Sometimes I feel sorry for my husband

Email to DH this morning:-

Your mad, bad, and dangerous to know knitter wife has just signed herself up for two days of knitting in September. The I-Knit-London Day this year is a weekend and this time there are classes. I've signed up for four, two on each day. No, I'm not dragging you along. That would mean you have to learn to knit and I know you aren't interested. The dates are 11th and 12th September (a Friday and a Saturday). I get to meet two of the goddesses of knitting design (the Yarn Harlot is different - she's a knitting rock star).

I think I've spent my entertainment budget for the rest of the year. But I hope he'll forgive me.

First I signed up for both days of this year's I-Knit-London Weekender. Last year, I met the Yarn Harlot. This year, I've signed up for classes with Annie Modesitt (squeal!!! The Annie Modesitt!), Alice Starmore (both of her classes) and Yarnissima (a.k.a. Marjan Yarmmink - she's teaching toe-up socks).

Then, I went on line and bought us two tickets to see Spandau Ballet. They've re-formed after 20 years and are doing a concert tour in the Autumn. And we have tickets! This is the band that were the sound track of the 1980's. (OK, there were other bands, but when I think of Eighties music, it's Spandau Ballet.)

Poor DH. He gets to spend an entire evening with me reverting to a teenager.

- Pam

So much for good intentions

Inspired by Crazy Aunt Purl's recent post about travelling and the Yarn Harlot's one last weekend, one of the things I was planning to do this week was write a post about travelling light. I thought I'd have the perfect opportunity: three evenings to kill on my own in a country pub in the middle of nowhere. Not a chance! Those three evenings turned into dinner with the guy I used to share desk space with in Reading, working late last night, and tonight I was joined in the restaurant by the Regional Director overseeing my project. So you'll have to wait until later for my explanation of how to pack a small case for a week away for work, complete with laptop. Believe me, I'm good at it - in December it even held Christmas Party Clothes and proper shoes (with heels!), as well as my usual clobber.

Instead, tonight's plan is to do something similar to last night, when I unwound by knitting whilst watching episodes of Lets Knit Together via iTunes. I have created the perfect knitting/viewing space in my hotel room: computer on small table (so it doesn't overheat on the bed), knitting on my lap, phone on the bed, and drink on the floor beside me.

Good night.

- Pam

Dear internal alarm clock

Why are you waking me up before 5am? The alarm on my phone is set to go off at 6.

OK, I'll concede - I got up at 5 on Tuesday to come to Site. But that was a one off. It's no excuse for waking me up early on both of the last two mornings. It's not as if there is anything happening in the hotel at that time of the day: the kitchen is closed; the central heating isn't noisy and my neighbours weren't making any noise. Also my room is at the back and the hotel is a converted farmhouse in the middle of fields, so you can't blame traffic noise. And it wasn't as if you were waking me up with a Full Bladder Alert!! You weren't.

Please cease and desist from this behaviour in future and only wake me at the times I specify.

Thank you.

- Pam

The best piece of financial advice ever

The best piece of financial advice I was ever given came from Maya Rozner's mum. Twenty-plus years ago, Maya and I used to sing together and, after a carol concert, I cornered her mother and admiringly demanded to know the secret of her success. (Hopefully, I was more polite than that - I honestly don't remember.)

What I knew about Mrs R was that she was a successful businesswoman; a self-made millionaire who refused to give her children an easy ride (she owned the flat Maya lived in and made her pay market rent). She owned a business, multiple rental properties on the side, a farm and a large house in a wealthy suburb of Melbourne. I knew she had divorced Maya's dad a decade or so earlier, so all this wealth was her own work.

Mrs R told me she left school at 15 or 16 and worked as a shop assistant. She realised early on that if she wanted a better job she needed better skills, so she did a secretarial/business studies course at night school. It got her into the back office of the shop and she rapidly learned the business.

However, the big secret of Mrs R's success, she told me, was simple. From the day she started work, she saved one-third of her take-home pay. That gave her the capital she needed to buy shop when the opportunity arose - her big break, she told me. But she didn't stop there. Continuing to save a third of what she earned funded her investment properties, her farm and paid off her house.

