It seemed to make sense at the time

I'm a special school nurse so I get school holidays off. Like most things it's a blessing and a curse. It means more holidays (which I pay for through the way my days are structured- so you can stop sniping about how unfair it is..) However, its in school holidays so the it's much more expensive..

Part of this is countered by going to non tourist places, and partially by staying in places that most families wouldn't go to. My holidays tend to be in big cities and I stay in hostels and B&B's.

I'm coming to the end of a very busy half term, going in early and finishing late just to get what needed to be done finished. I'm not disorganised, there is too much to do for one person alone. My job was previously done by 1.5 people and you cannot fill that gap with being more efficient.

I spent most of my childhood holidays being told how grateful I should be to have a holiday, and having time pass with the aim of spending as little money as possible. When you've spent a day on a beach at Skegness in a arctic gale, wearing coats and gloves and have to stay there because you're on holiday. Even at age 10 I was thinking "This isn't right" and "This is a holiday?"

I travel a lot now because for most of my life for many reasons I couldn't. Where to next ?

"New York, London, Paris, Munich..."

Yes its been a while, but will it be worth it?

Saturday started clear, so I went out for a bike ride. Then off to Villa Park (cold wet and a miserable game) about the less said about the better.

The evening bought a gathering of the clan (minus two members at work) . My brother came up from Suffolk with his partner and two year old son. We had a chinese takeaway and then he kept us amused playing with cars and making his daddy be a "horsey" I love having grown up children! They may be less cute, but I can watch tv without being bounced on!

Sunday was a much better day than the forecast suggested. Mostly ok, but with the odd rain and hail stone/ shower.

I wanted to get ahead for next week, so went to work for a few hours and then went to church. Geoff gave a fantastic sermon, that will take some reviewing and pondering over.

Ali and I had lunch together. We went for a carvery and had the usual large amount of vegetables and some meat. What was great was we actually talked, rather than dealing with jobs, organising etc. It was brilliant. Then a trip to Aldi. Highlight was boxes of Christmas cards for 25p! I would recommend the (non sale price) Aldi budget lemonade for 17p.

The rest of the afternoon was trying (and failing) to get Ali's car started, calling out a breakdown man (10 seconds with the right tools) and reorganising the clothes in my wardrobe.

If all of the above thrills and excitement is too much for you, then you probably need a lie down.

Yes, its been a long time and a couple of Apple products since I posted in this blog.

It's been great to review the posts and review what was going on in my life, and how much has changed.

The children are more grown up, and the house is quieter. One has gone away, come back, and gone again. One has a job, and another is at college. There are some problems, and life is still busy. It's much more positive than 2007

I'm still a special school nurse, but now have responsibility for two schools. It's busy and challenging, and I'm looking forward to finishing!

I'm writing this on a Macbook air, after my trusty white Macbook died. It was sold for parts and hopefully recycled. My iPhone vanished one Tuesday morning, and never returned. I could ring it and then it went to answer phone. The only explanation I can give is that it dropped into the bin, and got took out with the rubbish, and then got crushed in the bin lorry. So i went off and bought a shiny new Iphone 4S from the good phone at the Apple Store Solihull. I took a deep breath and paid the price

Would I upgrade to the IPhone 5? It's a great phone, but like all Apple products it's an incremental improvement on the last one. I also know that there's an Iphone 5S and a 6 on their way. I will get another iPhone, but it would hopefully be in a couple of years time.

Unless I lose it .....

I feel a little explanation is in order. My last post was in November 2007, and you might be wondering why. Have I been struck down by an almost fatal illness, have I been abducted by aliens and just returned last night by the mother ship, or lost my memory and been wandering the world in search of myself? The answer to all of these questions is no, but it would be a very interesting post if any of those were true.

