Is this thing on?

[ cough ]

Hello?  Is there anyone out there?

OMG!  There is!  [ Jumps up and down ]

Hello, how are you?  What's been happening in your life?  How is work for you?  And the family????

Errr.... The Blog?  Well...err... I didn't mean to go silent...Um....I lost my mojo.  It's not that I didn't want to blog - I just couldn't put one word in front of the other and...well.... time just got away with me.  (What do you mean it's April?  Surely, we're still in February?)

Sooo.... What has been happening?  When I look back over the last few months, all I seem to do is work, eat, sleep, go to the odd football match and occasionally knit.

The kitchen is finished.  And I love it.  And I need to take some photos to show you.  It is a joy to cook in.  Seriously, even washing up is a pleasure.  Did I tell you that it's got underfloor heating?  Sheer bliss to walk on at 6am.  As part of the work on the kitchen, we've installed an outside light on a movement sensor.  I walked into the kitchen one morning in February and saw a local black cat get the shock of his life.  He was walking across the patio and must have seen movement in the kitchen, so walked towards the picture window and triggered the movement sensor.  Poor cat look stunned when the light came on.  (Very funny though.)

What else? I'm still singing every Monday. My choir had a very successful performance of Bach's B-Minor Mass at the Cadogan Hall back in March.  It was so intense that I didn't register we'd finished when we sang the last movement and was expecting more music.  Our next concert is on 14th June, a mixture of Tippett and Benjamin Brittain.

As to everything else... I've played a couple of rounds of golf with my good friend, AJ - we're managing to get in a round a month.  That's probably the most frequently I've played in years.   I do think I need at least a couple of lessons - my swing is dreadful and my grip is all over the place but I don't mind playing embarrassingly bad in front of AJ - we don't keep score and really just use the golf game as an excuse for a chat.  (It's lunch, followed by a walk with golf clubs, followed by coffee...)

On the work front, well.... I joke that it is "all about the social life, really..." but it isn't.  I'm averaging 50 hour weeks.  During February and the first half of March, there were a few that were 55 hours.  My pregnant colleague's maternity cover lasted a week before he jumped ship and I had to throw my toys out of the pram before the situation was sorted.  I was still not allowed to hire anyone, but there is now someone responsible for her work in Glasgow, who I actually trust to do the job.

On the work social-life front, I did get to play in Glasgow with Tall when I was last up there for the quarterly forecast review.  Surprisingly, he got an invite to the meeting, too. (It was just like old times.)  We travelled up together, went out for drinks and a meal afterwards and talked until 2am.  A couple of weeks later, we teamed up with Dark and had another late night drinking chatting session, followed by meetings the next day.  We are a great team; we work really well together and we're friends.  If only the three of us could come up with a viable business idea....

- Pam