The boy who is working for me this week, while I'm on holiday, is hopeless. The other booth in the mall hired him and trained him, and sent him down to me when Joseph, as I mentioned before, the boy who was supposed to be working for me while I went on holiday, got a job on the ferries. Yesterday I heard that they'd fired him, and since he insists on showing people his newly pierced nipple, and fancies himself a ladies' man, I'm not surprised. He called me, just after I started writing this, to see if I was coming in, and I said, yes, at 4, because it's payday, but he wants someone to work a few hours this afternoon while he "does a few things" before going to a friend's birthday party... Won't be me. I'd not much like to be him in a while if he calls Alison, either.

I'm worried that he won't show up next week. And I'll be at Long Beach...

miraculously, although I was called in to work on Sunday, I have managed to have Saturday, yesterday, and today off. So I've been baking, and reading, and mucking about in the garden. I've made biscuits and blueberry muffins (courtesy of a fabulous case of blueberries that I froze two weeks ago) and pavlova, which I've always wanted to have a go at, and was happily gobbled up tonight when Mum and Dad came to visit. I've read a big fat Jilly Cooper book about a bunch of loons making an opera movie , a hitherto unread Ruth Rendell, No Night is Too Long, that Serra who used to work for me was in the movie, and Margaret Forster's Have the Men had Enough, which made me miss Grannie. I've weeded the bean patch and made a salad with the harvest, and also weeded the front garden, which was beginning to look like tiger habitat. (Observe behind the dry grasses, as the tigers play with their young...) Also I've been making coffee and drinking it, reading the newspapers from cover to cover, and Rachel and I have been to the park and to pick blackberries.

So far, a very satisfactory vacation.