…so here goes! It’s been another busy few weeks for me, yet again.
The Townhouse restaurant where my Mum works re-opened as a carvery nearly 2 weeks ago. We went there as a family on the opening night, and the food is really good. I even prefer it to the carvery at The Cottage restaurant. The quiz night has started up again, every Thursday evening, although there’s no more curry. We plan to go every Thursday for the quiz, taking it in turns to pay, so at least I can look forward to a nice roast dinner once a week!
On Saturday (not the Saturday just gone but the one before that), I went to Wymondham with Terry and we had a milkshake and a cake in the cafe and then I went to the bookshop where I bought 3 second-hand books about ghosts! I’m still busy reading them now.
My Dad and step-mum in Thailand have just opened up their own travel agency called Canary Travel. I’ve been designing a website for them - you can visit it here. This is one of the main reasons why I’ve been so busy over the past month or so, but it’s pretty much completed now.
For some reason, I’ve been finding it very difficult to motivate myself to update this blog very often. I think it is probably because I have been so busy recently. However, I just had a look back at some of my old blog entries from 2004 and early 2005, and it seemed that in those days I used to update on average 7 times a month! That seems totally unbelievable now! My entries back then were short and sweet, covering what had happened over the preceding 2 or 3 days or so. I think I will have to go back to that format again, as since January this year I’ve been providing on average just one update a month. I get so busy that I just seem to let all the news mount up, until I end up with so much news that I feel overwhelmed about typing it all up!
I’ve got a holiday coming up on the 16th August, for 2 weeks to Pickering in North Yorkshire. I really need a holiday, as I haven’t had a holiday away from home for nearly a year now. I had breaks from work at Christmas and Easter, and all the other national holidays but it’s just not the same as staying away from home for a few days. I’m hoping I will come back feeling refreshed, and I will have some fresh ideas for revamping this blog and hopefully adding new features.
It’s getting quite late now and I have to be up for work in the morning, so hopefully I will provide a more detailed update (about what’s been happening in my life over the last 3 weeks) tomorrow evening, as long as I don’t get caught up doing something completely different!
I’ve actually been putting off updating my blog for several days now. The reason? So much has been going on recently (both at work and outside work), so I’ve been dreading how long it will take me to type everything!
Where shall I start? Last week I had to do a presentation at work. My department was having an “away day” which is when we spend a day at a local conference centre and they organise presentations, talks and interactive sessions about various work-related issues. Each individual team within the department had to deliver a presentation about what their has been working on and their plans for the future. As my team is fairly small, and the other team-members were away that day (one was on holiday and the other was off sick), I designed the presentation and delivered most of it (although my manager helped out with the introduction and the first Powerpoint slide). I was quite nervous, as I had never delivered a presentation to such a large group before. There were only about 25 people there, but the most I’d ever presented to in the past was 10 people. I got through it OK though, and I received good feedback from the audience, so I was pleased about that and I think it has boosted my confidence. Then in the afternoon of the away day, we had a couple of SQL training sessions, where we went through the exam paper that we had taken a few weeks earlier, and the course leaders explained the correct answers.
A few days ago I received my certificates for passing my CII course. It means I can officially use the letters “Cert CII” after my name!
I’ve been out for a ridiculous number of meals in the last week or so! The Townhouse restaurant where my Mum works has closed down temporarily for refurbishment, and when it re-opens it will be a carvery (which I’m pleased about because I love roast dinners!) So on Thursday the 19th of June we went to the final curry and quiz night before it closed down. I think they still plan to do the quiz when it re-opens, but there probably won’t be any more curries. Then on the Saturday Mum and I went to the cinema to see the new Indiana Jones film, which I enjoyed. Afterwards we had a meal at Malaysian Delights. Then on the following day - the Sunday - I went for a carvery at The Cottage restaurant with Mum, Terry and my grandmother. On Thursday evening Mum and I nipped in for a meal at the Riverbank Chinese buffet restaurant. So that means I’ve had 4 meals out in the space of 8 days!!
