spiders. My phobias tend towards the bipedal and noisy. It feels horribly insincere to make a sudden, complete transformation and pretend even for an hour that things have changed. I know it's just a role, and actors play roles all the time, but this is family.

Hope Irwin's up to the task. He's way more paternal than me.

How do we say 'goodbye' to friends who are leaving us, if not necessarily for greener pastures, then for new opportunities elsewhere? Well, Mel got us breakfast circle people and attachments over to meet at Wayne's house for a farewell barbecue for JY and Linc.

For once, there was no messing around with a messy charcoal bbq pit. Wayne cooks with gas! Meat went on the grill, flipped a few times over, and then off for consumption (i.e., to be eaten, not tuberculosis). The biggest worry was overcooking rather than undercooking the spread. The other worry was, as usual, too much food.

We commemorated their departure the same way we celebrate each others' company every day at work: over food. Anyway, since JY still 'blades with us, we'll still be in contact with each other from time to time. And now that NBS has a pair of new pink 'blades, maybe she'd like to join us sometime?

Momo, you are such a bad example! I've been taking your lead over the last couple of days. So much needing to be done, but here I am procrastinating until there are no more days left to push yesterday's work off to. I am so dead.

Madoka, June's friend from Japan, will be arriving for a homestay with us a couple of days after Christmas over the New Year. That's gonna call for a major cleanup of our house, which, I suppose, is long overdue. Notice when I take pix in the house they're always super close-up? Now you know why.

Finally got to celebrate our anniversary, a couple of weeks late. Every year around this time, we'd pick a nice restaurant to pig out at to commemorate another year of our being together.

This year, thanks to a memory jog from Mary, I picked Wild Rocket @ Mt Emily. What I did forget was that the menu is entirely fusion which I disapprove of on principle.

Regardless, we had a solidly satisfying meal. June had a pleasant "giam chye" duck/quail soup, while I had a smooth cream of cauliflower to chase down the complementary foccacia dipped in olive oil.

What June's holding in the pix is our main dish: an Aussie ribeye. Just look at the colour... these people know medium-rare. I ordered the rare, myself. Let's just say ketchup is redundant when the meat can produce such a lovely quality of red on its own. The other things in the dish are sweet potato chunks and rocket, the leafy vegetable that the establishment takes its name from.

We took dessert at NYDC. Sorry, but fusion desserts do not compute for me. Simple, honest-to-goodness cheesecake and ice-cream (so fresh even the nuts are still crunchy).

Better start exercising to burn all these extra calories off!