24th January: Ten Things of Thankful

Ten things for which I give thanks this week…

1. – If you wondered why I didn’t post here last week, it was because I had a crisis at work! I work Tuesday to Thursday lunchtime but on my way home last Thursday, my immediate boss rang to say that Trading Standards had turned up unannounced and were not happy with our labelling of our products. This is one of the areas that I am responsible for but he didn’t ask me to come back in – which I would have done and would have saved him being made to feel like a naughty boy for the duration of their visit – the whole afternoon! My work, doing the things that others either can’t or don’t want to do, is also not always fully valued because it doesn’t generate revenue in the way that, say, sales or production itself do, but things like getting the details of nutrition right on labels are legal requirements and under the rapid growth in wholesaling that we have undergone in the last year, many products have been added to our system by people other than me and there are details missing. All of which is to say, that I spent every day of my 4.5 days off, going through all the data that creates the labels in order to fix the problem! Except for Monday when I only got up early and only did two hours work before a family emergency gained priority.
   I am grateful that the task is now almost complete, and checked and that going forward, the protocols I have been calling for around the introduction of new products, stand a greater chance of being followed after the rap on the knuckles…
   
2. – On Sunday, the family grapevine was buzzing with the news that Barbara’s brother was in hospital and we had no way of contacting him since his phone was not responding and his partner was abroad. After some detective work by several family members, the hospital that Steve was in, was located and we got to speak to him. He had fallen and his iPhone was indeed not working, so I searched for an old phone to take to him, and on Monday, Barbara and I drove to the hospital just north of Manchester – an hour away, arriving just as he was waiting to be discharged. After a couple of hours waiting for his meds to be dispensed, we drove him home, got him settled in with the knowledge his partner would be home that night – he is doing well now…
   
3. – Sunday had also been Barbara’s birthday and I took a break from my labours to bring us over to our daughter Beverley’s in the next village for afternoon tea with a few grandsons and one girlfriend (who is now in India for a couple of months to learn Yoga teaching). So that was a nice interlude…
   
4. – A week later and the house is still awash with flowers, to Barbara’s delight, at our age, there are few material things we desire so flowers hit the spot…
   

5. – Normal service is now being resumed in all areas – I posted a poem, “The Cartography of Life”, for a prompt from the dVerse Poets Pub which I was glad to see was visited by our own Artmater – so nice when people explore the blog for the other things to be found posted here…

6. – After a repetition of the fault with uploading photos here and another round of consulting the tech guys at Bluehost – they finally said that they had tracked down the issue, which I presume was with a third party piece of software since they couldn’t give a timeframe for fixing it – however it now seems to be working as the picture above loaded without issue…

7. -I manged to pick up my ukulele(s) after Christmas, and now that the work crisis is over, I intend to play more regularly – I play all sorts of songs but I have a lot from the ’20’s an ’30’s and more recently some more jazz numbers. I didn’t make it to ten today but I leave you with a favourite rendition of Carole King’s “One Fine Day” by the lovely Sophie Madeline. Sophie made an album of songs as well as the 50 songs of which this was the first, that she posted in 59 days on YouTube before sadly retiring from the world of musical performance on health grounds…

Have a great week ahead, each and everyone of you Gratudinals (and anyone else who stumbles in here…)