I had a couple of days off work this week, as I have several days of holiday to use up before the end of the year. Mum has been at home a lot more since the Townhouse restaurant closed for refurbishment, so I thought I may as well use some of my holiday allowance so that we can go out together. On Wednesday afternoon we went to the cinema, intending to see the latest Chronicles of Narnia film. It was reviewed in the newspaper and it sounded good, so I was looking forward to seeing it. Alas, when we arrived at the cinema’s ticket desk, the woman behind the counter said, “I’m afraid it doesn’t start until tomorrow.” The UK release date was June 26th, so we were a day too early. Therefore we had to choose something else, and we ended up seeing “Wanted”, which I enjoyed anyway, as it had plenty of action in it.
On Thursday Mum and I went to the Royal Norfolk Show, which was good as it was the first time I had been there since I was about 8 years old. My favourite part was the flower show and I took several photos which I plan to upload soon.
Last weekend was a bank holiday weekend, so on Sunday we went out for a meal at the Townhouse for a Sunday roast. Then on Monday we went to Blickling Hall for the afternoon.
As mentioned in my previous post, I had my SQL pre-exam a few days ago. It was much more difficult than I had expected. I thought it would just be a matter of writing a few simple SQL scripts, so the evening before the exam I read through my lecture notes which I’d kept from my university course way back in 2004. It actually turned out to be based on an official Microsoft exam for database administrators, and the first few questions really confused me. Even though they were mostly multiple choice questions, I found it difficult to choose between the answers as it had been such a long time since I’d studied the concepts in any great detail. But as I progressed through the paper, several concepts started coming back to me, so I was able to go back and correct some of my earlier answers. By the end of the 2-hour exam, my mind was buzzing. I could barely find my way back to my desk after the exam had finished, as my mind was so frazzled! I dreaded to think what mark I might get, although I wasn’t too worried as I knew it was only a pre-exam and it doesn’t really count for anything, except to give the tutors an idea of what to focus on in the main training sessions. It was one of the most difficult exams I’ve ever taken, and I thought I’d be lucky if I got even a quarter of the questions right. Anyway, I was told my mark on Wednesday, and to my amazement I’d got 50% and it turned out to be the highest in the team!
On Friday I had my final CII Certificate in Insurance exam. As it was an online exam, I was told straight away that I’d passed, although I’ll get the full results in the post in a few days. I was relieved as there were a few tricky questions. It means I have now finished the course, after studying it for almost a year. At least now I’ll be able to concentrate on my SQL course.
On Saturday afternoon we went to Wymondham, where I had a nice raspberry milkshake and a cake in the Creme cafe. Then we had a walk around the town, whilst it was still sunny.
…since I last updated. I just haven’t felt like writing much recently; I keep putting it off. At work, I’ve got several exams coming up at the end of May, so I’ve been spending a lot of time preparing for those. On May the 30th, I’ve got the exam for the final module of my CII Certificate in Insurance course. I’ll also be starting an SQL programming course soon, along with about 10 other people in my team - we’re going to have a “pre-exam” to determine our current level of skill, so then the course organisers will know what to include in the main course. Then a week later, we will have the actual course. And what happens straight after the course? Yep, you guessed it, another exam! So, that means I’ve got 3 exams this month. I’m not really worried about any of them though; I feel reasonably well prepared, and I use SQL quite a lot in my current job anyway, so hopefully it won’t be anything too scary.
I’m still enjoying my current Process Improvement job - I completed my first major project a week ago, so I’m pleased about that. The one I’m working on now seems quite a bit more complicated though.
The weather here has got warmer over the last couple of weeks or so. A week ago I went through a phase of feeling queasy and lethargic, but I’m over that now. We effectively haven’t had a proper summer for 2 years now (after all the heavy rain last year), so it took a bit of getting used to.
