Christmas

Christmas Day started off rainy, but after a few moments' reflection I went back to sleep for a few hours, failing to go out and run intervals in the wet. When we eventually got up, we ate sausages and opened presents, in the dry, a far more relaxing alternative. The skies looked grumpy all day, threatening to rain again, so our plan for a Christmas Day walk around MacRitchie Reservoir came to naught. Instead we watched a DVD of More Carols and Lessons For Godless People, which included Richard Herring's bit about buying his girlfriend an exponentially increasing series of Ferrero Rocher chocolates. What could be more Christmassy than that?

I still wanted to get a run of some sort in, so about midday I ran up Pearl Hill and did four laps of the summit as fast as I could, then jogged back down the hill. Not quite the full-on intervals I had planned for today, but then I did hammer it on the Kinect again yesterday, so my body deserved a bit of rest.

In the afternoon we went over to Buona Vista, on the western side of Singapore, for a Christmas party. It was nice to meet lots of new people and eat far too much; even now, my stomach is creaking as it tries to deal with everything that I've put inside it.

At the end of the evening, we distributed the Secret Santa presents. Every time I've been to something like this before, you just get a random present that probably isn't much cop. This time round it was made a bit more interesting by at least half the gifts being nice, and half of them being things like a bottle of hot sauce or six packets of aluminium foil taped together to look like an interesting present. As well, each person could choose to either pick a present from under the tree, or steal a present from somebody else who had already opened it. There's nothing like watching somebody unwrap a present, be overjoyed with surprise, and then have it taken away from them, all in five minutes.

There were lots of children present, and the parents usually delegated opening the presents to their offspring. This probably wasn't such a good idea, as that meant the children will now remember Christmas as that time when they open mysterious packages, find something nice and then have it taken away from them. Or it will be a useful lesson for them in how life works.

We got a box of Ferrero Rocher and some pastry forks. It's nice to have presents that have some sort of synergy. And ones that tie back to the DVD you watched less than 9 hours before. Now we sit on the sofa and groan at the revenges our intestines are having upon us.