My apologies to the four people who would have liked to see me at Husi drinks last week (well of course I voted for myself, silly!), had family (well, family-not-in-law) commitments, turned out to be a good evening - despite potential difficulties of separated mum-in-law and dad-in-law in the same room, at same dinner table, etc. but it all worked out. Had a good curry and got to hang out with the little nieces. Niece2 is coming along very well, going to be quite a late walker but she's getting quite chatty. Auntying has become one of my favourite hobbies. Though with them all being at different stages (0,1,2,3) it's important to remember who can do what. Such as, "why am I supporting this one-year-old's head?" and "I probably shouldn't throw this baby in the air yet"

Holidays

So we got our holiday eventually. A little one anyway. We spent the weekend on the Isle of Wight, and much wighty goodness was had. Went to some beautiful beaches, took a walk around Newport, checked out the launch of the cycling festival and went to Brickfields Horse Country where we made friends with a very cute baby donkey and met lots of other awesome animals. No cows though.

That was the little holiday. We're planning a crazy two-week Mediterranean holiday-fest at the end of of next month. A few days in south Spain (nr Granada) with my family at my parents' new house. Then somehow getting to Barcelona, followed by boat to Italy, train across Italy, boat to Corfu, then another boat to Albania. Awesomeness.

Work
Is OK. Deadlines, projects, etc. seem somewhat chaotic in that people seem to have been arsing around in the preparatory stages of a project since weeks before I started there, and have suddenly flung us into a Friday deadline. While of course, making lots of noise about "I don't think we can meet this deadline" while I'm trying to concentrate. Today has been a crash course in JSP, which seems fairly ugly, and would be less so if the JSTL tag libraries were a bit more useful.

Nonetheless, apparently I am the "XSLT guru" of the team - which refers to the fact that I know how to use it, i.e. not procedurally, and have a reasonable grasp of XPath. Perhaps I should get stuck into some w3c specs and actually earn my reputation :)

Heh. I just remembered I have vegetables waiting for me outside :)