back to work

First day back to work today.

It feels a bit weird, as I’ve had quite a long time off.  Well, actually it’s only just over two weeks, but it feels like it’s been a nice long break.

So I guess I should talk about Christmas and the new year and holiday.

Christmas I went to see my dad and my sister at my dad’s.  We had Turkey for Christmas lunch.  It’s a bit weird having Turkey as my Dad and sister have both said they aren’t hugely keen on it before, so I don’t tend to expect to have it.

However, we’ve had it for the last couple of years, where usually they like to have lamb or beef.  I think part of it is that my Dad has found a good butchers and buys what I think is called a Turkey crown.  Whatever it’s called it’s basically just a huge hunk of breast meat.

I’m assuming it’s from the one bird - that’s how he described it - but it must be a monster of a bird.  He’d basically chopped it up into three huge chunks and frozen two of them, sending me and my sister away with one each.  The third bit was what we cooked and it was a whacking great chunk of meat.

Unfortunately we got the timing a bit wrong.  We tried the thing where you skewer the meat and look for the colour of the juices, which was clear, but then when my Dad started cutting it up it clearly wasn’t quite done.

I mean, it wasn't a long way off, and we could probably have eaten it as is, but it’s always better to be safer rather than sorry with poultry.  As such my dad cut off enough for us to have then and we nuked those bits to finish them off (everything else was on the table, so we couldn’t really wait) and put the rest back in the oven while we ate.

In hindsight we should have cut it open when it came out the oven before resting it, just to make sure t was cooked and then we’d have known.

There’s normally one mistake for the chrimbo lunch, and otherwise it all went smoothly.

Unfortunately the rest of the time at my Dads was a little marred because I caught another cold!

My sister was riddled with cold when I arrived and was coughing and sneezing a lot and I could start to feel it come on within about 36 hours of arriving, so I think I caught it off of her.  Since she lives a fair way away that also would tie in with a different strain.

However, there are a couple of other possibilities.  Firstly it could have been my first cold making a comeback.  This is certainly possible, but y the time I wet away I was almost over it.

The second more likely possibility is that I caught it off someone else at work.  When I went on holiday almost everyone else in the office had a cold.  Now I had obviously assumed this was the cold that I had caught off of our “typhoid mary” (the introducer of the virus) that had then been past on, but apparently someone else’s partner had also got a cold and so there could have been another strain kicking around.

However, as I say, my belief is I caught it off my sister.

I’ll continue later in the week.