Posts filed under 'General overviews'
I’m sure you don’t need me to apologise to you - and indeed, why am I apologising to an audience I think I may have? Or am I apologising to the laptop, which is perhaps a little over familiar with hitting other people on Facebook (Heroes application) and wants to do something a little higher minded?
But in the last flurry of writing, I did discover I had a small readership at least, so I thought I’d give an idea of what Dan and I have been up to since early April, which is when the blog fizzled.
April: time of work trips to Germany and London, combined with cold/flu. I’d not had to do work trips while feeling ill before, and I do not want to repeat the experience. Laptop came up trumps in occupying me while lying in my hotel room in Bonn feeling sorry for myself, but it’s not fun being unable to go home until not one but two trips are complete. Hurrah for a bit of rest time at Dan’s mum’s between the two sets of meetings.
April also brought a halt to my knocking back the coffee quite so much. I still love strong coffee, but sadly it doesn’t love me back any more. I know that caffeine lovers never want to hear that life is possible without quite so much of it…and it is. And I feel better for it. (But I still miss it.)
May: An opportunity to change my working hours. It took a while to kick in, but I now have a Friday off every second week, and work slightly longer hours for the remaining time, to keep the pay level the same. I don’t know why I didn’t do it sooner - makes a difference, having a long weekend every second week.
Weather improves - and I start a bit more gardening, which includes lots of planting lettuce seeds and the like. I think there’ll be a separate post on this.
New arrivals for friends’ kids - and another colleague at work. A great day seminar on God and money, and a little course in our regular church group, exploring money management - timely, given the growing gloom in financial circles.
May also brings an opportunity to experience the bright lights of Dunfermline on a Friday night, for a birthday party of a friend in the same group. If you want to add razzmatazz to a cake, I can highly recommend wrapping a pink feather boa around it!
And back to another set of departures at work. One team had to wait until late summer to find out if they had won their contract - and some of them decided to look at pastures new. A reminder that even in an office of only 60, staffing never seems to stay still for very long. Meanwhile I notch up 8 years here…
June: a work trip to Switzerland! I have a day or so in Zurich, just before Euro 2008 kicks off. Another city I would like to live in - and which has a correspondingly high cost of living to match its high quality of life.
I finish up by taking the train over to Geneva - and meet up with Dan and other friends for a week’s holiday in the Burgundy area. Dan provides the contact for a free week’s stay, others provide the driving skills and the board games, others still take care of the chocolate rations. I cook two roast chickens simultaneously, and spend a happy time mostly focused around planning the next meal.
Another trip shortly after, to London for a friend’s wedding - and I don’t even make it out the door, due to a combination of high heels, trouser turn ups and a short flight of stairs. Lots of pain, lots of annoyance in being so near and yet so far. I also get a trip to the Minor Injuries Unit at the Western General on return, which is a more positive experience, particularly when I get advice from a colleague who had a recent leg wound and knows exactly what to do to get it looked at.
July: the Friday day off begins, and our plans to get some home improvements get a bit further. We spend much of the rest of July moving stuff out of sitting room, study and kitchen, and pulling really grungy woodchip off ceilings, in order to let two guys in to replaster and paint. My parents help us pick some new carpet, and we get a new fridge freezer. It’s all very domestic, but given that some bits of the flat really need replacing, nearly 4 years on from buying, it’s a good chance to have things as we want.
I also manage to work mornings only, for a week each in July and August, which includes time for charity shop visits, coffees out with mums, and a few practical things like finally finding a dentist near to home.
August: another trip to London for the weekend, this time to see Yasuko and Tatsuya, over from Japan. Yasuko was in the same halls of residence as Dan in his first year at university, and she’s kept coming back over to the UK when she could. This trip brought her husband, who took to life here very well, including his first trip to the Proms…and a certain liking for hummus.
Mum had a significant birthday - and we managed our usual August Mackenzies reunion to coincide with this and two other family birthdays. My brother John and his fiance Sarah were also up, with pics of their first home, in the town where John was born - a nice circularity there.
Dan’s mum Jen came up for her usual August holiday, and we managed a long weekend all together, including a wonderful walk to Cramond where the sun actually shone!
And we lost a staff member in our immediate team - again. Back to hauling some additional workload.
September: the students I’ve been preparing for arrive in Scotland, and I spend a week and a half travelling hither and yon meeting them and doing my exciting talks about tax and the like. This year’s group includes one from Senegal, for the first time. Limited opportunities for West Coast scones (usually a highlight of these kind of trips), but plenty of local authority sandwiches.
The carpet is down, and we begin the slow task of moving everything back. Despite a big clear out before all the furniture moving, we come to put things back, and I find myself wondering why we have some of it…
That’s quite enough overview - on to some of the quirky things, in other posts.
