We had a quiet Christmas day. We're hosting two couch­surf­ing young women from Kazakhstan. They and Raven and Iain were our dinner guests. We roasted a leg of lamb and an assortment of root vegetables. For dessert, we had one of my Christmas Puddings.

Aside from a few hours spent at two parties, we've worked from when we got up until midnight getting the bar room back in shape. I spent a couple of hours just washing all the greasy crystal glasses this morning (not to be confused with last night's cleaning the booze bottles). We sorted through all the cookbooks and set aside about a third of them. The room is now ready to use again. Alas, we've moved a pile of stuff tem­porar­i­ly into the spare room, which will have to be dealt with soon.

As I mentioned last week, we started painting our "bar room" blue. The picture above shows the new color—and why we call this room the bar room.

The kitchen stove is just on the other side of the doorway, but the extractor fan is about six feet left of the stove, over the sink. The kitchen was remodeled and expanded in the 1960s; I believe the original stove was under the extractor fan. One con­se­quence of this is that, over time, bottles and glassware in the bar room become greasy.

I cleaned all the bottles tonight. Some of them needed it quite badly.

We have a sizeable collection of liquor and liqueurs, but …continue.

It seems old-fashioned to do so, but I still like to send and to receive Christmas cards. We wrote 30 cards last weekend. Almost all were Wondermark Multi-Purpose Greeting Cards, from a Kick­starter that Emma con­tributed to a few months ago.

Speaking of Kick­starters, No Holds Bard showed up in my Facebook feed today. I was so tickled by the concept that I anted up $10. I've read several novels where Will Shake­speare was a character, such as Ink and Steel and Revenger, but never a comic book where he was a superhero.

Yesterday, we started receiving cards from other people. A couple of dozen more will follow.

Two weeks ago, we painted the kitchen blue. A deeper blue than I had intended. It had more than a little bit of the Greek taverna about it.

Today, we started work on the "bar room", the room between the kitchen and the back yard, where we keep the booze. No painting yet. We've taken everything out of that room and cleaned. Fifteen years of cobwebs have been removed from behind the book cases.

Soon, a lighter blue.

As I announced a couple of weeks ago, we're off to Berlin for June and July. We leave the house at 4:30am tomorrow to catch a 6:45am flight to Chicago and thence via Dublin, arriving in Berlin at 10:30am on Tuesday.

There's nothing like a deadline to focus the mind and make things happen. We've been spring cleaning furiously for several weeks. Frankly, it was long overdue. The bedrooms and the offices were all badly in need of being re­or­ga­nized. My office used to scare me, it was such a mess. It's still far from perfect, but it's much cleaner, you can use the desk, and the remaining clutter is stacked …continue.

Emma and I are going to spend most of June and all of July 2015 in Berlin.

Two years ago, our friend Joanna announced that she was going to spend a year in Paris with her husband and daughters. This got us thinking about spending a year in Europe ourselves. After con­sid­er­ing Bilbao and some other cities, we eventually decided upon Berlin. We had both studied German in high school or college; Berlin is a vibrant cultural city, full of history and art; it's a tech hub and a startup magnet; and it's con­ve­nient­ly located for travel within Europe.

We spent a week there last year in early August, staying …continue.

Allergies kick in strongly for me at this time of year. Usually a daily an­ti­his­t­a­mine is enough. This morning, I woke up from a poor night's sleep with crusty eyes, itchy nose, and explosive sneezes. I lasted at work until early afternoon, then came home to take to my bed.

It's the fiftieth an­niver­sary of the death of my maternal grand­fa­ther, George Victor Clery, on 3rd March 1965. It did not come as a shock to the family. His health was often poor and he had been ill for some time. He was born a month premature on 30th March 1900 and his mother was told she would never rear him. Nev­er­the­less, he grew up to become an avid golfer and tennis player, to marry and father five children, and to live all the way to a brief retirement, though not quite long enough to see any of his grand­chil­dren. Both I and my cousin Siobhán were born in the …continue.

Reading Why the Eyewear Industry Is An Incredible Rip-Off reminds me that I need to get some new glasses. I had my eyes tested last month and there is a small change in the pre­scrip­tion. I've had my current glasses for about six years.

From ages 12 to 44, I needed only distance lenses for my myopia, but then in the space of just a few months, I developed the classic problem of middle age: it became hard for me to read. I got a pair of glasses with pro­gres­sive lenses. I was used to having fairly clear peripheral vision and I had to learn to turn my head rather …continue.