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As requested, here are a couple of pictures of my newly redecorated room, from two different angles.

Not an awful lot has happened in the past week, although I have been spending some time in the evenings filling in an application form for a permanent vacancy at work (I am currently an agency contractor, but I’d like to become a permanent and direct employee if possible). There are 3 positions in my team up for grabs, and although they haven’t been advertised on the intranet site yet, the manager has said they have been authorised to recruit for these vacancies. As it appears to be taking quite a while, I sent an email to an HR person and asked when the vacancies would be officially advertised, so hopefully I will hear more about it this week.

My bedroom redecoration is now complete! The magnolia carpet has been laid, and my new desk is fully set up! All I have to do now is put stuff in the cupboards and drawers! The room looks a lot brighter and more airy now.

Work hasn’t been so stressful this week; I was feeling better and so I went round my Dad’s this weekend. My baby sister Jasmine can now say a few words, such as “mummy”, “daddy”, “car” and “tree”. She’s now about 20 months old.

On Friday during my lunch-hour, I went to the agency to pick up a holiday request form, to request my Christmas holiday leave. I have 6 days of paid holiday remaining this year. I have filled in the form and my supervisor has authorised it, so now all I have to do is hand it back in to the agency some time this week.

And while I’m on the subject of holiday leave – there’s some cracking news. On Sunday mornings I go to my Dad’s shop, so I have the chance to read most of the national newspapers. In two of the papers, it was reported that a new law is going to be introduced that will increase the statutory paid holiday allowance. At the moment, the legal allowance is for 20 days’ paid holiday per year, but that includes the 8 national holidays within the 20-day figure. So in other words, we get the 8 national holidays, and 12 days of our choice. (Some employers do already provide more than this, but that is entirely at their own discretion, and mine don’t!)

But the law will be changed so that employers will have to provide the national holidays on top of the 20 days – meaning we will end up with 28 days’ paid holiday a year! This will be good, because sometimes I exceed the current 20 day annual allowance, meaning I have to “buy” extra days of holiday (what that means is that you can sacrifice a day’s pay in return for taking that day as a holiday).

Over the last few days, my time at work has been stressful (whereas I am usually fairly relaxed at work) due to the fact that one of my fellow team members has been on holiday, meaning that I have had to cope with an increased workload. Of course I don’t blame him for going on holiday – it’s something that can’ t be helped. As I am the only other person in the team who understands how database queries work, it has all been up to me. If I have a problem, no one is really able to help me – I can only wait until the colleague returns from his holiday. There is an internal IT Solutions helpdesk, but they can only really deal with general problems, as they don’t have access to all our data-tables.

So, I have been feeling more tensed-up than usual. By Friday afternoon, some of my muscles were aching (possibly due to my tenseness). But my other colleagues are sympathetic, and say that they don’t expect me to do everything. Also, I try to remind myself that I can only do my very best under the circumstances, and nothing more.

But, at least the colleague will be back on Tuesday, and then everything will be back to normal once again.

In the last few days, I have also found myself getting uptight about relatively minor issues which wouldn’t normally have bothered me. But everyone in my family said I was worrying about a certain issue too much, that I take everything to heart too much, and that I should not let it bother me.

So, this weekend I have taken it fairly easy – instead of going round my Dad’s or helping at the shop, I stayed at home instead. This afternoon, I went to my step-dad Terry’s grandson Thomas’s christening. Afterwards we had a buffet lunch at the village hall, which was good. This has been the light in an otherwise stormy week. I don’t feel quite as bad as I did yesterday and the day before.

This week we finished painting my bedroom walls pale blue and cream, and at the weekend we bought new curtains in pale shades of blue, cream and beige, a new bedspread and magnolia carpet. The carpet won’t arrive for another two weeks, but I’m looking forward to it! The room already looks much nicer.

On Saturday I went to my niece Anya’s high school (she started her first term there a month ago) to see her perform in a fashion show. She has been a member of a dance school for a few years now (where they learn modern “street dance”), and recently the owner has set up a shop selling costumes and fancy dress outfits for the dancers, and so on Saturday they were modelling some of the outfits whilst performing dance routines.

Work is still going well – I am gradually growing in confidence, as last Monday I was asked to help train a new team member. I was quite nervous at first, as I’d never done anything like that in my life before, but I managed it fine. I have also been taking on more responsibility for running queries against the database system, which is good. This means I also have to speak on the phone more (sometimes I need to make internal calls to the IT Solutions if there is a problem with the database which I can’t resolve myself). And on Friday evening, when I went to the agency to hand in my timecard, one of the recruitment consultants recognised me straight away, and said that my supervisors had phoned the agency to say they were really pleased with my progress. That made me really happy!