A very good week

I have been the recipient of an embarrassment of riches this week, both big and small. I can, finally, tell you about them here. Seeing as it's late on a Sunday night, I might split this up into the ones without pictures, and the ones with, for processing and posting tomorrow.

On that basis, luckily the biggest news and the thing for which I was anxiously waiting in my last post has no photos. I have been offered a new job, which I am of a mind to accept. I enjoy my current job, but for the usual minor irritations and slight lack of challenge, but I've been told that they would promote me (overdue already) and give me a pay rise (so far below market rate it's not even funny) but they have no budget to do so. Therefore I have found myself a job which is a promotion and pays the market rate. Simple as that. Without meaning to be vulgar, it's a big enough pay differential that it will make a huge difference to the wedding and, basically, not starting out our married lives in debt. I can't say no to that, nor, actually, do I want to, because the job description and extra responsibilities appeal to me greatly. So, fingers crossed for an actual paper contract early this week, then a rather awkward conversation with my current boss towards the end.

I am taking the risk here that my current employers do not know of and read this blog. I don't think they do. I'm extremely careful. Still, it's not as if the new job is going to be a secret for very much longer, which is great as I loathe the cloak-and-dagger nature of seeking alternative employment.

I also admit to being slightly worried about changing jobs at all in this economy, giving up a pretty secure position for somewhere else where "last-in-first-out" may well be the formula in the even of redundancies, and every other company going into administration at the moment it seems. But hell, I was last into my current place, so that wouldn't be any better there. Also, with the job I do (and even more so with the specific new role) there's a need for me no matter how badly the company itself does... I'm therefore choosing to be brave and make the change, rather than putting up with things for a sense of security which is most likely false anyway.

What else?

Well, with the January detox regime my weight has finally dipped below a number which had seemingly been a bit of a barrier for a while. There's no real significance to it other than that it makes me feel like progress is being made. I haven't even been exercising that much, what with prepping for interviews, going to interviews, and endless calls with my recruitment consultant, so this has been from quasi-religious devotion to the diet alone. This makes me think it will be even better now I can get back down to the gym this week.

The only breach of the diet so far, by the way, has been accepting cups of tea in various interviews, and then a sandwich when offered at the final one. I felt that the social conventions were pressing enough to abandon my dietary fads. After all, I'm not stupid enough to risk my career on wanting to refuse wheat and dairy products for a month. Otherwise, my sushi consumption has been through the roof which makes me a very happy bunny indeed.

What else, what else...

Finally the building work that our landlord has put off for months is being done. The flat is currently in disarray but at least they have found and fixed the root cause of the horrible fluffy mould that was eating our spare room so that's all to the good. My laptop is now all fixed up with a new, reliable hard drive and an extra gigabyte of memory whilst we were mucking around with its innards, so I am typing this on my new, whizzy set-up - this means for the first time I don't have to disable all of Vista's fancy graphical bells and whistles. I scored some Wollmeise (that's yarn for the uninitiated, very covetable yarn) in this Friday's update, and plans are now afoot to head over to Germany in the spring to visit one of her market stalls for in-person shopping. I spent some quality time in person and on the phone with various lovely friends, some of whom I see all the time and some of whom I see all too rarely, though most of that stuff will go in the picture-driven post. And I have finally managed to secure a bouncy castle booking for the wedding, with the 2009 rates actually being lower than the 2008 ones for some strange reason.

I hope that you are all having an equally fortuitous time of it, and if not, well, things can and will change, take it from me.