That greeting may seem a little unseasonal right now but this week marks New Year in the Chinese calendar. Working in IT guarantees an international workforce and some of my colleagues have even taken the week off to go home for the celebrations. It makes for an interesting bunch of holiday requests as some of our Indian buddies for example will happily work through Christmas and take a month off later in the year for the Ganges river festival instead. From a project management point of view it does help to level out leave arrangements!

Closer to home it’s also Pancake Tuesday today. There are some events in the calendar of any young family such as The late late toy show, Eurovision(!), Easter etc and today is another of those. I celebrated this morning as this evening I am in the Dáil. I was also in the Dáil for Halloween. Admittedly a combination of business and pleasure but politics could never be described as family friendly :/

One hears a lot about down-sizing, work-life balance in other occupations but rarely in politics. My own belief if one is to be active on the outside, one should be active on the inside and look after one’s own family as well as anyone elses. It’s free will of course and I try to get that balance.

All work and no play is no balance either and I’ll confess my evening concludes at the Politics.ie Primary Party, organised by the website to commemorate the US Primaries tonight. Beer, hotdogs and big screens full of polling figures – a politico’s dream night out!