Writing here was always in the must do tomorrow pile. A large mound that never seemed to get any smaller. As well as all the normal things of housework, and coping with three adult children, there just seems to be so much to fill the time. A friend of mine successfully managed to blog every day for a month, and she still manages to write a very interesting and entertaining blog about life in Cyprus. Her little corner of cyberspace is well worth visiting at http://cypruslife.blogspot.com/.

Perhaps I should see it as a diary, and try and write something at least weekly. So here goes...

I have bought an Apple Mac. After years of owning PC's and never being entirely happy with their quirks, a bit like an eccentric uncle, you know what can happen, and you can't change it so you work around them. Then I saw the light and dipped a toe into the mac world and discovered safe reliable computing which is intuitive. It does what I need quickly, efficiently and reliably. I never thought I would join the evangelical Apple church, but I have. If your thinking about buying a mac then do, you won't regret it.

The other very useful things is Google Calendar, its not a big thing but it is very useful.

Google Calender is an online diary which I use to remind me of all the things I need to do. There are several advantages compared to an online diary. Firstly, you can never lose it, secondly you can always read it (a great advantage where I'm concerned), thirdly you can set up entries to repeat, so you can put family birthdays in without having to put them in the diary each year. It will also send you email reminders every day to help you to remember what you need to do.

Google calender is also very useful for those things that you almost remember. For example"Is it 12pm or 1210 that i need to pick up number 1 child from orchestra", and for those things that you do every week, and wouldn't put in an ordinary diary. So today I have set a reminder for my car's service and MOT test (a government mandated safety test for vehicles) that will not only occur in April when it's due, but also in April 2010, when I will be saying is it March or April?

I also get it to transfer to my phone, and my computer. All I need to do now is remember to actually do it!

If anyone at google want's to say thank you. Please post a 16GB black iphone to the usual address....

Labels: Apple mac, Google calendar

The last time I wrote we had just gone off to Cyprus on holiday.

All I can say is if you get the chance to go there, then go now! For a Brit its the ideal holiday destination as everyone speaks English, the plug sockets are the same at home, and the weather is warm. There is Sky TV on in many bars, so you don't even have to miss the football!

I left thinking I could live here. My friends had a superb house, and I had mentally bought one in the same street. Every morning I used to sit on the terrace drinking coffee, and watch the world go by. I was fascinated by the different characters. As a young man I read the Don Camillo books, with their accounts of village life and characters. This ordinary street in Larnaka seemed filled with similar folk. I used to imagine their stories as I sat and read. Captain Corelli's Mandolin is a similiar book if you've ever read that.

Very soon it was back to work.

Since January I have been working as a school nurse in a special school in Birmingham. I work 4 days a week, Tuesday to Friday, and have all the school holidays off. It is a fantastic job. I work with a fantastic group of nurses, it is very busy and I often find that the day has flown by.

Compared to my situation last year, my life is 100% better!

So after an eventful few months, my family and I decamped for a holiday in Cyprus. We had arranged to stop with friends from church, who now live in Cyprus. It was a holiday we had all been looking forward to for ages, even though it was an early start, a 7am flight means getting to the airport for 4am!

It didn't work out that way however, a problem with the airport baggage handling system left the airport in chaos. Large queues of people shuffled forward very slowly, like some legion of the damned, and we realised very quickly that the chances of making our flight were slim. Suitcases having eventually being checked in, we went towards passport control, and were greeted by another enormous slow moving line of people. The new security arrangements, designed to stop people holding up planes with bottles of juice or baby paracetamol, slowed things down even more... After a long while and a quick sprint we made it onto the plane, just as our flight was being called. At last we were going to get away! Or not, in this case. There was another half an hour wait, as those people who were now unable to make their connection had their bags taken off. Two and a half hours late we finally left for Frankfurt, to make our connection for Cyprus.

