meh

I worked hard today. But I broke my own rules, probably a necessity but it left me with a bad taste at the end of the day. I have nominated Thursdays as a day when my time belongs not to my main employer, but to another service that contracts me for 1.5 days a week. I even hang a large bright orange sign on the door: “Not available for [local service's] work.” My colleagues are pretty good at respecting this; not trying to grab me for local problems. If only the guy sitting behind the door would follow the rules... Instead I ended up spending most of the morning preparing stuff for the local service for tomorrow. Problem is when I got to the end of the day I found not only had I not dictated the reports I intended to write today, but my backlog was bigger than I realised. Ugrh. I'm entertaining fantasies of going in at 6.30am tomorrow and clearing it.

I cooked dinner tonight. While I was cooking I was interrupted by a phone call from someone in an overseas country we're more than slightly familiar with, wishing to be my future employer. They'd received a copy of my CV from someone by a slightly roundabout route... Anyway, they wanted to know if I'd got their email on Monday (yes) and if I was potentially interested in their position (no). Oh. Er. Well, thank you, says she. I'm distracted. We ring off. The job wasn't even in the area I specialise in, and I've got Moroccan chicken wraps, made with turkey, about to be served. (It should be nice to be wanted, but, well, meh.) Return to the kitchen where Bronwyn, who to my twisted thinking forced this call upon me while I was cooking in the first place by not just taking a message, has added mushrooms to my Moroccan chicken—an ingredient not called for in the recipe. More like mushroom cloud in the seconds that follow, if you get my drift. I finish cooking, we inhale food. I then spent most of the rest of the evening bleaching the bathroom ceiling—if the landlord ever replaces the floorboards that are rotting we don't think we'll have to do this, but in the meantime... So I now have a clean bathroom, and a robust bleach headache. I'm munted.

Finally, Bush has won the presidential election, so as a number of people have observed we can no longer sympathise with the Americans thinking they have a president they didn't really want... Now they've definitely chosen him. I've already been boycotting the States in any ways possible. In particular, on the off-chance that we might fly to New Zealand at some point (er, ahem) I can say we will quite deliberately not be flying via American cities. This rules out flying through Canada too, as all routes through Canada then pass through LA or San Francisco. A pity. But worth it. Stick it to the man.