Happy New Year

Happy New Year - 2008 already. What has been happening to me since I last blogged, do I hear you ask? Well, I was offered an interview for one of the external jobs and went along and spent an hour or so with some very pleasant people, came away feeling that I would really enjoy working with them and the next morning, I got a "Thank you for coming to the interview, but you haven't been succesful this time" letter. On reflection, I should have picked up when the first thing the interviewer said was "This is the second day of interviews and we will definitely have made our minds up by the end of today." Presumably they had already decided on one of the previous day's candidates - possibly an internal applicant - and were only going to change their minds if someone really outstanding came along on the second day. Maybe the fact that I was asking for a salary pretty close to the top of the range went against me as the interviewer did say that the company's policy was normally to appoint near the bottom of the pay scale and that increments would have to be earned.



Still, I haven't let it put me off looking and I have now turned up a vacancy in the same company at a higher level (where the starting salary is more like the level I am looking for), so I shall be aplying for that one. It is so easy to apply - the company has an interactive web site, so once you have applied for the first job (which did take about an hour and a half), you just go back and amend your details to match the person spec for the next one and press the SEND button. You don't have to worry whether your application has been lost in the post because you get an email confirmation of receipt.

Christmas went like a dream; everyone brought what they said they would and turned up in time for the all the food to be served while it was still hot. I had cooked the stuffings and a gammon the evening before and only had the turkey and the sausage and bacon rolls to cook on the day. A brought new potatoes which had to be cooked, but she arrived in plenty of time and M & I brought the pudding which I left steaming while we ate the main course. K & M brought a cold starter (parma ham, mozarella and salad leaves) and assembled it here and S & I brought still hot, cooked vegetables (sprouts with nuts, carrots and roasted parsnips) so they went on the hot tray while we ate the first course. The table looked really good; we brought the garden table in through the French windows and D had made a chipboard cover for it which brought it up to the same height as the dining table - the garden table is round, so the finished article was shaped like a thermometer. We put four people down each side of the long table, one at the end and five around the 'bulb' of the garden table. I had made a new cream tablecloth the right size and a festive (poinsettia patterned) runner for the length of the whole table.



P & C arrived on Christmas Eve and she made us a lovely dip with nachos for supper. We had all eaten quite a bit at K & M's house earlier so didn't need any actual dinner.



D and I both had to go back to work yesterday (just for the one day) and then back to normal tomorrow. We are both beginning to look forward to retirement - maybe in France, but more of that in another post some time soon.