It wouldn't be a good story if that was the end of the tale. Another large wait followed, as we had to rearrange our flight (as we had naturally missed our connection), as had a lot of other people. My mother used to say "there's always someone worse off than you" when my brother and I complained, and we always used to mutter under our breath "so what". In this case it was definitely true. Standing next to us was a Taiwanese lady, married to an Englishman, with two small children. The next flight to Taiwan was the next day, and she had to wait in Germany. As she wasn't a EU citizen she couldn't stay without a visa, and they were trying to obtain an emergency visa for her, which on a Saturday would not be easy.

After nearly four hours, we had the news that our flight was boarding. Frankfurt airport is HUGE, so after a sprint of nearly a mile we were away! To Athens, as there were no more direct flights that day. Athens is supposed to be a wonderful city, but Athens airport is like any other airport, but the weather was warmer. At Frankfurt we realised that we hadn't got our friends phone number, but I was able to email our friends and let them know, and after a call back to the UK to get their number was obtained, and the bad news communicated. Our friends still came to pick us up at the airport, even though it was nearly 11pm Cyprus time.

That was brilliant of them, and was the start of a great week. Some photos and more news next time........

Labels: Airports, Cypus, Holiday

This is part 2 of a 3 part blog. It continues the theme of having song titles for titles. This time its Barbara Dixon. All together now I can hear you singing along "January, February You don't understand"

Hopefully it won't be like Back to the Future 2 and be the worst of a trilogy. So here goes. Our hero starts on the first day of a new job, and completes his manual handling course. He then announces that his teeth are really hurting and might be a little bit late for his first day at work tomorrow, and then disappeared off sick for 5 days. Then back to work for a few days and followed by two and a half weeks off on jury service. I don't want to sound like a wimpy man, but it was the worse pain I have ever experienced. I sat in my living room crying having taken all of the pain relief I could have had. I can now understand why patients clock watch and badger nurses for tablets. My dentist was fantastic, but I did get a little concerned when she was looking in the digger hire section of yellow pages when she was talking about my tooth. Three treatments later, a huge filling and lots of tablets later and I am now pain free and sorted.

It is illegal to discuss what happened in the jury deliberating room, so I won't. However, I can tell you about the jury service experience. No, its not a new theme park, its a living hell....
In some ways its nice, like being retired. You get up and potter around the house and get into the court for about 10am, sit around until about 1pm reading the paper and doing sudoku, and then go for lunch. After a long lunch break, usually over an hour (I work in the public sector where any lunch break where you sit down counts as an extended one) you come back, and sit around the afternoon paper, and watch TV. At about 3pm if no one is needed you can go home, and come back into the morning. You have an expense account for travel and lunch (not a huge amount but I'm not used to any at all) and time to really do all those things you wanted to do, like look out the window, write letters, or ponder the imponderables of life, like why do I have so many odd socks.

Jury service combines the drawbacks of a trip on a budget cruise ship, with being in the Big Brother house. There was a TV in the room, but it seemed permanently tuned to talk shows, which were mostly sub standard Jerry Springer type shows where people acted out their problems in public. I stopped watching or listening after a while, but there seemed to be a lot of paternity claims, DNA testing and polyester on show.

Every so often one of the court usher comes and reads a series of names out. If your name isn't one of them you can go back to the paper, but if you are selected as part of the 15 the serious sitting around begins. The jury of 12 is selected from this randomly. I spent a lot of time on the subs bench, not being selected for the jury

The speed of justice runs slowly, at an almost glacial pace. There are delays for almost any reason, one case was delayed for over a day to try an get a video link working. Acting as a juror is one of the few times when your decisions really matter, which makes you think. It was a sobering thought holding some one's life in your hands, knowing that what you think can change this persons life forever.

I came back to work on Tuesday, and was greeted by a huge hug and a big welcome. They had really missed me and had been very short staffed due to sickness as well as my absence. As I work in a school it was only a week until half term. I worked out that I had done 9 days in my first half term. very, very different from normal.....

We went away for half term, but that is a story for another day..............

Labels: big brother, jury service, teeth