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A week from Hell

It’s been a reasonably awful week this week. Firstly I’m in holiday mode – as we’re off to Spain next week to do some work on the cave – so I’m basically counting the days.  I spent the start of the week battling with a new service provider, the one I’m using for this and other blogs. Just silly stuff like me not realising I could not add an email redirect until I’d actually set up an email account in the first place – makes sense really – but you don’t have to do that with 123-reg so I wasted a morning figuring that out.

The rest of the week was spent in FSB meetings. Tuesday morning I drove down to St Johns Hotel in Solihull – took me the better part of 5 hours as the traffic down there wasn’t too good – and what HAVE they done to the M6 down at that end? There are more bumps in the road than some of our rural roads… awful.

The hotel I have to say was about as nice as the weather – it’s a Principal Hayley hotel and the food was awful – others agreed.  Thankfully at night there was a cracking Indian restaurant and a few of us spent our evenings in there. I can’t go into details in a blog but the meetings were hard – culminating in elections. I came out of it well, starting my 13th year as National IT Chairman and member of the Executive Board – not unexpected but then one should never take things for granted. Others didn’t do so well and two people I respect lost their posts.

Woodall ServicesThe meetings finished yesterday afternoon and at 5pm I set off on the trip up North and stopped at the Welcome Break in Woodall which houses the slowest McDonalds on the planet. I then took a different route as I thought the A1M might be a little better than the overcrowded M6. BAD mistake – it was closed, or part of it was, so the traffic ended up being routed through a small town – thousands of vehicles – absolute nightmare.

Traffic on A1M diversionThe end result was that it took me 7 hours go get from Solihull to Wark-on-Tyne.  I don’t mind driving FAST but slow journeys like that I find quite depressing.

I’d planning on spending the day here today preparing stuff for Spain but as it happened I ended up spending most of the day on conference calls or Skype, phone calls or emailing… to add to the damage, I’m involved in a European (EU) project and there is “trouble at mill” there which needed attending to – so I managed to get all of an hour or so to do my own “thing” as it were.

And to add icing to the cake, the only decent part of the trip away – the Indian restaurant saw me lose a filling so tomorrow it’s off to the dentist to get some repairs done before heading off to see a friend and his wife. That, at least should see a nice end to the week. More meetings ahead before we finally head off to the sun mid-week.

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