Day 701

Day 701...

And another day at home and another quiet day for obvious reasons.

My day was filled with work as the joy of technology means that I am still able to complete most of my administration tasks. By keeping in touch with my deputy we could confer and plan and by the end of the day I was pretty pleased with the progress made through my 'to do' list.

Once again I have probably completed more work than I would have done on a standard Wednesday in work but that is fine as it has kept me focused. My only 'illness' symptoms has been a runny nose but as a side effect of that I have been suffering with sinus pain which is something I often seem to get with a cold. Luckily I had some sinus relief medication in the house so dutifully took some this morning hoping it would make a difference which it didn't. When I looked at the packet later on I realised thatvthe 'sinus' medication was no different ingredient wise to the 'cold & flu' medication that I also have...in fact the only difference was the name of the medication - what a swizz!

A little bright spot in the day was when my Hotel Chocolat delivery arrived. I had been a member of their Chocolate Tasting Club for a lot of years but when that scheme came to an end I swapped over to their 'high cocoa curated collection' and every couple of months or so I get a parcel. The collection contains a mix of different items with the common factor being that they all have a high cocoa content. Now for me personally I prefer my chocolate around the 90% cocoa mark but anything over 70% is what I would consider to be 'high cocoa'. 

I was therefore a tad disappointed today when I found two items in the box to be, what I considered, below par. The first was a small selector box of 'supermilk' chocolates...err supermilk? I don't think so! Turns out these are 65% cocoa. Then there was a bigger box of 'Unbelievably Vegan' chocolates...okay so where do I start with this one. Firstly it's great that they can make vegan friendly chocolates but I am not vegan and surely I should have the choice as to whether I want a product that has been made in a non-standard way? Secondly to make them vegan they use a nutmilk; I don't like diary alternatives and I don't like the chemical processes that are needed to produce them. And thirdly the cocoa content is only 45%!! How on earth is that high cocoa?

Suffice to say an email was issued expressing my displeasure and to their credit I received a reply pretty quickly along with a £5 gift card as compensation for my disappointment...mmm...well as the two products that I'm not happy with have a value of about £19 it doesn't seem very proportionate!

I did try one of the 65% chocolates with a coffee this afternoon and while it wasn't bad it also wasn't anything amazing either!

See you all tomorrow.
xx

Day 623

Day 623...

Ah the beginning of December and the countdown to Christmas, so that can only mean one thing...Hotel Chocolat Advent calendar time. That time of year when it becomes acceptable to have chocolate at breakfast...dark chocolate in my case of course!

We have the middle of the working week and yet again I have been in work for a full day rather than my usual half a day. With a member of staff off sick I was needed to work the afternoon shift as cover.

It was a pretty standard day at work for me; lots of admin to catch up with, lots of banking, lots of emails and then the organising of all our Christmas activities.

Last night Simon had very kindly transferred our Christmas concert music, that Molly had put together for us, from my laptop onto one of the pre-school i-pads. Today we were able to test it all out and thankfully it all worked perfectly. I was also able to update pre-school's Spotify account with my Christmas playlist called Xmas-a-go-go...a mix of classic Christmas songs with some pop, some Disney and some RuPaul...suffice to say an eclectic mix.

This afternoon I decided to update our safeguarding policy as we had been issued with a newer version. Our policy is around 50+ pages and so I started out comparing the existing policy to the newer version, flipping between two tabs on the laptop...not the easiest or quickest but thankfully all the changes were in red. Initially I was able to update it all rather quickly but the further I got into the document the more red appeared; it was no longer a simple amend and move on, it was now entering re-write territory! But time was not on my side and so I quickly made a note of how far I'd gotten before packing everything away and heading home.

It was on the drive home that I hatched a plan as to how I could create the policy document I needed that would be a lot easier and hopefully less time consuming. So with a fresh pot of coffee brewed I set about my new plan and in about two hours I had re-wrote the whole document and had actually split it into two distinct, and easier to read, documents. And while that hadn't been my intention I knew that sitting at home in the quiet and being undisturbed meant it had gotten done a lot quicker than had I attempted it at work.

But this did mean that my day was now done and so with that I will say see you tomorrow.
xx