Recalled

Heading back to London on the 2015 flight from here tomorrow night to land Friday morning, ready for a full day of work!

I didn't get to see a single penguin or elephant. /sob

A quiet weekend in Jozi

The blindingly good night out on Thursday meant most of Friday was spent wandering dazedly around the office not doing much work. Saying goodbye to the other team was heartbreaking - no one to plan more frantic weekends, no one to use the English language as only a non-English speaker can, and no one to do the monkey dance. You guys are already being sorely missed.

So much so that I went to bed on Friday night at 10.30pm, passed out for close to 10hrs, had a two hour manicure-pedicure where I fell asleep again, and now I'm knocking around bored as hell.

This weekend is nothing like the last, when we got off the plane at Cape Town raring to go at about 10.00pm, stalked the streets for for the next five hours, in and out of clubs, and then got up again st 5.30am to go shark diving. 8 hours later, a quick shower then the sunset and wine on the beach, a massive drunken dinner, and more partying til about 3am. The morning passed unnoticed and everyone got rounded up at about 2pm slightly worse for wear while the hotel called around to ask if we would kindly check out already. Another long lunch under grey skies, and back to Jo'burg by 9pm, bed by 10pm.

Oops, off to lunch and Mandela Square!

BA versus MAS

BA economy seats are squishy and small, which doesn't make sense because British people are large. (-1)
BA air stewards don't bring you water at all during the flight unless you ding them (-3)
BA business class is basically economy seat + footstool, and the privacy screens make the entire set up look like coffins (-10). MAS business class makes you feel like a king! (+10)
BA might lose your bag (-5)
BA smells like MAS, that nauseating lemon spray laced with several thousand types of body odor. It hits you like a wall in the boarding tunnel. (-10)
BA screens are touch screens, which are genius - how many times have you got out of a MAS seat only to be very nearly castrated by the remote control wire wrapping itself around everything and then trying to shoot itself very viciously back into its hole (+5)
BA food trays are so messy. I don't know which one's my salad or whether it's actually the dessert, especially when the loser in front of you has not put the seat in the upright position when everyone is eating whatyouthinkyouowntheworldah?! (-1billion)

BA (-1billion and 4) on my highly accurate marking scheme, MAS (0).

No wonder MAS and SIA have like the best cabin staff in the world (and they don't lose your bags) - they aren't up against all that much.

The traumatic 10hr45mn flight to Jo'burg left me so tired, I watched my bag go around the carousel THREE times.

Industrial strength shopping

Bank holiday by myself saw me at an eerily empty Oxford Circus at 9.45am. Moped around outside Nike town waiting for it to open and blazed through to Covent Garden via Oxford Street in a whirl of changing rooms and shopping bags the second the clock struck 10. I didn't spend horrendous amounts of money, but the rate at which my bank account ticked down was scarily efficient. I was back at Earl's Court by 3.30pm with heavy bags and a persistent shoe-shaped hole in my heart because everyone knows that you never find what you initially set out to buy.

I can't help but feel that all British highstreet brands are pretentious and really not worth the blinding amounts of money they charge for what is clearly Chinese merchandise. Take, for instance, a pair of £140 pumps at Russell & Bromleys that maybe, sorta, kinda look like last season's Salvatore's. Without a second's thought, I would definitely pay that extra £100 for this season's originals, except for the fact that my conscience forces me to wait for the Boxing Day sales to make the guilt-ridden acquisition.

There's nothing to watch on TV now that the Olympics are done. The closing ceremony was as awe inspiring as the first. I felt the slightest stirrings of resentment in defence of the mother land when some British anchor person on TV pointed out that the IOC president didn't say that the Beijing games were the best ever, just 'truly exceptional'. More amusing, however, was the reiterated message about how hosting the Olympic Games is not about putting on the most expensive show ever. The London Games will have a budget of £9Bn compared to the £22Bn tab the Chinese have racked up, and based on inflation rates and the spiralling economy, that'll be something like £40 and a tin of baked beans by the time 2012 rolls around.

Anyway, I'm out of here. Weng is napping on the cushion next to me (very stressed out about not being stressed out about his impending exams, go figure) and is giving off an uncomfortable amount of heat in our sweltering 22 degree weather (there is no aircon!).

