Catch up

Work is nightmarish at the moment - no sorry, it's not the work itself which is nightmarish, but my diary. Having just come back from holiday, I will have spent the grand total of two and a half days at the Watton office, 2 half days on courses, half a day at Bury and a day at Thetford on Friday. Next week is bank holiday Monday (yay!), then Tuesday at Bury, Wednesday in Watton, Thurs and Fri off for revision. The week after is 3 days off for revision, 2 in the office. The week after that I have a team meeting on Wednesday which usually last all morning, followed by travelling to Salisbury sometime in the afternoon ready for an all-day course on Thursday (at which I'm doing a bit of a presentation about PI truts - scary!) and then I'm off on the Friday to go to the Good Food Show summer thingy (can't wait!).

So, not a full week in the office for ages - the work is just piling up there and when am I going to do it???.... Still at least the first day back wasn't anything like the bad dream I had about it so that was a bit of a relief!

Have been on 2 separate courses the last couple of days. Yesterday's was in London and about periodic payments - or so I thought. There was about 20 minutes spent on explaining the effects of some legislation which came in last year and the choices for types of settlement claimants have in PI cases as a result (which is what I had gone for), and then the remainder of the hour and a half spent explaining and promoting a new whizz-bang financial product which has recently come on to the market offering something better than already exists. Interesting but not quite what I was expecting... and meant that I kept drifting off and thinking about Gilbert & Sullivan for some reason.

Today went to Colchester for a tax thingy. Again not bad, but the bit I wanted to know about was relegated to a rushed 20-30 minutes at the end when the speaker found he'd over run on the other topic by about an hour! The first topic was really technical and not something I have to deal with usually, so I was concentrating hard and just about managing to stay with it when the tea lady came in to change the cups/glasses, put plates out etc and generally make a bit of noice. Well that was it after that - i got so distracted by the tea lady I completely lost the thread of what was being saidand didn't really catch up again! Still, the break was only 20 minutes later and that helped.

Oh well, the rest was good. And, you know my usual horror stories about having to travel to new places? The AA site told me it would take me 1 1/2 hours from Watton so I gave myself a good 2 hours to get there anticipating problems...got there in 1 1/2 hours! So early. Made myself a coffee to pass the time but was over-enthusiastic with the milk and had to drink it really quickly before it went too cold. Poo.

The course was at the University of Essex which has a really bizarre system for numbering rooms - the building I was in started at floor 4, because it is higher physically than another building further down the hill which starts at floor 1. Yes. Really.

And I'm sure I must be a bit wierd - I had my arms crossed at one point and my fingers brushed against my elbow. This led to me thinking "oh that's smooth" and every time I had my arms crossed after that I kept feeling my elbow to see if it was still as smooth...

Still, home now and the journey back seemed to take hardly any time at all which was great. Just about to check email and do the Da Vinci puzzle for today - then off for some ironing, bit of cross stitch and I have an abundance of exotic fruit to sell in my village! Hurrah!