Ten Lords a-Leaping

Wow, the tenth day of Christmas, it's almost over. It's pretty poor stuff that people have to go back to work before Christmas is over, so I was pleased to see in the Guardian yesterday that many Brits are taking annual leave during the Christmas season. What I was less pleased about was the article's title which implied that by doing this people were skiving. Bloody cheek.

Kevin's skiving today, or rather his case exactly makes my point. Like many other people in his company and elsewhere, Kevin has a backlog of holiday time which he never seems to be able to take because it's always some crucial point in the project they're working on.
He had been unable to come to the UK with me in November because the project was going to be at one of those points. Then it wasn't, so he kept his holiday time.
Now he is being bugged to take some of it. Over Christmas does seem to be a good time, not too much going on at work, and in fact there is some enforced holiday during this period. So he decided to extend the Christmas holiday, take some leave.
Wrong! He has been sent to Calgary today because he is the only engineer who can check up on the work of one of their suppliers.
Ah well, Ikea had better be readying themselves for me. Just kidding. Or am I?

I didn't make any New Year's Resolutions because, having the weeding personality, an aspect of this is setting yourself continual targets and of course, being a teacher in Britain didn't exactly undermine that side of things, far from it, it reinforced it on a daily basis.
Nonetheless, I do enjoy the idea of a fresh new year, complete with new number, to look forward to.
I did the transferring of various important dates from the old calendar to the new one a couple of days ago, and maybe that wasn't such a good exercise after all. I found I was zapping through the months and suddenly I was at December 2007 with the feeling that nothing much had changed. Of course that made me set some targets, you know, the usual ones, weight, job, personal achievements.

Another article in yesterday's Graun that caught my attention was about the dumping of kitchen gadgets.
My mother loved gadgets but she was also a very strong discourager of the 'household items as presents' school of thought. And good on her for that. She was also a discourager of the 'giving pressies just for the sake of it' thing too, so when we were all grown-up and the present finding became a chore, she called a halt and only kids got presents after that.
I did like this article though. The garlic paraphernalia, the wok, the mandolin. I love things that either have lots of functions, or that you use every day. The veggie peeler for example. Ok, uses are limited, but you use it often.
There was a time when everyone had to have a wok, but as Tim Hayward points out, many modern stoves don't have the correct level and type of heat output to render your stir-fried veggies edible. Then there are the bits and pieces that go with.
And I loved his 'inexplicable plastic thing'. Oh Lordy did my mum's kitchen drawers contain many of those. I'd say that ours do too, but it wouldn't be true, Kevin knows what all the bits of placcie are. But I also know he fears my weeding habit.