I love how everything slows down at this time of year.

I’ve been hanging out watching TV for most of the day. My hands are still grumpy at me. We managed to make another batch of Oreo Truffles for tomorrow. They’re in the fridge hardening now.

At about 17:30, I found myself getting very annoyed about Baby Jesus so decided that was a sure sign that I needed to get out of the house. Weasel went with me and we slipped all over the ice. Good times.

Steam are having their annual holiday sale at the moment. I got 10 games for £36. I love me some seek and find and mystery solving games.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it, but Weasel and I have been playing Suikoden V for the last couple of weeks. Our main character is called My Penis [of course] and he is commanding the Your Mom’s Box Army. They’re headquarters are in the Glory Hole Castle. This amuses us greatly.

My hands are making me make many typos so I’m going to leave it there.

Hope everyone has a lovely Christmas day and enjoys good times with family and friends.

I think I’ve done a pretty good job demonstrating how much my wife means to me over the last 10 days. I appreciate everyone indulging me. Our wedding was ultimately very small. My family couldn’t [or wouldn't] come so it was just us and eight others. Doodle and Stoat missed it too. So I don’t have a lot of mementos from the day, but I do have this [slightly altered]:

Here’s to my wife and at least another 10 years together.

My darling sister, BlanketGirl, turns 33 today. She is one of my most favourite peoples in the whole wide world.

My sister:

1. is a talented artist and painter.
2. is stylish and beautiful.
3. loves to learn and will read anything she can get her hands on.
4. is an exceptional mother to her two gorgeous children.
5. is an endlessly patient wife.
6. is generous with her time and energy – sometimes to a fault.
7. is very kind; especially to animals and children.
8. loves deeply and without reservation.
9. is very silly.
10. is wonderfully supportive.
11. provides a sympathetic ear and a shoulder to cry on without complaint.
12. is vastly more experienced than I so is great to bounce ideas around with.
13. is respectful of me and my partners and doesn’t judge us – or anyone else for that matter.
14. cannot roll her ‘r’s.
15. helps me understand my childhood better and make peace with it.
16. is right handed, but often uses her left just to keep her brain on its toes.
17. is a huge fan of Sims 1, 2 and now 3.
18. adores Tori Amos as much as I do.
19. is the one who introduced me to Depeche Mode.
20. always falls asleep to sounds of the TV.
21. is always up for a laugh; I love her spontaneity.
22. is a wonderful cook and baker.
23. is fastidious; but not in a bad way.
24. is writing a novella; I’m so excited to read the end.
25. is a pianist. I could listen to her for hours.
26. is travelling this illness path with me, even through we both don’t want to be here.
27. consistently sees the bright side of life.
28. has excellent taste and her house is decorated accordingly.
29. is blind as a bat without her glasses/contacts.
30. helps me feel better about myself.
31. is one of my best friends.
32. works hard at all she does and gives 100% to everything.
33. is my role model and hero.

I am embarrassed to admit that I ran out of ideas for the second-to-last day. I asked Weasel if she had any ideas. She kindly volunteered to write it herself. – Amy

I’ve been reading these posts in the run-up to our anniversary with the most embarrassed and delighted face on. They make me feel loved from the top of my head to the tips of my toes and I’ve wished I had the … eloquence and level of comfort with putting myself out on the net to do something similar.

So when Amy mentioned there was a day still unaccounted for in the countdown, I felt like it was my cue to step forward and say a few words. The last ten years, hell, every day since we first started talking have been filled with the most crazywonderful moments of my life and more happiness than I ever felt like I had a right to.

To this day, she is my greatest love and my best friend all rolled into one. She makes me laugh outrageously with the simplest things and is as easily amused as I am.

We started out as a wild dream, crossing oceans for love and not worrying about what we were doing for a moment because we were too young to question it, living on a shoestring’s shoestring in a rent-free back room on love and ready meals and doing whatever we could with whatever we had because we were together – and that’s all that mattered.

And that’s still all that matters. To this day I still can’t believe that I get to wake up next to my best friend every day. Little things become so much more fun when we do them together and everything else just makes more sense when we’re sat together at the centre of it. Amy is as silly as I am (and just as easily amused), she’s deeply passionate in a way she won’t always admit to (though it underlies everything she does) and a laugh from her is worth the world to me.

