How clever is that!

I chopped the Christmas tree up into very small pieces and put it into large plastic bags. Then I took it to Broadripple park where the Christmas trees go to die. This took about four hours. Next year we are getting a smaller tree.

Then I tried to vacuum up all the needles – of which there were approximately one trillion – and were all over the house. I vacuumed for an hour and when I had finished and put the vacuum cleaner away I found even more of the little blighters hiding in nooks and crannies.

I will hunt them down over the next month or so but I suspect they will be a bit like the hairs from the Reindeer rug - and haunt us for years to come.

Did I mention that Cate resurrected the Reindeer rug? It now resides on the sofa in our bedroom – and scatters hairs to the four winds. I took some to Canada with me on the bottom of my bag and spread them around Montreal and St Johns.

Today I finally downloaded Shazam. This is an App that listens to music and tells you what it is. How clever is that!

I think Shazam has been around for some years but I have never really needed it because I listened to – and watched - a lot of music when we were in Vienna.

We have about 275 channels on our satellite TV – but none of them is a music channel – and we have no Indie music stations here – so I have to ferret things out as best I can. They do have country music stations here – which I like to listen to in small doses. But there is a limit to how long one can listen to someone howling mournfully about lost love.

Anyway – I occasionally hear music on the local stations that I like – but they never say what it is – hence Shazam.