Week in review

I believe it has been said that when something bad happens to you, you should count your blessings...
#1. I was dressed at the time.

I've locked myself out of a number of things before. (I've locked myself in one or two as well, from which enthusiastic friends and I learned that the person holding the keys should never be the one to climb into the car boot. But that's another story.) Usually I lock myself out of houses, and as a student seemed to manage to do this particularly during study weeks prior to exams, for some reason. I even locked us out of someone else's house a couple of months ago, though with my cybertool managed to break back in, literally in seconds, before the first mobile phone call for help had even been completed. But Monday took the cake. (Possibly the saveloy, actually, as it was Australia Day after all...) Mid-morning I slipped out to our rental car we'd had for the weekend to check the mileage. But it was cold, and of course I wouldn't want to let the heat out of the house. So it was that I returned to the front door to discover I had closed it behind me, and the only key I had was the one for the rental car. I also had no money, though I did have my rental car agreement as a rudimentary form of ID.

Rather than go through the painful details, let us simply close this sorry story by noting two points of information:
a) Both Bronwyn and our housemate Nick work within six to eight miles of our house, and I had a car with fuel.
b) I didn't get back in to the house for three and a half hours. (But at least I was dressed at the time.)

I should point out that even though it was Australia Day and there are a lot of Australians living in Wimbledon, it wasn't a bank holiday on Monday. I'd randomly taken the day as annual some time ago, just to catch up on life, and had high hopes of achieving many things. Needless to say, few of them ended up occurring. Instead, when I got back into the house I ditched all my plans in favour of re-arranging our room. In a fit of inspiration I perceived a change to the furniture in our room that might give us a bit more space. Turns out that wardrobe wasn't built-in after all. As you can see from this mid-process photo, the hallway can get a bit messy when you move everything out onto the floor. By the end of the day it was all back in though, the room was thoroughly spring-cleaned, and we did indeed have more space. It's taking a bit of getting used to, and I don't think we're fully sure about the new arrangement yet. We'll see.

Last night we had a work do to farewell my colleague Claire, who is taking six months off to travel round South America. Now antipodeans will often come here to the UK to earn money in order to fund further travel. However, when people from the UK go overseas my observation is they tend to just travel. After all, why work overseas to save money when you can earn the world's strongest currency at home? Claire's departure is just part of the high turnover in the teams here in London. At one of my workplaces, I will be the longest serving staff member in the team in a month or so, when a couple of my colleagues who are leaving finally depart. Even worse, by June every one of the current team members bar myself will have either rotated to their next position or have left. Dynamic, but unstable.

A review of the week would not be complete without mentioning both snow and politics. It was exciting to have it snow here on Wednesday. It started late afternoon and was an inch on the ground as I walked home from work that night. Cooler temperatures throughout this week have meant that the snow stayed all through Thursday and even today there was still a fair bit of snow on the ground. Temperatures now are beginning to rise however...

Things also seem to be thawing for Tony Blair's government. He won a critical vote on tertiary education funding reform, albeit by only 5 votes despite a 161 seat majority in the house. The Hutton Inquiry report was also published this week which completely exonerated the government of wrongdoing and pointed the finger squarely at the BBC in the events surrounding the death of weapons expert Dr David Kelly last year. In fact, while the temperatures are predicted to rise a little round here generally, the heat has really been on the BBC with two top heads already having rolled. I plan to keep listening regardless.

Happy Birthday Mum!

Across the miles we'd like to send out warmest birthday greetings to Duncan's Mum. She is a most remarkable woman who has taught me many things, and given me more than I would credit no doubt. Thank you Mum! I love you a lot.