Fantasy Football: Arghh

It's back to the new EPL season, the first weekend of which was overshadowed by Britain's unexpectedly good medal haul in Beijing. After being out of touch with the Premiership for the better part of last year and most of the transfers over summer, I completely bombed the first weekend of Yahoo! Fantasy Football through a mixture of injuries, poor choices, and unfamiliarity with the new layout. Anyway, I'm sitting cozily at the bottom of the table, a real positive start to the season.

Couch potato eventing at -7 Beijing time

The Olympics is owning me. I eat, sleep, and breathe live text updates. Because of a horribly twisted confluence of technology-related circumstance, we cannot stream anything from anywhere in a time when all of the biggest television providers are raving about their 100s of hours of live coverage now available online. The rest of England, however, must be streaming every second of the Olympics because our connection speed is horrendous. Live morning finals for the convenience of the American public and us sitting in that awkward timezone between Beijing and the eastern seaboard have conspired to leave me fighting unconciousness for the rest of the day.

Having been inspired by the swimming feats in the Water Cube, I finally hit the gym last night. It was a really good feeling for the first six hours while my body was in shock from the sudden onslaught of exercise; less welcome was the ravenous hunger that made up all hours between breakfast, tea, lunch, tea, and dinner today, and even less welcome, the deluge of guilt following my high-calorie cravings, all of which have finally been sated after a huge KFC dinner. In the words of the immortal Donald Duck, "Ah phooey."

On other fronts, I am getting better at foosball and will one day beat the German and the American.

One idiot always starts it

I've just seen the fourth "please return my power pack" email go out to all London staff in as many days. It's anarchy, I tell you. Times are desperate when you have to remember to unplug the adapter and lock it away. I wonder who started the chain - look at all the victims! We've also taken to hoarding those spiral bound notebooks. As part of the cost cutting regime, office services are refusing to restock. Word on the street is that you can get one if you know the right people.

Our gym and swimming pool look amazing - much better than I initially thought, so I think a one-off payment of £40 is great value. I promise to start exercising already. In my head, I've got an hour's long run-cycle-swim thing, but we'll see what materializes, probably just some splashing and then more eating. I'm ever the optimist.

My sister has kindly gotten me my Christmas party dress already, and only RM80, which is like £0. No lah, but definitely way less than what I'd have had to pay if I'd got it here, and it's pretty. Nothing is better than finding an amazing dress for very little money.

Weng is crushing heavily on his accounting tutor who apparently looks like Kelly Brook, which does very little for my self-esteem as I am starting to look like the Pilsbury dough boy's Asian sister, char siew pau girl. He has also studied the length of her necklace very closely, started explaining his observations, and then struggled to talk his way out. Needless to say, he remains at the far end of my dining table/couch/imaginary stick.

I almost bought the CFA level 2 study notes today. Almost. I'm in a firm full of masochists as I am not the only one talking about it already. I feel incomplete without having an exam to study for, but that'll be another £200ish that I won't see for at least a year, or potentially longer.

Why hello there, stranger

Yea, I know, long time. Well in that almost-month-long hiatus, my bank account got raped by the new flat security deposit (money hemorrhage) and then the summer sale (money flood) and then the 32 inch LCD TV (future money flood). (Don't worry, mummy, my savings are still intact and untouched.)

Then there was lots of grief because my bank account was empty and it was still a couple of weeks to pay day, the old flat wasn't going to release the deposit sharpish, I wasn't sure if more money would be forth coming from the CFA, and my beautiful new TV couldn't even get freeview.

And then pay day came around (money in!), I actually passed CFA level 1 (some more money in!), we should get the deposit back by next week (lots and lots of money!), and I won't have to eat jam and bread for the next six weeks.

But when things are picking up, there's always something to gripe about. Like how today, the second it struck 2pm BST, the CFA website crashed: think 7,000ish over-achieving, banker-wannabes all trying to get their results. The pass rate was 35%, not pass mark, pass rate. Or how the weather's been too hot, which makes me cranky and Weng, slow, and when Weng is slow, I get even grumpier.