Later this evening I’ll be taking Mum and Terry for a nice meal at Malaysian Delights. We haven’t been there for a few months now, so I’m looking forward to it. We still go to the Town House for the curry and quiz night on Thursdays, so this means we haven’t been going to other places so much.
A few weeks ago I had a dental check-up. It wasn’t all that good. The dentist said my teeth are showing early signs of decay (there are little brown spots on some of my front teeth), and that I will have to be more careful when brushing my teeth to ensure I clean my gums as well. I think these problems all started when I had to wear a brace and retainers all throughout my late teens/early twenties. Some of my teeth were quite crooked when I was younger, and so they recommended I should wear a fixed brace (on both the top and bottom teeth). This effectively meant I couldn’t clean my teeth properly for 2 years, as the braces were in the way. Before I started wearing the braces, the dentist always used to say that my teeth were good - when I was about 16 or 17, I remember them saying that it was quite rare of someone my age to have never had a filling. I was never warned of the risks of having a brace, and sometimes I wonder if I would’ve been better off keeping my crooked teeth! I recently started using mouthwash twice a day, so hopefully that will help.
It seems like ages ago since I last updated, but yes, we did have a white Easter in the end. In the last 3 weeks, we’ve visted the restaurant where my Mum works (The Townhouse) 3 times! It was recently taken under new management, and it has improved a lot since then. They do a nice roast dinner on Sundays, and last Thursday evening we went to the Curry and Quiz night, which was fun. The questions were quite difficult though (they were mainly about celebrities and old films from many years ago), so we only got 26 out of 60. The last round was a “wipeout” round, whereby if you get even just one question wrong, you will get zero for the whole round. So if you’re not absolutely sure of an answer, it is best to leave it blank. This wipeout round caught us out, as we thought we knew the answer to a question, but it turned out to be wrong, wiping out our entire score! It was still a good night though and I liked the curry - I had a nice chicken korma. We plan to go again this week.
I’ve met my friend Naomi twice in the last week or so. We met up during my lunch-hour and we went for a meal at KFC in the local mall. It was quite busy and we had to queue for a while and by the time I finished my main meal, I realised there wouldn’t be enough time for me to queue up again for a ice cream. So we decided to go to the Walls ice cream parlour downstairs instead. I had a chocolate ice cream which came in a huge cup! I couldn’t eat it all by the time I had to go back to work, so I ended up having to take it into the office with me! I was a bit nervous that the security guard might not let me in, but no-one said anything about it. So I sat at my desk eating it, and as I was trying to do my work at the same time, it took me nearly 20 minutes to finish it!
Work is going well at the moment - I was recently moved into a new Process Improvement Taskforce, where I’m responsible for speeding up and improving existing reports using macros and VBA in Microsoft Access and Excel. I’ll also be learning new programming languages such as SAS.
When I logged in to write this blog, I noticed that Wordpress 2.5 is now available. From what I’ve heard about it, it sounds good. I’ll have to try it out in the next couple of days or so.
So, we didn’t get a white Christmas, but it looks like we could well get a white Easter - the weather forecast says there will probably be heavy snow tonight.
Yesterday I had my belated birthday party. Three of my best friends came along. We started off by having a meal in the Castle Cavery, which serves roast carveries every day, not just on Sundays. I chose the roast turkey and stuffing. It was the first time I’d ever been there, and it was really good. Afterwards we went on to play ten pin bowling - unfortunately the main bowling alley in the city has been closed for several months due to structural problems, so we had to go to the old one on the edge of the city instead. We still had a good time though.
Not much else has happened recently, which is why I haven’t blogged for what seems like ages. On Thursday evening last week, I went with Mum for a meal at the Waffle House. It’s quite a small, cosy restaurant which specialises in savoury and sweet Belgian waffles. For my main course I had a bolognese waffle and for dessert I had a pecan nut waffle.
