How Many Foods Can You Cook in a Wok?

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So this week I got a job. It’s a job that sounds cool. It’s near my house and in the morning when I walk there I’ll buy coffee from a cute café where the barista wears hawaiian shirts.

I start my job in two weeks, which gives me a lot of time prepare, and also a lot of time to purchase things I don’t yet have the money for. Also, it provides me with two weeks of actual holidays to spend doing holiday-things, without having write job-applications. After this next two weeks, holidays will be a commodity to be nurtured and treated sensibly. Like bank accounts. Or puppies.

When I was little, holidays were exciting, magical, and most importantly happened four times every year. Both my anonymous parents were teachers, and so their holidays coincided with mine. At the time, I didn’t realise their occupation was the reason for our ability to take family holidays. To me, it seemed infinitely sensible that the world just stops four times a year, so that everyone can be with their families and eat ice-cream (never mind the people who serve the ice-cream… maybe my family’s holidays were somehow staggered with theirs').

It certainly never occurred to me that when I grew up I might not get my four designated holidays per year.

It seemed (read ‘seems’) insane.

When I was growing up, my family spent many of our holidays camping in various coastal towns. As mentioned previously, most my memories from these events revolve around ice-cream. Also disagreements of which foods can be cooked in a wok (not as many as you think, Dad), and disagreements over the rules of Gin Rummy. Our last family holiday began with my wok-loving father putting up metal tent-poled in a lightning storm (while my mother and two sisters cried at him from the car), and ended with some unpleasant (and lasting) tension between my anonymous sister Bridget and I regarding ‘Who left the tent open in the rain?’ (and I swear it was probably not me. Plus, the Tarago was a pretty sweet second-choice sleeping option, in my opinion). Anyway.

When I got a little older, I realised that only The Lucky Ones; school-teachers, get four holidays per year. Meanwhile, other perfectly good grown-ups make do with much less. It is my believe that the doctors, administrative workers, engineers, council workers, draftsmen and hawaiian shirted baristas that I know all work quite hard too. They suffer the same three-thirty-itis as teachers. They know the pull of the Freddo fundraising box (and have had to live through the twenty-cent price increase) the same as teachers.

And yet, when it comes to having time out to eat ice-cream and cook wok-food, these poor plebs are annually under-compensated.

After some caffeine fuelled thought (the most reasonable kind), I have decided that there ought to some kind of dramatic Holiday Uprising. A ‘Huprising’, if you will. I will lead it through the powers of this blog (with my eleven ‘followers’ in tow), and you can join if you like. We'll can Hawaiian Shirts (Up for discussion).

Hmm. It comes to mind that I have a lot of friends who are teachers. Also more family members who are teachers than who aren’t. Also, I think at least five of my eleven ‘followers’ are teachers.

But I reckon together we could take em’.