Duncan's Dad's birthday was in December. The fact that it appears this was only mentioned in passing in this blog was Christmas-rush oversight presumably, and certainly does not reflect on his status, which is still rated as “awesome”. Just so you know.   : )

Last words

"Famous last words", my mother used to say. Probably still does. Perhaps she just doesn't tend to say it via email or on the phone, cause I haven't heard it said in a while. Anyway, some of mine a while ago were, “Whatever I do, I'm hoping to get it off again to a new journal quickly.” You can find them here. I was writing, on the 10th of September last year, about my paper that had been returned (unpublished) from a journal. Their recommendation: our paper was too clinical for their particular focus, and it should be submitted to another journal. I knew there needed to be some further work done on the paper first though, as it was too long for the second journal's word limit, and hadn't been formatted using their document template. (Manuscript submission is all-electronic now – a change since I was doing this kind of thing before, a couple of years ago. This makes it easier, yet more complicated too.) Well, I'm pleased to say a mere four months later I've finally submitted the article today. I'm frankly stunned to discover it has been that long. I knew it was way overdue, but would have thought it was November not September that I got it back. In the end, I didn't shorten the article, as I decided we'd already done that all we could. I asked the editors to be nice to us instead, to consider it on its merits, and to let me know where it could be shortened if they felt it was too long. We'll see.

Another milestone yesterday was booking flights to Prague. I've been talking about going to Prague since 2001 (Bronwyn seems to have tolerated this), about the oldest of our travel plans. When we passed through London in July of that year one plan had been to go to Prague for the weekend. Our tickets gave us one additional stopover in Europe and we'd decided Prague would be the place. Subsequently we realised our time in London was too limited already, and we ditched the plan. I ended up simply not using the flight, while as Bronwyn didn't (officially) stop in LA either she had two spare flights and was able to downgrade her ticket for a discount. All this meant however we had a residual Prague plan niggling to be re-activated. Once you've committed to an idea they can be remarkably persistent. Well, friend Jenny from Palmerston North used to live in Prague and once told us Easter was a good time to go there. Before we left New Zealand I'd been saying we'd go there at Easter last year. As I wrote then we realised soon after we got here in March that April was going to be too soon for an overseas trip for us. Looks like it'll actually be happening.

Before all that happens though, there's a couple of other trips. This weekend we have hired a car for the exorbitant fee of £2.58/day (plus £5/day insurance) from easycar.com and are going to stay in Salisbury. We will be visiting Stonehenge which is in the near vicinity, though we know with the A303 motorway now passing close by and not being able to walk freely among the stones it is nowhere near as impressive as it used to be. However... We also hope to do some hiking in the area and just have a good weekend away. Following that, in the second half of February, is the school half-term break. We're hoping to go somewhere warm, perhaps Mediterranean, and may simply wait till, well, the last minute, and then book via lastminute.com. What fun.

Weekend roundup

On Sunday morning Bronwyn was up the front with her guitar, leading the worship at our church, which went well. My contribution there is less musical... At the end of last year I took on the job of assisting with maintaining their web site. So far I've just tweaked the existing design and updated some information on the site. Last weekend also saw us move the site to new servers. Percolating in the background though is a complete site redesign, finally putting to productive use the skills I've learned producing this blog. In the meantime you can see the existing church site here.

We were joined for a late Sunday lunch with Brent and Megan, who we've recently got back in contact with after having known them a little in Palmerston North. They're about to move out of London, finding the better life in Harlow, West Essex. It was nice to show them a little of Wimbledon Common and to walk through the Village in an ultimately unfruitful search for hot chocolate. Inspiration hit as we headed back home where we were able to make our own with a new milk frother, just received from friend Sonja as a bonus Christmas present. Brent and Megan head off from London on Saturday but we'd like to think they have not seen the last of us... we hope to experience a little of the idyllic country life in a visit to them in Harlow. We may wait until they move from their initial accommodations though, an (admittedly large) caravan.

Meanwhile, on planet geek Panther is prowling the house, mostly up and running after Saturday's efforts. There are a few final things to iron out, like installing print drivers and the odd application. Invariably you only find these things when you need them immediately, like when Bronwyn wanted to print out a document for school last thing on Sunday night. We're getting there. In the meantime, iLife '04 arrived last night and has now been installed. The best improvement is to iPhoto, which we use to store and manage our digital photos. The new version is markedly faster. Nice.

"Who let the geeks out?"

