House Buying Update

Received the contract for the house today! Yay!

On every document there is a typo in the names. Boo!

I’ll have to call the lawyers tomorrow to see how much of an issue this is.

Who Broke the Internet?

I can imagine everyone is being a lot more productive this afternoon since the internet seems to be hosed…. well Twitter and Facebook are borked for me and both are usually the sites that distract me when I should be doing something more productive with my days off.

The last few days have been very relaxed and I should be in a state ready to go back to work now.  The last few weeks I have found myself experiencing that Friday afternoon tiredness on a Monday morning and that’s never a good sign. I definitely needed some time out of the office. We’ve been more or less constant since the start of the year.

I’ve spent my time improving my non existent photography skills and… *shudder*… shopping. Damn those inconsiderate friends for having birthdays! Still, the resulting birthday meal was a lot of fun as normal.

Now I just need to enjoy the time I have left before heading back to the office.

Update: Twitter is experiencing a distributed denial of service attack.

Jobless Graduate Sues her College (via BBC)

Apparently a graduate unable to find work in the US is suing her college

I thought I would post this in an attempt to come up with some words to describe how completely stupid I think this is, but I really can’t find any.

So all I will say is…. this is completely stupid!

No really, I worry about  the sanity of our planet when this is the type of thing people feel they should take legal action against.

Still Here

I’m getting slightly more successful at writing here although I still have a long way to go. It’s been a couple of weeks since I last wrote anything…. sorry about that!

Some downtime at work means I’ve taken a few days off.  Not many of the bigger projects move forward during August due to the number of people taking time off.  This means as the techy person I can also escape the office and the chains on my desk for a few days…. although I really hate to think how many emails I’ll end up going back to.  A guesstimate in the hundreds probably isn’t that far out… still I’m pretty good at shutting those kind of thoughts away and not considering them until I’m back in the office.

Although as soon as I get back into work we’re into a period of about six weeks where all leave is banned due to the volume at work. No rest for the wicked I guess?

The house moving thing hasn’t moved any further forward. The surveys etc are all done and it’s not just a case of waiting for the contracts to be drawn up. Is it me or do lawyers have no sense of urgency unless they’re waiting on you to do something? Really hoping though to hear something in the next couple of weeks. For now I’ll just be patient.

A Family Saturday

While July 4th means no fireworks for us here in the UK, what it does mean for me is a lot of family birthdays all rolled up into a short space of time.

Hence after a looooong (and what I think was a well deserved after a hard working week) lay in everyone (including some cousins I haven’t seen in 5 or so years!) pitched up at the pub for a family meal. It was good to see everyone sat around the same table because it doesn’t happen that often these days now we’re all off living our own lives. Plus the food wasn’t bad either! It’s been ages since I last had waffles but these were good! Wish more restaurants/pubs in the UK served them.  Actually there’s a lot of American food I wish was served in the UK but I think that’s for another post entirely some day.

Didn’t get up to anything too exciting in the evening. Catching up with podcasts (I’m about six months behind) and watching CSI. Problem is with the weekends is that they fly by all too quickly.

Getting Back Into It

I said I would try and start writing again and after some procrastination and some gentle pushing from some people I’m actually sitting down to write a full post again. Go me!  This would have been yesterday but sitting in the office until 7pm put pay to that idea as it sucked away all my free time for the evening.

The UK is currently in the middle of a heatwave.  Temperatures are pushing 30C which for a lot of the world is a hot spring day. For us it’s somewhat of a crisis since the British don’t cope with heat well.  The awesome thunderstorms this causes make it almost worth it but they have been somewhat lacking around MK recently.

Work is going well.  We’ve been busy recently but it’s slowly winding down for the summer when people are traditionally on leave and the office is a little quieter. I’m pushing for promotion (and the pay rise it brings) and have some work to complete in order to achieve that and prove my worthyness.  Hopefully I can have that done by the time Autumn comes around because….

…. In other news I am currently going through the process of buying a house.  The pay rise would come in handy for making the mortgage easier to pay.  So far the process hasn’t been too bad. There’s obviously been the inevitable drain on the bank account for legal fees etc and plenty of forms to fill in but nothing horribly complicated.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it continues like that. I would hate for anything to fall through right now.

I think I may now go and complain about the heat some more…. however as a cooling final thought, July 1st means we’re halfway to Christmas

Writing Again

I should really try and start writing again.

Maybe a day where I’ve been glued to a computer screen for 10 hours trying to fix a problem at work isn’t the best time to start.

