Last Day Of The Month

November has absolutely flown by, as will December I'm sure - all the excitement and madness that is Christmas and then it's all over in the space of a day. I for one am very excited for Christmas though; it's our first Christmas in our own house and just the two of us (three, if you count the dog!). We love spending time with family and this will be the first time that I won't see my parents and brother on Christmas day, which will be very strange. However, I'm really looking forward to Jack and I not having to rush around to see each other's families and we can instead do what we like and then catch up with them all for New Years Eve & Day.

Made some sausage rolls for my work colleagues on Friday; I did plain sausage rolls, sweet chilli, caramelised onion and mustard too.

It was a busy weekend for us. I tried and failed to get more Christmas cards made so that's this week's task. I did however manage to tidy up the conservatory which is currently being used to store all manner of bikes, tools and gardening bits until Jack's shed is built. We can at least now turn around in the conservatory and I won't keep stubbing my toes on Jack's various toolboxes. We had a lovely meal out in London on Saturday night with our friends; we try and get together for a meal near to Christmas each year to make sure we have a good catch up and now that we're all living in different places, London seemed like the logical place to meet. We had a lovely dinner, a few drinks and caught the train home again. Jack had to work yesterday so I got on with housework, sorting the landing bookshelf, cleaning inside windows, and getting side-tracked along the way with magazines and paperwork I kept discovering. I also took Barry on some wet and windy dog walks too which he enjoyed despite the weather. So other than the dog walks I didn't venture outside all day but was constantly on the go indoors. I certainly did a lot of steps yesterday and the screenshot of my Fitbit proves it!

 A day indoors and I still managed to do a lot of housework exercise!

 

Jack bought me a Fitbit a couple of months ago and I love it; I had wanted one for quite a while and was pleased when Jack came home with a purple one for me (my favourite colour). The main reason for wanting one is because I do an office-based job it's very hard to do the target 10,000 steps you should do every day. This has got considerably easier since owning a dog - on weekends I can do over 20,000 steps in a day when we're going on really long dog walks. My Fitbit also measures heart rate, how far you've walked/ran, how many floors you've done (how many times did I go up and down the stairs yesterday?!), calories consumed, calories burned, measures your sleep pattern and more. It's spurred me into keeping active and next Spring I hope to try and improve my heart rate when I get back into running (I'm a warmer-weather type runner), but for now I use all the dog walks as an excuse for my daily exercise :-)

 

Barry snoozed most of Sunday in between our blustery walks around the village & fields

 

In between lots of housework I managed to cook a lovely leg of lamb that my Nan had given me when I'd last seen her and she'd given me half the contents of one of her freezers (see related post here)! I roasted the lamb my favourite way; with garlic and lots of rosemary sat on a bed of vegetables and with a good glug of white wine too (didn't have any red and white actually worked really well). I made such a tasty gravy, it was almost better than the lamb! We've got lots of lamb left over that I'm making into a Shepherds Pie tonight - yum!

 

Roast Lamb yesterday with a mountain of veg because that's my favourite part of a roast dinner with lots of gravy!

 

Last night we finally got around to catching up on some TV series we had recorded; Homeland has been a favourite of ours but this latest series hasn't been anything to rave about. I'm looking forward to the next series of House of Cards, definitely recommend it! I did make Jack endure Strictly too, I don't think he minds it too much but I love watching the dancing, I'd love Georgia or Anita to win. We did watch the tennis highlights too, what a game for Andy Murray and Great Britain! Formula One is over for another year too, which now means Jack will be extremely busy at work making parts for the F1 cars of next season.

 

Wishing you all a good week!

 

Em x