Trying to fit a square peg into a round bowl

I know that many of you are reluctant to follow my example and take a gap year decades into your career. The main worry is that you'd lose your finely honed analytic and problem solving skills that help you to exceed your employer's expectations and meet your key performance indicators every year, which drives those big bonuses.

The trick is to keep these skills fresh by applying them to the everyday problems that during your working life always had to take a back seat in favour of your professional issues. For example:

Since I came back to Australia I have changed my breakfast habit to eating four Weet-Bix every morning. Weet-Bix appeal to me with their no-nonsense, down to earth, utilitarian approach. They don't display any of the pretentious flakiness of Special K that crumbles to dust if there package gets agitated a few times, or the unnecessary frivolity of Fruit Loops, or even the pubertarian ambiguity of Coco Pops, which don't know whether they want to be a milk flavouring or a rice crispy. No, Weet-Bix are just straight forward bricks of compressed layers of wheat that not only make them extremely storage efficient, but with the correct addition of fluid allow you to create an experience that comes close to eating a mille-feuille for breakfast. 

You want to add just enough liquid for the biscuit to get soft, but still retain a crunchy top layer. The viscosity and sweetness of the liquid is important. I have tried various options and found SoGood Almond Milk the optimal additive. (Beer is only recommended when you fail in your late night party bet of eating a Weet-Bix without liquid in under a minute)

It has the correct viscosity and natural sweetness

But now we come to the problem that needs to be solved. Tableware manufacturers didn't anticipate and rectangular breakfast and only created round bowls, which makes it impossible to accurately control the correct and even moisture uptake of each biscuit. 

How on earth can this work? It's like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole!

The first thing that you need to do to approach the problem is to think about the aesthetics of the brickwork. After all it is one of the first things that you see in the morning. Luckily the Weet-Bix are twice as long as wide, so there are many layouts possible in the same breakfast dish real estate. Unless of course you do something silly like the top most layout in the next picture.

Next you need to size up the problem. Make sure that you work out the size of your layout exactly. I can offer you that my most recent measuring in an uncontrolled environment of around 40 centigrade ambient temperature showed that a Weet-Bix is roughly 82 X 41 X 20 millimetre.

Equipped with this knowledge you can then head off to the shops to find a dish that is just slightly larger that your complete layout. You want to give the liquid a little bit of room to disperse itself evenly amongst the bricks. I tried several shops and purveyors of reputable tableware, but didn't have any luck until I hit the Tupperware section of Big-W in a last ditch attempt. And there I found it, the perfect four brick breakfast vessel:

My preferred left to right eating layout

As you can see, the dish leaves some room for the almond milk to surround the bricks, but not too much so that it would run too far away for the biscuits to soak it up. When you pour the liquid onto the Weet-Bix you want to pour the first third over the top and then slowly add the reminder along the side of the dish, so that the top remains crunchy. I figured out that approximately 42.5 millilitres of almond milk per biscuit does the job (170 ml in total).

The other very pertinent feature of the dish is that it has rounded corners. This is very important because it is easily reached with your spoon. Not only when you first start eating your breakfast, but right down to the last crumb.

Also notice that there is hardly any liquid left. Distribution and moisture/crunchiness ratio was perfect.

Now, you can see that a systematic approach and some attention to detail goes a long way towards addressing your everyday problems. But I would just like to end with a word of warning:

If you are following this blog from the UK, don't be tempted to try this with VitaBrits. They are completely different in their internal structure and I would need to approach it with a completely different set of tests!!

I trust that this post reassures you that the skills that you acquired in your long career will not be lost, regardless whether you are just taking a gap year or even if you get retired. Naturally if you get retired you have time to go into a lot more detail than I could afford here.