Bryn’s first Pictures
Bryn’s first video (may take a while to download)

Bryn waves (large ~9Mb)
Bryn waves (small ~1.1Mb)

Haven’t posted for ages, so thought I should. I’ve also updated our current reading – we don’t really read that slowly!

I wasn’t very well today – first time I’ve been off work for ages. I slept until 1 o’clock – but I’m still feeling a bit tired now.

We spent last weekend in Bristol. We had a really nice time – we went to see The Incredibles on Saturday – which I’d really recommend – and then ended up in a pub called The Old Duke, which has live jazz every night. We saw a singer called Beth Rowley and her band. The keyboard player was really good, as was the singer. Some really good stuff, including a jazz interpretation George Formby’s "I’m leaning on a lampost" – which sounds strange, but was really good.

On Sunday, we saw the ‘Earth From the Air‘ exhibition, and also went up to the Clifton Suspension Bridge, before meeting some friends for a drink, then heading home.

Unfortunately we forgot our camera, so no pictures of our weekend.

This week we’ve had a couple of pictures framed – one that Damyanti took, and one of an Indian print on fabric. This second one is quite large – don’t know where we are going to put that – perhaps somewhere in the corridor.

We’ve hopefully got a quiet weekend coming up. We’ve got some Christmas shopping to do. We did buy one Christmas present last weekend – which is probably the earliest I’ve ever bought a Christmas present – but still quite a few to go, and less than a month before we go to India!

We are also meeting some friends tomorrow in Richmond, so hopefully we should have a nice afternoon.

Well – almost. We’ve got some stuff that we want them to come back and do, as it seems though they finished off in a bit of a hurry. Anyway, despite this, we love it! Have a look

After decorating the living room and painting the hallway we have now turned our attention to the kitchen.

We had started talking about the kitchen even before we moved in, and we actually started some serious thinking, and sketching out designs around Easter – so in some ways it seems to have taken us a while to get to this point. However, it all seems to have happened really quickly. We looked in three places seriously – Moben, MFi and Homebase.

It was quickly obvious that Homebase were simply not offering the same service as the other two – and really going to this ‘consultation’ was a waste of time. The MFI offering looked pretty good, but we decided that the Moben kitchen was what we wanted.

The style is Shaker Maple, with a Butler sink, and a solid beech block work top. At the moment the kitchen is completely bare, as we had it plastered last week. We now need to paint, so we thought we’d take a ‘before’ picture to remind us.

It’s been a busy January for us. By the 8th January we’d already been in 4 countries in 2004. Well, we’ve now planned our 5th – yesterday we booked flights to Seattle for Easter.

For Damyanti’s birthday we went to the Cotswolds for the weekend. We stayed in the lovely Three Ways House, home of the ‘Pudding Club’. The hotel was small and friendly, and the food (especially the syrup sponge and custard) was delicious.

On the house front, we had an offer on our flat in early January, and we are in the process of doing the paperwork now. The buyer’s solicitor is being extremely thorough, which created a long list of questions for us and our solicitor. However, we think we’ve answered all those now, and yesterday our solicitor (Emma) sent a large package back to the buyer’s solicitor. I’ve got a few loose ends to follow up (I need to make sure we are paid up to date with both our ground rent, and service charges), and hopefully then we can start talking dates!

Damyanti says ‘yeah’ 🙂

Work is going pretty well. It was pretty difficult to get back into it after such a long break at Christmas, but I think I’m back into the swing now. (Damyanti says ‘boo’ as I’ve started doing work at the weekends again). We’ve got some interesting stuff coming up – the whole e-learning area is moving slowly forward, and I’m also involved in the college ‘Portal’ project, and ‘Content Management’ solution. The college is in the process of buying a new Student registry system, and although I won’t be involved directly in that implementation, it looks like some other software we are getting as part of the deal will touch on all three of the areas I’ve just mentioned.

Damyanti has started to look at her ‘chartership’ stuff. Apparently it’s horrible. In order to become a chartered librarian, she needs to record her professional development over the current year, and the first thing is to write a ‘training plan’ which lays out what she is going to do in 6 specific areas of her work. The odd thing is that when she submits her final report, she can only include experience from the current year. So, although one of the work areas is related to the use/implementation of electronic resources, she can’t write about the 2 years worth of experience during which she wrote and implemented an e-journals database, and also was part of an implementation team for MetaLib – our e-resource management system and federated search engine. It’s this kind of stupidity which reminds me why I get so irritated by CILIP.

Anyway, by the wonders of wireless, I’m writing this from the comfort of bed, which probably means it’s time to get up (although when we were in the hotel, we got a taste for breakfast in bed)

We went to the ballet today (to see the Nutcracker), and ended on an unexpected high when we made took an impromptu ride on the London Eye. I’ve added a few photos to the Christmas collection – some of them are a bit shaken because they needed such a long exposure (the flash was no good). I thought some of them came out quite well.

I think Grandma had a good day – she enjoyed the ballet, and it was her wish that took us to the London Eye.

Well – actually it’s been and gone. We had a lovely day yesterday – pancakes for breakfast, guinea fowl or salmon for lunch depending on your inclination, and christmas pudding to finish it off (after a few hours and a walk). You can see the pictures if you want to catch the highlights!

Today we’ve had a really quiet day, spending most of it hiding from the bad weather in the flat. Then we went into Richmond for a quick look round the shops, before going to see ‘Love Actually’ – which we enjoyed.

Tomorrow, its the Nutcracker, which we are looking forward to. In the meantime we have a jigsaw to finish!

Lebanon court lived up to the photos and more, it’s really light and spacious with good sized rooms. The kitchen door led out to a firescape with potential for hanging baskets, the living room had a great bay window and all in all was just a funky flat, unfortunatley it comes with expensive maintenance charges which we can’t afford.

On our return home we checked the details of the Berkley Court flat and worked out that although Lebanon Court had an extra room there was little difference in floor space between the flats. The price of Berkley Court will also leave us with some spending money for decor etc and fills all our criteria and is also a nice flat but I think I would rather decide between two pairs of boots!

On the plus side we made a delicious pasta dish tonight (spaghetti, tomato sauce and chilli prawns, cooked in a bag of tin foil)

Came home to find out that our viewing was cancelled tonight as someone has put an offer on the house 🙁
I am sure there will be more to see though

I have learned a valuable lesson today, when estate agents take your phone number and say they will call you back it does not always mean you will get called back.
I have organised five flat viewings for this week, so we should be kept busy and maybe even see something we like. The five flats we are going to see are
Grove Lodge
4 Queens Road
Berkley Court
Crossdeep
Melton Court
We are hoping that after viewing all these flats we should have a clearer picture of whats on the market and what we want.