It's Powderfinger tonight! Poor Sarah is very sick though, she's got the same nasty thing that I had last week. She rang me before and it wasn't so much a conversation as a coughing fit. Poor girl. I should be at home looking after her, however I have a 30 page report to finish, plus 2 other things to design. It's a busy day.

I'm really looking forward to Powderfinger, though it's a shame that Sarah won't be coming. I've been to a Reel Bigh Fish concert by myself before and I still enjoyed that, so it's not the end of the world. It'll be packed with Aussie and Kiwis, so I'll feel right at home.

Well I don't have much else to say really, so I'm going to have lunch. How boring.

Tim

I was up very bright and early today, 5am is not my usual getting up time. I have to be in Reading for an 8:30am meeting, so I'm currently on the tube to Richmond, where to train to Reading departs. Because I wasn't sure how long the tube would take to get me to Richmond, I was at Acton tube station at 5:30, turns out that's probably a little bit early, I'm going to end up being 30 minutes early for my train.

I went to Karate last night after a week off due to illness. I've only got this week and next week left to train before my grading. We got a little speech last night about how important it is to know the Japanese names for all the moves, that's what let me down last time so I've got my book to do some study on the return...

It's Christmas Time! December, when I actually agree it's time to start thinking about Christmas. I get annoyed when they (they being the big corporates) try to get us thinking/stressing about Christmas in September. Or is it August these days?
We bought a mini Christmas tree today and some mini decorations, as well as some flashing blinking lights to really get us in the festive mood.

I'm finally feeling better, it's taken long enough. When I woke up on Saturday morning I had a very good grumble voice, it's almost back to normal today though.

We've done all of our Christmas shopping now, except for each other that is. I've got a bag of presents to mail off tomorrow and a few more to ship out later this week.

When I started this entry I thought I had lots to talk about, but it seems that I don't! So I...

Back at work today. I started to get a lot of "Hi Tim, just wondering how you were getting on with..." type phone calls yesterday, so I really needed to do something. Plus it's one of the Project Manager's last day today, she's been kind and helpful to me as I found my feet here so I'll be sorry to see her go. But she's moving to Australia, so I highly approve of that.

In other boring news, I've changed the way comments work here a little bit. I got my first ever spam comment yesterday, which I wasn't expecting. Usually only sites that show up in Google/Yahoo etc get spammed, which is one of the reasons I keep my site out of search engines. But as a precaution to lots of stupid crap, I changed things so that if you're not logged in and you post a comment, the...

I'm sick again, it's so annoying. Sunday morning I felt a bit crappy but I thought it might have just been from the night before, but as the day wore on I got worse and worse. I went into work on Monday, briefly, but then came home. I went to the Dr yesterday afternoon (it wasn't even that much of a hassle to get an appointment) and she took my temperature and told me I had a bad infection "somewhere". Vague words like "somewhere" are a bit worrying coming from your Doctor.

So I've got a bunch of nice strong antibiotics and hopefully I'm on the road back to health. I'm annoyed that I've missed two Karate lessons, I have my grading coming up very soon. So not much to report for the last 3 days, lots of lying around and extended periods of sleeping.

Saturday night we went to...

We went to see Opshop last night, a Kiwi band that both Sarah and I really like. It was their only show in the UK, which seems a bit strange to me, coming all this way for just one show. There wasn't really that many people either, probably 200 maximum, if even that many.
The band still put on a super performance though, their lead singer really can sing, he has an amazing voice that's really strong. I wish I could sing like he can, loud and in tune. Hell, I just wish I could sing.

They placed a great show, most of their favourites and a couple of covers, The Police's "Message in a Bottle" and, randomly, a bad cover of "Eye of the Tiger". It was only bad because they were just playing it for a laugh after someone from the crowd called it out, it was a...

Not a real lot really. We did some shopping on Sunday, we bought some hair clippers, some Christmas presents for people back home and for me, the worlds most puffy and warm coat. It's the warmest thing I've ever owned and it was only £50! I will take a photo at some stage to show it off, it's that good.

We need warm clothes at the moment, it's getting colder and colder. Today it started to piss with rain, which amazingly it hasn't really being doing that much of late. Today was totally miserable though. Sarah still biked all the way to bootcamp, ran around like a mad person (in the rain) for an hour, then biked back! I was a much bigger wusschook, putting on my nice super warm new jacket and catching the tube to Karate. I got a free guitar from Sensai at Karate, he was going...

So I went to see a Blackbelt grading on Saturday. It was really amazing to see, first of all they had to warm up in front of us all for 25 minutes. That's intense situps, pushups and all that sort of stuff non-stop. Then they had to demonstrate the 30 self defence moves they had come up with over the last few months. The last thing (and the most amazing) was the sparring (fighting with gloves, like boxing) they had to do. They had to do 40 rounds lasting a minute and a half each. Each round they had a new, fresh person to fight with. So for almost 2 hours the poor blackbelts got attacked by round after round of fresh people, while they had to hold their own.

And full credit to them, they did it, and they did it well. After 5 and a half hours of...