Now that it's March we start work at 8.00 am instead of a quarter past. The shift is gently disorienting, since all my guideline timings to get out of the house in the morning are thrown into confusion. The time by which I need to have finished doing odd bits of clearing up in the kitchen and start making my packed lunch, the point at which I need to be sitting down eating breakfast if I want time for enough cups of tea, the moment at which I need to be cleaning my teeth, putting on my uniform shirt over my layers of t-shirts, when I need to stir myself to go outside to let the chickens into their run and top up their food and water, all of these are closely calibrated against the kitchen clock, and when our start time moves they all have to be reworked. Knowing that by ten to seven I need to have begun making my lunch is not the same as having to calculate that at whatever time it is at fifteen minutes before ten to seven I should be digging around in the cupboard for the tupperware and assembling sandwiches.
The week got off to a slightly ropey start since the owner did not mention receiving my e-mail over the weekend with a draft poster attached for our next talk at the plant centre, and when I asked her if it had arrived she was cross I'd sent it to her in the first place, grumbling that the point of outsourcing publicity for events was so that she wouldn't have to think about it, and I should have sent it straight to the woman who works in the office. I explained that I'd done that with the last poster, which had ended up stuck on her desk for nearly two weeks awaiting approval, so I'd thought she wanted to see it first. We agreed that future posters could be sent direct to the woman who works in the office, and I found out her direct e-mail address, so that the boss couldn't intercept the next one and sit on it like he did last time.
It was not a very sophisticated poster. I have no training in and no natural talent for graphic design, and no software packages to allow me to attempt anything fancy, even if I could think of something attention-grabbing I wanted to do, so it was only a home-made poster done in Word. The woman who works in the office dropped in our logo, which I have not been entrusted with on my own machine, and I copied a photo from Google images so that it least it had a colour illustration at the bottom. It included all the necessary information on the event, what it was about, where and when it was happening, how much tickets were and where to buy them, so people who like that sort of thing and are free on the day can buy tickets if they want to. It probably wasn't a poster to bring people in who didn't have any previous interest in the topic. The owner did admit it was OK, once she had calmed down and understood that she wasn't being asked to add the logo or find an image.
Deliveries of perennial plants have started to arrive, and I spent much of the day pricing a couple of recent consignments and putting them out for sale, and removing the ones put out for sale over the weekend from their plastic trays, which my colleagues had failed to do. The manager wanted them de-trayed because otherwise in wet weather they can suffer from the lack of drainage, even when the trays have holes in the bottom, but of course it is easier and faster to put them out for sale if you don't have to handle each individual pot. It's always interesting to see what's come in, and I bought myself a couple of violets, one with white and one with pink flowers, to slot into whatever gaps I can find in the bed by the ditch. There are bound to be a few bare patches, and my ideal is for a continuous, interweaving mat of woodland flowers.
The younger dog has started chasing and killing the owners' chickens. She could do with some sessions at a puppy obedience class. At least her mother restricts herself to rabbits and rats.
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