I've been quiet

I know, but it's been the usual hectic routine. This week I finally got verbal confirmation from work that I could come back full time, this is brilliant and I have to thank my boss for making such an effort in proving my worthiness to come back on flex-time. It's a 3 month trial but already I'm feeling the benefit of working a more "normal"day. Previously I was working an 8.5 hour day, through in a lunchtime of 30 minutes and travelling time and that was totalling 9.5 hours easily. Not a great system and I was feeling squeezed all the time. Now I feel less stressed by it all, knowing that I'll be in the office 5 days rather than 4, I wont miss the normal day to day goings on either.

That's enough about work. My Open Uni course started this week, and it's been really lovely to see that the University got rid of their horrible First Class software that acted like a forum and email system - to be honest I hated it and finally stopped reading emails and only looked there if I was desperate for help. This year they have taken a different approach and I can see my fellow students emails pop into my personal email account. It's been nice reading the relevant ones and just deleting the ones I don't want. Though it does clutter up my hotmail account on the odd occasion when a discussion heats up.

I decided to stuff the separate Web Design certificate course after completing the first of the 6 courses I realised that I really REALLY hated writing reports and that in all honestly I was crap at writing them too. I went back and looked at my options and decided to get it all over and done with and just do another 30 point level 2 course but when I looked there was very little left that I could choose from and it came down to picking either "Developing Concurrent Distributed Systems" or another course that involved a project - I decided I'd rather face my Achilles heel than complete another report or project, so developing concurrent systems it is!

I'll let you know how it goes - but fingers crossed, after the normal 3 hour exam in October I'll get my results in December and then hopefully I can attend my award ceremony. The cool thing about this is I get to choose where I accept my certificate, and I really fancy Ely Cathedral. Looks impressive doesn't it?

So what else has been happening - not alot, but I did make time to host 2 dinner parties for some friends. For the first one we did a Burns night and had some Cock-a-leekie soup, followed by a nice haggis with mashed neeps and tatties, and for pudding I made some Cranachan with raspberries but instead of using whiskey in the cream I used some mead and it was very very lovely.

For the second dinner party I skipped making a starter and went straight to Pheasant in a claret and orange gravy, with roast potatoes, peas, carrots and sweetcorn. Very similar to the recipe in the link above but with some minor differences. We then followed this with a choice of either apple or rhubarb crumble with Cornish ice cream. Lurv-ley :)

We (Tosha, Lisa and I) tried to arrange a night out for some grub but it all fell through when two of us became ill. I came down with some nasty viral thing again that had me feeling really nauseous ( I was a little sick) and now I have the most awful sinus infection. It was so bad even my teeth hurt. Sinus infections totally suck , suck suck suck. I've now been taking sudafed decongestant for 3 days and this has been my only source of relief though I still have 3 litres of nasty sticky gunge that is lodged in my head - grrrr.

Anyway I'm being called to watch Wall-e for the hundredth time. Enjoy :)