And . . . relax

We find ourselves at Friday, and two cheers for that*.

This week has been long and it has been hard.  Some of this has been to do with the accumulation of fun that naturally occurs during time away.  Like the mail on your doorstep, it tends to pile up with no regard for human dignity and a chap's well-being.  The rest of it has been to do with some really big, hairy problems.

You know when you are at a party, or anywhere in a social setting with at least some people who are unknown to you, and you are circulating, and you are asked the "What do you do?" question.  "I work in IT", you say.  At this point about fifty percent glaze over, or see someone over the other side of the room to whom they just have to speak.  The other fifty percent then ask "Oh, who do you work for?".  Once you have delivered the "Starfleet" answer, a further ninety percent get a call from their baby-sitter.  For that tiny percentage who are still talking to you, the next obvious question is, as I have discussed before, "I know someone in Starfleet, you probably know them".  If not, then it might well be "What do you do?".  I have experimented with several different answers to this question and based on the blankness of the look, have concluded that the easiest and most effective answer is "solving problems".  And that is about it really.  There is a lot of devil in the detail, but basically it is about being faced, every day, with a bunch of problems, and looking for ways to solve them.  The sad fact that many of these problems are those of trying to get a behemoth like Starfleet to do your bidding, or more precisely how you work out a way round Starfleet not doing your bidding.  This naturally leaves only a small amount of your time to actually, you know, talk to your customer and stuff like that.

This weekend, we are having a Dinner for Eight and look forward to seeing Brad and Angelina, who are staying at our Saturday night.  We can hear all about Brad's marathon exploits and be rather glad that our ambitions do not point in that direction.

Have a good weekend, and speak next week.

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* too tired to do three.

End of season

Apparently, Drogba's agent is expecting a bidding war for his player at the end of the season, between Casualty and Holby City.

Wednesday is here folks

Second day in the office, which has been good to get back in touch with colleagues and all their issues.  It is also time when you get very little time to yourself, because everyone wants a piece of you.  I don't mind this because it nails dozens of issues in a relatively short space of time, but I am looking forward to working from home tomorrow just so that I have some time to do some actual work.

I am at a leaving do tonight, to say goodbye to a colleague, and I will be sad to see him go.  He was good fun and good at his job working as the portfolio lead for a complex programme of work, and will be sadly missed.

Attending the drinks means I will miss tennis this week.  Having been to the physio last Friday, who gave me a caveated green light to gently break myself back in to playing tennis, I will be looking forward to getting back on court and (gently) smacking the hell out of the little yellow balls.

Brad

Correction: 


Brad ran the BRIGHTON marathon, not the London marathon.

I saw this...

... and thought of you.  Made me smile, which is all you can ask.

• "Military justice is to justice what military music is to music." Groucho Marx

This reminds me of the other one which is:

• "A gentleman is a man who can play the accordion but doesn't." Anon.

and this one, a definition of "perfect pitch":

• "When you toss a banjo into a skip and it hits an accordion" - Pamela Stephenson, wife of banjo-playing comedian Billy Connolly

So that was the weekend then?

We had a great weekend, mixing DIY, family stuff and socialising in to a perfect cocktail.  The Saturday evening wedding anniversary was fine.  We knew hardly anyone, which is always a bummer, but managed to find a few people to talk to, including an old friend of my sister's.  The husband ended the evening with his covers band which provided MoR musical entertainment.  Not quite Mark E Smith, but then anyone who likes him tends to expect to be marginalised in any "what music do you like?" discussions.  We were out of there by 9pm also, so this meant we were able to get home in good time, take over from my dad, who was baby-sitting, and get a recorded TV show in before bedtime.

Sunday saw us at lunch with David and Samantha - a lovely roast followed by five, count them, sweets.  Heaven.  We then went down Felpham beach for some stone-throwing, long-jumping and general "get some fresh air after a massive lunch or fall asleep trying".

As for the long-jump competition, needless to say I came second, and in pursuit of first place, I have bruised my instep.  Not actually sure whether you can do such a thing, so for the medically inclined, the bit between my heel and instep arch hurts like hell.

Once home, LO took a turn for the worse, and she was in bed at the same time as the maggots.  I followed at a more reasonable hour, and slept all the way round to sometime early for most, but quite late for me.

Finally, wanted to give a massive WELL DONE to Brad, who ran the London Marathon yesterday.  I don't have the details on his time, but unconfirmed reports say under twenty four hours.  Well done Brad, and see you next weekend.

Have a good week, and speak later.

A couple of Friday Funnies

"Ask five economists and you'll get five different answers - six if one went to Harvard." Edgar R. Fiedler

"If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel."  Will Kommen.

"I take my wife everywhere, but she keeps finding her way back."  Henny Youngman.

And finally...

A sailor meets a pirate in a bar, and they take turns recounting their adventures at sea. Noting the pirate's peg leg, hook, and eye patch, the sailor asks, "So, how did you end up with the peg leg?"  The pirate replies "We was caught in a monster storm off the cape and a giant wave swept me overboard. Just as they were pullin' me out, a school of sharks appeared and one of 'em bit me leg off." "Blimey!" said the sailor.

"What about the hook?"  "Ahhhh..." mused the pirate. "We were boardin' a trader ship, pistols blastin' and swords swingin' this way and that. In the fracas me hand got chopped off." 

"Zounds!" remarked the sailor.

"And how came ye by the eye patch?"  "A seagull droppin' fell into me eye," answered the pirate. "You lost your eye to a seagull dropping?" the sailor asked incredulously.  "Well..." said the pirate, "It was the first day with me hook...."

And . . . relax

I know it has been a while, and from my bulging post bag I know you have all been missing me.  I like to live by the adage "don't let a good story get in the way of the truth".

