Mischief Managed

The rest of England seems to be underwater but Hull is not (yet). Yay! I'm not sure why as it doesn't seem to have stopped raining for the last three years. I can't remember the last time I saw some sky.

emony just mentioned that she's sad that she's not going to Peg3 this weekend and so am I really. :( I've got no conventions lined up this year at all which is just not on. I know that the usual suspects have mentioned having a meet up at some point which I think we should definitely do.

( SGA "Quarantine" Spoilers )

For the first time in ages, I stayed up late on a school night reading McKay/Sheppard fic: Forget Me Not by maisierita. It's in five parts, pretty long, and it sucks you right in. It's prison fic and amnesia fic, but manages to make the clichés work really well. I sometimes forget that I love long and plotty stuff.

I think the roof of my flat is going to blow off! The wind is coming straight across the Humber and into my windows - or that's what it feels like anyway.

Work is still going the same as before - mad and stressful. Two more people are starting in the team tomorrow so hopefully, that should help things somewhat. One of the people who's starting used to work in the team before so she should be able to hit the ground running which is great.

I've actually spent the weekend in Hull for the first time in a month. I've been to Nottingham, Wales for a reunion with my uni friends (my Hermione costume for the fancy dress party looked pretty cool!) and Leeds for a equestrian show thingy where there was lots of shopping and I came home with a new coat for horse stuff that I desperately needed. I was glad of that coat today - taking the recycling turned into an epic battle against the wind and rain. Suddenly it feels like winter.

I seem to be watching millions of shows this season: Heroes, Atlantis, Supernatural, Smallville (which I'm finally completely caught up with now), Dexter (how much do I love this show?) and then I discovered that Nip/Tuck is back on. Yay for trashy TV! I saw the Doctor Who special on Children in Need. Very cute indeed.

OK. I'm really ready for the British monsoon season to come to an end now plz.

I've been down to see my friend in Coventry this weekend which was lovely. I drove down and back but avoiding motorways still. I think I'll have to tackle a motorway this month. On the way back I had to negotiate Nuneaton (which I thought only existed if you had to change trains there) and its one way system in torrential rain. Luckily I had my trusty GPS navigation which got me through ok!

Back at work tomorrow. Poo. The bank holiday at the end of this month is the last one now until August (when I might already be up in Hull!). I think they should add more bank holidays to the calendar. Preferably during the summer and maybe one in autumn as well. I also think that I should be able to work a three day week from ten 'til two on full pay. Oh well. I can dream can't I?

I hope we get some rain up here. Apparently it's only drizzled here over the weekend and I need rain on the field to get some grass through and get the herbicide spray for the ragwort to start working faster. Damn poisonous weeds. Why won't they die??

Oh - and no Doctor Who next weekend because of the Eurovision Song Contest? WTF? I admit that the Eurovision is compulsive car crash TV but still, it shouldn't deprive me of my Tennant fix.

So. On Wednesday afternoon I got on a plane over to Frankfurt in Germany for an all day meeting on Thursday in Mannheim. I got there Wednesday night and went to the meeting yesterday. At about lunch time, we surveyed the howling gail outside and thought, 'hmmmm, better check the airport and see if any flights have been cancelled'. Ha! The flight to Amsterdam had been cancelled (I was supposed to be getting a connecting flight to Birmingham from there). I was with two of the people from the Hull office, so we decided the best thing to do was to get on a train to Amsterdam, stay the night there and then fly in the morning because frankly, I didn't really fancy flying in that weather, even if there had been another flight I could have got on.

The travel lady at work booked us some more flights and a hotel in Amsterdam and off we set on the train. Unfortunately we had to change at Cologne and it wasn't until we got off the train at Cologne that we were told that all trains in Germany had stopped running! All the trains! So then we thought we might be able to hire a car and drive, but all the rental companies had run out of cars. We conceded defeat (this was at around 6pm) and decided that we had no choice but to stay in Cologne for the night. The nice travel lady in Hull managed to find us a hotel near the airport in Cologne and booked us yet another set of flights for the morning, this time to Heathrow.

We then had to get to the hotel. Up until this point I was finding it hard to believe that the weather was as bad as it was supposed to be. We went out of the train station and stood in a massive queue to get a taxi in the driving wind and rain, watching pieces of scaffolding blowing off the cathedral (which was rather lovely and I'd like to see it again under better circumstances). There were hardly any kerfuffles in the taxi queue - I would have expected near violence if we'd have been in Britain, a fact which probably says more about British people than German - and after about half an hour of being windswept got taken to the hotel by a circuitous route because a bridge was blocked. We sat in a lovely little bar there, had dinner, some drinks and went to bed. There were no problems this morning - we got an early flight to Heathrow, picked up a rental car and I was dropped off home on the way to Hull. And if anyone thought I'd be in work today they had another think coming!

And now I'm home. Hurrah! That was quite an exciting trip for my first time in Germany. Although I am a little sad that I didn't get to cross the Germany/Netherlands border on a train.

Meanwhile in Nottingham, two of the garden sheds with hay in at the field were completely disintegrated and blown away (remembering here that we still don't have a barn after last years fire - just five three garden sheds). Bugger.

ETA: Blimey. I haven't posted for two weeks!! I think that must be a first!

While everyone else is talking about the football, I'll talk about some brief ( Doctor Who spoilers )

We could really do with some rain now. The grass is going brown and crispy and so the horses are just pulling it up by the roots which doesn't really do the field much good. We're having to feed some hay again now.

And the NTL engineer actually turned up at twenty past twelve this afternoon! I almost died of shock. He's replaced our decrepit old modem with a new one so I'll have to see if that makes any difference. It seems to have been working fine so far. (Famous last words there I think.)

Here's a picture taken with my phone of a tiny little rabbit that I found hiding behind a stable door this evening. I hardly ever see rabbits up there - they probably get eaten by the rats, cats or foxes.

( baby rabbit and bonus giant, evil nettle )

I really think it needs to stop being so hot and humid now. It's horrid at work, I just seem to spend the whole day drenched in sweat. One day I'll work in a place that's actually air conditioned properly. It chucked it down with rain this afternoon and that just made it worse.

I think I need to watch another episode of Supernatural now and then go to bed.

Hurrah! It's vaguely sunny! It's nearly two weeks since I've had to close the blinds at work and even now most of the sky is still flat and grey with only bits of blue. I can't believe that it's been like this for so long yet we haven't had any rain. So strange.

No Atlantis today. Woe. At least I get to leave work early to go to the dentists.