Posty surprises

I've had a couple of really, really horrible days in work with the prospect of more to follow.  I have found zero christmas spirit this year and don't even care.  Haven't decorated and don't plan to.  Haven't organised to do anything and don't plan to.  The fact that the holidays fall on weekends this year means we don't get a lot of time off anyway (if a holidays falls on the weekend here you don't get a Monday off to 'make up' for it), just the Fridays that are Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve.  I'll head to the market tomorrow to stock up since they won't be back until the second week of January but I don't have any plans for fancy meals either.  Just a bit of time at home to cook and enjoy some simple food will be enough.

So with all this grumpiness following me around in work the last couple of days, not to mention the tiredness which is inevitable when you end up working twelve and fourteen hours a day (because a few weeks ago my boss started again on the whole 'make sure you leave on time' thing - so that people will get annoyed no-one is there to help them and he'll be able to justify hiring another person - but what he fails to grasp is the fact that if I am only there for eight hours, I can only do eight hours of work, which means things are left undone and then I have to work like a maniac to catch up), it was even nicer than it might otherwise have been to come home to some nice surprises in the post.  First of all was the not so nice surprise that is the (hopefully) final bill from the dentist.  Good: it's about two hundred less than his estimate.  Not so good: the health insurance won't pay me their part (about three hundred) up-front; I have to pay it first and claim it back from them.  Oh well.

But the very nice things were a christmas card from a friend who had a baby in July.  I missed seeing her by about a day when I was home and since I'm not on facebook and she kept getting my email address wrong I haven't actually seen the baby yet.  So it was lovely to get a photo of what must surely be the cutest baby in the world.  :)

And then I got a big envelope from a friend who only lives a few minutes away from me and couldn't figure out what she might be sending me.  It's a copy of an essay about a book we discussed recently, which she said moved her greatly and she wanted to share it.  What a lovely thing to receive.  So it looks like I will have to make time to do something special this weekend after all and make sure I have time to sit down in piece and quiet to read it. 

The world's not such a bad place sometimes.  And I can always comfort myself further with the fact that hopefully this time next year I will be heading in my notice at a workplace I like less and less all the time. :)