On the social scene, Aaron and Young came to visit for a weekend. That was wonderful even if it was an extended WoW pitch about how it can develop all your soft skills and make you a better manager/gimp/CEO/king of everything.

Cheryl went home and has become the new communicative channel between my parents and myself, bringing messages about the family and our aging dog and guilting me at every chance they get for a) not going on the Alaskan cruise this fall, b) not visiting home enough, and c) not permanently moving back to Singapore / KL. I will be home soon.

The only thing that's not rapidly changing is my location, I must be the most stagnant consultant in the world, and my desperate yearning for a (couple of) Maltese puppies - two girls please. I want to name them Theo/Po and Smudge/Mercutio. I've not decided on names yet, maybe I should get FOUR puppies, then I won't have to choose!

Bring on the bubblewrap

We're moving soon! About 20 minutes down the road.

I also need to take my camera out more. Text is boring, and since the light's been so great the last couple of weeks, I should really take more pictures. Maybe I should start documenting the week in pictures.

We've lost Weng to his studying for this last weekend, so he's been really quiet.

I need to go and handle some really mundane things like bills and debt collecting.

A hundred degrees of boredom

I'm so bored. I'm not free, I'm just bored and lazy. I'm so bored, I've eaten half a kilo of fruit everyday this week (I love summer berries, don't you?) and refreshing BBC's Wimbledon live text every 20 minutes. My discipline is inversely proportionate to the blueness of the sky and the fluffiness of the clouds that scud across my skylight, and then there's the discontinuity because when it's completely overcast, I cannot be bothered to work at all. The time crawls up to lunch and then ticks with heartaching slowness towards dinner.

I want to go biking in southern Italy or Bhutan (backroads.com makes it look so awesome) - who's up for it? See, I couldn't even be bothered to properly link that website or think of anything particularly insightful to say.

Tomorrow's Friday

It's a little bit stressful when every other IM that pops up on your screen is someone wanting to talk about who's gotten 'outcounselled', doubly so when you know that everyone's mid-years are around the corner, and that every single review counts that little bit more amidst the current financial crunch.

Then there are the 20 odd interns that have started this summer. Keen beans that walk in infinitely better dressed than me, hogging the printers with white papers on risk that they read in their spare time while waiting for that life-defining meeting with our staffer.

But onto other things. Like the beautiful weather. Someone remarked the other day that he must bring luck to London. I asked, why? He said, because the weather's been pretty good for the last 9 months he's been here - no where near as depressing as he originally thought. I wonder what he prepared himself for because January through to April were pretty miserable.

Cloudy days are so quickly forgotten though in glorious 20 degree sunshine, I almost got a sunburn sitting under the skylight today, almost. My only gripe is that every morning I wake up at 6.30 and panic because it's too bright outside to be 6.30, it must at least be 9, and I must be late for work. I know I'm going to wake up one morning, winter will have crept back in, and it will be 9am and pitch black outside and I'll just go back to sleep.

The weather today made me duck out of the office to get cash, and on the way, I walked slowly past all the shops on sale, bought nail clippers, and went to get a frozen yoghurt, then finally made it to the cash machine.

Wow, a whole two paragraphs about sunshine. It must be Friday tomorrow.

Spain's in the final also. I love the spanish team, they're beautiful to watch, so beautiful.

A change is gonna come

My new layout is awesome. Cheryl made it for me because I'm a complete html noob. The pictures are three of my favourite things: my dog, the breakfast room at The Great John Street, Manchester, and a Parisian sunset. The colour scheme reminds me of the light brown coffee swirls in the foam of my latte every morning. My coffee dependency is getting worse, so I only thought it fitting that the life blood that is caffeine is also represented here. I think things should change with the weather, even if the recent passing of the summer solstice means we're on the way back to winter already. I've even developed a brand new obsession with accessories.

Otherwise, work's been pretty quiet. I'm on 'the beach' (oh, the irony). I usually update when I'm sitting around twirling my thumbs but after getting caught up in the entire first season of Greek on youtube, I've decided to start looking at how deep the water is for CFA level 2. I took up a whole hour of printing time this morning at the office, generating a queue of consultants who clearly had more value-adding printing purposes than mine, which was highly probably illegal anyway. Looks like part 2 is starting out well already.

