A close inspection of the grindstone

It was a major relief to find that the first day back at work after the Christmas/New Year break was incredibly quiet. I am about to start a new project and had been forewarned that I might have to hit the ground running today.  It was therefore a complete delight to find my in-box filled with promotional e-mails from Amazon, eBay and many other Internet based retailers but nothing significant from my colleagues in The States...

... I therefore spent a few minutes filling my trash folder with the aforementioned "promotionals" and wondered what the hell I could do to fill the remainder of my day.

To kill some time I removed the flitch of back bacon from the fridge, washed off the dry cure and soaked it for an hour before wrapping it and hanging it in the kitchen. I had started this cure a couple of days after Christmas and am intrigued to see whether the star anise makes a difference to the flavour of the bacon. I suspect it will be sliced and taste tested before the week is out.

Back in front of the laptop I discovered that the only conference call of the day had been cancelled and hence my working day was to comprise nothing more than shuffling a few e-mails.

Away from work I took T&M for a VERY BLUSTERY walk. Over the past few days I have been using a whistle to attract their attention before giving them a command. The reason for this new approach is because they seem to be somewhat desensitised to verbal commands. This is probably down to the fact that we all prattle on to them like they are members of the family and hence they now ignore everything we say*. The whistle has caused a complete transformation. I have been using it in conjunction with edible rewards and the dogs now come charging back to me after a single blast. It is still early days and I have yet to use it to recall them from playing with another dog but it seems to have potential...

... watch this space.

I also managed to move my i-Tunes library from my work laptop to the iMac. After a bit of faffing the two devices talk to each other as nature intended and my laptop now has far less baggage cluttering up it's drives. I should probably point out that the "faffing" is down to my lack of familiarity with iTunes and Mac OS X rather than the machine.

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* just like teenagers really