Mischief Managed

It's just nine o' clock and it's only just dark and it's warm! It's really spring at last! I walked to work and back today and it was lovely being out in the fresh air (if I ignore the car fumes) before work.

I had a great bank holiday - met up with a friend who's going to Taiwan next week for a year and got covered in green goo cleaning the horses trough out. I did have to get the vet out on Sunday morning to see Kaz as her cough seems to have got worse to the point where she's having breathing difficulties. She had a temperature as well so the vet gave her some antibiotics in case of an infection and some ventopulmin to ease the breathing. I'm not sure of how much effect it's having though so I think my mum might have to get the vet out again on Thursday. Fingers crossed, she'll be a bit better.

On Friday I got to work to find out that someone had stolen my laptop out of my drawer overnight. Someone else in the department also had their laptop stolen and other people got money and personal phones stolen from desks and drawers. Fuckers. I might have daydreamed about someone stealing my laptop so I didn't have to do any work, but the reality wasn't quite as good! I did hope to go in this morning and find my laptop back on my desk with all my work done, but unfortunately I don't live in the world of the Elves and the Shoemaker...

I should hopefully have a new laptop tomorrow and I'm hoping that they can recover my data because I think if I've lost all my emails from the last few years I may actually cry.

They've no idea who did it or how they got in. There was no sign of a break-in and the building is access controlled by passes. What about the CCTV cameras, we said? Not much good, as apparently they're dummy ones.

But apart from all that, I still had a good weekend!

Work continues to suck. This week has not been one of the best.

Torchwood on the other hand does not suck, especially when I unexpectedly get two episodes for the price of one! And OMG. Was totally unspoiled for that.

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.

I don't seem to have posted in August yet. I've been about, reading and sometimes commenting, but fandom seems to have lost its squee at the moment. People are either bitching about LJ or bitching about people bitching about LJ. I'm not leaving LJ at any point in the near future (although I do have a GJ, JF, IJ and Vox account under this name) because I like it here, I like all my friends here and my activities and the things I enjoy haven't been affected too badly. I'm not going to weigh in on the whole debacle because I think enough people have already. I will say that I think LJ has handled it all very badly (again. Was there no learning curve the first time round?) in terms of both inconsistency and communication.

I'm beginning to feel a bit stressed now by the whole move thing. I'm still excited about it all, but there's so much to organise! Even sorting out the removal van seems to be taking forever (and OMG - how expensive?! Luckily my company is paying for it!). I'm finding it so hard to motivate myself at work too. I've got so much work to do for the end of the month and I've got quite a lot of days off between now and then and I still can't give myself enough of a kick up the backside to get it done.

I'm off to the Thistle Hotel at Heathrow tomorrow for Galactica 3 where emony and maryavatar will both be too! niannah, we'll miss you. :( I'm a bit sad that Aaron Douglas and Michael Trucco won't be there but I'm quite excited that Alessandro Juliani (Gaeta) is going to be there, and of course, Callum Keith Rennie. I'm just watching the last few episodes of season three again. I can't wait for season four to start!

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!

The work Christmas do on Friday was great. I was very drunk, but not as drunk as a lot of people. Hilarious. I did feel a little ill yesterday and I'm still sleep deprived but I think it was worth it to see so many of my work colleagues make fools of themselves. I also managed to get away with not buying a single drink all night which is something I've not accomplished for a while!

Me and mum put the Christmas tree up this afternoon. It only took us about four hours in total. o_0 I'm not entirely sure how it took that long but at least it's done now, even if we can't find the star for the top or the bows.

All I seem to do recently is post 'I'm still here!' messages and here's another one. I can't be bothered to elaborate but my weekend has sucked - it's a bit better now but I think I need another weekend to make up for it!

I'm off to meet up with my friends from uni next weekend so I've got Friday and Monday off work. Hurrah! We're having a fancy dress party one night like we did last year with the theme song titles. I can't tell you what I'm going as though as it's a secret and one of my friends reads my LJ occasionally! It should be good fun. We've got a cottage booked in Derbyshire again and it's kind of a 30th birthday party for one of my friends as well. Can't wait!

Because of the party, I'm only in the office two days next week as I'm working in Hull on Tuesday and Wednesday. I would be glad to get out of the office for a bit but I've got so much work to do! I don't think next week is going to be much fun...

I started watching Heroes after vanilla_tiger told me what it was about. It's kinda cheesy (but that shouldn't really bother me seeing as I'm still watching Doctor Who and Torchwood ♥) but I'm enjoying it. I especially like Hiro and his storyline. I'm up to date with BSG and Supernatural now but I'm about three episodes behind with Lost. I would say I'll just watch it when it comes on UK TV next week but they've scheduled it against Torchwood!! Rubbish.

I'm trying one of grrliz's layout templates at the moment. It's very pretty!

I'm still here! And my laptop is mostly working now due to an XP Professional disk that the boyfriend 'acquired' from work. Thank god! Now I can do some hardcore BSG and Lost watching. I've already caught up with Supernatural. I just don't trust that the laptop is going to stay working properly for long so I think I'm going to have to invest in a new hard disk at some point. But it'll be good to get a new one because my current one is a pitiful 40GB and I can get a bigger one.

This not having access to LJ or gmail at work is killing me as I've just not been able to keep up with anything this week while my laptop's been out of action. Rubbish.

I still haven't really decided what I'm doing about the work situation. I think I'll probably be going to Hull though as otherwise I'll have to look for another job and I figure moving towns is preferable to job hunting. And if I don't go to Hull then I'll have to move out of Nottingham anyway as there are no jobs here doing what I do.

Torchwood soon! Hurrah!

I'm in London for two days tomorrow on a medical devices training course. Not the most interesting thing in the world but it should allow me to do some more interesting stuff at work. The upside is that I've got a king sized bed for the night and can charge stuff to the company. The downside is that my taxi to the train station is booked for quarter to six in the morning. That's obscenely early.

Aaaargh. I've just bashed my elbow and it hurts all the way down to my little finger. Ow.

I watched Supernatural. OMG. I love that show. I'm going to have a gruelling download schedule: Supernatural, BSG, Nip/Tuck, Lost and SGA (when it comes back). No wonder I never actually watch TV.

I missed a couple of birthdays - Happy Belated Birthday to lykaios and maryavatar!! :D Better late than never, eh? ;)

Do you know what? My internet connection is still shitty. I haven't phoned up nthell for a while but it seems to be almost impossible to convince them that it's something wrong with the connection or the modem. What do they think it is? Magic internet destroying pixies?

The rest of the course today was ok and no one had to sing which was a bonus. The last section was about understanding cultural differences and the French woman I work with was wetting herself laughing at the following point about communication style (and the Germans there seemed to find it pretty amusing too) because it's so true:

British: If it's not too much trouble it would be awfully nice if you could consider the possibility of thinking about...

American: We really need to do this by...

German: You must do this by...

There was also something about the way that meetings are run in various countries and the UK bit mentioned small talk involving the weather, TV and sport. Scary, scary lady who was running it (who is Italian by birth, grew up somewhere in Latin America and lives in the US - her accent is mental) said that when she goes back to the US after being here for a while she gets people asking her why on earth she's talking about the weather. Because it's true - you almost can't make small talk here without mentioning the weather. I remember there being nearly a whole chapter in Watching the English about weather small talk and all the unconscious rules we follow while doing it.

In another comedy moment, I spotted that the German guy had a man-bag! A small, leather pouch type affair with a long, over the shoulder strap. Heh. I'd never actually met him before, only communicated with him over email, and he was surprisingly pretty. Tall with longish blond hair and thick black framed glasses.