We're almost thoroughly sick of football and our relationship is slightly strained, but you know that when Euro 2008 wraps up, we'll be huddled on the couch, flicking through the channels, waiting for a glimpse of a black and white football. Good thing there's Wimbledon to fill some of the gaping void, and then the Olympics, but that's on a weird timezone and I'll probably miss most of it anyway.

We're also moving really soon. Cheryl's nursing her beat up right foot from her beachfootball week in Zurich to get ready to trundle back and forth with our brand new platform sacktruck. Good thing she has a lot of friends to help this time around.

I'm really tired and I have to think of intelligent questions for tomorrow, so I think that's it for now.

Football and freedom

I sat the CFA level 1 exam yesterday with 5,000 other candidates, two pigeons, and a massive bumblebee. None of the wildlife actually completed either of the two 3 hour papers. The pigeons entertained themselves by running races down the aisles and swooping low over our heads, while the bumble bee fought free from the flourescent proctor's bib that an enthusiastic volunteer had thrown over it in a fit of panic. Oh right, and 5,000 candidates with varying degrees of preparation coughed, guessed, and shaded their way through 240 questions. Results are out in July.

Passion World Tour:London on Thursday was phenomenal. If you can make any of the other legs, go!

Manila :: Aug 1
Kuala Lumpur :: 3
Jakarta ::: Aug 5
Johannesburg ::: Aug 9
Cape Town ::: Aug 13
Mexico City :: Oct 3-4
Vancouver :: Oct 6
Seoul :: Oct 10-11
Tokyo :: Oct 13
Hong Kong :: Oct 16
Sydney :: Oct 21

Watching the David Crowder Band live is out of this world. We were sitting three or four rows from the front, next to the amps. We left with our ears ringing and Weng still struggles with deafness (although that was there before we went for the concert), but the love and light for Jesus was so powerfully renewed. I was buzzing the whole of Friday and well into Saturday.

Then Euro 2008 started and football, football, football for the next three weeks (and no more studying!) yay!

Consumerism: These are a few of my favourite things

1. Abercrombie & Fitch: The uberfussy shopper in me has finally been satisfied, trust it to be a sea, sand, and surf-type brand. Their clothes fit the strange proportions of my body by some stroke of genius in design and fabric. I can't wait to go back there in search of a perfect pair of jeans, and maybe flip flops, and that polka dot bikini, and a hoodie maybe...The next step in my diabolical plan is to set up an A&F pusher who lives in the land of half-priced American clothing with access to a post office and my eternal gratitude - any takers?
   
2. Boulevard Deli, Covent Garden: The most amazing roast chicken sandwich lives here. Half a roast chicken, hand-smashed and deboned, stuffed into a soft, freshly baked bun on a bed of lettuce and tomato with any sauce you can think of. The best part is that you can get two whole meals out of that one sandwich. There's a roast pork and crackling version that has Aron obsessing while he works on his due diligence. The anticipation of lunch time suddenly got a lot worse.
   
3. Sony Ericsson's W910i: The feel of the sliding screen is like a cup of Max Brenner's hot chocolate, I can't stop thinking about it. I'm still trying to justify the ownership of said instrument on the back of a phone plan that I don't really need at the moment. Weng doesn't really buy 'But when you slide it open...phwooaoh...' and he's a Nokia fanboy so everything else is crap.
   
4. Book shopping on Amazon: Even though Cheryl always beats me to opening my delivery (and sometimes tries to stick the box back together), there's nothing more exciting than coming home to a delivery of books that you'd totally forgotten about ordering. Since you don't engage in the physical act of handing over cash or card to pay, and we all know that entering credit card details online isn't really paying, it's almost like Christmas.
5. My Birkenstocks: I've wanted a pair for the longest time, but how can you spend almost RM250 of your parents' money on a pair of slippers? So I went out and a pair on my November paycheck (London prices put everything in a totally different context), in the middle of winter, and I haven't looked back since, even if I have had to wait almost three months for the right weather.
   

Let's go boil the ocean

I've had a run of really unstructured projects. How does one manage to be proactive and value-add when you're not sure what you're supposed to be adding-value to? Clients always want to get more than what they paid for.

I walked to the tube station this morning at around 7.20 thinking the only thing good about really early starts is that the tube will be really empty, I mean who goes to work before 8am? As it turns out, quite a lot of people.

I've also realised that I suffer from tourist rage. I hate tourists that get out of the train, and stop. get out of the lift and stop. get to the top of the stairs, and stop. Wander onto the busiest street corner and STOP. IN THE MIDDLE. gah.

Time for...baby clothes!

A few months ago - 6 to be exact, I received an email congratulating me on conceiving and telling me that my baby is the size of a peanut. Thereafter, I've been receiving regular reports comparing the developing fetus to various bits of fruit and vegetable and remarking on the development of fingernails and eyelashes. Apparently now it's big enough to wear baby clothes.

For those who know me, I have the maternal instincts of a steak knife. Little children and babies smell the fear and sense the anxiety and start screaming - bless their God-given survival instincts. Good thing Weng has enough nurturing talent for the both of us, he's like a kiddie magnet - little girls fall in love with him and little boys try to head butt his favorite parts when they rush in for a bear hug.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this post. It's late, I'm hungry (how much air can a being digest?) and I'm still at the office, trying to help with damage control on a project scope that's threatening to condense six months of work into ten days. Then there's that 7am memo review tomorrow, face to face.

Bring on the booties and jumper suits, I say.

No, joking only lah.

Everyday should be a Friday

Now that I've finally stopped procrastinating on getting things in line for the International Firm Day weekend (but only because I was procrastinating on something even worse and it wasn't studying), I'm excited.

I'm also thinking about all the summer wear I get to buy in anticipation of Spanish sunshine. Weng would probably read this and roll his eyes, because my shopping success rate is something like 5%., which doesn't make for highly efficient time use. Knowing my luck though, the rains will come rolling in that weekend, effectively ending the drought and any hopes of a tan.

On the topic of spending scary amounts of money, it's a toss up between a tote that'll hold my laptop and everything else I need or a Wii. I haven't found a bag that doesn't look like it doubles up as a windbreak or costs less than my conscience allows. Weng might have a hard time sharing the Wii considering his current savings strategy is to put 70% of his pay away, and Cheryl owes money if anything.

Cheryl has reached all new lows: stressing about not stressing. Being a student is pretty overrated at times.

Anyway, I'm off to happy hour. 15 minutes late, the wine isn't going to drink itself!

Monday once again

I think Pret completely abuses its position as the lunchtime go-to for stressed, unimaginative professionals, but it does include very cute extendable chopsticks with its sushi boxes.

I seem to have developed a very strange allergy to something spring-time that manifests as a large, angry hive-looking lump under my eye.

My laptop backpack is far from chic, and being the only chest-high tortoise on the tube during rush hour is very embarrassing.

The warm weather is great for romantic, billowy skirts and gladiator sandals, but less so for the corporate look - conscious efforts to avoid sweating only accelerates the process.

I felt bad not wanting to go and watch Iron Man with Weng, and he's so excited about the movie, so we're going tonight.

I'm still thinking about the space between the trees. Rob Bell's Nooma series on how Christianity relates to life is probably the most effective teaching tool I've ever tried. I usually struggle to pay attention to, much less remember, these things for any longer than 11 minutes (which is how long the clip lasted). Miracles do happen, it seems.

Three inches of heel and two inches of sunshine

Second day in a small, windowless room, sitting at a dining table from the 80s, 10 meters away from floor to ceiling views of St. Paul's cathedral on the River Thames. The printer averages a page every 5 minutes, or 2-to-a-page every 10. It too is obviously a throwback from a similar decade. Our 3G cards struggle to work in sync with our email clients, the latest failure of one or both announced with a soft tired sigh of resignation. We threaten to turn in our malfunctioning laptops with a well aimed rant, but also know the humiliation when it purrs like a kitten for those in tech. Yet we persevere, typing up minutes in Power Point, diligently taking notes as the interviewee sits there deciding whether telling us the truth will get him fired. Thank goodness it's Friday tomorrow, thank goodness for Scala pasta sauce and canned sardines.

