Geek, me? Never.

This weekend saw me doing fairly practical things for a change. I managed to get my car parked close enough to the house to wash and vacuum it, which is not an easy task considering all the workman that are still around my estate. The car park at work became like an ice rink when it was snowy at the start of the year, so the landlords dumped piles of grit salt everywhere – it’s almost a gravel car park now. So my poor little car got filthy dirty inside as the girl I give a lift to and I tracked the little stones into the foot well each day.

On Sunday I cycled down to the rowing club and me and another girl from my crew did some maintenance on a boat we’ve been allocated. It used to be rigged as a junior quad but the riggers were hastily changed so we could row it sweep. The shoes of the girl at bow were too small, the slides were all too short and the rigger heights were all different, so armed with Allan keys, screwdrivers, rigger jiggers and a fine adjusticator (a hammer) we set to work configuring it for our crew. It’s not the side of rowing I’m used to as at uni we elected a boat man to do all the maintenance work and if there was something we wanted doing we just logged it in a book. Now mostly it wouldn’t happen until all the problems with the guy’s boats had been fixed first, but that’s boat politics for you. It wasn’t really difficult, and it was good fun working in the sunshine. I got so dirty though, completely covered in oil and grease and general muck. Combine that with walking into a ladder and getting a bruise and a graze on my knee I felt like I was 5 and playing in the mud in the garden again :)

At work I’m doing a quarterly project of mine where I track all the retirements on all the schemes to check we haven’t missed any and the scheme owners are on top of all the upcoming ones. It’s a fairly dull job, it just involves running a load of reports and compiling them all into one massive spreadsheet and putting some code in to compare retirement dates with work completed and in progress. It’s my baby – I came up with the idea and have generated the spreadsheet from scratch. Every time I do it I make it a bit whizzier. It’s this project that was mentioned to the head of our division of the company I work for as being an example of how good an office we are and why we should get more work. Eeep! Anyway, my systems are going sooo slowly at the moment, and the spreadsheet is fairly large and takes a while to compile; it’s taking forever, not helped by the fact it keeps deleting bits of itself. On Tuesday the whole computer shut down, lost all my work for the morning and then couldn’t reconnect to the server. I spent three hours learning anatomy and watching it try and fail to log in: attempt 237…failed, attempt 238… failed. Roll on university is all I can say!

I really can’t wait now, I feel like I’m just marking time. All the people I know at uni are all finishing and having end of exam celebrations and I sort of miss that - the celebrations, not the exams - so I’m filling the in between time with exciting things to look forward to. I’m going to my first ever festival with a girl from work – a local one called Chagstock which the Hoosiers and Adrian Edmundson are playing. We are both so excited. I’m looking at tents and praying for sunshine. Apart from that, there’s a couple of balls at Sandhurst with mr, I’ve got tickets to Les Mis at Bristol with my parents, a comedy night with some guys from work, a couple more regattas I’m coxing, our club regatta where I’m racing, and the free work summer event where they open a local kids theme park for us and families/friends to play in after hours and put on a hog roast. I have something every weekend for the next month and half, it’s ace. There was a little excitement as I nearly got tickets to see Bill Bailey in Brstol for this weekend with mr, but he’s coxing the Sandhurst girls at Women’s Henley so couldn’t get away. Never mind, I will see Bill Bailey at some point in my life :) Right, back to seeing if this spreadsheet will behave. Bye for now,
Your geeky bean.