Christmas Eve, Eve.

The Delia Smith Christmas cake has been sitting in the cupboard for a few weeks now and as it's almost the big day I thought i'd better get round to making it.  It's quite easy really, you just throw everything in the bowl, give it it a mix and then pour the resulting mixture into a cake tin and pop in the over at about 140C for 4 hours.  There's more to do after that but I'm not that far yet.  Another 3 hours 3 minutes to go before i need to do anything else.

Back to work in the uk.

Well back working in the uk again now. Off to the BBC world service today to hopefully sort a few problems. Train up to London very quiet, must be because it's nearly Christmas. As usual got the bus from Victoria to Regent Street as the underground can get very busy.

First Snow

Well it's 16 December and it's the first snow flurry of the year in Bromley, UK.  They're big flakes however won't settle too much as it's too wet due to a night of excessive rain.  Working at home today sorting out expenses from my Kazakhstan trip, it's amazing how quick it adds up when there are 4 of you.

Here's the Pyramid and others.

Here's the Pyramid we trekked to in the last post.

Below is the Presidents residence.

A few golden towers looking back towards our hotel.

The View from Narnia.

Well as you can see above it's 'the view from Narnia'.  Still in Astana, Kazakhstan, we have had 2 enforced days off as the President opened the media centre yesterday despite there being an awful lot more construction to do.  The bits he must have seen looked very nice as people have been cleaning and re-cleaning all week and in their credit it has come on a great deal since we first got here 10 days ago.  Well on our day of we took a trek to a building in the shape of a pyramid which was sadly closed, so we walked back and found a supermarket where we navigated our way around Kazakh produce.

We got a Skype this afternoon with an invitation to dinner at the Khan Shatyr shopping mall.  When we arrived it was a big party I assume as a celebration that the Astana Media Centre has been officially opened.  The party was hosted by the Main Contractor and it was pretty good.  At the top of the shopping mall there is a beach club.  It has water and imported sand from the Maldives.  We were the recipients of some great Turkish hospitality and watched some try interesting dancing.  We then chanced a taxi back and that was our evening.  Two more days here then home!

Astana at night - taken on 1st December.

In Astaka, Kz now.

Well we're in Astana now.  Currently about -10C which actually isn't too bad.  Hotel is good which is handy as when we went on site today our equipment hadn't been installed so we retreated to the Hotel to do some planning.  As you can see from the picture it's a little snowy but nothing too dangerous.  One thing to mention though is that a good set of snow tyres on the car really seem to make a difference.  We were picked up from the airport in the early hours of this morning and the driver was going along what must be icy roads as it was around -20 to -22C at about 60mph no problem at all.

Off to Astana, Kazakhstan

Despite immigration strikes there were no problems at all at heathrow. I just walked straight thorough security. No problems except being told off for not removing my iPad from my ruck sack.
Well I'm here nice and early. The others from work are still on the motorway. I'm sitting in a restaurant called giraffe trying to wake up on black coffee...... I was up at 0315.
Anyway the flight looks to be on time so we should make Frankfurt ok to catch our connection to Astana.

Working at home today

Well I'm working at home today which for me means an outbuilding at the end of the garden.  The facilities are ok.  It's a reasonable size building split into 3 rooms, 1 of which stores garden stuff, 1 of which is an office and the other is a storeroom which houses a large amount of bits and pieces I've collected.  The office is good, it has internet and a/c so what more could i need.

I'm meant to work at home most of the time and visit the office occasionally, however in practice this often isn't the case and i spend more time in the 'real' office than i should.  The idea behind it was that we live 2 hours away from the office so a 4 hour commute was too much, hence home working.  In practice though I need to be in the office a little more than we originally agreed, however it's ok.  Although the home office is fully connected to the 'real' office it can be a little lonely which is often why I spend a little more time in the 'real' office.

The Home Office

It's getting colder in Astana

NCT 1 year meetup

Despite most of the mums meeting up fairly frequently we decided to all catchup as a mass group around the little ones first birthday.  I think from memory the children in our group were all born between end of September 2010 and early November 2010.  This weekend has been the first one we could all do so we met at LA fitness in Ruxley, Kent.  They have a soft play and kids area and we were able to rent the whole place out for quite a reasonable cost.  Anyway 9 mums and dads and 10 babies spent 2 hours playing, singing and eating.  It was good good to catchup with everyone and the little ones loved it too.  It's amazing a year has gone by and most of them are walking little people now.

Saturday lunch

Nice lunch out in beckenham with a group of friends. Zizzi is a great place to go with kids, they make it really quite easy.

It gets colder

Brrrrrr -23c now. Glad I bought a big north face coat.

Just been shopping

Just back from the local shopping mall, Bluewater, there are some great deals in pretty much all stores.  I got my arctic style coat i wanted in Blacks and they had 1/3 of everything which meant a £93.50 discount.  Popped into John Lewis and they seemed to have 20% of lots of stuff in mens clothing.  Had a quick early tea with the little one in Wagamama then back to the car.  There were around 1000 people queueing outside Waterstones for a Lee Evans book signing.  Back home now and the little one has had her milk and is up in bed.

That's a shame

The little one goes swimming every week at a pool run by a reasonably well known nationwide company.  She's been going every week since she was about 10 weeks old and loves it.  We used to go to a reasonably local pool however the pool was at a private house in a pretty quiet road and the neighbours complained to the local council, which in turn lead to the eventual closing of the pool and the necessity to go to another pool which isn't so close.  Well the little one is in here 4 term there so is on Level 4, however the new pool didn't have enough people for a Level 4 class so we were informed that she would be in a level 5 class.  Whilst we missed a week due to jabs one of the little ones friends and his mum did go and it's way different in a level 5 class.  Anyway there's only one week of term left so not too much to worry about.  Then we get a letter from the company, we thought that as the little one is in Level 4 she would just go to level 5 next term, no.  They're not running Level 5 next term, so she will have to go into Level 6.  That's a bit rubbish as not only does she miss a whole 10 weeks of swimming instruction, but also the other kids are way bigger.  We started when she was just over 10 weeks old so even now is only use over a year, however lots of people start a bit later which means by the time they reach Level 6 they are way bigger and running about and jumping in from the side.  Well it's a shame but we've had to find another company now that has vacancies in our price range.  Luckily another local firm has 2 places which means our little one and her friend can continue swimming together without travelling miles.

It's gonna be cold

hmmm need to by a new coat today.  Not in itself exciting however I'm off to Kazakhstan again next week.  It will be my second trip.  Hopefully all of our hardware will have arrived safely and will be installed correctly so we can commence getting the system up and running.  Also hopefully the building will be finished as last time I went (2 months ago) it looked like it needed about another years work.  It's pretty cold over there, on Sunday evening it was -20C.

The First Entry

Welcome.

Here's some words that I'll hopefully expand over time.  I live in South East London and am married with one child.  I work in the television industry and currently have a full time position as a project/programme manager with a big worldwide equipment supplier.  I am sometimes in the office although mainly (hopefully) work from home a lot as the office is a bit of a commute.