Hooray, hooray, it's a holi-holiday

I was meaning to wish all my American readers a happy July 4th yesterday, and remind them it's too late now to come running back and say they want to be a colony again. Hope you all had a good time, anyway, even though I saw fit to devote last night's entry to more whining about my free holiday next week.

Although it would be cool to be American in order to have fireworks in the summer, what wouldn't be cool is the amount of time off work you get over there, from what I've heard. This trip to Brazil next week, New York earlier this year, Germany the other week, then the WMC, MSO and BOC to come have almost completely eaten up the 25 days' annual leave I get. I don't know how I'd cope if I only got a couple of weeks off a year.

One dream of mine is to acquire a biggish chunk of money, £20,000 or so, and take a year off work to do all these things I never get round to doing. I'd join a gym, go to college or university or both and do as many weird courses as I could find (this is what the bulk of the twenty grand would go on), do all the usual memory and other mind-sporty things only with more time to practice, fit in a couple of trips to Las Vegas and general globetrotting, just generally have a good time. Write a book or two, set up websites about weird things. Maybe learn to play snooker well.

I'd also need some kind of brain surgery to stop me feeling guilty about spending all that money on myself rather than giving it to the people who need it, of course.

Oh, and by the way, I'm flattered and fascinated by all the comments I got on that post about my credit cards and things. I thought at the time I wrote it that it was the most boring blog entry I'd ever done, but it seems to have been one of the all-time most popular. I mean, I take the contents of my pocket and write about them in graphic detail, and people read the whole thing? Am I out of touch with what's cool and interesting nowadays? Or am I just such a great writer that I could transcribe the phone book here and everyone would love it?