Something very strange happened last night. I woke up in the middle of the night feeling very startled, although at the time I wasn’t sure why. I just had this uncontrollable urge to leap out of my bed at the speed of lightning and to get out of my bedroom. I started rattling my bedroom door, as if I was trying to escape but because I was still half asleep I felt disorientated so I didn’t remember that my door was closed completely. After pushing the door for a few seconds, I suddenly felt more alert and I thought to myself, “What on earth am I doing standing here rattling my bedroom door even though it’s closed? What am I trying to escape from? Why am I even awake when it’s still pitch black outside?”. I glanced around my bedroom and I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. My panicky feeling started to die down, and I assumed that I had just had a bad nightmare but I couldn’t remember what it was. I got back into bed, and I noticed my alarm clock said it was 12:58 am. So I had been asleep for 2 and a half hours, maximum. I eventually managed to get back to sleep again.
In the morning, when I went downstairs to have my breakfast, Mum and Terry said to me, “Did you feel the earthquake last night?” I thought to myself, “An earthquake, are you kidding me?!” You see, we very rarely have earthquakes here in the UK, and even when we do, they are usually very mild and confined to a particular town or county. There has never been an earthquake in my area during my lifetime. Until now, that is. I then looked at the newspaper and saw that it was true - there had been an earthquake, and it happened just before 1am. It was also the main story on the TV news.
So that explains why I woke up feeling startled. I must have heard and felt the tremor in my sub-conscious while I was still sleeping and it must have frightened me so much that I felt an urge to get out of my bedroom. By the time I had woken up properly, the shaking had stopped. However, now that I’m thinking about it, some of the memories from my sub-conscious are coming to the fore - now I can vaguely remember hearing a loud rumbling noise, and the doors and windows rattling.
The earthquake had a magnitude of 5.2 on the Richter scale, and it is apparently the largest shock to hit the UK for 25 years. As I’m 24 years old, this means I can say this is the first major earthquake of my lifetime. Also, it didn’t just affect our area, it affected pretty much the whole of England and Wales, although the epicentre was a town called Market Rasen in Lincolnshire which isn’t too far away from here. Here is one of the news reports:
I’ve also been searching on YouTube to see if anyone has got any live footage of the earthquake actually taking place. Unfortunately, this has been quite hard to come by, and of the few home-videos I have found, most of them appear to be fake or staged. I was thinking that surely someone somewhere must have genuine footage of it, even if it’s just a CCTV camera from a 24-hour shop. However, this is the most realistic video I have found. It’s not brilliant, but it’s apparently CCTV footage from a shop in Lincolnshire (ie very close to the epicentre).
As you can probably tell from the amount I’ve just typed about this, I’m fascinated by earthquakes and other natural phenomena!
I do remember a time when I was about 12 or 13 and I was in a geography lesson at high school. The teacher left the room for a couple of minutes to go and fetch something, and all of a sudden the floor started vibrating and I could hear a faint rumbling noise. It stopped for a few seconds and then it started up again. Nobody was sure what it was. I assumed it was an earthquake, but then I overheard someone asking one of their friends (who was in a class in another part of the school at the time) whether they had felt anything. They said no. It seemed to be just the geography classroom that was affected, and there was certainly nothing about it in the news. To this very day, I still don’t know what caused that vibrating sensation. One of my theories was that maybe it was workmen doing some work on the school building, but from what I could see, there were no workmen on the school site that day. However, if I remember correctly, the geography classroom was directly above a science lab. Maybe some people in the science lab were doing some kind of weird experiment which caused the vibrating sensation? I’ll probably never find out.
Now onto non-earthquake related stuff - on Saturday evening last weekend I was invited to the wedding reception of one of Mum’s co-workers. It was held in Drayton and they had really nice food and a disco. I had a really good time. You should have seen the selection of cakes and buns that they had - I had to check that I wasn’t dreaming! (I have a very sweet tooth).
