Daniel Hutchinson From The Hutch

It's 5.30am and I'm peering through windows and checking to see if the door is unlocked.

After casing the front of the building and the side, I hit the jackpot at the back – a window is ajar!

Like a ninja in cargo shorts and stripey jandals, I poke my head inside and size up the terrain. The building is set about a metre into the ground, so I must get a leg over and a foot onto the top of the concrete block wall that runs halfway up the inside.

From there, it's a simple matter of grabbing the hand grips on a crosstrainer and stepping down onto one of the pedals with my other foot.

I probably should have taken the slippery jandals off before attempting this move, but I'm an optimist and the soles of my feet are a bit sensitive. There is one dicey moment where my legs are unnaturally far apart and one of them is travelling downwards in slow motion while my arm is travelling up.

Clearly, I have excellent core strength because after scraping my belly on the window, head-butting the punching bag and knocking the flyspray off the ledge, I finally arrive the right way up and I've still got one jandal on. From there it's just one internal door to the office.

I'm at work!

Am I there yet?

Going to work is an expression I don't really use anymore. I feel like if you are going somewhere, you need to leave one address and go to another.

Just wandering down to the other end of the garden with a coffee in one hand and a diary in another doesn't meet the criteria.

The commute this morning has been as frustrating and time-consuming as an average 8am trip down Hewletts Rd. Of course, losing my keys would have added to that drama as well.

We have a rack for keys, but I use them so often for so many different things that they often get left in the nearest place to where I once was.

My process for searching for keys involves retracing my steps, and asking myself that annoying question; Where did you use them last?

Quite often someone helpfully removes the keys from one of my favourite locations and places them on the rack of keys – very annoying!

This morning I simply couldn't find them anywhere so rather than enlist the help of Mrs Hutch at 5.30am on her day off, I've used my physical prowess to solve the problem.

That funny feline

Working from home is a mental game, so much so that employers these days must consider more than the possibility of another company poaching their staff.

Now, employees are likely to be poached by any number of things – the washing on the line being threatened by the rain, the courier arriving with an oversized parcel, an addiction to Netflix or test cricket.

Now I'm something of a cat whisperer and often get funny felines rubbing up against me, however I've been wasting a lot of work time lately on staring down the neighbour's fluffy brown demon.

He is almost certainly responsible for the demise of my red onions this year, commandeering that section of the raised bed as an ensuite. I'm not sure he realises that's my garden, not his but he stares at me belligerently through the very window I've just climbed in, from behind the chilis.

He knows I don't have the reflexes to leap through the window and put him in a headlock. At worst, I will walk around the office for a verbal confrontation, by which time he's reluctantly sifted back over the fence to eye me from the top of his pagoda.

Beating inflation

I've resigned myself to the fact I will only have two red onions this year, and only because they were protected by an aggressive zucchini plant.

I tell you what, if you want to beat inflation on groceries, plant a zucchini. These things grow from the size of a finger to the size of a leg in the space of a week. You won't need to buy another vegetable again.

You've just got to make sure you water them regularly.

Which reminds me, I've got to go now – the roof sprung a leak overnight and dripped water down into a strategically placed rubbish bin. I thought I fixed that last time but clearly not.

So, I'm afraid there won't be a column this week – there are far more urgent things to attend to.

daniel@thesun.co.nz