[Woof, woof, woofwoof...] After an extended period of on-and-off effort, today I finally completed the task of getting our finances up to date. The biggest effort has been tracking where all the cash we've spent has gone. Our bank here wouldn't give us SWITCH cards when we arrived, which are used for electronic payment at time of purchase (the service called EFT-POS in New Zealand). As a result, we've been living a life dominated by cash. As we now have bank accounts in both the UK and New Zealand, we also could no longer use our old personal finances software, which could only handle one currency. I discovered in fact that this was an area of weakness in most personal finance packages. In the end though I came across Liquid Ledger, which has fulfilled our needs well. We're now back on track to knowing just where all those pounds are going to. (If only it were so easy to shed kilos as pounds...)

I'm doubly pleased to be up to date with the finances because some time ago I made a deal with myself: I wasn't going to upgrade to Panther until I'd finished that task. Last Sunday night, knowing I was nearing my goal, I placed an order with the UK Apple Store online. Panther arrived on Tuesday and after a quick look at the packaging I hid it away until I'd earned it. Well, after a morning of finances it was an afternoon of software installation. I opted for a complete erase and re-install which required careful backups but has been well worth it. The combination of a cleaned up system and an OS that is faster anyway has made for a whole new computer. Rrrrrwwwww!

While it's perhaps more associated with the United States in antipodean minds, we have the online auction service ebay here in the UK too. I've bid on a couple of items in the past, somewhat half-heartedly, but have never actually bought anything. That may change soon though. Through the assistance of housemate Nick I have taken free but unfettered possession of a beige G3 desktop Mac. That came from elsewhere, but I'm now bidding on ebay for a new video card and some RAM to kit it out. The plan is to make it into a credible second computer, replacing our old Powerbook 1400cs. Unlike that machine, this one will run OS X, and with Panther just installed on our iBook, I have a copy of Jaguar lying around that just happens to be the ideal thing for the G3 desktop machine. I think we let the geeks out...

To the future, to the past

One true thing I have learnt in life: to catch up on a backlog, first get no further behind. Following this advice, I have uploaded our York trip photos. Extending back to July last year, we still have photos from Tuscany, Paris, Bristol and Bath to upload. I will be working on these gradually, but plan to first keep up with any new trips. Perhaps we could decide not to go away until I was up to date, but with the next two trips in two and five weeks, that's not going to happen. Anyway, enjoy York!

At church this morning we had a sermon about finding the heart of success. The speaker asked an interesting question, “Did you have a successful year in 2003?” He went on to discuss what this might mean, how we define as success in our lives, and what God might have to say about that. It was good thought food. I made no New Year resolutions this year, after the single one I'd made for last year was a complete write-off. (It was about exercise...) I do have some hopes for this year, which probably speak to the issue about what might make a successful year in my book. It's all about finishing things for me. I'd love to end the year with no loose ends, no outstanding projects, no overdue books from the library of life. Whether this is what God would want for me, I'm not so sure. It certainly would make me more available to move in new directions however. I'll be giving this some more thought.

In that vein, two months ago I wrote my first three-month plan. This came out of quite a bit of thinking, and then a discussion at our church home group that finally goaded me into action. When I was a research student we had to submit six-month plans of what we would achieve, at the same time evaluating the previous period. I found this a useful discipline, and it helped highlight the progress that was being made as much as keep me on track. In November I did the same kind of thing, looking at many spheres of my life though. I plan to review it in February. Immediately however it showed me something: the number of things I thought I could achieve in three months was ridiculous. No wonder I always feel like I'm behind and not doing everything I wanted to. I hope at the least this exercise will help me to scale down my expectations to be more appropriate. I'll let you know in four weeks time.

From the legal department

In a first for this blog, following a legal challenge, an out-of-court settlement, and advice from our lawyers, we wish to make the following statement:

New Year's Day

Happy New Year everybody!

We've just arrived back from a few days away up in chilly York, where we were excited to have it snow last night. It was a good inch or so, which may not be much for hardy northerners... We thought it was pretty cool though! We've both been in snow before when sking on mountains. However it is quite another experience to actually be somewhere while it is snowing, as I guess many of you have experienced.

It's been great to have a few days with friends Michael and Jenny. We last visited them at Easter when they were living in Whitby. It was fun to have yet another new town to explore with them!

Well, trip photos to follow soon, but all the revelry is catching up so it is off to bed for us...