Update 17/01/13
Now back at work, the practice has been challenged – it is harder to concentrate in meditation without stressful thoughts arising, stress levels increased overall, difficult to stay mindful whilst at work and particularly hard to follow the 5 precepts – such as right speech – gossip is such a ubiquitous part of a workplace - hard not to be involved. So, being patient with meditation sessions and more disciplined. Whilst some of the best and longest sessions were in supine position, it is harder to not fall asleep and to wake up out of sleep to meditate properly. So transitioning to sitting (kneeling using seiza stool) and placing time limits on sessions. Jhana 1 and 2 (Samata) are deeper but harder to get beyond them at the moment. Also started doing Metta technique as I suspect it might be helpful in Dark Night whenever I get to that and also I think its just good for the world

Continuing to do stretching yoga twice daily and 85 pushups daily to keep strong, and flexible releasing stresses from the body as well. Also yoga stretching is designed to help with sitting more comfortably for longer without pain distraction.
Continuing to build noting practice through the day particularly on bus to work and home again. Trying to snap out of daily delusion and notice this moment and reality throughout the day but this will take time to develop and grow as a practice.
As a pre-path practitioner the following contemplation insights have been useful – was contemplating the idea of how we associate places, objects, actions etc with often complex affective positive and negative perceptions. Really suffused mind with questioning around this. Such as why do we need or want holidays (ie going somewhere else from our home etc)? Would it be in part because we have grown to hate the place and people we work in and with? Or is it that we have grown to hate the associated thoughts, feelings that we have attached to the place and people we live, work with every day. Alternatively, a holiday in some beautiful place we are drawn to for the opposite reason – because it is a place we have only done relaxing and good things in or have been told is the place those positive things are experienced, so we have a positive association with those places (they are also probably really comfortable beautiful places too). This is interesting when seeing tourists walking around the place you live, they are experiencing it with completely different associations to those who live there and so attach different and presumably more positive associations to the place we live than local dwellers do. This is complex as many other associations such as fondness, sentimentality, excitement etc are also combined into our ‘view’ of a place. So maybe a holiday is at least in part taken not because we don’t like the place we live but the associations we have attached that form our ‘view’ of the place. A holiday offers some respite and refreshment of this for a time. So if we were free from combining experiences with perceptions and associated emotions, would we seek holidays for a different reason? Or would we want a holiday at all? Would the need to get away and refresh still be there? Maybe Arahats can answer this?
So thinking this way, I saw how noting could help with this tendency to combine feelings, perceptions from collected experiences of a place, object or action by training the mind to just experience (6 sense doors) them for what they are, breaking that chain of automatically converting them to an experiential catalogue that forever embeds into the mind, enhancing the opportunity for mental tendencies/biases, characteristics (collectively termed our personality) to demonstrate, grow and proliferate. So if noting is effective at this, an advanced practitioner could presumably walk around very familiar areas such as where they work and live and not view them as a combined emotional, perception experience but rather just as they are – a street, a shop, an office, a person at the office I work at etc. Thinking through this makes noting a lot more meaningful for me as a useful tool and motivates me to practice it more. So this has been helpful, however, and whilst I have not articulated this very well, if I have got this wrong or confused, would appreciate clarification from more considered or experienced practitioners.

: