Saturday 19th December 2015

Friday

And what should have been the long slow slope into the weekend ended up being a nightmare of meetings, document reviews and finally, a complete IT failure, which in the end brought the curtain down on the working week, but means I will be working Sunday to make sure I am all done by the end of Monday, in time to wrap up for the year.

A teleconference at half eight, phone call to my boss, another teleconference lasting an hour: so that's where the days go. Outside the day is grey but mild. Very mild in fact. With the wind set in the south, teperatures were in the mid-teens during the day and hardly dropping during the night. Hardly worth putting the heating on, and so we sleep with the windows open still. In years gone by on this day, we have had four inches of snow, but not this year.

I have some toast for lunch, then try to get my task for the day done, reviewing a document, well, judging the comments I have received. The day slips by. Buy three, I have another document to review. I try to open it, but MS Office fails. I re-boot the computer, and once powered back up, Outlook fails as does the intranet site. Nothing works, I can't open a document nor receive or send an e mail. I decide that it is enough for the day, and so turn the computer off and head up to the spare room for some lard pumping. It has been some time since I did a session on the cross trainer, but I thought I really should.

That done, I have a shower and a shave, and in an experiment to find if I am allergic to strong scent, I put some after shave on, which leads to no allergic reaction at all. I am stumped. But at least I smell lovely.

Outside darkness fell, and Jools was on her way home. I made breaded chicken with lentil dahl, which was rather wonderful even if I say so myself.

Back in my final years in the RAF I used to get tickets to the opening night of each Lord of the Rings films, and that continued as the Hobbit series came out, until last year, when due to work pressure, I just did not have time to go. And so the final part, Battle of the 5 Armies is an unknown country to me. Until this Christmas. We now have all 6 of the Middle Earth films on extended versions, and we plan to watch all of them one after the other each evening. So, after cleaning up and making a brew, we watched the first half of An Unexpected Journey, and sitting between us was Miss Molly, purring almost loud enough to obscure the sound of the film, but then I can always turn that volume up to 11.

So, one more day at work for me, a day and a half for Jools, then we can have two weeks off.