So that was another Christmas

My 51st though I don't remember the first 4 or 5.

It seems my ultimatum to the family that I wasn't going to brook any attempts to jolly me into the holiday spirit worked. The buggers let me read 'The Old Curiousity Shop' during that most painful of rituals, the unwrapping of the presents. This is good. This means that we've reached a compromise.

I did get one or two pressies that I appreciate. Foremost is a collection of little balls on elastic that I use to keep my hair in check. I couldn't resist making the joke 'most men have hair on their balls, I'm one of the few who have balls on their hair'. They laughed about as hard as you did reading that! :-)

The other pressie I really appreciate won't even ship until the end of February, a new book by Mark Kurlansky. His Salt: A world history[^] is a fascinating read. Who'd have thought you could write 450 pages about so common a household object as table salt and make it so interesting I couldn't put the book down? The new book seems to be about New York City and Oysters - I'll resist the temptation to google for more detail.

For the rest, Shelby and Matt were, as always, a pleasure to be with. Morgan was a little less self centred than usual and Andrew was, as always, in work-avoidance mode. When, at the end of dinner, it was time to clear the table and do the dishes he pleaded that he couldn't be trusted with Mum's best dishes. Unfortunately, Mum agreed and the little bastard got off scot free. We had words, in private later, about that. I reckon he'll never begin if he's never allowed to take the risk of making a mistake. To her credit, my wife did see the force of my argument. We'll see if he's required to assist next year!

I spent the rest of the day working out how on earth one embeds a WebBrowser control inside an ATL ActiveX object in such a way as to be able to catch the events the WebBrowser fires from within that ATL ActiveX object. I worked it out (it was frightfully obvious once I'd solved the maze of mapping macros and template invocations) and maybe there'll be an article on CodeProject in the near future. Or maybe not; I'm still trying to decide if a lightweight non MFC COM object rework of this[^] would be worth the posting.