Andy's Blog

I am up in sunny Glasgow today for a meeting with one of our major customers.  Unfortunately the lady who does the flight bookings decided that I needed more time to ‘acclimatise’ so landed me here at 8am for a meeting that won’t start till 1pm.

I think I am starting to get the DT’s from too many shots of Latte’s whilst waiting in a nearby hotel!

This blog isn’t yet a year old and already it’s on its seccond entry regarding earthquake experiences!  At a few minutes to one this morning both me and she-who-must-be-obeyed sat bolt upright in bed as the whole house vibrated, pictures fell off shelves and a DEEP rumbling noise like an underground express train shook us out of sleep.

“what the hell….” both on our lips as the vibrations and noise lasted another 10 seconds, and then silence.  A quick run around the house; kids still in bed and asleep, no truck embedded in the side of the house, no starlight winking back at us instead of artexed ceiling.

Definitely one of the strongest quakes I ever experienced.  Although I had to laugh at all the pics of toppled chimney pots on the BBC news website.  Not because they are funny in themselves, but when compared with pics I’ve seen from the American or Asian continents in similar circumstances – then these do seem a little  ridiculous.

Today was somewhat hectic as ‘she-who-must-be-obeyed’ is not feeling very well at all and it was left to me to do the School run with my two boys; Alex and James. Of course the School run also involved me having to make their pack lunches (wait till they open THAT little surprise!), break-their-fast and also ensure they are sh*t, showered and shaved before departure.

We survived

After all that, and the grumblings they made when I told ‘em we were walking to School, it was back to work, albeit working from home – thank gawd for broadband and a VPN connection.

Work, as in my previous post, is not going particularly pleasantly and today has gone pretty much to that same script. However, this post isn’t really a usual rant about how badly work has gone, but the small things that make life seem so much more worth living.

The look on my youngest son’s face, as he popped out of his classroom, when he saw me waiting made the whole day seem not so bad after all. His enthusiasm as he skips in front of me telling me about all that he did today does make me wistful for those yesteryears of my youth.

Keeping cynical in the face of his youthful exuberance seemed almost sacriligious.

Definitely in a bit of a ‘funk’ at the moment. All the responsibilities I thought I had seemed to be in the hands of others and nobody seems to have had the decency to explain why, what and how this all happened.

New ‘challenges’ are coming on-stream and the resources I thought I had have been moved elsewhere, and the people who moved those resources are asking how am I planning to support the new ‘challenges’? Good question!

I actually do enjoy challenges and given the reins I will run with any challenge, the position I find myself in now is kinda pulling me down. I have decided to just calmly follow the new world order and see how well they do my job for me.

Let’s see how this week works out….

Just gotten some new cartoon me’s done by Piers Baker ready to start littering around my various sites. This site will, hopefully, start getting a new look to make it a little more ‘troozcentric’ and a little less off-the-shelf, and the smattering of new cartoon me’s is the start.

I am always a little in awe of cartoonists and the apparent ‘ease’ at which they knock out these little drawings. Although one of the problems that you find when getting a cartoonist to do you a cartoon, is that their first impulse is not to offend their ‘client’. Certainly the first batch of cartoons I ever had done, by a rather nice Brazilian guy, were extremely good but he couldn’t help but put a positive spin on the look.

I on the other hand, being of a certain thick-skinnedness, don’t mind the cartoon being not too good looking – after all, and you will be SHOCKED to learn this, I ain’t no Brad Pitt (probably more ‘Tar Pit’). However; Piers done an excellent job, of which you can see the results.

I will still continue to use the cartoon face piccies to show my particular mood at the time of writing these little snippets of literature gold.