the weeks gone by

I guess it’s pretty obvious so I don’t need to say it, but I guess for the record the last few weeks I haven’t been blogging because I’ve just been too busy at work.

Well, I say that.  The last two and a half weeks I haven’t actually been at work!  The reason for that leave was because of work, though - I flagged up to my boss that I had been doing ridiculous hours (and was going to do even more hours before I was finished) so she agreed to letting me have time off in lieu.

So what have I been doing at work?

Well, we received some very large bids and there was very little resource available to bid for the work apart from me.  To be totally honest the situation was ridiculous - the total value of these piece of work were several million pounds as they covered many years and I was basically bidding them on my own!  And what’s more all of them had only several weeks to bid and they overlapped!

As you can therefore imagine, I was full-on with them, but what made it worse is that, because there was no-one else to do anything else, I still had to do a bunch of other stuff too.  I therefore had multiple weeks where my hours were in the order of 45 hours per week (instead of 37.5 as contracted) and I was doing loads of hours at the weekend.

I actually reached a point where I was at work but unable to do anything - I was so tired I couldn’t even think.

And so as I say I had the time off in lieu.  And I feel so much better for it.

But what did I do with my time off?

Well, a lot of time was spent doing things that I should have done during the normal week but just didn’t have time for. So I did a big pile of washing, which consisted mainly of the bits of washing at the bottom of the basket where I’ve just been doing quick washes of my basic clothes.

I also did all my Christmas shopping.  I mean, obviously I bought most of the significant presents online, but because of how Christmas is this year I’m having to buy presents for several other people (don’t ask - it’s complicated and I’m not hugely happy about it) and these are mainly of the booze variety, so I bought them at normal shops.  I also like to buy a few random gifts for people and of course there’s cards and wrapping paper, so I got all that.  I therefore now have a big pile of presents and stuff ready to go instead of some unopened amazon boxes and a list of stuff to buy.

And there was the chrimbo food buying.  While I’m leaving the break until New Year I’m still planning on having my own chrimbo roast.  So I bought pigs in blankets and stuffing and all that, which are now squirrelled away.  I’ve also bought all the food I’ll need until after Chrimbo - shopping becomes hell this time of year, so I avoid it by pre-buying, but obviously couldn’t do it until now.  In particular I bought the ingredients for my traditional chrimbo bolognaise, one portion of which I had and the others went in the freezer.

What else?  I did clean the flat - this I do every fortnight but haven't really done properly while I’ve been so busy, so that was good.

I also sorted out my big piles of Japanese magazines - the piles are huge as I’ve done no scanning.  I have a plan, though - I’m going to use my chrimbo money (and bonus?) to buy an A3 scanner.  The A4 scanner + Photoshop's “sticking together” tool is just not for me: it quadruples the time taken and is beyond tedious: so much so I’ve avoided it at all costs.  However, my old A3 scanner doesn't have a windows7 driver and the heat sink on my XP machine has packed up.

But the three things I particularly did were play some computer games, “internet stuff” (meaning reading e-mails, reading blogs and articles, buying stuff, downloading fansubs - all that stuff I used to fill my time with at work that then got moved to weekends and having been working weekends I’ve not done at all!) and, in particular, watching recorded TV programs.

Now this work isn't he reason I built up loads of unwatched TV, but it is the reason the amount of stuff has steadily crept up rather than shrunk. Well now instead of less than 30% free space I have more than 50% free.