Christmas is fairly quiet for me this year. Family on the day. Catching up with friends on either side. A couple of days off work scattered around. Not bad, but certainly not the raging celebratory period it could be.

In a startling and entirely unexpected turn, it seems that I actually enjoy my job now. Not to the degree where I leap out of bed each morning, but I certainly don’t mind going in each day. I’ve moved teams, changed my day-to-day work from repetitive processing to more sophisticated data analysis. I’m no longer on the phones and have a great team leader and manager. It’s a rather unofficial move, but the only problem is that I’m not being paid what I should be getting paid. I’d still rather being doing this work than my previous work for the same money.

My team leader had a private chat with me on last Friday and said that he hopes he’ll have a more permanent solution ready by the end of January, and gave me a gift voucher to a department store as a thanks for doing the work I’m doing. Not bad at all, and a nice little christmas bonus (I already had to use some of it to buy presents).

To all my readers, whether it’s slow and steady like mine, or you end up with tennis elbow from unwrapping all those presents, I hope you all find plenty of joy in your christmas this year.

It seems my blogging hiatus occurred during all the painting of the apartment, and so I haven’t posted the results.

All of the re-painting has been completed now. In fact, it was completed over a month ago when I raced to finish the last room in time for when I thought the piano would arrive. I’m very happy with the result; I feel the place has gained some maturity.

Amy helped a great deal with a lot of the painting. Without her help I would not have been able to complete a room per weekend, and would most definitely have thrown in the paint-covered towel. We even got adventurous by painting stripes in the bedroom. Though at first my bedroom looked a little like a circus tent, I remixed some colours and tamed it down a little.

Brett pitched in for the final room to get it all completed. We were originally going to do a checkerboard pattern, but I was well and truly over it by that time.

I think I underestimated the amount of disruption it would cause, not to mention the huge amount of work. The living room/entrance/kitchen was a mammoth effort which started around 8am and didn’t finish until about midnight pretty much non-stop. Though, when you’re painting something like that, there seems no point to stopping as everything is bundled up in the middle of the room covered in drop sheets anyway. At the end of it, as long as I don’t think about the hours I spent in the shower cleaning brushes and rollers (and myself) only to go to bed exhausted, blistered and still feeling filthy, it was very much worth the effort.