Birmingham...again

Well I'm off to Brum again today, the 3rd time since Saturday, for my IET C.Eng interview. We went in on Monday to have some lunch (at Cafe Rouge) and to get some presents for the new arrival in the street. Of course we found it hard to resist a good mooch around the ground floor at selfridges, where they have this jelly bean man. Restricted ourselves to 4 doughnuts from Krispy Kreme too!

Working from home this morning for a couple of hours then Tasha is dropping me at the station for the hop to Birmingham.

Well Florence's ankle needed some dressing this morning, but throughout the day she has been able to put more and more weight on it. We went over to Tasha's mums today. It was great to see Dan, Karen & Lauren too. We managed to get dates sorted out to go and visit them.

We then went over to Janice's for their 60th birthday bash.

Tasha is out on the lash tonight - it might be a late one!

An hour after eating a Chinese meal you could eat another one...

... or so they say. Well, certainly not for me last night - the Chancers went to Birmingham for the first get together. Met up with Adrian and Trapper as they who were in town early.

Mark met us in the apple store in the bullring, and we had a great 1/2 hour of geeking (John and Adrian had gone for their first drink by this stage). After that we wandered around New Street and stumbled on a german wine festival, and enjoyed a glass of red. Geoff and Chi phoned, so we set off back for the station to collect them.

We all called in on the Ikon gallery, which was a first for me, but won't be the last, before meeting up with the others in a pub near the canal. After some more drinks we ate at the big wok. It was busy but unlike similar places I've visited, the food was varied and abundant.

I ate so much that the train journey home was pretty uncomfortable!!

The clan had all been to Jean & Melvyn's and Florence had sprained her ankle (hopefully nothing more serious).

Thanks guys for a great afternoon!!

Chores

Had a productive day from start to finish today. Testing is going well especially after Peter and I discussed the philosophy - I was trying to get too much working. A more basic approach is required, and as soon as I got that in my skull things speeded up.

General good karma tidying and installed new power management for the desktop. Caught up with LOST, and cleared my inbox - after the backlog when the router fried.

Had a great talk with Mark on the way home. He is obviously feeling the same way in upping the level of photography being done. Looking forward to Saturday, MP3s, geeking and a good catch-up. Do I take the camera????

Old Street roundabout comp-1

Old Street roundabout comp-1,
originally uploaded by BombDog.

Bombdog has been at it again. Fantastic image composite. This is part of the Parkour group, go check it out here group.

Back on line

Never thought I'd miss the internet (especially having done without it on holiday), but when there is a PC there with a fried router....

...anyway, its all OK now.

I'm back!

Well back in the UK after a fantastic break in France for nearly 3 weeks. It all started pretty badly, with the clutch failing on our tow car the day before we were going to leave. After speaking to a varied amount of people (some cowbows and some who obviously knew what they were on about), it appears that our car is known for getting through clutches. I rang the caravan club to see if they could offer any advice. As we'd taken out some comprehensive travel cover with them, they could supply a hire car equivalent if they couldn't get it fixed. By 4pm (16 hours until we wanted to set off), we had decided that it was not possible to repair the car in time, so a hire car was arranged, but it was coming from London over night and wouldn't get to us until 10am at the earliest. This news was both a relief (that we were going to get away) and also a frustration, as we wanted to leave at 8.30. We checked that we could change our ferry if we needed to and then waited. Practical the hire company were brilliant, and they delivered the car, a very luxurious Nissan Pathfinder and we got it loaded up, hitched and we were on our way just before mid-day. That meant we had 4 hours to get to Dover, which in turn meant no stopping on route, if we were to meet our ferry.

We made it (with minutes to spare), and as we sat and had our first French beer that evening, Tasha's dad said "Well, you are here, on the ferry that you booked as planned". It was true, although it had been stressful.

The rest of the holiday was a breeze in comparison. There was a lot of long day driving, to get to the Dordogne, but it was all worth it - and the in-car DVD player that we bought helped no end with the boredom for the children. Straight back into work yesterday was a shock to the system, but a little French wine on the return home, just made the holiday feeling trickle back into the system for a while.

Of course now the taks of getting our original car repaired is upon us!

We were all very grateful to Simon at Practical in Leicester, and Will at the CC Travel line for getting us on hoiliday.