It's the best piece of financial advice I've ever been given.

- Pam

Finance 101

(Sometimes when I start writing a post, it ends up in a totally different place to where I envisaged it going. This started off on Wednesday as a rant about cash flow.)

One of the courses I taught, back when I was a Trainer, was on project finance. The aim was to explain to a room full of (mainly) engineers how our company accounted for its projects. Each project had its own Project Summary Report: a project specific Profit & Loss Account and mini Balance Sheet. Relatively early in the day, I'd introduce some accounting principles and basic concepts to help prepare them for the sessions on the PSR.

Since it was highly unlikely that any of the engineers would ever be interested in accounting and finance, I used to make it personal and keep it personal for most of the session:

While we all know we need to "work for a living", most people don't view their efforts as selling their labour for cash or that the stuff we spend our money on is cutting into our personal bottom lines. Think about it for a minute. If you view your Cost of Sales as your essential living expenses, then everything else you spend your money on eats into your personal profit. If you can cut your Cost of Sales down further, then that too will make you a bigger profit. Of course, if you spend more than you earn, you will make a loss, going into debt to fund your lifestyle.

After the P&L came the Balance Sheet and then a discussion on cash flow.

(Here, I'm showing them the other way around, cash flow first. I set that slide up so that the smiley face danced across the page, whilst the frowny face bounced "splat" into place.)


In business, poor cash flow isn't indicative of making losses. However, if they can't get/keep cash within the business then no matter what the paper profits, the company will go bankrupt. It isn't what is earned that is the problem, it's running out of money to pay the bills and buy more supplies. Only very small businesses run on a purely cash basis - most offer credit to their clients, even if they don't realise it. You do the work, send out your invoice and wait to get paid. (Most employees do it, too. We work first, then get paid afterwards.) Running out of cash is the number 1 cause of bankruptcies.

A Balance Sheet is a business' Net Worth Statement. Continuing the concept of personalisation, in class, I'd use this example to explain the main headings:


I'd tell my trainees that Current Assets are things which you can harvest readily for cash - in most companies that'd be debtors, stock and work-in-progress. Current Liabilities are things which need to be paid fairly immediately (i.e. suppliers of your materials), or things which could be cancelled almost overnight like overdraft facilities.

We'd pull apart the example, concluding that this person has a positive net worth, but their finance situation isn't that rosy:

• They have a lot* of credit card debt.
  
• They have very little in the bank and no investments.
  
• Their car has depreciated to a point where it is worth far less than the loan used to finance it's purchase (something that happens within 2-3 years on a brand new car).
  
• To have chattels worth £5,000, they must have spent closer to £50,000. Chattels are personal possessions: furniture, clothes, household goods; again things which depreciate massively from the moment they are purchased. Think about it for a second: how many top of the range electrical goods are next year's old junkers? Technology changes very fast. (That got the guys thinking.) So does fashion - if you had to sell the clothes in your wardrobe, how much do you think they'd fetch compared to what you paid? (That got the girls thinking.)

In class, there would always be a few "light bulb moments" when the above sunk home. Inevitably someone would grab me at the break with questions about personal budgeting. Depending on how receptive I thought they'd be, I'd either recommend they check out the discussion boards at the Motley Fool or read the Tightwad Gazette.

- Pam




* All things are relative. When I created the example, the average British salary was £27,000.

And the verdict is.......

The concert was a resounding success. The Bernstein was a universal favourite, much praised by the audience. I enjoyed it too!

It was preceded by Duruflé's Requiem, which DH says was "rubbish" (not true. He just didn't like it.), Mathias' Let the people praise thee, Oh God (sung at the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Di - not a good omen), and Paert's De Profundus, a piece for male voices.

- Pam

Dear Mr Bernstein

Tonight my choir will be singing your Chichester Psalms. I'm really looking forward to it, but I have a few problems with lyrics to your score. It's in Hebrew and I'm a Jew, surely I shouldn't have problems?

Please tell me who did the transliteration of the Hebrew into the Roman alphabet. It's the first time I've sung in Hebrew for over 20 years, but I'm sure this is the first time I've seen a chai written as an "h" with a dot underneath. Why haven't you used the more traditional "ch", as in the Scottish word "loch"? You use it some of the time, maybe 20% of the chai's are written that way. As a result, most of my colleagues are singing anachnu as "anahu", which is totally wrong. (Anachnu translates as "our".)

Also, you have totally screwed up the stresses of the words, particularly in the middle of the first movement. You're a Jew. You must know that Hebrew frequently stresses the second to last syllable of a word, just like Italian does. And yet, when you get to the bit that goes bar'chu sh'mo, the stresses are all in the wrong place making it really difficult to sing and make sense of singing. Why? Did you expect your non-Jewish choristers to just wing it? If it's hard for me (and at least I know what the words should sound like), it's even harder for them.

Finally (and this isn't your fault), do you know how hard it is to not sing the very last verse as:

Hineh
Ma tov, umah
naim. Shevet achim gam yahad.*

to the theme from the Flintstones? Every time we've rehearsed it, I drive home singing that.

- Pam




* "Behold how good and how pleasant it is for breathren to dwell together in unity" per my score.

Time to buy

There is a lot of doom and gloom being spouted about the economy. I see it every time I switch on the news, or turn on the radio or open a paper. Banks are announcing record losses. Car manufacturers are asking governments for bailouts. House prices are falling fast. "Wall Street is plummeting. 12 years of gains have been wiped out", trumpeted this morning's news in America. On the radio tonight, one commentator described the stock market as "carnage".

(You know things have reached mass hysteria levels when the conversations you overhear in the pub or in the work canteen all sound the same: "Should I get out of the stock market? It keeps going down - should I get out now before it gets worse?" "Oohhh, you don't want to leave your money in the stock market. Shares are dangerous.", etc, etc. It's as if the sky has fallen in.)

The FTSE 100 index has fallen to levels not seen since the Second Gulf War started in 2003. It closed at 3512 today, down over 3000 points since its most recent peak of 6732 in June 2007. What should your average investor do?

Me? I'm going shopping. I'm going to buy the index.

As far as I'm concerned, if you drip feed your money into an index tracker, it's the perfect time to buy. Here is my logic: from the time I started watching the stock market as a teenager, I've witnessed at least three major stock market declines, including the "crash" of October 1987. After each decline, the market recovered, usually far exceeding its previous peak before the next great decline. I want to buy a share in that recovery growth.

Certainly, companies are failing and that is why I wouldn't try to pick individual companies to invest in right now - the world's rapid decline into recession and the credit crunch turns even normally healthy companies into far more risky individual investments. It is much harder to spot which companies will fail. However, investing in an index tracker spreads that risk across all the companies in the index (100 companies for the FTSE 100, 500 companies for the S&P 500). Most companies in the index will stay in profit; most companies will survive; some companies will even thrive.

Of course, the above is just my opinion. Feel free to argue with me. However, I am putting my money where my mouth is: this afternoon, I set up a regular purchase of a FTSE 100 tracker.

- Pam

Money March / Frugal February

How did your "Frugal February" go? I thought about doing a series of posts to mark Frugal February, but the month was half over before I got the chance. Instead, I'm going to devote the month of March to talking about money and saving it. Welcome to Money March.

Why do I call February, "Frugal February"? If you read my post about cheap food, you'll have noticed me mention a very tight February when I fed two adults on the contents of the freezer, the contents of the pantry and £25. That was back in 1991 and was probably the first time, I suffered the after effects of running out of money in January after being paid my December salary before Christmas (No Pay Day bit me rather badly). The month is etched into my brain. I had enough money for my monthly train ticket into London but not much else. I was overdrawn, my credit card was about to explode, and I was living with a leach (aka "Dumbo") who contributed virtually nothing to our living costs (he owned the flat we lived in outright, but I paid all the costs).

