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.