Due to silly stuff at work, the usual pile up of pleasures and personal invitations, I am going to be brief today.

I very much approve of a two-day week, and maybe two days on and five days off is something I can suggest at our next "bring us your wonderful ideas" days.  This weekend we are at a wedding anniversary on Saturday, starting and ending early so it is child-friendly, for friends who live round the corner.  Sunday may be lunch at David and Samantha's, depending on their general preparedness for the Monday start of the Summer term.  This may well be a "kitchen supper", something most of us had not heard of until fairly recently.  To be honest, as a major donor to David's Euro Lottery Investment Fund business opportunity, a kitchen supper is the least of it.  A few double-digit wins wouldn't go amiss either.  And if we go to lunch with them, we may avoid the usual Sunday afternoon Monopoly marathon, a game which involves a lot of dodgy dealing and ending with world domination by me.

Other than that, I hope to have a fairly quiet and family-friendly weekend.  Until we can sort the insurance claim for the accidental damage to the shower door and shower tray, my main DIY task needs to go on hold, and all the other bits are tiddlers for which an hour will probably suffice.

First day back to work

So, today is the first day back to work after four days of illness followed by four days holiday wrapped round the Easter weekend.  This means that I have not been at work since 28th March.  That is like a two week summer holiday.

This means that I have returned to work to a ridiculously full Inbox, the modern day sweatshop, and an awful lot of loose ends that have been created, nay unpicked, during my absence.  It is always a bit daunting coming back to work after such a long time off, and it is worse at the moment due to the resourcing challenges that is making everything be cranked up a few degrees.  Hey ho, at least it is keeping me off the streets.

I am also sorting out the fitting of my shower door, which was going well until something went wrong when I was handling the glass panel, I really don't know what happened, despite the insistent questioning from LO, but the result was my shower panel was turned in to hundreds of little safe pieces of glass, and a few not so safe shards.  I have also managed to take a chunk out of my shower tray.  The air was blue (and the F-words were replayed to us by the Maggots later that evening) and the levels of frustration was very high.  And that was putting it mildly.

We have since called the insurance company for advice and have logged a claim for accidental damage, which our policy luckily covered, and we now need to sort the details to try and determine if it is worth the pain and cost of pursuing a claim.  I am now versed in all the techniques for repairing dents, and there are a number of products I could choose to buy, with the main issue seeming to be the colour you put over the resin applied to the dent.  It turns out that the colour white can be in many shades, so I have now logged a call with a company that can do it for you, including colour-matching the final finish, which sounds like a service worth paying for.  I am expecting a call back today to get a quote, and then can evaluate whether it is costly enough for me to go via the insurance route, or cheap enough it is in my best interests to do it myself.

This story will run a while yet.

Wot, no blog?

They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder, and if that is the case, then it is probably just as well Starfleet is a remote-working company, because all that man-love can upset a chap's constitution.

The reason, I am sad to say, is due to illness.  Today is day four of sickness, and I am now on antibiotics for a chest infection.  This is an illness that almost feels better if I do nothing, but as soon as I raise a finger, to ring the butler bell for example, then I break out in a sweat and need to "sit down for a while".  Also, all this sweating is doing terrible things to the crease in my plus-fours.

Normal service will be resumed after Easter.  I am hopefully off 'vannin' for 5 nights - here's hoping those drugs do their thing and I get the usual health improvement in day three or four - and then it will be back to work to a terrible mess.  That is not to say my cover is not capable of doing good things, but rather the team is depleted over the holiday period and so the backlog will grow.  Ho hum, that seems a long way off right now, and we all know the truth, or lack of, in that statement.

Have a good break and speak after Easter.

And . . . relax

I was so relaxed that I didn't get round to blogging until Tuesday.  I had Friday afternoon and Monday off, and a lovely time I had as well.

Friday afternoon I watched the rest of Inglorious Basterds which, despite me agreeing with Mark Kermode that Tarantino does fantastic set pieces, but never stitches them together in to a cohesive film, I thought was rather marvellous.

Saturday was spent in pursuit of Maggot 1's birthday, which was mountain boarding followed by Pizza Hut.  Mountain boarding was "awesome dude" and we had a fantastic couple of hours.  The sun shone and the boys (the Maggots plus four of Maggot 1's friends) thoroughly enjoyed the morning.  The only negative was that LO turned her knee on her first descent* and had to sit out the rest of the session.  And spent the following three days limping as well.

Monday say LO and I shopping in Brighton.  Another lovely sunny day and a fantastic day out, with a lovely meal in the middle.

I am now back from 1.5 days off, to an Inbox that would suggest a week or more absence.  i.e. back to work with a bump.

Is it Thursday already?

This is my first day working from home, and I have to say that it was all the more stressful for being so.  Thursday and Friday are the days LO has to leave the house by 7.30am - not so early I hear you cry - however we are going through a phase* of not getting up early enough, which makes the get ready routine a very stressful time for all.

Needless to say, the Maggots were delivered to the breakfast club at 7.42am and Scobi was able to get on with breakfast and work.  I have stopped the pain killers today in an attempt to wean myself off the drugs, and so far the cold turkey is not so bad.  The shoulder is aching a bit, but that may well be due to 3 days of driving this week, so I am hoping that I can stop them and feel no adverse effects.  That will then mean I just need the physio to get it back to full working order, and make sure I treat it more gently in the future.

I have Friday afternoon and Monday off, so will have a lovely long weekend.  I had planned a sports massage for tomorrow, but was not sure whether I should go or not with my shoulder, so I rang for advice, which came back much stronger than I had expected.  "I wouldn't touch you with a barge pole.  In fact, my insurance would be invalid if I did".  That sorted that then.

Better get back to work to try and close down all the lose threads that are dangling.

Have a good one, and speak again tomorrow.

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* a phase that started in our teenage years