Thursday 3rd March 2011

This evening Batty and I went to Jose and Maria's for chinese. It was a lovely evening, as always. I love chinese but I can't eat the quantity that everyone else seems to manage. I was ok this time but generally I end up hungry before I go to bed. I took along a couple of cheesecakes and Maria had cooked an apple dessert too so we had lots of pud. Enrique was cute asking for his mash potato out of the freezer as he said he hadn't had dinner despite having had MacDonalds! He didn't get his mash anyway. He was playing “Super Nintendo Entertainment System” on the laptop. It kept him out of mischief for hours. Jose and Batty fixed (hopefully) Batty's laptop and watched TV while Maria and I put the world to rights and exchanged information. No, it wasn't gossip!!

Wednesday 2nd March 2011

As I can't get to bowling next Monday, we rescheduled our game for this evening. It was fun. We managed a 6-2 win. This is the last game of this season. We needed to win. Shame it wasn't 8-0 but we can both be blamed for not getting there. It was very close. We lost the game that I got the lowest score in. I think I got a 198 on one of the games. I didn't get any games over 200 on this season. The standard of bowling has gone up considerably with our 3 new teams. It will be interesting to see how next season plays out. Whatever happens on this final game, we will finish in the top 3. Jose and Sara are due to play the team that is in 1st place on Sunday. No pressure but we need them to draw or win so that we can be 1st. The team that is currently in 3rd place can't catch up with us as they are 4 behind us.

Tuesday 1st March 2011

This evening, being the first of the month, we met elsewhere. We watched a Next Generation episode, Disaster. It's the one when Picard gets to take 4 kids on a tour of the ship as a prize for winning, and they get stuck in a lift together while everyone else on the ship in different areas thinks that they are the only ones alive. Deanna Troi gets to be captain and Worf delivers Keiko's baby. I still can't take Worf seriously. He might well be saying “prepare for battle” or something equally heroic but I hear “I am Weasel”.

Monday 28th February 2011

Another busy end of month. I did nearly 50 invoices. I have been asked why I leave them all to the last day as there are our regular monthly ones that just need to be duplicated with a few details amended. If only I had time to do them earlier!! I seem to be permanently busy. I used to have a relatively quiet last day of the month as it wasn't necessary to send anything out as if it wasn't delivered in the same month it didn't count in that month's sales. Now the Sales guys carry spare software packs to leave with the customers. I think at 4 pm this afternoon, one of the guys was off on a 4 hour journey just to make sure it was delivered today.

I said “bye, see ya later” to Buffy this morning. It is sad that she isn't here now even though she was noisy and a big distraction.

At bowling this evening, we were surprised that we won 6-2. We were playing the team that we were joint 2nd with. If I had been playing better, we could have won the middle game too. Batty wasn't bowling well on the 3rd game but I got 198 and we won by 8 pins.

Saturday 26th February 2011 – Tower of London

Another soggy day. After a full English breakfast at the Kiln, we met up with Matt at Ashford Station, we set off to London for the boy's birthday trip. It was my first trip on the fast train. We headed straight for the Tower. With our train tickets we were able to get two of us in for the price of one. This makes it so much more affordable. Having been round the towers, we then queued to get in to see the Crown Jewels. We were herded like sheep through the ropes and through the tower to look at the jewels and royal memorabilia. A few hours later, having seen all we needed to see, we contacted Terry who had found us a pub, a nearby Wetherspoons. We settled in here for a few hours with dinner and a pint. It was good to catch up with Terry. We got on the bus to Covent Garden, one of Matt's favourite haunts. We said our farewells to Terry. The boys had ice cream from the shop that sells breast milk ice cream though I doubt that's what they had. It definitely wouldn't appeal to me! We then went on a hike around the side streets, following Dave while he tried to remember where a certain pub was. We abandoned the search eventually and made our way back to St Pancras station.
Link to today's photo album on Facebook

Wednesday 23rd February 2011 – Wingham Wildlife Park

We slept in until gone 9.30. I was so tired. As I knew I didn't have to get up early, I was up until 2am catching up on stuff on the Sky+. Checking out the window, rain. Not good for our plans. We could either stay in and sulk about it or carry on as if it were dry. After all, we're not going to dissolve. So we set off for Wingham Wildlife Park. Getting through Canterbury was relatively painless. We followed the instructions on Dave's sat nav and found it relatively easily, although the sat nav tried to direct us off a side road but the main entrance was off the main road. After parking, we had to cross that road to get to the Park. After getting our tickets, the first stop was the tropical house. There were lots of birds flying around in here. There were no butterflies to see as it was too cold. The hornbills were very noisy and were hopping about on their branches. We also saw lots of bats through the windows of a very dark room. They were quite a lot bigger than the ones that we see out in the country. The highlight of the place for me were the penguins. We were able to be there for feeding time and the keeper gave us a talk too about the penguins. We were able to buy a tub of wiggly things to feed the meerkats too which was lovely. I think originally this was a bird park only as this still seems to be the main feature. Despite getting wet, it was a good day. Can't wait to go back soon.
Link to my album on Facebook

Monday 21st February 2011 - Happy birthday Dave

As soon as I got up, I dug out Dave's birthday cards and presents so that I could see him opening them, before getting ready for work. As much as he wanted the Sky Trillium book that I'd bought apparently it is the 3rd of 3 and not the 1st. Oops! I was able to order Black and Blood Trillium later.

At work, our Manager told us of another panic on Thursday evening after the flooded kitchen. She was still working at 6.30 and the fire alarm went off. She went downstairs to go out and found that there wasn't a fire at all. The cleaners had opened the hoover under a smoke detector. It was so bad that it was like a fog! She didn't know how stop the alarm going off and the fire brigade turned up before she had chance to find out. Several of the key holders were also called and one of them came in to help. Tania thanked everyone who helped with the clean up and the call out today. She said that she was proud to work with such a great team of people.

Another colleague noticed all the tool bars had disappeared from the program that she was in. She thought it was something that she'd clicked on that had caused it. She has done this before. After we had decided that it wasn't something that she had done, we checked ours. They had disappeared too. It meant that we'd have to use short cut keys until it was fixed. The IT guy didn't know what had happened either. The server was restarted at lunch and that didn't fix it. A call was put through to the helpline. They were able to tell our IT guy what to do to fix it. Some dll files got corrupted.... apparently!!?! All fixed now. With these problems and covering the phone line today, I was late finishing and not ready for when then City Link driver arrived to collect. After work I had to go to the City Link offices to drop off 3 more and also drop the post off at the post box. Trying to get the big bag into the box was a bit of a struggle. I got it to drop in properly eventually.

Off to Asda next with the plan to get us something good for dinner but due to me not having my mobile connected to the ear piece, Dave didn't hear me properly and told me that he wasn't hungry and would be OK with just a sandwich. I bought some ham so that I could have ham, egg and chips and he could have a ham sandwich. I found the Monty Python films on DVD which were on Dave's present wish list.

Once home, and Dave realised that I didn't say that I was going bowling and not cooking, we were quite disappointed. We both had ham, egg and chips which was good anyway, followed by trifle. We watched “The Life of Brian”. Apparently I had seen it before but we think it could have been as long as 25 years ago when we lived in Folkestone. There were a couple of sayings I knew but didn't realise that they were from this film like “My name's Brian and so's my wife”.