Ahhh, the holi...

Hold the phone! Holidays? What holidays? I was convinced I was s'pose to have two glorious weeks of school holidays which, as my also-a-teacher wife glumly imformed me today, finish tomorrow.

Impossible. How can sixteen (16) days vanish faster than my daughter can inhale a Tim-Tam? (no savouring the flavour for that girl - just inject the chocolate I say) Sixteen glorious "non-contact" days in which I was to recouperate from the ravages that were term three. Sixteen bliss-filled days in which I could meander from one distraction to the next. Sixteen days where, should the mood take me (or my darling wife nag long enough), I might look at, and even attempt, one of the many jobs listed in the "Holiday jobs to be done because-you-do-nothing-during-the-damn-rugby-season encyclopedia" (the list was superceeded many years ago). What happened to my sixteen days?

Sure, I did have a few days where I slept in and the occassional night when I was heading to bed as my loved ones were waking up (no, I'm not addicted to MW2. I can stop any time I want too!). I did manage to look at, attempt, and even complete a few jobs listed in the "encyclopedia". The swimming pool is now full with clean sparkling water, the new pool pump is installed and doing it's job, the pool garden is looking weed free and uncluttered, and the pavers in the patio area are now waterblasted clean. But all that arduous manual labour only accounts for about four days of the sixteen.

So the breakdown looks something like this:
4 days - mindless video games, television,  DVD's, and internet
4 days - "encyclopedia" jobs ie manual labour
4 days - taxiing my children to/from jobs, parties, friends, movies, house sitting, shopping
4 days - unaccounted for

Four whole days, that's 96 hours, or 5760 minutes (I hear you ask "What about the seconds? Please tell us how many seconds." And so, for dramatic effect... the seconds), or 345600 seconds (see, it was worth the build up), of my life I've lost! Unable to recover (unless someone loans me a working time machine). Four days I may have been marking (but wasn't). Four days in which I could have been planning (but again, wasn't). Four days I should have devoted to the betterment of my teaching practice (but obviously didn't).

So the only obvious answer to account for the "lost" four days, the one which makes the most sense, is... I was abducted by those damn aliens (again, hopefully no probing happened).