Wednesday finds me at my laptop at 0500 hours. I am an early bird, but this is even a bit early for me. The truth is, the two days out, plus the fact half my team are on holiday, and one of them has not been pulling his weight, means that I have a short-term pile up of commitments, one of which is directly with one of my customers. So it was that, at 0415 hours, I glanced at my watch, considered all the things I have to do today (a day when I am in the office, so the chances of doing anything other than answer questions is very slim), and decided I might as well get up and get on with things.
So it is that I have nearly re-written the solution previously done by my less that popular team member. Just need to get the polish out and send the resultant "pig with lipstick" to a couple of PMs who are managing the previous iteration of my current solution, so they can give their considered views on how I have done.
Anyway, enough of that, I need to tell you about my long weekend away. We stayed at Riversidelakes, which was a chilled camp site which allowed open fires. The website, which you can see if you click on the link, does have a slight tone of "we are very relaxed people, so if you are not, f##k off", i.e. it felt to me rather passive aggressive, but in fact I could not have been more wrong. The owners of the site were absolutely lovely, friendly and could not do enough for us.
And so the tone was set for a wonderful 4 days. We did a bit of fishing, we have open fires every evening on which the Maggots cooked* marshmallows and we had a long and chilled time. The sun shone every day, and the Maggots were in seventh heaven, making friends with the two girls next door** and spending all their time on "Pie Island", "Diarrhea Island***" and other Swallows and Amazons type locations. They also seemed to acquire a fairly large group of followers, or "little kids" as the called them. We became friends with the whole family next door and spent every evening round the fire chatting and toasting. In fact Elspeth, mum of said family, was very sad there was no-one with a guitar, as the web site had intimated. I had not taken mine, and in truth she does not know how lucky she is. In the evening, the staff came round on their golf buggy selling bags of firewood and also to hand out glow sticks to the children. This latter element delighted the kids, and maybe harked back to the site's previous incarnation as a festival site, however it did not quite sit with the overall ecologically sound stance they had for the rest of the site - for example, at the back of the main field, they had a "composting toilet" which was described by the kids very succinctly; you do a poo and put sawdust on it. Yeuch.
Since we have returned, Maggot 2 has talked of nothing but the site, and what they would be doing now if they were still on the site, and all the things they did, some of which he cannot divulge because adults wouldn't like it.
It was a fantastic site, with fantastic company (thanks to Brad and Angelina) and fantastic weather. It was the perfect storm of holiday experience, the only thing letting it down being that it was for only 4 days. Having said that, the Tuesday were were back (yesterday) was raining, so maybe even the departure day was perfect.
I shall leave you now to complete my solution, and will speak to you later in the week.
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* incinerated may have been a better choice of word
** another great feature of the site is that they do not believe in cramming you in, so we had three times the space of a usual site, which themselves are always adequate, and so you needed a strong arm for them to be a stone's throw away
*** Don't ask, because we didn't
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