The pantry contained spices, flour and the odd tin of stuff. I remember going around the supermarket, calculator in hand, trying to buy enough food for the month on £20. I don't remember the whole shopping list, but I remember purchasing the following:

- 3lb frozen minced beef
- 1lb cheddar cheese
- 2lb rice
- frozen mushrooms
- probably some tins of tomatoes
- all-bran type breakfast cereal
- washing powder
- toilet paper
- bread
- eggs
- garlic
- squash / cordial to drink

When I reached £20, I stopped. I didn't have much choice. Later in the month, I stopped at the green grocer's near the station and purchased 5lb of potatoes and 10lb of onions and lugged them the mile home. We'd also run out of instant coffee, so I picked up a jar of disgusting own-brand pot scrapings for pennies from the nearby mini-mart. When I found out their tins of tomatoes were cheaper than Tesco's, I purchased 5 for £1. By then, I'd spent all of my £25 budget.

Fortunately, I got lunch for free each day at work, along with copious amounts of freshly ground coffee. I don't know what Dumbo did for lunch (and apart from the curiousity value, I really don't care). For breakfast, I ate the cereal. For dinner, I cooked quiches, curries, pasta, even a souffle. I got through that month without starving and, at the time, that was all that mattered. Later, it inspired me to investigate ways to stretch my food budget and to make all my money go further. And eventually it brought me to this: writing up my Money March....

- Pam

Knitting Hiatus

Remember at Christmas, how I said I'd knitted until my wrists ached in order to finish Peter's present? Well, it's come back to bite me. I have RSI.

Naturally, I was sitting here two weeks ago reading about Tama's tennis elbow, thinking I'd been lucky, when this flared up. The day before, I'd manually rolled my first ever centre-pull ball:


It ached a bit afterwards but I cast on the next pair of socks anyway and started knitting, waiting for the point where I'd have to haul a big knot of yarn out of the centre of the ball (so far, I've had one tiny tangle, but nothing more). Saturday morning, I was still waiting and still knitting, when my right forearm began to ache. I rested it for the remainder of the weekend, but using the mouse all week at work aggravated it a lot. I could only knit a row or two in the evenings and my right little finger kept going numb. So I gave up knitting, which almost killed me.

Finally, last Saturday, I got the chance to buy a wrist support. It has made a big difference because it's made me conscious of my movements. I've worked out that the real cause of the problem is being lazy and dropping my wrists when I type or when I use the mouse. Knitting just aggravated it. (I have wrist rests at work, but you shouldn't actually use them to rest your wrists - they're a reminder to lift them up to work.)

I'm not sure how long I'm going to have to wear the support. But I may have found a way around the restriction on my knitting. My knitting-buddy Kate has just taught me how to knit continental style. Because you hold the needles over the top, it doesn't strain the muscles at the back of my wrist (in "English style" knitting, you hold the right needle like you're holding a pen, bending the wrist back). I'm slow, I'm not sure of my tension yet, and I'm still having problems conquering purling, but I am so glad that I'm able to knit again! Thank's Kate.

Kate's off to Wisconsin tomorrow for at least the next 8 months. I'm going to miss her. She's the only knitter I regularly see. Here's me, Kate and Nicky at Kate's leaving lunch on Thursday.


- Pam

The price of convenience

This morning, I paid £3.42 for a packet of Nurofen. I was desperate - I had a headache and had to pop out to the local garage to buy them - but the price still left me reeling. It was ten times what the supermarket own brand costs! Daylight robbery! It cured the headache, but left me wondering about the price of convenience.

How many times have I opted for the convenient option when, with a little bit of planning, I could have had something better for cheaper? The Nurofen is a case in point - I normally carry a packet of supermarket own-brand Ibuprofen with me, but I'd run out and forgotten to replace it. What about the times when I've forgotten a book to read on the Tube and bought a magazine, getting an expensive second-rate reading fix? Or buying a bottle of water, when I could easily have brought a (refilled) bottle from home?

We all do it, often without thinking about it. These are the little things that eat away at your budget. You waste your money on the unimportant things and then it's all gone before the important stuff occurs. I heard a great quote today - I wish I could remember who said it, so that I could look it up - about it being the accumulation of $3 purchases that make you bankrupt. That's the price of convenience.

- Pam

Cheap food

I was talking to a colleague on Friday, who mentioned her husband complaining about their weekly grocery bill and all the food that they wasted. A couple of weeks ago, when she came back from food shopping, he fetched the bin saying “Shall I chuck it out now or do you actually plan to cook with this?”! She spends about £150 a week at the supermarket for just the two of them. When I told her we spend £160 a month on food, she was stunned!

