Friday 20th August 2021

We had made it to Friday, the weekend and all the fun stuff that we can do.

If I'm honest, I pretty much get to do what I want o most of the time, my boss doesn't look over my shoulder that much, and I am able to get on, or not, as I see fit.

So, although I say I am tied to the hot keyboard for eight to nine hours a day, I can get up, sit in the garden or take a walk as I see fit, a software update or failure is easy to use as a pretext to go for a walk to Windy Ridge.

So, not all bad.

And yet the frustrations with IT and lack of training and the general chaos is depressing. Depressing, not in a mental health way, but in the way that you really don't believe it will get much better and we will have to just accept it. And as the years go on, that becomes harder to do. So, having two and a half days in which to switch off and get out of the house is great.

But I have been slacking, two audit related tasks were two weeks overdue, and so I really had to get them done by the end of the day, and this would mean using my old work laptop on the residual systems that we use to log our audits there.

Before that, I had to engage in some creative writing in explaing how the issues seen last month are no longer issues after all. This issue, or rather these issues, I have been wrestling with since the beginning of JUne, and now I had run out of time. And with Jools about, I couldn't procrastinate as much as I sometimes do.

Although, she was up and out early, no yoga for four weeks, but an early session in the pool, then to Tesco.

Tesco was out of milk.

And frozen vegetables.

That first one is quite amazing. But understandable as there are less drivers to drive milk tankers, work in pasteurisation plants and so on. Jools had to go to Lidl to buy milk and some fresh fruit.

It is worth pointing out that the rest of Europe or NI doesn't have shortages in staple foodstuffs, just here on Brexix-plague island.

But Jools ensured we had enough food and milk for the week ahead.

And I was completing my mail closing out the issues. Yay.

We had brunch.

THen the second half of the training, which was on SAP.

SAP is a fine system. If you use it a lot. Like every day. But it is complicated, and for us, used to a Windows based system, its a tough steep learning curve.

The last three hours of the day was to raise findings in our old Windows based system.

Not difficult, just copy and paste, but over and over again. What it did mean was to switch off the new laptop and close down e mails and stuff, power up the old laptop, where just about all commincations did not work, and once I had stopped the insistant pop up message asking me to input my credentials to uses Teams. IT have, thoughtfully, removed the certificates i need to use Teams and Outlook on this computer, which means I have to violate IT policy by using a pen drive to transfer files from one laptop to the other.

I get it done, finish at two, which I make it just about the start of the weekend.

A present had arrived in the post: a box set of Faces albums, all four albums with another one of singles and out takes. I put the first album on, the last one credited to The Small Faces. Its a mix of the 60s and 70s, a bit bluesy. In fact it's a lot bluesy. And comes with lots of bluesy bonus tracks. The next album has a cover of Paul McCartney's Maybe I'm Amazed. You're lucky because this live version is even better than on their second record, "Long PLayer".

I write blogs, eat an ice cream, listen to the music whilst JOols sits on the lower patio and reads.

So the afternoon passes.

I take part in the music quiz at six; new rules so you get just one guess for all of the ten clues, which makes it more interesting. Well, I do OK and was third to guess The HUman League with the clue about The Undertones crediting them.

We drive to Jen's for an evening of cards.

She cooks us Lancashire pasties and chips for supper, which was very nice, and then I scoop the two jackpots in the game of Queenie we have at the end.

A neighbour has the dreadful singer that kept me awake a few weeks ago, so we were happy to leave Whitfield and his souless wailing to the peace of St Maggies.

A fiffused moon partially hid behind a covering of thin cloud, it looked fairly full, but not sure if it was.