Random rant!

I've just seen an advert for McDonalds and it's reminded me of something I've wanted to rant about for ages but never quite get round to. And given it was McDonalds that sparked the rant I think most people will be surprised by where I go from here!

Why would anyone want to ruin a perfectly tasty burger by putting bacon in it! It's the just wrong and, quite frankly, in my opinion a filthy thing to do! Bleurgh! Yukky! It makes me feel ill just thinking about it. Bacon should be in bacon butties, burgers should be burgers. The 2 should never be combined!!!! So there!

Day out in Cardiff!

Well, what can I say? I had a lovely day on Saturday. Firstly I got up fairly early and drove to Cardiff - and had the most fantastic run ever meaning I got there in time to pop in and see Steph, Tim and Alex for a couple of hours. Alex is such a sweetie - very quiet and well behaved indeed. Here's a picture of him; Steph and Tim avoided the camera as neither were feeling photogenic following quite a rough night with Alex...


Then after a quick change I went to Michelle and Graeme's wedding. It really was very good indeed, and given it was February the sun shone out for them. Kirstie, one of Michelle's chemistry friends from Exeter (who has since had a total change of career into opera singing) sang Panis Angelicus whilst they went to sign the register - it really was very beautiful. Another of the highlights of the day has to be the first dance - they'd put together a full dance routine to a medley of tunes ranging from The Monkees, through The Proclaimers to Doris Day singing 'A guy is a guy'- it truely was a stroke of genius! Here's a selection of some of my favourite pictures from the day.

She'll kill me for this but I just love this is one - it's just sooo Michelle!


The boys, Bouncy (aka Chris) and Paul.


Michelle and Graeme surrounded by all the men! Didn't she do well for herself! ;)


Bouncy and Vicky - despite the rosy cheeks Chris is actually sober as he was acting as chauffeur for us all for the night!


Paul, me and Kirstie, none of whom are remotely sober! ;)

Away to Cardiff

It's been a while since I've posted anything, for a combination of reasons. Firstly I've not had a great deal of interesting things to say, other than the stuff that's been going on Tully's blog anyway about her birthday etc. And also I've been a bit down in the last couple of weeks too and I don't want this to turn into a forum where I grumble about things. This whole being 31 thing has hit me hard - it's defintely not a good age...

But, I'm in a really good mood today as I'm heaading off tomorrow to Michelle's wedding who is one of my friends from Exeter. It's in Cardiff which is even better as it means I'll get chance to pop in and see Steph too, and finally meet her little boy Alex. I'll also get to catch up with a few other friends at the wedding that I've not seen since my wedding, plus a couple of other Exeter people I've not since since even before then. I'm really looking forward to it. The only downside is that because Tully wasn't invited it's meant that Mark has chosen to stay at home and look after her, as it's not long since we both abandoned her for a week when we went skiing. I'll just have to do enough partying for both of us then! :D

Birthday!

Today is my 31st birthday - how old is that? :( I had a fairly quiet day, mainly because we were recovering from our holiday, and having to get up at 3am UK time to come home. Mum and Dad had stayed overnight so I got one last mini lie in. Then Chris and Chrissie popped in to see us in the afternoon, and finally Jon and Mandy came round in the evening for a curry. Yum!

Still, Mandy got all the best presents though - we brought her tinned brussel sprouts (Spar best!) home from Val D'Isere! :D

Val D'Isere

Last week we went skiing in Val D'Isere, although our chalet ended up being in Le Fornet, a couple of km up the road. It was really good fun, and it was quite nice to have a week away from Tully (at least when it came to sleeping!)!!! Anyway, here's a few photo's from the week...

Grenoble Airport - the first time I've had to walk quite so far to the terminal from the plane! (Although it is closely rivalled by Chambery - must be a skiing thing...)


New goggles (very very good - didn't steam up ever, not once!!!!), and my fav skiing hat!


The outside of our chalet.


My only fall of the week! Which given the piste is, well, completely flat, is really rather embarrassing!!!! Oh well... But, as an aside, look how lovely and sunny it was! And it was pretty much like that all week which is a first. Usually there's at least 2 days of grey yukky weather.

How much!!!!

Looking at the state of the house, and the fact I am now working full time, I decided to investigate getting a cleaner today. And my general feelings have been 'How much!?!?!?!?'!

So far the quotes have ranged from £8.25 - £11 an hour. When we used to have a cleaner about 5 years ago we paid £5 an hour - how can it have gone up so much!!!! Everyone I spoke to today though were agencies - maybe I need to find little lady who works for herself instead... Or just give in and get the hoover out myself. Sigh... Actually no, I hate hoovering soooo much it's worth paying someone else, even it means we can't eat! :D

Desperate Housewives

Yey, I nearly forgot about the start of the new series of Desperate Housewives, but luckily happened to be watchng Channel 4 when it started! Phew!

I really enjoyed the last series, so I hope this one proves to be as good!

Home again.

Home again! And I suppose overall the week wasn't too bad. Surprisingly the highlight of the week was the team building event. It was incredibly well done, I felt I knew the people was grouped with much better afterwards, we learned lots of useful concepts, and, most importantly, it was FUN! Blimey!!!

