Sulkyblue's Blog

April was dominated by the wonderful number of bank holidays, with two sequential 4-day weekends I took the opportunity to use just 3 days annual leave and have 11 days away from the office. I went down to Cornwall for the first weekend and had a lovely time enjoying the beautiful sunshine, lovely company and unhealthy food. After a day at home playing Portal 2 (I like the puzzles, I'm less enamoured at the moment by the wandering through hallways bit) I headed off to Weston with my brother to visit dad and Gran. We cunningly timed the journey to completely avoid the Royal Wedding, then ruined the effect by watching it on video later on in the day... I thought it was rather nice actually.

Work kind of stuttered about a bit, what with the 11 days off it hardly seemed worth starting. I know that makes no real sense. I got confirmed in my new role which is essentially just an extension of my current contract with me moving to the Information Management Consultancy team, 15 or so people who advise government on how to manage the records that will eventually end up transferred to the National Archives and the grubby little hands of researchers. I'm no longer a Project Manager, instead becoming a Service Manager, although my first job is to actually make a service out of the slightly random collection of processes and activities. Should be interesting. I'm still working with Digital Continuity for a bit though while we wrap up the project properly, actually doing things like lessons learned and reports and the like. Weird concept, but quite satisfying.

Baking... I'm not sure I baked anything new, just remade previous things like flapjacks and bakewell tart. Oh! And the Digital Continuity Cake! We held our end of project party and I volunteered to make a cake, then got completely stupid and made a giant victoria sponge and decorated it with Royal Icing to match one of our key diagrams. God bless edible ink pens and pre-coloured royal icing, the damn thing still took me several hours, but I was very proud of it when it was finally done.

Films:
The Towering Inferno (suitably disastrous, but way too long), Lethal Weapon (mindless action with a weird suicideal plotline thrown in), High Society (I liked neither the original film, nor the additional music), Hamlet (authentically Shakespeare in all it's dullness), Zombieland (very entertaining).

Books:
Kate Atkinson's Left Early and Took the Dog wasn't nearly as good as her previous novels, if felt way too contrived. I continue to slowly work my way through Patrick O'Brian's series, the third book HMS Surprise was a thrilling read although I have no idea what was going on most of the time. And despite a very slow reading month, I polished off Marc Abraham's autobiographical Vet on Call in pretty much a single afternoon - a modern day James Herriot.

Television:
Another reasonably quite month at Narrative Devices with pilot reviews of Game of Thrones (epic and interesting) and Body of Proof (not epic and not interesting). I also reviewed United, a BBC produced film on the Munich Air Disaster which was as good a job as could be done in the format available.