A day spent in the drizzly, cold Docklands. Installed the kit I was in town to sort out and then popped over to Harbour Exchange for my delayed meeting.
The meeting goes well and fairly quickly, and I’m left with three hours to kill before my late train back. I’d much rather get open returns, but one must always count the pennies when dealing with expense claims!
I figure that it wouldn’t be too much of a wait if I made my way over to St Pancras, and sip a couple of quiet ones at the Baby Betjeman, where I could use the wireless and get on with some stuff. So, I make my way back across town and just miss the 5pm mad-dash – which was nice.
However, disaster strikes. The Baby Betjeman is no more. It has ceased to be. Bereft of life, it lies in peace. Well. It’s closed, anyhow. All that’s left is the giant parasol and a chalk noticeboard saying that they’ve closed up because the ‘proper’ Betjeman pub is nearing completion – at the end of April! Bollocks.
The only other option is the on-platform ‘Champagne Bar’, which is entirely as pretentious as it sounds. I find a seat by the bar and order a cup of tea, in true British stiff-upper-lip style. However, tea doesn’t last 2 hours and curiosity gets the better of me, and after supping my (rather bland) tea I take a look at the drinks menu.
Coo – A couple of days go by without a blog entry, and I’m surprised to find that people appear to be relying on my entries as proof of my day-to-day existence! I receive a few emails and smses from colleagues and friends wondering ‘what’s happened to you?’ and ‘where are you?’ – blimey!
Up fairly early as I have a long day today – travelling down to London for an overnighter. It is, by happy coincidence (as these things often are!) also LONAP‘s 10th Birthday Party this evening too, at The Old Bank of England on Fleet Street.
The train journey is uneventful, and I’m sure the 3G service that I use (O2) is getting worse. I manage to sustain a connection for a few minutes, but the signal is so shonky that by the time I’m at Chesterfield it’s gone. I can’t even connect up directly on my phone. Crap. So, I spend most of the journey guiding Birmingham City through the mires of a underachieving Premiership season in Football Manager 2008. I wonder how long it’ll be before the board get sick of me and give me the boot?
The afternoon meeting I have scheduled with our datacentre account manager is pushed back until tomorrow, which is both a blessing and a pain – but it gives me some time to catch up with work, before heading across the city to Temple station for this ‘do’.
Attended the afternoon and evening sessions today of the Rotherham Oakwood beer festival. I’ve not been to this festival before, but had heard good things about the scale and variety of ales on offer – especially when compared to the Sheffield ‘festival’ which, for the last few years at least, has amounted to 50-60 beers in a hall. Rotherham claim well over 250 ales – not including the variety of wines, ciders and bottled continental beers on offer.
In days gone by, I’d tick off beers I’d tried in the official programme with a pen or pencil, and scribble a score out of 10 next to the beer. I utilised my technological wonder that is my E90 and jotted some notes for each beer along with a score.
Started with one from the Sheffield Brewery Company and tried their “Seven Hills” – a very hoppy light ale which is the sister ale of their “Five Rivers”. I scored it 6/10. Too light in colour and hop-heavy for me.
Then tried the Acorn “Old Moor Porter”, hoping for deep Porter flavours, but instead found it to have a very ‘Bacony’ taste on the tongue and didn’t really enjoy it. 5/10
Back to work today with not so much a bump as a gentle coast, which was nice. I guess it’s down to the fact we’ve come back on a Wednesday, and have a nice little half-week to deal with instead of that horrible “Monday morning” feeling. I guess we’ll see on Monday.
My job, managing a team of sysadmins, DBAs and support staff for ‘a large internet retailer’ means that I get to be the lucky punter whose phone number appears on DNS WHOIS records. This is something that Add a comment
Had a very quiet and subdued New Year’s Eve – Aimee in bed around 7pm, and just me, our lass and the dog watching the telly and catching the bells at midnight. Stayed up til around 2am watching Jools’ Hootenanny. Pleased to see Seasick Steve and his famous ‘Three Stringed Trance Wonder’ guitar again – Jools gave him his TV debut _last_ New Year’s eve. Kaiser Chiefs and Kate Nash good, Macca looked a bit tired, Kylie had an awful dress on and looked like she was there for the money. Madness were very good, but there’s no escaping that they’re old men now.
We agreed that I’d give Emma a lie-in in the morning, and deal with Aimee when she woke, which I did, but because I’m working on-call today I got dragged to my laptop at about 9am when Nagios told me that something was broken at work, so I had to disturb Emma for her to look after Aimee.
Aimee is such a handful now. She’s walking, and by God does she want to use those legs. She runs round the house like crazy, and being on her feet – it brings a _lot_ more into her reach than ever before. She got an absolute shedload of toys for Christmas, but does she want to play with them? No. No, She wants to paddle in the dog’s water bowl, or swing on the tv unit door, or repeatedly switch the damn tv off!