Still, it's definitely good to be home!

In Florida

Ok, well I guess it's not been TOOOOO bad so far. I set off from home at 7am on Wednesday, and 17 hours later I arrived in my hotel room. The journey was pretty uneventful - got through immigration in Newark surprisingly quickly, and even had a friendly immigration officer too!

The highlight of the journey was getting transferred from the airport to the hotel in a super stretch Hummer limo - I haven't got a camera here as left it at home for Tully but Jon took some pictures so look out for some photos fom him at some point.

Overall the agenda has been mostly better than expected. And it's been really lovely to catch up with some people I've not seen for AGES! The lunches have been pretty good, but the rest of the food has been a little disappointing so far. I'm looking forwards to getting home though - I'm missing Tully and Mark loads. Still, only half a day left to go, and then the 17 hour journey home again... Ho hum...

Off to sunnier climes

Tomorrow I'm heading out to Florida for the annual global corporate wide sales meeting, which I managed to avoid last year as I was too pregnant to fly. (How smug was I?!?!?)

Anyway, whilst the hotel looks really nice, the agenda looks really dull, and not only that but it continues through Saturday meaning I don't get home until Sunday morning. I would say at least it'll be sunny and warm, but realistically the chance of us getting any free time to get out the hotel is very slim. Most days there is only a 30 min gap between the end of the meeting and the start of the organised evening entertainment... Oh, and the agenda seems to start at 6:30 in the morning! Oh joy...

Watch this space and I'll let you know if I'm just being a misery or if my doom and gloom is justified... :)

Going Skiing

Well, we've done it! We've been threatening mum that we're going to go skiing and leave Tully with her and dad for the week, and this week we've booked it! We are going to Val D'Isere for the week with Inghams, who are, in my opinion, by far the best ski tour operator of the main few. We know the resort, but as it's a last minute deal we get allocated a chalet on arrival. I'm very excited about it - although slightly worried I'm so unfit I'll be exhausted by the time I've walked to the chairlift! Let's hope we get put in this chalet where we can ski to and from the door! :)

Still, Mum will probably be more broken having to look after our monster for 8 days! I wonder how far through the week she gets before she gives in and sends her to nursery for the day so she can catch up on some sleep! :)

Home alone

This week Mark has gone to the Philly office for the week, so I'm left holding the fort here alone. (I don't feel too badly done to - I'm off to Florida next week and don't get home until Sunday so he has Saturday with her all day! :) ) She's been really good for me so far too which is a definite bonus.

I just have one question though. All week last week when we were on holiday she woke up ridiculously early each day and wanted nothing other than to play. Yet now I'm back at work all she wants to do is sleep in! Very annoying!

Happy New Year

Well, another year is over with. And another New Years Eve, which has always rated high in my list of the worst night of the year. And once again it proved to be somewhat of a washout last night...

Firstly we had forgotten that other people still have some form of social life and by the time we remembered to make plans everyone we knew already had social engagements. So we were going to make the best of it and had plans for having a fun if rather quiet evening in alone. However, for reasons I won't go into, both Mark and I were totally exhausted so the lovely meal I had planned to cook is now going to be today's lunch (we had the easy option of fish and chips last night), and we were in bed before 10pm...

Still, I thought I could reply to everyone's texts of happy New Year this morning. I was rather chuffed to see I had 4 messages when I woke up - how popular I thought! Imagine my disappointment to see that most people had indeed forgotten us - 3 were from the same person who had clearly had one too many vodka's!!! :) Ho hum...

Memories...

On Christmas Eve we needed Tully to have a nice long sleep, so decided to go for a bit of a tour! Mark had never been to Norfolk so we headed in that general direction. Not far from Kings Lynn, which is just over the border from Lincolnshire, is Sandringham so we decided that was as good a place as any to go to. I'd forgotten how lovely it was there. But it also reminded me of something from my childhood.

As some of you might know, Sandringham is where the Royal family spend their Christmas. On the Sunday they all walk down from the house to the church, and the general public are (were? not sure if this still happens...) allowed to go and join in the service by virtue of it being transmitted outside. Then afterwards the police gather the children and there is opportunity to give flowers / gifts to the family.

One of the last years we did this I had 2 bunches of flowers, and really wanted to give them to Di and Fergie. But how soft am I??? When I got there everyone was giving their gifts the the 2 'young' ones, and the Queen and Queen mum were stood there looking a bit like spare parts so I felt sorry for them and decided to give mine up to them instead! Ho hum...

Night out

Last night Liz and Alison came to look after Tully, so Mark and I decided to go to the cinema for a change. Rather stupidly I'd not thought through the whole mad last minute Christmas shopping thing and had decided that the best venue was the cinema at the Trafford Centre as it had better show times than the cinema we normally go to in Manchester. However because of the traffic jams to get in, and then parking at the far end of the car park about 10m from our front door, we missed the one we wanted anyway and had to go and see a later showing! Ho hum...

