A Cold Snap: Take Three... (Real Gainsborough)

Well, I eventually got tired of watching the snow and decided that I'd see what the results were in the morning.
I was woken up at half 7 in the morning by my mum telling me that it had been snowing (really?) and that we had better set off early just to be on the safe side. I'd managed to write our traditional christmas music album to CD the night before, so after a cup of tea etc, we grabbed that and headed out to the car.
As it turned out, despite the inch and a half of snow, troad conditions weren't really a problem, and we made our way to a local petrol station, where I reinflated the car's tyres (always me that does it, never the car's owner, ever) while my mum got us a couple of sausage sandwiches.

A quick drive round the houses (well, round Wentworth) and we eventually passed over the M18 and into the countryside, noting that some public buildings in Maltby already had Christmas lights up. A nice drive through a couple of towns later, and we arrived in Gainsborough, fnding a parking spot first time!

Instead of going straight to the hall, we spent some time walking around the market and shops etc, where my mum found an art shop. Being a big creative-type person, my mum had to go in, and I went along with it, finding some nice jars of coloured glitter/sand to make abstract photos of.

Eventually though, we wandered round the mostly-still-undisturbed snow to go round the Hall. Again, we met some familiar faces, bought some nice stuff, and as always, sat down in the great kitchen next to the fire, with mince pie and a huge (compared to last year's!) drink of fruit punch stuff.

Eventually we left, and wandered around the town again visiting the various shops, where I picked up some all-important pork crunch, as well as a cool lil' cartoon bedspread for the lil' dude to sleep under at Christmas time/Xmas eve, depending on arrangements for who's coming over and when, and whatnot. I also bought two inexpensive but "luxury" (funny how words like "Luxury" and "Professional" are used to denote products that generally aren't luxurious, and usually aren't useful for professionals, isn't it) hollow-fibre bed pillows, in a nice bulky plastic bag, which I vaguely considered using to bat annoying shoppers out of the way, to upgrade my cool bed, turning it into an awesome bed.

Eventually, we left Gainsborough and proceeded to the next stop on our little travel plan, Tickhill Garden Center, which as always, had a nice Christmas department (complete with 2 "dead" (until I put them back upright) illuminated reindeer) with various christmas lights and whatnot. I noted with annoyance and a tiny smidge of amusement, that rather than go and buy a real Christmas CD, this place was playing a horrible mixture of crappy cover versions (no doubt by obscure "who he?" artists), of songs that themselves weren't particularly festive. But no matter, I managed to get a cool pressie for my dad, and my mum bought some terribly bad (but quite inexpensive) chocolate/walnut praline thingies.
So there we were, driving round the countryside, listening to our nice Christmas CD, eating chocolate digestive biscuits, pork crunch, and crappy walnut chocolates.

Now remember I mentioned that my ickle nephew had become fascinated with a certain product he saw on TV, "this year's must-have toy for kids" apparently, well, I'd been searching online to find it cheapest, and discovered that while most places wanted £30/35 for it, good old awesome Toys'R'Us only wanted £25 for it.
Of course they also wanted £5 delivery, so we figured we'd drive there and save me £5. After a quick search, we managed to find the armour, "Reduced: Was £25, now £14.98". For a £35 product, wahey! So it was very quickly bought.
Realising also that the lil dude desperately wanted some shiny golden bits to stick on it (well, shiny silver bits - see below - , but we weren't given a choice (!)), and Toys'R'Us didn't have the accessory sets in stock, we drove even closer to home to pop into Argos, which did have them. However, bizarrely, you paid for an accessory set, and you didn't get to choose which one of the three you were given. Which is a shame cos out of Spikes (you don't get the gold things on the bottom), Flames, and Wings, I reckon Wings is (at least as far as the shoulder spines and shield spikes are concerned) probably the least good of the three.
On the other hand, the gold goes with the blue a lot better than silver would have, and the helmet crest looks awesome. The shield doesn't look that bad, so maybe it's just personal preference. My nephew was very definite about wanting Spikes, but later admitted he didn't really mind which set he got as long as he got a set.

The armour itself looks pretty cool (I had a peek before wrapping it all up), and is made, as you can see, of one million and one pieces of some sort of plastic foam, all joined together by special plastic clips called snapperons. The snapperons that join the majority of the armour are shiny black, but the box also points out with great enthusiasm that included with the set, are two "free" silver ones. Silver or Gold snapperons are available to purchase seperately, and I'm toying with the idea of getting some, purely to make his armour look even cooler. By and large though, the stuff looks extremely well designed, and to be honest, I wish I was 6 again just so I could get my own set, heh.
I have, as I mentioned, been spending most of today sitting on my awesomely upgraded bed, supervising my nephew, eating pork crunch, and wrapping Christmas presents (6 wrapped so far), and surfing for yet more presents. I didn't get the little guy a sword, mostly because no one who knows him trusts him not to run round hitting people/animals with it. Instead I was/am considering getting him this, on the strict condition that I will keep hold of the arrows for him, and he is to only ever use it in the park :-).

That's about it really. What's left of the snow is slowly turning to frozen puddles, the roads, while mostly snow-free are now covered in patches of glass-like pearlescent ice, and it is still, regardless of the insanely bright and surprisingly warm winter sunshine, brutally hand-burningly cold. It's quite cloudy tonight, as well as hugely cold, so hopefully tomorrow morning will see at least a few inches of fresh snow.

In the meantime, I'm going to sit about, look forward to sleeping on my awesome bed (now with 6 pillows!), daydream about Christmas, surf for presents, and look for food. I would have bolted this entry onto the bottom of the earlier one, but I was so sleepy yesterday that I really wasn't in the mood to do a big writeup, and instead just wanted to make up and try out my awesome upgraded bed :-).

Here are some shiny pictures :-). It was nice to go on a Christmas outing with snow on the ground, for once :-).

Mini Epilogue Bit (22:56):

Well, having done more reading online, it seems that I should really buy extra snapperons to attach the extra bits to the armour. So I have done - the lil' dude now has two addon packs of 6 gold snapperons to make his armour look even cooler :-).