So much for my back-from-the-black-hole-blog. I try.

It's been really busy here and I've got to admit I'm not feeling all that Christmassy yet. I'm sure finishing work this Friday is going to help enormously though, particularly if I can get this wretched cast off this week, and switch to a boot. It has caused a surprising variety of pain all over my body. First there's the agonising crop of blisters on the sole of my foot which developed about two weeks ago when I started getting mobile, sans crutches. I have old blisters, new blisters, popped blisters, blisters with blisters, and blisters sticking to the bandage inside the cast. The bandage inside the cast, which peeps out top and bottom, is dirty, grey, and utterly revolting. And the whole thing stinks. (Think of wearing a fluffy sock inside an unbreathing boot for four weeks. Gah. Not to mention walking through a field on a rainy Friday night and drenching the fluffy sock through the gaping hole where the toes stick out.) Plus, quite apart from the blisters, my entire body is permanently aching from the funny lopsided gait I am walking with. I also have a headache right now.

If I concentrate and try to list body parts that are not hurting, I come up with the following list:

• my chin

That's about it, really.

Other items in the news:

We (I and the other guy contracting with me) have decided to do the polygraph test. Our company is copping out of the decision and leaving it up to us. Sad as it is, we would rather stay where we are even to the point of doing the polygraph test, rather than return to our previous posts in our company. The people we are working with are pleasant and we have a satisfying amount of autonomy in what we are doing and it is reasonably easy to ignore the bigger political picture. Not that the people at my own company are unpleasant - they're not - it's just that for ages now I have been working, alone, on weird and wonderful esoteric alternative methodology stuff that they think they are interested in pursuing but are too busy being in permanent survival mode to pay any attention to.

So at least my scientific curiosity about polygraphs will be satisfied. Got to admit I'm pretty nervous about it. The questions of interest are about the sale of client data, and naturally those questions will make me anxious, since they matter, so how will my nervous reaction due to the content of the questions differ from a nervous reaction due to lying about the answers?

Apparently one of the standard starter questions in a polygraph test is 'Have you ever told a lie?' Now naturally the answer to this one is yes, as everybody has told a lie. Only, I was then getting stressed trying to think of a lie I had told so that I could answer the question without lying. I mean, I knew there must be some lies I had told but to answer the question correctly and not trigger the sensors, surely there would have to be a lie I was aware of telling? Finally I thought of some seasonal lies I regularly tell to my offspring (ho, ho, ho and all that). Huge relief.

Speaking again of Christmas, we took the kids to the annual Christmas thing put on in our village for charity (proceeds go to charity, and toys for charity are collected at the door). The highlight of the evening is when Father Christmas arrives and the names of the kids in the audience are called out one by one and they go up and receive their presents. Very mysteriously, each of the three kids received a perfectly matched present. Daniel got Henry, Robyn received a scrap booking kit, while Lauren's present was a domino shuttle which comes with 300 coloured dominoes, domino bridges, and a very cool little battery-powered truck which drops off lines of dominoes.

Robyn: We're so lucky we got these from Uncle Jumbo's. Mom and Dad would never have bought anything this nice for us.

Daniel was so sweet with Henry. When he got home he introduced him to Thomas so that they could be friends. Lauren put his Thomas DVD on for him, and Danny sat and watched with Thomas and Henry on his lap. When the bit with Henry came on he took his Henry up close to the screen so that he could see himself on TV.

Oh, and my cell phone finally died, so now I can go ahead and get a new one. I was putting off getting a new one because I always destroy them sooner or later, and it had been a while, so I thought I was about due to destroy one pretty soon. [So when I say it died, it was more a case of culpable phonicide on my part. I stood on it. There was a sickening crunch and now there is only half a screen showing.] When I receive a message now, I can see the bottom half of it only, and not whom it's from. Dialling is a bit of a lucky dip too. We went in to the shop to see about getting a new one. The assistant was mortified on my behalf that I've been hanging on to my embarrassingly old phone for a full year more than I should have (previous contract expired over a year ago). I apologised as best I could and she seemed to recover. We could not, of course, actually get a phone. But we did put an order in and it should be coming in about a week.