Anyway, we went to see Harry Potter, and I have to say I really really enjoyed it. Rather bizarrely I think it's one of the worst books in the series, and yet this film I think was the best so far. I'm sure lots of people have alreayd written reviews so I won't bore you here, but needless to say I really enjoyed myself.

Phew, I've calmed down at last!

APologies in advance, this is going to be a dull dull diddly dull blog entry... But still, here goes!

I had a very grumpy Wednesday and Thursday this week for worky reasons I won't go into here. But on Friday I was back in Birmingham again, and it made me remember why I do actually love my job and made me get over my crossness with the internal politcal bobbins we have to put up these days. As sad as it sounds I love being on site and working with our customers / prospects and showing how I/we can help make their day to day working life so much easier. It was a bug I caught all those yaers back when I first started out in implementation, and still get now I work in technical sales, even though the customer interaction is at a totally different level.

I have to go back on Monday and present to a large audience (~40 which is far more than the average for such a demo) and I'm really looking forward to it! (You watch now - I'll probably end up posting some woeful tale on Monday now about how disaterous it was to serve me right for being so cocky!) My only worry is that the podium stand I'll be presenting from has the most unusable mouse in the world ever. Still, I suppose that'll just make me think of innovative ways to show the software with the fewest possible mouseclicks - something that's meant to be a good thing - or so I learnt in my training last week...

Mad Week!

I have to apologise on both mine and Tully's behalf for lack of blogging this week. It's all been a bit crazy!

Saturday was mad busy what with taking Tully swimming in the morning, then getting stuff ready before going out obscenely early (5:45) for the Christmas party. Sadly Mark had caught Tully's tummy bug from the week before so we ended up cancelling Mum and Dad who were due to baby sit overnight and he stayed in with her.
The party was everything you'd expect it to be, with maybe slightly better food than usual. There were cocktails, wine, gin, some food, some more wine, and dancing! Perfect! I staggered home at a relatively respectable time a bit before midnight - but mostly as I was sharing a taxi home with Jon and Mandy and Jon had got to the stage where he wasn't much use to mankind! :) He has managed to post some very embarrassing photos if you are really that interested!

Sunday was generally spent recovering from the night before, although I was surprisingly well - I really shouldn't have been! We did all manage to go out for a walk to the park though and put Tulster on the swings for a bit.

Then I had to come to work on Monday and Tuesday for a training course - typically as it was run by am american trainer it started at 8:30 in the morning, didn't finish until 5:30 at night as we didn't really have anything that you could call a break in the meantime - working lunches / coffee breaks etc - the only time I left the taining room was for a 'bio-break' as americans seem to say! As you can imagine I was a bit tired after all this to do blogging when I got home. And yesterday I was in a bad mood so went straight to playing some World of Warcraft to cheer myself up! Looking forward to a quiet weekend, and a mostly non-working week next week.

Sorry!

It's been a long time since I posted anything (again)... So, what have I been up to?

Well, last Saturday I went skiing at Xscape in Leeds again. I was meant to be meeting Stu and Amy there, but Stu had dropped a radiator on his foot in the morning and was in no fit state to be on the slope. Since I'd got there I thought I might as well ski on my own though. I had quite a lot of fun, but it's surprising how many runs you get in when you don't wait at all for your mate to get on / off the lift! One thing that did keep me entertained was watching the people tobogganing! It looked like loads of fun and kids and grown ups alike were screaming and chortling in equal measure as they went down! Definitely something to do with Tully as soon as she is old enough!

On a duller note I've been spending more time in Birmingham with work than strictly ideal. We are putting a pilot trial system in at a lab at one of the hospitals there, so I've been down for the odd day over the last couple of weeks helping to get the system configured, and then spent 3 days there this week running 'drop in' sessions, which basically involved people from around the lab coming to see what we'd done. Harder work than it sounds (honest)!

I've also been using up some of my holidays. Not done a great deal really - spent some quiet time at home, caught up on the housework a bit (although that was a couple of weeks ago and you'd not know I'd done anything at all again now :( ), went in Manchester and started the Christmas shopping etc.

And that's it! Not very exciting I'm afraid to say. Still, it's our work Christmas party tomorrow night so maybe there'll be some debauched stories to tell soon! :)

No sleep in the Evans House

Oh dear. For some reason the last few nights Tully has gone to sleep absolutely fine when we've put her to bed, but she's then woken up and is wide awake at about 3-4 in the morning and nothing we do seems to make her sleepy again for a couple of hours. Mark and I are both absolutely knackered! I think her gums are hurting her, as she's generally more restless too the rest of the night. Any advice gratefully received - we're both getting rather broken. She's gone off the Dentinox stuff I've been using - she used to love it but now it seems to make her cry more. Last night we resorted to Infant Nurofen, but not sure that's good for a longer term solution :(

Visit to London

Last weekend we went to London to see Vics and Ben. You can read more about it on Tully's blog here and here. Anyway, there wasn't a good photo of them together there so thought I'd put this one on my blog. Oh, and in case anyone is feel adventurous and wants to go on an activity holiday Ben has started up his own travel company so I'm sure he'd be pleased to hear from you!