A quite New Years (primarily owing to illness and poor transport), although we did have a few visitors. Plenty of wine, some nice New Zealand sparkly wine, and (predictably) Triv at 3am - which Joel and Kieran won

Very cold - bitingly so - but we went out to the KWVR for their Mince Pie Special (basically a bloke comes down the train with mince pies). When we'd finally got out of the house it made us feel tons better, and we got some Christmas beer in on the CAMRA buffet too

A day of recovery and relaxation. I'd left the 10D at Ruth and Brian's, so I ended up using the Powershot to attempt to shoot the early morning moon over Wrenthorpe: didn't quite work out. Ben also took a shine to the washing machine (especially on the spin cycle).

Well, Ellie started it out at 6:30am and we wandered downstairs to find Santa had been Tim was with us (in body, although not really in mind given he'd been on the lash until 2:30am) which was really nice. Then off to cook goose!

Cooking in preparation for Christmas day, a paella for tea, a Christingle candle (which Ellie used to set fire to her hair), syllabub, and wrapping presents. In short, a typical Christmas Eve really!

Some odds and ends of pics which were left on the U30's memory stick.

The kids were a handful.

It's a Toshiba, to replace the Dell whose screen fried within two weeks of us getting it

A rush of blood to the head when the kids had gone to sleep ensued in me and Nicky putting up the Christmas tree, and then attempting to take some arty shots which worked, sort of.

Bits and bobs. And Nicky drinking wine.

Caught between appointments and work stuff and I was around Covent Garden, so I took a few snaps while I was there.

Beers in the office, followed by more beers at the Pickled Pelican, followed by a dinner and dance at Barbarellas.

He's our youngest member of staff, y'know.

Having a duff USB port means that my memory cards are having stuff left on them right now - this is a few random photos which were left on my little Sony U30. Includes gratuitous seafood cocktail shot - don't click if you don't like tentacles.

Was pottering around on Sunday morning and stopped just off the M621 to get a photo of Leeds as it slept. More an experiment than anything

We started at around 4ish with alcohol in the office (and Nicky wrapping mugs again), followed by a coach to Leeds to the Fab Cafe. After lots of sugar there (and an attempt by Gaz to snort sherbert) we went off to TigerTiger for dinner. Mmm, yummy raw steak. Mmm, cocktails.

Millions of mugs, millions of t-shirts, so we've got a new system to deal with them.

In a bandana alice band, Guns-n-Roses on the radio, she decided she wanted to mosh a bit.

We'd had enough of work, so got in the car and went to York for the day optimistically to do some Christmas shopping. In reality we just pottered around and forgot about the world for the day, and remained calm and relaxed even amidst the sea of idiots who really insisted on me running over their heels with the pushchair.

More shifting stuff into the workshop, configuring machines, wrapping mugs...

Christmas rush in full swing, Nicky's moving more production to the office. So we paid a trip to Ikea at lunchtime and got some desks.

One of the fileservers was acting funny so we moved the RAID array to another box. Mmm, 3ware cards are ace.

Christmas orders to be fulfilled, children to be entertained, shopping to be done. Never really ends eh?

On a trip to GS1 to fit another Fotopic fileserver, I took a few photos while stuck in traffic jams in London. Oh, and a couple of the racks at GS1 as well.

This is only about half the event, because the heavens opened and poured loads of rain on us. Because the Ridings Shopping Centre had closed as well nobody really had anywhere to run, and sadly it all turned into a damp squib.

Ben's getting a bit boisterous now!

With the afternoon came Joel's charity reverse bungee jump in aid of Jimmy's Hospital in Leeds. Basically, this involved Joel being shot in the air in a metal cage - Neal was meant to be here too but in his absence Lawrence stood in. Exhilerating, but I'm not sure it'll happen again...

After spending most of the past year or so in Iraq and Afghanistan on diplomatic service, Nicky's best friend Jane came to visit while she was in the country and play with the kids.

Take one Internet meme, a colour laser printer, and a coder whose brain has been mashed with coding new rules into the postage system. End result, a blue dinosaur thing.