Ah, the week before christmas. When most of the working day is taken up with long team lunches, putting decorations up, surfing the internet for last minute presents, the abandonment of the usual fascist dresscode and knocking off early because there's no real work to be done.

Is it fucking bollocks.

We're unbelievably busy this week mainly because our deadline for making the council website 100% e-Government compliant (being public sector everything is obviously 10 years behind the normal jargon, hence us striving to make sure our e-Gif issues are sorted about before the e-Forms are processed by e-Shop to make sure we meet e-Government targets etc. etc. I haven't actually made any of that up either) is the end of the year (i.e. this week) and as predicted all the council staff who've had eight months to provide us with the required info have waited until this week to dump it all on us. There's about 30 council staff who should be very grateful that I'm not Chief Executive with power to sack them. Bastards.

Anyway, I'm not ill this week which is good but probably only temporary as girl 1 was very, very ill over the weekend with flu. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before I come down with it (just in time for my only break since August - good timing!) Girl 1 kept me awake both nights I was back in Bristol with her coughing so I spent a lot of Saturday looking after her with some degree of success. I slept more on Saturday night certainly!

I also went to see King Kong over the weekend which I heartily recommend. I've been a fan of Peter Jackson since I saw Braindead (the scene where the hero fights off the zombies with a flymo is genius) and he's done a really good job with the remake. The spider pit scene had me squirming a bit though - you can see why they cut it from the original version.

The other news is on the job front. I'm not accepting an extension up here as I can't handle it any more and had lined up a job with a drinks distributors just south of Bristol to start in February (perfect timing). It's a fairly rubbish salary but with the pension and 25% off alcohol sales from the company shop ( :) ) it pushes it up towards somewhere reasonable. Plus it's a permie job and in Bristol. All good news.

Except....

....the company ideally wanted everything sorted before xmas and I said I'd be available during xmas and new year, or failing that I'd delay a day coming back up here and be ready for interview on the 3rd Jan. I thought this was all agreed. I then get a call from the pimp about 4:30pm on Friday saying that they were interviewing two other people on Tuesday (today) and only if both were rubbish would they want to interview me (despite me apparently being the best qualified, intelligent, good looking and modest of the three). If he'd told me that a bit earlier I could have tried to get yesterday free to meet them but by the time he called me it was too late to organise anything :(

So, a curse on all pimps and also on the two people being interviewed (but not in a nasty way, maybe something minor like a small limp or a sore throat or something. Perhaps an unsightly boil? Not much to ask is it?)