Not for the first time, it struck me that the tools I use to manage my grocery budget other people can’t do, won’t do or don’t know how to do. It's as if I know some arcane lore that nobody around me knows. So here it is.

(If any of what I'm about to say sounds familiar, it's because in 2003, I wrote a post on the Motley Fool explaining how I managed to feed 2 adults on a grocery budget of (what was then) £130 a month. Things haven't changed that much since then.)

Firstly, an explanation or two: England is a country with a very high cost of living and we live in one of the most Living Above Your Means cities in the world. Also, remember it is £160 not $160! According to www.oanda.com, at today's exchange rate my £160 is $231 US. We split it up as follows:-

£ 40.00 / $57 - Meat fund (we visit a Kosher butcher every 3 to 4 months)
£ 10.00 / $14 - Bulk fund (accumulates for bulk buying special offers and visits to Wing Yip)
£ 10.00 / $14 - Christmas fund (we also use this for Easter eggs)
£100.00 /$144 - General groceries

My grocery bill includes cleaning products, toiletries bought at the supermarket (but not expensive hair stuff bought at the drug store), wine, DH's shaving products, etc - basically everything we buy at the supermarket and the vegetables we buy at a local farm shop.

I've been a careful shopper since the early 1990s, when a very tight February taught me the value of a well stocked pantry, dried goods and fresh produce (I had £25 to feed 2 adults for the entire month). So here are my tips and techniques:-

