So why is it called a Dog’s Life? The idiom means that something is hard and unpleasant. Speaking for my dog, he gets 2 good meals a day, walks, we play ball with him, he has toys and chew bones, he gets groomed, he gets to stay home and sleep, or play with his toys whilst we go to work or school. He never has to worry about bills or go to work when he’s feeling under the weather. Not a bad life if you ask me and there are days, many days, when I would gladly trade with him.

Work is almost back to normal after the Christmas break with students smoking in the doorways, and leaving the front door open despite signs to the contrary. It’s January, it’s cold! You may recall I had to work a weekend recently, and have another coming up, and we weren’t going to be paid for it. Well I armed myself with a load of facts and figures pertaining to how much revenue will be raised from that day and forwarded it to my manager and specifically asked why they weren’t going to pay us when we’ve helped raise a lot of revenue, whilst our counterparts in the so called merger are being paid for working a weekend. Yesterday we had the news that we can claim overtime for the work. Result! Along with some travel expenses I have, and a small win on the lottery, it will all help pay for the car service in March.

For Christmas my ex and his new wife bought me a Kindle. They both have one and love them, so naturally thought I would too. It was a very generous gift and well received don’t get me wrong, but I really don’t like it. It’s a basic Kindle with ‘buttons’ on both sides to ‘turn’ the pages. There is a button at the bottom. This really limits where I feel I can hold it without inadvertently pressing buttons. I set it up and downloaded a free book. A while later I downloaded a cheap book and wasn’t asked for any kind of password, the amount will just come off my credit card; I don’t like that. I feel that if I lose the Kindle or have it stolen then anyone can download books and I’ll be paying for them. To that end I’ve set a password on the device though I really want to remove my credit card details from it. I’ve also inadvertently pressed a button whilst reading and have gone to the Acknowledgements at the end. Nothing I press gets me back to the correct page and I’m forced to page through until I find the correct page. I’ve done this 3 times and it’s so annoying! The novel I’m reading has footnotes, but I’ll be damned if I can work out how to read them. Once I’ve read this book, if I make it that far, I’m going to put it in a drawer and forget about it. It was a generous gift, however if they’d spent that same money on book tokens I would have been ecstatic. I love books. I love the feel of them, the smell of them. I love to browse through my 2 bookcases and pick a book at random, glance at it and maybe choose another. I often have more than one book on the go. For me, no electronic device can ever take the place of a physical book. The Kindle and similar devices are fine if that’s what you like, but I’ll stick to a good ‘old fashioned’ book thank you very much.

Know anyone who wants to buy a slightly used Kindle? LOL