Christmas 2025

 Christmas this year was unseasonably cold. 

The temperature might have struggled to the low twenties but with a chilly wind from the south it didn't feel like it.

We were aiming for a relaxed Christmas, just us, no friends or family, or any parties - not quite true, the Athenaeum had lunch in the pub on a stinking hot day the previous Friday, and the theatre people had a windy barbecue a few days earlier, but basically it was just us and the cats.

As always, we cooked our dinner the day before, in the hope of being able to have a leisurely outdoor Christmas dinner on the deck.

But it was not to be.

On Christmas eve we rugged up and sat out with a drink to listen to the Christmas bells from the Anglican church - while neither of us are in the least religious we both enjoy the trappings and theatricality of a traditional Christmas - before retreating inside for our traditional Christmas eve prawns and potato salad.

Christmas day was even colder and again we sat inside, read, listed to jazz, ate more than we should and ended up watching something silly on iView - basically a pretty good, if uneventful Christmas.

Now I'd been silly enough to take advantage of the $500 discount and buy J a Surface Pro for Christmas - basically she needed a tablet like windows device for writing, and with the discount it seemed sensible to go for the base model Pro than an older refurbished device.

So, after watching the start of the Sydney Hobart race on Channel 9 - the only time of the year I ever watch Nine, I went to set it up for her, thinking it would only take twenty minutes, and leave me the afternoon to do something productive.

More fool me. My previous fun with changing windows configurations should have warned me that nothing with Microsoft is ever simple.

It started off well, zipping through the setup screens until it got to a point where the installation script decided to check for updates and download them. Which it did, at the speed of a snail on the aged pension. Given that we have a 500MBit fibre optic connection these days a complete download of windows would only take a few minutes rather than tediously going through each module, checking signatures and deciding which components to download and update.

It then proceeded to install the updates, which involved an hour's worth of gnomic electronic farting about, got to ninety eight percent, where the update failed, the machine restarted several times and then came right - basically about two hours to do what an iPad or decent Android tablet would do in quarter of the time.

Anyway, after numerous invocations of the deity the machine works and I have to say it's a very nice device, just a pity about the appalling installation and update routine...