September 16th, 2008
Here’s the official summary of the year from Dan and Alison:
We’re well. We celebrated eight and a half years of marriage a couple of nights ago…and ten years of being together (back in April). This last year has mostly been about continuity for us, although quite a lot of changes in other areas.
We’ve been in our home in the north of Edinburgh for over three years now. This year we got a reworked bathroom, thanks to the hard work of Olly and Artur, which we’re enjoying a lot. Hopefully next year we’ll do a few changes in the kitchen, and then most of our plans for alterations to the flat are complete.
Dan continues to develop his web company, Inigo, and has seen his client group change and grow. He’s also had some staff changes, and the company moved to new premises in Leith back in the spring.
I continue to work with language assistants, as I have for the last few years. We’ve had some major staff changes this year, with various colleagues moving on, some to promotions, others to new organisations. Thankfully our new colleagues have also now started, and we have some extra people working in international education, which is making the workload easier. The organisation is also changing the way it works, focusing on fewer projects but ones of a larger scale, and we’re just starting to see how that affects our daily activities.
We continue to enjoy our travels, some with work and some for ourselves. This year included a trip to Paris for work, which we added some holiday time to beforehand. We returned to Poland for the first time in several years, and I had the opportunity to show Dan where I used work outside Warsaw, as well as seeing lots of changes in the capital itself. We continued on to Zakopane, the main alpine area in Poland, and did some walking in the Tatras National Park.
Our main break was around the time of Dan’s birthday. We stayed in a small town called Eze, between Nice and Monaco, and managed to explore all three places. We then went on to visit our friends Rachel and David, near Milan.
This year has been one of loss, with the deaths of several friends and family, as well as departures at work for me. However, there have also been lots of new arrivals, in Edinburgh and elsewhere, and we’ve enjoyed some good time with friends and their young families. We’ve also been able to spend time with my parents, and Dan’s mum and granny in London.
I finished my counselling course back in the spring. It’s not easy doing essays as well as working, but I found it good to combine thinking and practical skills. I also started doing more creative writing - mostly writing this blog, and starting exploring other ideas. Dan continues to be involved in the Africa Fund, a development charity connected with our church, and I sing with the worship team there every few weeks.
We hope this note finds you well, and wish you all the best for the coming year.
With love,
Dan and Alison
December 21st, 2007
A year today since we started the blog. In terms of entry material, it’s more like two, since we started the blog as an alternative to Christmas letters.
Dan pointed out that most of the entries have been a) in the first month or two (rapid posting to emulate the year in full look of the Christmas letter) and b) in the last couple of months, since getting the laptop. So it’s maybe not so true to the time periods themselves, but hey, it’s there.
I know there are plenty of people out there who hate Christmas round robins. There are even books of assorted excerpts from (we trust) genuine letters, designed to bring out anyone’s inner humbug. So on one hand, you’re let off lightly by not having them from us any more. And on the other hand…much more to read!
The difficulty with overviews is that they can’t help being a bit blow by blow, a bit exhausting, even just to contemplate writing, let alone to read. A couple of years back, I attempted a CV for my own purposes, just to see what I’d been up to, as I’d been in the same job for a while. I was tempted to have a lie down after…because however you write it, en masse, all those activities, those opportunities, become overwhelming.
A blog, with luck, is a bit more like a telegram. Or a social column. Or a shaggy dog story you can relate to someone else. Maybe even akin to a poem, if the writer’s really going for it. Certainly potential for a Speaker’s Corner type rant - we can’t all get to London for that kind of opportunity every time we want to let off steam.
Maybe a blog is also like a soap opera. Bite sized, but addictive. Designed to make you come back to see what’s new, whether any new characters have been introduced. With the big advantage that the writer is not limited to the environs of Albert Square, the Woolpack, or any of the other soap locations. More like a series of postcards from different locations, akin to the (very well) organised interrailer who’s determined to gain as many different postmarks as possible on their cards back home.
So, what can we promise you for Frydmania 07-08? A few new categories, perhaps, so that I’m not lumping work with church with relatives, all under the heading of family. But at the same time, having kept to the same set all year, it’s forced me to think differently about these groups of people, and others. And hopefully a blog is a good place to start thinking differently.
Maybe I’ll go back and retag previous stories for the new categories. That could be a little uber-geek. But a few more photos might be nice, if I can get Dan to remind me how to add them.
Perhaps the real challenge is to go back and see how much I’ve written about particular topics already, so as to avoid them in the future…or not. Like the soap opera, the postcard, there’s a certain comfort in familiarity. I promise not to include a Christmas shopping guide, a la magazines with their regularly revolving seasonal focuses. But sometimes, given that writing in cyberspace tends to make me muse about transitory and changing things, a bit of repetition, a bit of grounding in real life is no bad thing.
After all, a blog is an ideal opportunity to “stand and stare”, in words, stepping back from a “world…full of care”. Whether it’s a blink, a double take…now read on.
