23/3: a White Easter

Happy Easter to everyone!
(Or should I say Christmas?).

We awoke with a surprise: snow everywhere!
Until I saw it I didn't realize how much I was missing the snow.
There was none this winter and even this one didn't stand longer than few hours: still, quite nice.

Apparently one of the traditions for Easter in UK is that parents hides chocolate eggs and kids have to find them in the Easter morning. Agnese, having heard this at school probably, wanted the same arrangement. Fair enough.

So at 5:30 she came into my bed asking: "can we go looking for the eggs?".
I can't recall much beside the '5:30' on the watch, but I guess I said politely 'no, is too early'. She must have tried few other times until 6:00. After that, she asked every 5-10 minutes.
(That reminds me of Shrek 2, when Donkey asks: 'are we there yet?').
At 6:30 for some reasons she decided to go without asking, but of course first she awoke Rachele.
At that moment I really appreciated this Easter tradition!
And why search for chocolate eggs silently?
So every 2 minutes one of the two was back, asking for hints.
"Check in the living room".
"Check in the window of living room".
"Check properly the window of living room. For example the curtains".
"Check under the curtains of the window of the living room".

But the real question is: why these traditions (chocolate eggs, Christmas and birthday presents) involves events that ALWAYS happen in the morning of a bank holiday, when other people tell me they 'are going to relax and rest'?

A nice Easter otherwise.

The aXe

March 2008.

It has been a while since I wrote last time.

Everything is fine but last month was quite 'depressing' in a way.

My company is going through a reorganization and half of the people working in Cambridge are going to be made redundant.

The selection process was done very professionally and it took one month to complete.

People were grouped into pools of competences and each one was evaluated by considering a list of skills needed by the company future plans. Everyone of us had three interviews, to be sure that the evaluation was fair.

During this while it was very sad to stay in the office: the mood was lower than ever, and it was very difficult to focus on actual work, since I (as many others) didn't know if I was affected or not by the cut.

Every now and then someone said something about it, and everyone went to listen his/her point of view: uncertainty led to a lot of conspiracy and theories about what and how was going to happen. The result was always a total confusion and nothing more.

This week the process was over and in a way was a relief for everyone.

I am spared by the axe: I am still part of the Cambridge team.

In the picture how the axe works: the cut comes from the top. One piece of wood fall in one side and one in the other. If you are a piece of wood, you cannot do much to decide in which side to fall off.