On other more positive fronts, I finally made it to Alpha. I even sacrificed watching Liverpool's valiant exit from the Champion's League, but it was all that the testimonies promised and so much more. It hadn't even properly started yet (although Weng made every effort to answer everyone's questions), but I left refreshed and am eagerly awaiting next week's talk. Our other achievement this week was that we beat insane DoTA AIs 2 vs 2. Oh, geekdom.

Out of the blue

Lucky if I can so much as manage a single post every quarter. That's pretty pathetic. What's more, without the frequent updates that force me to put thoughts to type, I can hardly recall anything that's happened over the last two months without confusing events/people/places.

I know at some point we visited Young and Aaron in Birmingham and had an amazing time eating nonstop and getting ripped off at their local fruit and veg market (in our own excitement). Then we flew to Amsterdam the next weekend to look for Tom in his pretty little town, where we we got assaulted by bad weather and got given lots of really random directions to Vondelspark once the map stopped making sense (one canal looks very much any other). I didn't get to try any spacecakes, which was disappointing, but I think I'd take slight disappointment over Weng's glaring most days.

I also know we definitely gave Ben a rousing send off because a) I was still feeling the adverse effects of that all-nighter a week later, and b) 'Rousing' for Ben since he spent most of those 8 hours scolding Evan for dying so much. Needless to say, when dawn came, I wasn't really my sleep-deprived self and proceeded to run around the house taking photos of everything.

Cheryl came back from her Easter holiday the Monday after that weekend and showed me a slideshow she had made which featured 15 minutes of photos of Perdy, who's looking pretty good for an 84 year old, and Joel came back a week after bearing my new laptop (for which I will be eternally grateful). My new toy has fancy graphics all over the cover which makes it look like it should belong to a 16 year old MTV-addict type person, but I adore having a laptop that is entirely mobile, weighing less than a Hummer, and one that turns on without having to do the hokey-pokey and wave it all about. We fully tested its DoTA capabilities on the first night and it passed with flying colours.

There, I think that's approximately in order.

I'm still based in London, which is great, because I really need to study. I've started to have small panic attacks at the thought of my impending exam. Weng's settled into his month of college quite quickly, although he is much less fun than he used to be. Now that he's net positive, he's a lot more serious and less inclined to all night gaming sessions and other youth-related shenanigans.

We're also due to say bye to Evan this weekend, when he goes back to good old KL to figure out what he wants to do next, which really sucks.

Dinner's at Shanghai Blues tonight. You know that if it's a Chinese restaurant with an English name that doesn't read "Mr. Harry's authentic Chinese restaurant - real Peking duck!1!!" and qipao-clad waitresses that look Chinese but speak English, then it'll be horribly overpriced and have none of that good kitchen floor flavor.

I want to be a zoo keeper

I'm really tired, really, really tired. Short tough projects one after another without enough downtime has run me into the ground, so I called Weng on Monday night and in between gulps of air, told him I was in the wrong job and wanted to be a zoo keeper. He reassured me that I was just going through a rough couple of months, but if I wanted to be a zoo keeper, he would support me, only he said that zoo keeping at Zoo Negara probably wouldn't be ideal. He's always so practical, even more so when I'm throwing a hysterical fit.

So I got back on the horse on Tuesday, we watched Man Utd host Lyon that night, so that helped a little. Wednesday and Thursday were generally getting better, then Friday hit with a really nasty cold. It just doesn't end.

Basically I was asked to go back to Manchester this week to support the other team until their project ends. My total contribution was largely negative this week - Monday was wiped out by having to take the 6.20am train after really shit week and Friday was spent fighting through cobwebs and cotton wool to form a coherent thought. I feel for the job manager.

Back on the beach

Manchester has finished for me, for the next three weeks anyway. We failed to achieve two main objectives: 1) Go on the Manchester wheel, and something else, I forget. I will definitely miss the hotel - the decor was so relaxing. Once I got used to the silence, sleeping by myself and not keeping one eye on the staircase, it was a room I was always glad to get back to. The Wii nights were also really cool.

This week'll mostly be a whole load of tedious wrapping up to do but at least I won't have to start Mondays at 6.30am for the next week. I'm hoping I'll be able to get away with hiding out at Kingsway and not contacting staffing so I get a couple of weeks to study. Either way I'll be on the beach while everyone else starts making their way back into the big financial world and the office will be a graveyard once again.

