I still want a daemon

James and I had some stepmother-stepson bonding time today - John had to make a last-minute trip to London. We mostly had chores to do in the morning: pick up the leg of lamb for tomorrow from the butcher's, go to the farm shop, and have Freda try on her potential Christmas present.

F & T weren't sure where the store was (and I was having trouble explaining it), so they came over to our house and we all went to Needham Market together. Freda gets cold easily, so she generally wears an old quilted waistcoat around the house. She's had it since the dawn of time and it's completely threadbare. New waistcoat, you say? Well, that was the plan. But she doesn't like things high on her neck, so it had to be a v-neck waistcoat. We looked EVERYWHERE. The only ones that come in v-neck are generally men's ones, which tend to be too big for her since she's quite petite. But we managed to find one, at the v. horsey High Flyers (where we got my wellies and some other stuff). It's a mens' one, but it was a 'small' so it fit. And since it was so small, it didn't fit any of the men, so it was on clearance. Which was awesome - if it had been full-price (quite expensive), she wouldn't have let me buy it. I would have had to ask the saleslady to put it on hold and then I would have had to make a second trip to buy it (and we'd have had to tell the M-i-L that it was on sale...) Phew. And I have randomly had brainwaves (and suggestions) for what to buy the rest of my NY family for Christmas. They can be a tricky group. Not sharing here, obviously, since they read it. Sorry, guys!

T decided that he wanted a coffee after the shopping ordeal (the whole thing took about 10 mins, start to finish, but it wore him out emotionally). We went to the farm shop cafe, where the coffee was pretty good, the hot chocolate was fab, and the cakes were v. yummy. We had cups of tea there when mom & dad were here - but it seemed a world away.

We coordinated with John on his return - he got off the train in Ipswich and we all went to see The Golden Compass. I LOVED the books (read them twice and made John read them), and the movie was pretty good. Most of the characters were as I'd pictured them, but it was one of those bizarre book-movies where a character will randomly reel off about 30 pages of plot in one breath. And then they'll have some drama. And then another chunk of plot. It was a little bizarre, but definitely worth seeing. And I hope they make the next two - apparently it's still up in the air. I thought the witches were perfectly drawn - Serafina Pekkala is one of my favorite characters in the books and she was exactly as I'd pictured her. Lee Scoresby was awesome, too - just the right kind of gritty.

We HAVE to break James of his most recent annoying habit: he's a movie talker. The WHOLE time, he kept asking me questions, from "Who is that?" to "Why didn't they put [something from the book that he describes in great detail] in?". Then we had the totally random comments that were unrelated to the movie. I'm pretty patient, I think, but finally I'd had enough (and I imagine the people around us had). "Kiddo, that's enough. No more questions." I'm a mean stepmother.

He tends to talk through TV programs, and he's always interrupting me when I'm reading to ask questions, and he talks through dinner. And he monologues in the car. Ok, so he talks all the time so I shouldn't really expect that movies should be any different. It's funny - he's obsessed with daemons and keeps asking us what form we think his daemon would be taking now. And now. And how about now?