Then on Sunday we went to Raveningham Gardens for a snowdrop and daffodil walk. It was very pretty, and in my opinion much more interesting than the walk through Felbrigg woods we did a couple of weeks earlier.
This coming Sunday will be Mother’s Day. I’ll buy my Mum her favourite Amy Winehouse CD (it’s OK, she doesn’t read this blog anyway), and then I’ll take Mum and Terry out for a meal at our favourite restaurant - Malaysian Delights.
Yesterday (15th February) was my 24th birthday. I booked the day off work and had a quiet morning/afternoon at home. In the evening, I went to Zaks restaurant with Mum and Terry for my birthday meal. I had half a fried chicken with fries, coleslaw and sweetcorn. The chicken was massive! I managed to eat quite a bit of it though, and it was a nice meal. For dessert I had a “Mint Mountain” ice cream sundae, which was good. I also noticed on the menu that they had maple-flavoured milkshakes, so I decided to try one of those, too. I’ve often had maple syrup on pancakes, but I’d never had a maple milkshake before, so I thought it would be nice to try one. However, it was really sweet and sickly and I already felt quite full from the main course and dessert, so I ended up leaving most of it. I had the feeling that if I’d have tried to drink all of the milkshake, I would’ve been sick. Overall, it was really good. But in future, I’d stick to vanilla, chocolate or fruit-flavoured milkshakes.
This year, most people gave me money or cheques for my birthday, as they weren’t really sure what to get me. (I am quite difficult to choose presents for). Today, I went into the city to spend my money on several CDs and DVDs. They should keep me busy for a while!!
As the weather is starting to get better now, we have begun going out more at the weekends. Last Saturday we went to the cinema to see the film Juno. I really liked the film, but annoyingly the fire alarm went off part way through, so we all had to stand outside for an hour until we were told we could go back in. The entire mall had to be evacuated and not just the cinema. It turned out to be a false alarm, and we didn’t miss any of the film as they started it from the same point where we had left off.
Then on Sunday we went for a walk round the woods and grounds at Felbrigg Hall. It was nice to get some fresh air, but there wasn’t much colour as hardly any of the flowers were out yet and most of the trees were still bare. I still took some photos though, and I’ll upload them to my Flickr account shortly.
Work has been going well - my first online report finally went live on Friday a week ago. There were a couple of issues with it, but luckily we managed to resolve them on the same day. My second report is currently in test, so hopefully it will also go live very shortly. A week ago on Thursday, I had my second CII Certificate in Insurance exam. I passed with a score of 92% (pass rate 70%) so I’m really pleased about that. I’ve got one more exam to do in May or June, and if I pass that the course will be complete and I will get the certificate.
My new job is going well so far. Now that I’m more used to the software, I’m getting through the development work more quickly than I could last year. This new team that I’m part of may even become a permanent team in the future. I’m settling in OK. Last Wednesday I went out for an introductory lunch with the team, which was good.
A week ago I bought a DVD recorder. You may remember I mentioned in a previous post that my old DVD player had broken down. I decided that this time, I may as well buy one which can record as well as play discs. The good thing is that the one I bought has even got a hard disk drive built into it, and it’s also got the facililty to pause and rewind live TV!
Other than work-related stuff, I’ve had quite a quiet time recently. I’m already starting to think about what to do for my 24th birthday party in February. Sadly, it seems likely that only one or two of my friends will be able to make it this year. One of them is currently at university away from home (she is in her first year), so she probably won’t come back until Easter. She is about 150 miles away so it’s pretty certain she won’t be able to make it. I will probably end up asking my nieces to come along, as it would be boring to play ten pin bowling with only 2 or 3 people.
My entries back then were short and sweet, covering what had happened over the preceding 2 or 3 days or so. I think I will have to go back to that format again, as since January this year I’ve been providing on average just one update a month. I get so busy that I just seem to let all the news mount up, until I end up with so much news that I feel overwhelmed about typing it all up!