We're watching American Idol and my sister, younger by three years, is complaining about feeling old as a bunch of 16 and 17 year olds take the stage. I'm growing further away on the wrong side of 21, with another marker in a month's time.

Weng's goofing off in KL. Actually, goofing off isn't fair, he spends a lot of time in his car and running around with his parents. He's such a guai zai, a well fed guai zai.

Valentine's Day in a bucket

I'm still looking for all those lost hours every day - there are never enough, and I've potentially shot myself in the foot by signing up for the CFA level 1 exam this June. Pathetic that I could only go 8 months without something to study towards. The kiasu-ness runs deep.

With one week left in Manchester, I'm in two minds about whether or not to try and stay on or move on. The city has definitely grown on me and the Great John Street is now a second home, a very comfortable one.

Valentine's Day on Thursday was economically celebrated with a 3 piece Colonel's meal and American Idol with Cheryl. I know Weng ate better than I did. I didn't even get a flower, just a really big serving of chicken rice the next day - I shouldn't be complaining, really.

I've spent most of Friday and Saturday determined to make a dent in my 35 hour sleep debt. Weng occasionally remembers he has a girlfriend and tries to hassle me out of bed. I think I have only been awake about 7 hours so far, and the time I have been awake, I've been catching up on pop culture: Juno has amazing chat.

Manchester, week 1

I'm finally on the road. We were told that we'd be spending about 50% of our time outside of London. By my calculations, I'm going to be spending the rest of this year on the road. I've been consigned to Manchester for four days a week for the next four weeks. I think I will eventually manage to leave the country.

In Manchester, old Victorian architecture rubs shoulders with modern monstrosities and several blocks of grim concrete buildings, a throwback from the 70s. Drunken women on a night out in this town have a similar fashion sense.

The first week has been hysterical. The team is hilarious. We've been working hard but the social time and drinks afterwards more than make up for any grief during the day. Good company, great times. My hotel room is possibly bigger than our flat in London, but more importantly, has significant Wii party potential.

Let's go again this season, guys?

The skiing was brilliant. If you're on Facebook, which I'm sure you are, our pictures are on there. We're still waiting for Aaron and Young's photos. They've got more action photos because Aaron, being a confident skier, tagged along with Young and I in our significantly less confident group, which meant he had time (and sufficient control) to take out his camera.

We are definitely old now, though. It would have been worse, were it not for my Forest Gump-esque knee guards. By the time we had stopped hurting from the unaccustomed exercise, it was time to head home. We're going to start snowboarding before we get too old.

So that really bad project finally ended the first week of January. I was working on the eve and got straight back to it on the 2nd. I can definitely say I learnt a lot, but I'm undeniably thankful that it's over.

I've started a new project already, although we're technically in week zero and will have another week zero starting Monday. Being on a week zero generally means being tagged to start the project, preliminary prep, and going home by 7pm. Being tagged also saves you from being put on nasty beach work that could potentially keep you in the office late - all the slogging, none of the credit. This job manager totally kicks ass too, it's going to be awesome.

Weng's started his interviews. I can't wait to find out what God has in store for us both this year. Exciting times. I hosted the second batch of first round interviews, which involved a lot of sympathetic nodding and grimacing as candidates filed in and out. I really don't ever want to go back there - interviews, I mean, not hosting, hosting was great.

I also bought a Nespresso machine in somewhat premature anticipation of my bonus. I no longer have to pay extortionate prices for coffee at Starbucks. We calculated that I'd have to drink a cup everyday for 9 months to break even, but I'm well on my way. It does the usual espresso shots, longer coffees, hot water, froths milk for a latte or hot chocolate, and collects the mail. I can make a perfect latte at the touch of a button and, more importantly, clean it at the touch of a button. That was my splurge and my very first appliance.

I've also become obsessed with my iTunes coverflow. After a week of Googling and uploading album covers, I am only at artists beginning with 'R'.

Otherwise, I've been busy adopting other people's flus. My sinus cavities are currently hosting a viral orgy and all I get is dehydration and a chapped nose.