November 26th, 2007
I’m sorry. I’ve not been away. I’ve been busy.
Some would think that this is Alison’s blog and Alison’s alone. It is not! Let me squash those rumours right here, right now. She does a good job though, don’t you think?! I enjoy reading her posts much more than my own.
I wrote a little while ago of building blogs for clients and not having much time for this one. Well, that’s come full circle and I’ve been told by a number of people that I need to blog more, if only for work and to show that I can and do write posts.
We’re off on holiday next week, so I intend to say “I’m still here” and post a few before it’s head down and work full tilt up to Christmas. Yes, Christmas, it’s not far now. Birthday first, can’t think about Dec 25th until my birthday is done. Cue next post…
October 20th, 2007
No, we haven’t abandoned the blogosphere…seems to have been a long time since we wrote anything.
This weekend is meant to be one of the last nice ones before autumn sets in (though you could feel the temperature falling at the start of the week anyway), so probably I should be out there, soaking it all up, instead of typing. But then, the timing of my writing is also related to the availability of Dan’s laptop, so now is actually a good time for a post.
This is meant to be a catch up post, so we can excuse why we haven’t been writing, and then do some more individual posts on different things we’ve been up to.
July: Glasgow course for me, arrival of the final Harry Potter, minor op for me and recuperation time, and then:
August: Ten days of holiday in Poland, and now just over two weeks back at work, being pretty busy.
July and August have also seen the departures of two of our cell group, a Finnish lady and a Brazilian lady, and the arrival of several new babies, the most recent being Amy Louise Gibbons, the latest addition to Rachel and David and family, based near Milan.
Dare we say it, our most exciting arrival has been our new bathroom, which our friend Olly and his plumber mate Artur worked on while we were in Poland. An example of EU mobility that while the Brits went to Poland, the Pole was at our place working on our tiling… The bathroom is very small, but having very soothing pale green tiles and a new loo and basin, and some lights on dimmers, makes us feel very swish.
Dan has had his designer leave the company, and is now wading through CVs, waiting to see who will stand out as the next choice, or whether to go with a range of freelance designers as an alternative. I get to see a fair number of websites, between my work and viewing Dan’s work, but it was interesting to see who I thought might work - and how quickly each of us came to our conclusions of which ones didn’t…
The departures continue at my work - one last Thursday, two on Tuesday, and probably more to come. Managers have come to the end of a heroic month of interviewing to fill all our vacancies, but some current colleagues have got promotions, and there’s at last a bit more hope that things will finally settle.
And now, the weather…variable, but always the chance of some sun, whether in our lives or someone close to us.
August 25th, 2007
So, thanks for clicking the link and coming to have a quick read. In the past we published our Christmas newsletter online, but this time we’ve extended the experience a little.
The 2006 newsletter is here in the form of a blog. Alison in particular has written lots of mini articles (over 70 delights to choose from) to keep you up to date with what we did this year.
Can we recommend the Travel section (there was quite a lot of it in ‘06) and the Out and About section?
For those who are coming here via a written link in a card, don’t forget the Africa Fund - you don’t have to buy a whole goat - any donation welcome. We’re donating the money we would have spent on cards to help publicise the Africa Fund - you can donate here.
PS You may notice one or two articles mentioning photos that don’t seem to be there. They aren’t. But they will be . . .
December 14th, 2006
In order to make sense of some of our postings, here’s a month by month to show what happened when:
January: Alison back to language assistants job; Dan to Kenya and Tanzania; Alison work trip to Belfast
February:snow; bird and animal visitors to the garden
March:Peebles book fair
April:trip to Aberdour; painting and gardening
May:trip to Madrid, time in Toledo
June:short trip to London (Artist in the Home); wedding anniversary and spotting JK Rowling
July:Alison’s time in London with Jen; visit from school friend Debbie; Paul and Esther’s wedding; church beach party
August:charity shops; Bill Bailey show; walk/pick brambles
September:Nederlands Dans Theater; Inverness trip; Alison work trip to Germany and Austria (Berlin, Graz);our short break together in Graz
October:Holiday to Ischia, Rome, visiting friends near Milan
November:Gourock trip; rugby match; reading Princess Bride
December: Christmas in London; Hogmanay in Edinburgh; making tarte tatin!
November 30th, 2006
A friend of mine once said that everything in the future was in the landscape of the imagination. I always loved that phrase and thought it might be a good title for a book one day. For now it has to make do with being the title of this post.
Why blog? Well, we’ve been humming and hah-ing about putting together our Christmas newsletter [2006] and I suggested that we do it bit-by-bit, let it evolve in the run up to Christmas. So here we are and you never know, we might continue this after the big day too.
Being people who like to make a good impression, this blog is likely to change in style [both visually and in terms of tone] over time, but this is it for now.
Dan
November 26th, 2006