So this year as a Christmas present our boss has whipped up something very nice: spending the weekend in Antwerp, sleeping in a four star hotel and expenses taken care of. The city is bustling with people and christmas markets and we’ve gotten some (rather staggering amount) of spending money to cover things like travel expenses, dinner and just stuff for yourself. Most of my colleagues are making plans for shopping, but I’ve noticed that they have a spa and a hair stylist right next to the hotel, so I think I’ll be spending my afternoon right there. 
In the evening we’re making plans of going for booze and dinner with the colleagues, and on Sunday we can sleep in and then go home again. Sounds like a lovely bit of retreat. It’s a pity Olli can’t come too (he is busy with work), but on the other hand he is usually not that keen on work-related stuff and this way we don’t have to find any babysitter for Bodhi. I’ll miss him! But it’s only for a night anyway.
Speaking of Olli, his contract at TS for that large oil company that he’s been at for the past five years has been quite suddenly not extended. On one hand this sucks monkeyballs because of the job market at the moment, and the fact that he’s quite comfortable working his own shifts and being able to work from home so much. On the other hand, it’s past time to leave the current project he’s working on, because it’s driving him into the ground and it’s giving nothing in return. So in the past week we’ve been on the lookout for jobs and cancelling expensive subscriptions like charities and fitness that we weren’t using, saving ourselves some money.
But now it seems that within the company they might want him on some other project after all. A place with much more chill working environments and nicer colleagues. I say FUCK YES. Olli was pretty enthused as well. Now we’ll just have to see whether it’ll all fall through the way we want it, but hopefully it will. Fingers crossed, people!
And speaking of fingers crossed: will you keep my fingers crossed for my mother’s boyfriend Ron next Wednesday? He’s going to have brain surgery. They’re going to cut away the tumor in his brain. Scary times. I can very well imagine he’s terrified. But they wouldn’t start cutting in brains if they didn’t think it was either a) urgent or b) relatively doable. So yeah, even more fingers crossed there…
I don’t think that there’s any way to convey how utterly knackered I am these days. Work is doing a good job raping me from behind at the moment for some reason. It’s not that it’s so much busier than it was half a year ago around this time – except that, now that I think of it, it probably is. I’ve had a few weeks where I had to visit clients, which meant that my days that are usually spent on administration, were now spent training. So I do 8 trainings a week, sometimes 9. The time that this leaves for administration is pretty much zilch, so my inbox is overflowing with e-mails and I’m extremely behind on all my evaluations. I make 9 hour days (standard) at the moment – of which 8 hours is spent teaching.