1. Buy your vegetables loose from the market or from a local farm shop instead of from the supermarket. As well as being (probably) cheaper, they'll be fresher and last longer, because they haven't been stuck in the supermarket's cold storage system for months. And they won't have spent days deteriorating in sweaty plastic bags before you get them home.
2. Pad out meat meals with vegetables and/or lentils. 8oz/250g of minced/ground beef (hamburger) can easily feed 4 people if you add the diced pulp of an eggplant/aubergine or several zucchini/courgettes (zap in the microwave first to soften), plus a grated carrot or two and some sliced mushrooms. To stretch it to feed 6, add half a cup of split red lentils to your sauce (i.e. to a bolognese sauce for pasta). Always enhance the "meatiness" by crumbling in a stock cube, before you add the sauce ingredients. I routinely use only 4oz of mince or 8oz of stewing steak per person per meal and use veggies/dried beans to make up the rest of the meal.
3. Cook enough for tonight and for lunch tomorrow for both of you, then dish up both at the same time. Most recipes feed 4 or 6 anyway. The trick is to only eat one portion each instead of doubling up because it's there (and tempting!). The only way I've found to stop myself nibbling is to create "set asides" for lunch tomorrow.
4. Use grains creatively. We don't just have rice or pasta with a sauce. We have cous-cous (technically a pasta), polenta (cornmeal) and cracked wheat (tabouli anyone?), too. These vary the taste of one of my main sources of "meal padding".
5. Think Indian or Chinese or Mexican! Cure dietary boredom by varying the flavours of the foods that you eat. Mince-with-a-sauce may become bolognese, keema curry, chilli con carne, moussaka, corn pone, or piccadillo (sorry about the spelling). Use leftovers to fill samosas or pasties or cottage pie.
6. Consider vegetable based dishes. During my very tight February, I lugged home a 15lb bag of potatoes and onions. They became onion quiche, potato-cheese-garlic-&-onion flan, home made gnocchi, and baked potato with sauce or cheese on top. I also turned the half-dead contents of the vegie draw into a curry. Another idea: Mexican Pilchard Pudding (add a can of pilchards in tomato sauce to 1lb of mashed potato; stir in a well beaten egg and 2 teaspoons of baking powder; tip into a greased dish and bake for 3/4 hour).
7. Canned fish is your friend. Tuna is cheap and versatile. Tins of pilchards or mackeral in tomato sauce can be curried or, with a bit of imagination, turned into fish pie or fish stews. Salmon can be mixed with cheese sauce and left over rice to become a salmon casserole. Or dress it up as salmon mouse.
8. Use pulses and nuts. Try a lentil loaf or a carrot & hazelnut loaf, instead of meatloaf for dinner. Curry mung beans. Make your own refried beans and serve them in homemade, soft, wheat tortillas. Blend a can of tomatoes with 2 cans of butter beans then heat for a filling, "instant" soup. Add kidney beans to stews. [To cook from dried: Soak beans overnight, rinse and drain. Turn into a clean bread bag and freeze for 6-8 hours minimum (breaks down the cell walls). Defrost, cover with fresh water and bring to the boil. Boil for 10 minutes to kill of toxins then simmer until soft (or pressure cook for 20 minutes at 15lb pressure). The freezing cuts the cooking time. I do 1lb of dried beans at a time and freeze the excess.]
9. The cheapest way to buy chicken from a kosher butcher is to get boiling chicken breasts (unfilleted and with the skin on). I skin the breasts myself and save the skins/fatty layer to rend down into cooking schmaltz (when I have a big bag full, I rend it slowly in the oven, strain and store in the fridge). Then I slice the meat off the bones and save the bones for stock. The meat is usually cubed for cooking.
10. Post-stock-stew. After I've made chicken/poultry stock and drained it, I go through the bones and strip off any remaining meat. This will be cooked up later in something that doesn't need a big chicken flavour (a vindaloo, perhaps).
11. Don't just cook for today. Double up quantities so that you have a readily available second meal for those nights when you'll be too busy to cook. Make up batches of base and store them in the freezer.
12. Plan your leftovers. I'll roast the largest chicken or turkey I can fit in the oven precisely because they'll result in leftovers. Then I'll use the leftovers in stir-fries, soups, stews, or whatever. Check out this series of posts on uses for leftover turkey.
13. Your freezer is your friend. Use it to store bulk bought bread, cheese and meat, as well as freezing the items mentioned above.
14. When you're shopping consider whether a convenience food is really that convenient. Can you make it more cheaply from scratch (soups for example)? Will it save you that much time? Most expensive jars of "cook in" sauce can be replaced with a cheap tin of tomatoes and some herbs or spices.
15. Shop carefully. Make a shopping list. Know what you already have. Plan your meals in advance to make the best use of what is available. If a recipe calls for half a cauliflower, can you do something else with the rest or will it end up in the bin?
16. Know your prices. Tama has written the best post about price books and bulk buying.
17. Do a little bit of maths. Is brand A in the big box really cheaper than buying two of the same thing in brand B? Just because something is on special, doesn't necessarily make it cheaper. Cans of tuna are a good example: I often see cans of John West on sale as "four cans for £x" then walk down the aisle to find the own brand is still half the price.
18. Utilise the "pantry principle". Keep a well stocked pantry and that way you'll always have something you can make a meal from. Shop to replenish your pantry and not just for dinner next week.

- Pam (have I left anything out?)

LBYM tip du jour - recycling candles

As part of its new fascination with frugality, a month ago Channel 4 broadcast a program "The hunt for Britain's tightest person". Naturally, I watched it. And learned precisely one thing new: a trick for recycling candles.

The scenario: you have a pretty scented candle that has burned down more in the middle than on the outside, so that there is a bit of unburnt wax left once the wick has gutted out. Select a suitable container for holding a burning candle (I'm reusing a little metal bucket which previously held a candle). Fix a prepared wick into the bottom of the container using a drop of melted wax (you can buy prepared wicks at Hobby Craft). Cut or break the wax up into lumps and pack it around the wick. Place the container on top of a working radiator; the wax will gently melt and consolidate around the wick and voila! You have a new candle.



Points to note:

1. If you don't have a suitable radiator, select somewhere that gets really warm. I used the top of the gas fire in our lounge. Just make sure that it is a flat surface.
   
2. Wax is highly flammable, so put the candle-in-making somewhere you can keep an eye on it and remove it from the heat-source once the wax has softened sufficiently.
3. You will probably need something to hold up the wick, to keep it straight and upright. I've tied mine to a skewer. The guy in the documentary secured his between a couple of pegs, but it occurs to me you could slide it into a giant paperclip. You cut it off once set.
   
4. Once the candle has set, trim the wick to within half an inch of the top of the wax. Use really sharp scissors - wick is quite tough.
   

