Christmas come and gone, and a sad start to the New Year

Well, I hope you had a jolly Christmas, fair reader.  Mine was very minimal, and very jolly, thanks for asking.  Excellent food and drink, amiable company, compliments on the Christmas lighting, all good.

Alas, the end of the year brought sad news to the House of Luuurve, and hence to the house of Sears.

Poor Bruce, Leo's noble and much loved canine companion, was humanely wafted away on New Year's Eve, and now lies serenely interred in the back garden of the HoL.  Alas, the big C got him in the end.  He was 11 years old, which is, apparently, a fair innings for a dog.

Bruce, still looking noble until the end

Also alas, Bruce's most distinctive and unusual contribution to canine lore, the much vaunted Brucey waddle, now remains forever a memory, having never been successfully captured on video (as far as I know).  This was a gait I've never seen any other dog perform, which seemed to involve moving both legs on each side together, in the same direction at the same time.  It was always performed at a trotting pace.  It seemed to work, after a fashion, although it did look quite comical. I always thought of it as a bit like skipping - not particularly efficient, but quite jolly, when one feels like doing it.

Anyway, Bruce will be missed by all who knew him.  Except, perhaps, Layla, who is only just three years old now.  For her, the lure of the new is much more interesting than things one has already encountered.  Her mother patiently explained that Bruce had been very ill, and that sadly, he wasn't coming back any more because he had died.
Layla: "So we won't have a dog any more?"
Ellen: "That's right."
Layla (after a pause): "Can we get a cat then?"

Meanwhile, almost simultaneously but in another part of the country, our most newly-wedded niece (last summer) announced that she is pregnant.  Reincarnation at work?  I couldn't possibly say.

At an altogether more trivial level, I've been having a bad day with technology today.  Ebay has taken to offering me the option of using a PayPal account which isn't even mine.  This actually sounds quite promising, in a beard-stroking BwaaHaHa! ne'er-do-well sort of way, but the account in question belongs to the lovely Jackie, so I'd never get away with it.  I can laboriously change it to use my PayPal account, but it defaults back to hers every time.  I've read other people's stories of trying to fix this issue and failing, and I've tried unlinking and relinking PayPal accounts, and logging out and in again, and rebooting and all that, to no avail.  Suggestions welcome. 
Current status: DEFEAT.  Player 0, Technology 1.

After getting quite uncharacteristically annoyed about that, I tried to cheer myself up with a nice game of scrabble on my phone.  I've been playing "Classic Words" in spare moments (of which I have a lot) for ages.  The "droid" one plays against is infinitely patient (which I like) and I can beat it just a bit more often than it beats me, which is nice.  Somewhat surprising, when the level is set to "extremely difficult", but nice.

Today, however, it wanted to re-register with my Google account, where it keeps its historic stats.  OK... so I logged it in, and guess what? It had forgotten the last six months worth of results, including my best ever scores of 484 for the game, and 148 for a single word!  Bah!  Resigned to the idea of a fresh start for 2020, I decided to just scrap the lot and start again.  To which end, I went through the settings page, and discovered the default setting "Droid doesn't use some very rare or vulgar words: True".  Ahah! That's why it never puts down QI, even though everyone knows it's in the official Scrabble dictionary!  So, of course, I set that to False and carried on.  This was the result:

Not just thrashed, but with the highest Scrabble score I've ever seen.  I was floundering around with words like GIFTED (45), HOOKER (42), AVAST (36) and the like, which in olden days would have seemed like reasonably good scores. Here are some of the words it used:  POLLMEN (83), REMOTION (61), FLAWNY (45), QAT (92), AVULSION (72),  SEINE (31), BOURNE (38), ZE and ZA (42). 

I know, I could simply tick set the "prevent rare words" setting and go back to normal, but my confidence has been cracked, and I'm feeling deflated.  Perhaps the effect has been exacerbated by an excess of New Year's Eve jollity in deepest Cornwall, and the resulting disturbed sleep patterns.  On the up side, I've got Ellen's old Samsung phone to mend (price quoted for repair £120 - I reckon I can do quite a lot better than that) and it will soon be time to bring down all the Christmas lights (without the use of specialist climbing or lifting equipment, hopefully).  So I will continue into 2020 with the same resolve as before - try not to worry about it all too much.  I hope you can all do the same.

Happy New Year!