Sulkyblue's Blog

Huh, where did that month go? Apparently nowhere very interesting, I’ve read less books, seen less films and written less blog posts than I did in the much shorter February. I’ve even done less baking – struggling to find anyone who I can feed them too, everyone is a bit caked out and thinking of their waist lines. The failures of February also continued in the only baking attempt I made – these incredible looking raspberry cheesecake brownies utterly failed as the consistency of the components came out wrong with the pretty solid cheesecake mix sinking straight through the runny brownie mix and creating a layer of cheesy mush at the bottom rather than a beautiful filling in the middle. They tasted ok... but not worth the effort or the calories.

I can’t even really say that I’ve been busy with work, nothing much going on there either, quietly pottering along and vaguely trying to get my next contract sorted out. It’s so much fun in the civil service at the moment, the pay freeze and recruitment freezes make it impossible for managers to actually recruit who they need, keep who they want, and reward those that deserve it. New rules now put restrictions on internal promotions as well, so in thanks for doing a good job for the last year I’m being rewarded with... a new contract and a distinct tone of “and you should be thankful for that” from our HR department. Thanks.

To top it all off I spent the last week out of the office on PRINCE2 training, possibly the worst training course I’ve ever had the misfortune to be stuck on. The trainer was terrible, the subject a bit miserable and the exams a joke. On the plus side i passed my foundation exam with 91% and am pretty optimistic about the Practitioner one (although if you don’t hear from me about it within a few weeks then my confidence was apparently miss-placed and we’ll never speak of it again).

Mind you I did actually enjoy the studying bit, doing practice tests and taking notes. I’d forgotten how much fun I find it when I actually know and understand the subject, maybe I should do more of that. Helped along I’m sure by the fact that I did a lot of my homework enjoying the sunshine sitting in the beer garden of the local pub. Which is also where I’m sitting now, hiding from my house which is full of people.

Films: The Losers (mindless entertainment), The Lovely Bones (mostly pretty good, but heaven was a bit weird), Brothers (ok, but Tobey Maguire overeggs it), Pretty Woman (entertaining, but actually rather troubling), Cemetery Junction (ok but unremarkable) and How to Train Your Dragon (absolutely brilliant!)

Books: Guilty Pleasures, the first of Laurell K. Hamilton Anita Blake vampire hunter novels was disposably entertaining, The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi started interesting but left the plot too late. Francis Spufford's Backroom Boys is something I should have read years ago because it’s absolutely wonderful – emotive and educational.

Television: Blog posts have been a bit sparse because I’ve mostly just been watching the middles of a lot of seasons, although I did manage one post talking just about that (What I'm watching at the moment). I did a piece on why it was preferable to have no title sequence at all, rather than the terrible ones that seem to be becoming popular (Setting the scene... or not). Then, inspired by enthusiasm at the renewal of Fringe I did a piece about what shows are still waiting to be renewed and a bit on how the process works (Bubble shows).

Oh and Formula 1 is back. Australia was unremarkable as it always is, but the new rules and stuff going on might lead to an interesting season and I’m looking forward to catching it in pretty pretty high definition at some point.