- Pam

Time challenged

I have the greatest respect for those people who manage to work 50 or 60 hour weeks and still squeeze in a life. Today, I did an 11 hour day. I got to work at 9am and left at 8pm and didn't really take a lunch break. Oh, I ate lunch, but I didn't really stop working. (I normally eat lunch at my desk and use the time to surf the internet - not today.)

Except for when I nursed, I've always worked in time-based businesses, selling knowledge and people's time. Since my job is to do the invoicing, I spend quite a lot of my time staring at time records. Most of my colleagues at Site do 50 hour weeks - I resent doing 40 (we work 2.5 hours more than standard UK hours). And yet.... whenever I'm working on the time billing, an avaricious part of me pipes up with "If you were a contractor and did those hours every week, you could earn £xxx per annum".

As if... For a start, I'm staff (and in today's economy, I'm glad I have a little job security. Most of my colleagues at Site are contractors. When the project finishes later this year, they'll be out of work). But I have my plans in place if I ever do end up as a contractor: Monday is for me, Tuesday for the Taxman, Wednesday for the mortgage, Thursday for the Emergency Fund, Friday for investments. I dreamed that up a long time ago, way back when I worked in Practice and spent my days preparing VAT Returns for a portfolio of computer contractors.

The other factor is time. I don't mind doing 10 hour days - I've done them often enough - but I resent being forced to. In my old job, I'd regularly work to 8pm on a Tuesday, 7pm on a Wednesday and Thursday. I had to. It's what I needed to do to get the work done. However, I could take time back when I needed it. (Long lunch break? No problem.) I didn't resent it, although sometimes I wondered where my evenings had gone.

Here, all I think about is what time I can leave; how soon I can get my life back for the day; how many hours I have left before I've done my 40 for the week; when I can escape. I think it's down to the atmosphere in the office - I don't have the same problem when I'm at Site. In the Site office, it's "us against the world". We're a team and we pull together.

I've given up trying to analyse what it is about this company that I don't like. In my last company, you were there for life. Not here. Old Mr A believed that you were his people and did his best to offer his staff some tokens of his appreciation: contractual Christmas bonuses; a grading structure where everyone on the same grade got the same perks; a subsidised staff restaurant with a full bar; a tuck-shop. (Old Mr A died in 1989. When I joined the company 10 years later, it still operated as he'd left it. Things have changed a bit now, but most of the staff are still lifers.) There is no comparison to this company. This is just a job and most people are only here until they can find somewhere better. Me included.

- Pam

And the mountains burn

Have you ever been broadsided by something? I was, yesterday, when I heard that Marysville had burned to the ground. I had the TV on the background and the headlines "Bushfires rage in southern Australia", hadn't touched me - as an Aussie you get rather complacent about bushfires - but then they mentioned Marysville and the world changed.

Marysville is a village outside Melbourne, in the Dandenong Ranges. The Dandenongs dominated the horizon when I was a child; I grew up on the far side of the Dandenong Valley, which runs all the way to Port Phillip Bay. So Marysville was relatively close, but it was an awkward place to get to, off the main routes, and I don't recall going there until I was 19 or so. My childhood bestfriend moved there as a teenager; I have no idea if Linda's family are still there. I hope to God they are OK.

Marysville didn't stand a chance. Bushfires travel fast. Gum leaves are highly flammable, as is the bark that peels from from the trees. When the Dandenongs burned in 1983, ash and burning leaves landed on our back veranda over 20 miles away. On the outskirts of Melbourne, they must be watching and waiting and hoping the fires won't travel their way. Smart people have their fire plan in place - you can't assume it won't happen to you. In the summer of 2001/02, the fires travelled as far as Frankston reservoir, maybe a 15 minute walk from Big Sis's old home. I was home at the time; our plan was to head down to the beach and wait for the fires to follow.

Across Australia, people are collecting household goods, clothes, money, anything that will help the bushfire victims rebuild their lives. Towns like Kalgoorlie, 1500-odd miles away. Amy over at Live, Learn, Knit has already mentioned the Australian Red Cross bushfire appeal donations website. The site was overwhelmed when I tried to visit it a moment ago. I'll visit it again, soon.

- Pam