We come together on so many things, but with enough of a gap to make things work. We’re both avid readers but with our bookmarks in different genres. We’re both musicians, but where she sings and plays piano I do awful things to the bass. We’re both screaming music fans of the best possible thought, but while we’re both down the front for Tori there are parts of our CD collection that very definitely belong to one or the other of us. We seem to understand each others little quirks very well, and she may be the only person on earth who I feel really ‘gets’ me. She’s one of the very, very few people I will really open up to at anything other than a surface level and it’s a liberating feeling to be able to do so.

We’ve learned a hell of a lot about each other over the past ten years (and longer than that) and to this day there are still more things we figure out, and that totally amazes me. Our getting together and staying together is the best thing that ever happened to me, and I never want it to stop.

I am happier than I could ever express that it never has to.

Jim the neighbour cat came to visit me yesterday. I spotted him at the end of the garden and I opened the door and said, ‘Jim!’ and he ran up to me and came right in. We chatted and petted for a while. I got a better bit of wool for him to play with, he even went straight to the stairs to play since that’s where we played before.

He had a sniff and nibble of our Christmas tree. He went to the door and put his paw on the glass because he was curious about the other cat [his reflection]. He asked to leave and I opened the door for him. He put one paw in the snow and changed his mind. He went back to the door two more times and couldn’t figure out the snow. Finally, he spotted a path right next to the house and he left that way.

Weasel and I went to town today [fun!] and while we were looking for Christmas day game prizes we found a little stocking full of kitty toys. It was only a pound so we bought it. I’m excited to show it to Jim.

I’ve been baking for the last two days. I made five different sorts of cookies [Sugar Puffs, Raisin Oatmeal, Snickerdoodles, Ginger Nuts and Oreo Truffles]. I adore my KitchenAid mixer. The more I use it the more I love it. I fucked up my back in the process, but I loved it. I got six lovely foil display trays and filled them up. Weasel and I took one next door this morning and we exchanged best wishes for the season and chatted about Jim [he came out to say hi]. I have three trays for my doctors’ offices. one for Doodle to share with his colleagues and one for the family on Christmas day. I loved doing all this baking!

Town was a treat. Weasel wanted to go back to the central library and I needed to get six little toys for pass the parcel etc. Last Thursday night we had a great pile of snow dumped on our fair city. We finally decided to get a taxi into the city with my wheelchair in the back. Weasel pushed me around for hours. We went to pound shops, Christmas shops, book shops, department stores and the library. We went home the long way with her pushing still so I could have pizza. She did get some raspberry beers for her trouble. It was incredibly cold, but very nice in the sunshine. We met four German Lion Dogs [who looked much like this!] too. I was petting one and praising him [as I do] and he put a paw on my wheelchair trying to get me to move my hand down to his chest. I couldn’t reach though so he just left it there.

I have updated my WG page and I’ve added a new page so you can see all the sites I link to here.

Weasel is nearing 10 years with her current employer. We both started our grown up jobs in May 2000. I left mine in October 2007 so I could die peacefully at home. Weasel is still going strong with hers.

Our work ethic is very different. I was a bit… crazy? I rarely did anything non-work related during company time. I dragged my sorry ass in no matter how sick I was [see Jan-Oct 07]. I never disagreed with the higher-ups no matter how stupid I thought they were being. I was not being paid nearly enough for the work I did, but because I knew the company was suffering financially, I never rocked the boat. I should have left long before I did, but I never had the balls. I was too scared of losing my income.

Weasel though, has a more pragmatic attitude about it. Work is a means of making money so she can live the life she wants to live. She has worked her way up through a variety of rolls over the years and is now someone who actually has underlings and larger responsibilities. She gets to influence company policy and well liked and respected. She rocks the boat when she needs to and knows that there are enough people who would agree with her that it won’t endanger her job.

I’m incredibly proud of her and how hard she works. She works differently than I do, but she always gets her work done and it has taken me a long time to understand how she works. I wasted a lot of time over the years fearful that she would lose her job. She is an excellent provider for our home and us.