WooHoo - coming home!

I am sitting in the Boston airport lounge waiting to be called for my homeward flight. Should get in around 9 p.m. tonight with any luck as it seems that yesterday's weather delays have been lifted.
It has been a long and particularly tough week this week with many changes taking place at work. I was pleasantly surprised with my own situation which I had expected to be one of planned removal from the project that I have been working on. But have been asked to consider about six different prospects as it seems my experience is still sought. A good end to the week.

Wednesday night was a bit of a stress reliever with some of my team. Something that would be impossible to do home in the UK. One of the team has a veritable arsenal of rifles and hand guns which six of us took to his local range. Now I have shot rifles before when I belonged to a target shooting club in the UK some 15 years ago but I have never shot semi automatic rifles nor the array of hand guns that he had. Some of those were such monsters (e.g. .357 Magnum I think). It was a terrific way to de-stress and to pose a personal challenge.

Less than two weeks to go now for my annual holiday. Mrs DeeJay and I are going to Tanzania for a 7 day safari and then to a beach on Zanzibar for a week to chill and hopefully get some sun, lots of swimming and snorkelling and some new food experiences - can't wait!

ABC Wednesday - P

How appropriate that this is where the hotel is that I am staying in this week - Potsdammer Platz, Berlin. One taken outside but the other from the inside of the spectacular Sony Centre

If you want to join in ABC Wednesday, visit Mrs Nesbitt's Place

Catching Up

A varied weekend post to catch up with a week to forget!
I was in the U.S., Connecticut to be exact, last week for a series of meetings.

• I got food poisoning on the plane or in the airport lounge on the way out
• The temperature was around -6 degrees before the wind chill factor that took it to -13 degrees
• they were a tough set of meetings
• I took the dreaded overnight red eye flight home so that I could be home in time for the Aison Moyet gig and hardly got any sleep
• I arrived home with a cold that was being shared by several people in my meetings (how kind!)

Still, I got to the Alison Moyet gig with Mrs DeeJay and a fine performance it was. Although she appeared to get off to a shaky start with the first two or three numbers she soon warmed to the obvious delight of the packed house and seemed to really relax from then.
She performed for almost two hours with classics such as Love Letters, That ole Devil, All Cried Out and Only You. She was quick to point out that although the Flying Pickets had the number one spot with the latter it was Yazoo that did it first even though only getting to number two.
Incidentally Alison and Nick Clarke are getting Yazoo (Yaz for my American readers) back together again for a tour starting in March 2008.

Did I mention red-eye just now, well to cap the week off, I managed to poke myself in the eye this morning and now have a very bloody eye.

Mrs DeeJay took me out for a birthday celebration dinner last night (it's actually tomorrow) and that was really good even though I was having to wipe my nose every ten minutes :-)

Back to the office tomorrow for only a week before we are off skiing in Italy where the snow is still good. I can't wait!

Holiday Over

Sigh! It's back to work this morning after 12 days off (including weekends) and already it feels tough and I haven't even left the house!!
It has been a great Christmas break with loads of free time to do just nothing or more to the point just whatever I wanted to do. I have managed some significant guitar practice time and feel at last as though I might be beginning to take control over the beast rather than the other way round. Tonight's lesson, the first for 2 weeks, will probably burst that bubble :-)
I was glad to hear over the past couple of days that the threatened BAA strike for Monday has been called off. That means I can stick to my original travel plan for the U.S. and not have to use up my Sunday for travelling. I hope that the tentative agreement reached with the unions will result in the cancellation of the other day's strikes planned as one of those also coincides with a U.S. travel plan of mine. I think it is sad that the unions feel compelled to take up this as a crusade. After all their members will have their current pension rights protected and any new starters will simply have a new scheme which they can choose to accept or not as condition of new employment. This is no more than happens with thousands of other new starters in many different walks of life and it is a straightforward fact of life that final salary schemes are simply not affordable any more.

Promised photos of Zurich and Humph

ZURICH


I just couldn't resist this one of the dashboard of a taxi we used.
I offered to send him one from the UK but as you can see, centre stage, he already had a London cab


HUMPH
These are not too good as they were taken with my camera phone which didn't cope too well with the stage lighting

Back home from Zurich

Another successful project trip, this time to Zurich

Due to a slightly different format to the agenda for this office, we managed to get an additional night’s stay as we finished too late on the last day to get a flight home. This meant that for once we had a few additional hours to be able to ‘sightsee’.

The weather was extremely hot at just below 30 degrees C so it would have been silly of us not to sit at the pavement bars by the river and to keep up our fluid intake!

Our hotel was about 15 minutes from the city centre so we also had the opportunity to use the city’s very good tram system, which was fun seeing as we didn’t know where we wanted to go and whether we had paid the right fare.

I haven't downloaded my photos yet, so I will post them tomorrow