Half an Oven, Windy Fence Panels and plenty of Mince Pies.

I got home from picking my wife up from work and the oven broke.

It tripped the breaker and then the main oven wouldn't heat up above 50 degrees.

We had a look online and found a suitable replacement.

The whether was pretty bad overnight, to the point where Max was a little uneasy,

but he eventually settled down.

In the morning, I came downstairs to make coffee and let Max out into the garden to find that

a fence post had broken at the base, meaning two panels had collapsed, due to the high winds.

This meant a trip to B&Q to get wood and tools I hadn't already got for the job .

It seems as though where the bushes had become over-grown, the root system had cracked some of the

concrete around the post, which in turn got wet, rotted away and eventually broke.

I tried getting as much of the wood out as possible, which turned out to be about 20 CM, so I gave that up.

The concrete is still solid and almost half a metre square, so I decided I wasn't getting that out anytime soon and even if I managed it, what the hell am I gonna do with a large lump of concrete?

My wife did her normal and searched online for local businesses that did fencing work.

I look down the list of companies and of course, nearly all of them use Gmail or outlook.com or Yahoo of all things.

I browse the websites to look and they're all the same bog standard designs with bad fonts and layouts and even spelling errors, which annoys the hell out of me.

Yes, you may not be able to set up a website yourself and maybe you cant afford to get someone in to do that for you, but the least you can do is proof your own damn copy.

I've been off work for two weeks now. 

Feeling a lot less stressed now that stuff has cleared out of my head and not having to remember certain manual tasks on a daily and weekly basis also makes for a lot clearer head space.

I sometimes catch myself wondering what's happening with those tasks. Before I eventually turned my work phone off, I still saw people emailing me directly with queries and such, so its reasonable to assume some of them are being missed.

I still have no idea what's going to happen when I do go back in January. 

I've been meaning to start writing an email to my boss including a list of things that I think need attention and that I feel would help me to be moved to someone else's remit. 

I've' generally been putting this off to avoid the resultant anxiety, but this has proven to create its own problem in that whenever I put my head down to sleep, my brain immediately tries to run through them all at the same time, so I should really start getting that list down for my own benefit.

Still, now is the time for rest and relaxation over this holiday period. Mince pies are a-go-go and some of the various cheeses in the fridge have been open, not to mention the large box of milk tray I received in the post has completely gone.