It's all gone mad

Why is it that everything happens at once? We came back from Lindos and found that the cold water tank up in the loft had overflowed, damaging the decoration on the landing and in my techno-chamber (nice fluffy mould growing there now. Mmm - spores.) Once we'd dried everywhere out - thanks to Arthur next door for letting us borrow his dehumidifier - the central heating boiler packed up last weekend, cue a "help us!" call to British Gas, and thank God for the three-star service contract! The next thing to happen was that my PC ground to a halt, forcing me to reinstall Windows XP and twenty-five applications I needed to survive - what fun that was. Finally, the washing machine started to sound as though instead of being full of washing, it held the contents of the hardware section of a fully-stocked B&Q warehouse. So here I sit, waiting for the repair man to arrive, wondering if "between 8 and 1" will actually turn out to be 12:53PM as usual.

I've been travelling a fair bit of late. Last week I was running 2072 (SQL 2000 admin) in Hinckley and had a fabulous week, really enjoying every minute of it, apart from the 4:45AM wake-up to get down there on the Monday. This week I've had three days in Wythenshawe running a 5-day SQL 2000 programming course in 3 days (hectic, traumatic, knackering... never again) and then yesterday I was in Oxford doing some CRM consultancy, and apart from the seven hours behind the wheel it was a great day. Oh, and three cheers for the M6 toll road, which is absolutely bazzing.

Only eleven days to go now until the BCS awards, and I'm getting nervous. A couple of days ago I received the details of the ceremony, including the menu (sounds a bit non-Salford), a wine list which looks about ten pages long (not what I'm used to: "red or white, Mr Lee?" - the answer is white, by the way), a cigar list (never seen one of those before, and I won't be making use of it, thank you very much) and the news that the awards are to be hosted by Philippa Forrester. Now I've always been strangely fond of her, so this is good news to me :-) Fingers crossed that things go well and I end up walking onstage... Incidentally, Lou has bought her posh frock and equally spangly accessories, and I hired mine from Moss Bros.

Finally, we've already booked our holidays for next year. Yes, we're going back to Lindos again (hooray!) - that was a given, really - but in June we're off to a place on the Greek mainland called Stoupa. We haven't been there before, nor has Lou's sister (and she's had more holidays than Lunn Poly) but it looks really, really nice. Oh yes, and we're off to Edinburgh for a few days in December, which will be great.

More soon.