Maybe tomorrow?

Sick Day

I never made it to my desk as intended today. After the illnesses of the weekend I decided to stay away for just one more day. If nothing else, to save those I work with from catching whatever it was that knocked me out for the best part of the weekend.

As a result my highly exciting tasks of the day have relvolved around eating something for the first time (Yay!), taking pictures of the surprise snow we got today (that I didn’t know about until someone the other side of the world told me it was there!) and photo editing.

I was then caught off guard when the groceries were delivered half hour early which meant I needed to go outside in bare feet.  Wasn’t fun!

Still, it’s more than likely back to work tomorrow. I have a feeling it’ll be a long week!

New Year, New Effort

I’ve really neglected this thing recently haven’t I?  Nothing written since the end of November!

I guess a new year is a good time to try and revive it? If not only for my own benefit but maybe for the people I won’t get to talk to as often now the new year is taking people in new directions.

I wish I could say 2009 has started brightly but it really hasn’t. Especially today. I try not to be negative but sometimes it can’t be helped.  So far today’s woes have so far included:

1. Everyone around me (family, friends & work colleagues) have been ill over the past few weeks. I rarely get ill. I haven’t had a day off sick from work in over three years.  But this morning it caught up with me.  It’s been trying for a few days. New Years Eve I briefly woke up with a sore throat but it seemed to disappear within a few hours.  However today I woke up with a headache, feeling sick and with very little energy. After managing to just about take an aspirin I passed out again resulting in:
2. Me missing a phone call I really wish I had taken!
3. In fact I’m coming to the realisation that I don’t give enough time to my friends. All of them. I really need to change this. I will change this.
4. The Colts lost.  I don’t know how or by what score. I haven’t been able to bring myself to check yet. But one message not long after the game went into overtime told me all I needed to know.  I’ve followed NFL in the past loosely but this is the first season I have really been into it and the first season I’ve dedicated myself to following a team. I’m bitterly disappointed. Especially after a 9 game unbeaten run.
5. I’m guessing this is as a result of 1. But I just cannot warm up today! I’ve been told by people in the know that the secret to surviving this is layers (although I’m not convinced hairstyles has anything to do with it). I’m wearing several tops including my Colts jersey (in mourning, and technically (due to a 1.30am kick off) today is still game day in the UK) and I’ve not stopped shivering all morning.
6. Providing I wake up in some semi-fit state tomorrow work starts again. I’ve worked only a handful of days over the past couple of weeks so I’ve got myself in a relaxed state.  A five day week does not strike me as a whole lot of fun.
7. Again work related. January marks the start of the fourth financial quarter at work.  Which means every man, woman and child (well maybe not the kids) will want reports on what happened in the third quarter.  As the company’s resident dimensional modelling expert (it’s a posh term for meaning I can do clever stuff with data and numbers) that means in a couple of weeks i’ll be wanting to hang myself… well that or question if I am in the right job.  If that happens I’ll try and make a point of writing about it.  I need to keep telling myself that it’s just a job and I should leave those issues at the door. But sometimes people can be really unreasonable.

So I guess it’s safe to say I have some issues today.  I suspect I’m just feeling sorry for myself because of being ill. With any luck I’ll wake up tomorrow and this will all be gone.

Trapped

When you’re in a place you don’t want to be with no escape and very little to do what do you do? Blog in my case!

Friday was as quiet as could be expected in an empty office. For the first time in a few weeks I managed to be out of the door at 4pm. Normally something will go wrong and I end up being there until 6 or 7. I feel like I’m winding down for my week off beginning on the 17th. I’ll actually be able to refuse work this week as I won’t be able to fit it in until December.

I needed to get some small things like watch batteries done this weekend. Driving home on Friday night I suddenly found some motivation and got it out of the way there and then. I hate giving up my weekends to do that kind of thing. If I had left it until Saturday morning I would have struggled to find the energy to do it. Plus I would rather spend my weekends when I am not working with the people I care about and when that can’t happen within my own thoughts.

Sundays are not my favourite part of the weekend. It’s time to visit family which usually means being sat in the corner of the room being ignored. You know the one time I decide not to turn up though I’ll be moaned at. I’m not sure how I coped before the invention of the iPhone though. Writing posts like this, reading Twitter and Facebook just about keep me sane.

This kinda sums it up though…. everyone else just left the room and I’m now sat here on my own. I wonder if anyone will notice if I take a nap