Freeloading, weekend, tentatively satisfied

I'm not sure if you can quite make this out, but it's a photo of the handwash stuff from the men's loos in the Saatchi & Saatchi building on Golden Square. I've posted this purely as it seemed hilarious that after looking up to said organisation for most of my professional life, I found myself on Wednesday night spilling beer and eating more than my fair share of canapes in the foyer whilst Rudy used their lovely plant pots to knock the caps off beer bottles. What class and suaveness.

Anyway, the reason I was there was that a thing has launched recently called Voeveo, which is basically a global platform for sharing and selling content through one's mobile. So anyone who owns anything digital, be it music, video or whatever, can upload it to Voeveo and anyone in the world can buy it and download it. Very interesting stuff, mostly from a financial and back-end point of view which I won't bore you with here. They're from New Zealand, which generally makes them all-round good eggs in my book.

Apart from that, things have been reasonably quiet of late. The rugby finished on Saturday with a fairly limp game on the whole, which the Kiwi and I watched in the Temperance as usual before going home early and going to sleep more or less instantly. Sunday was more eventful; we had lunch with some friends who're not only heading back to NZ for good soon but pregnant as well. Despite one of our party being with child we managed a fairly long lunch and returned home tired and emotional at about 8, I think. Fortunately my rule of going ugly early on a Sunday worked and I have been hangover-free all day.

Last week was project management week, our PM being on holiday. I've refrained from posting on the subject whilst it was all going on, so I could give an overview of how it all went, and I'm pleased to report it all seems to have gone off pretty smoothly. The week wasn't without its learnings, suffice it to say, but on the whole much better than last time, which is good. #

And another thing - I'm only 30% of the way to my target, so dig deep, people. So far, Melvis, the Kiwi and the Milkman have all successfully bought my favour.

And here we go again...

Another 0430 start tomorrow, shudder. It really does leave you feeling a bit dislocated all week, that sort of thing, and dropping out of my normal routine does tend to leave me somewhat ruffled. I'm sure I'll learn to deal with it in time, the rest of the team seem to manage ok.

Given the relative silence from me this week I've decided to jot a little entry down now (whilst telling the Kiwi that I'm working, which I sort of am. Sort of.). You see, we have but one ethernet connection in the Irish office, between numerous people, and the connection in the hotel is appalling, so my opportunities to do interweb stuff are a bit limited. I'd hoped to be able to give nightly updates or something, but there you go. Oh, and if you think I'm doing this from my phone, stop right there. It took me 20 minutes to write an email the other day.

On the whole it's been a productive week. I'm fortunate enough to be working with a very experienced Project Manager who's giving me a fair bit of guidance, which is great as I've not worked as a Business Analyst before. There's a certain discipline to it, which seems to be aimed at coaching people for whom analysis doesn't come naturally through the whole thing. It's a case of putting fairly rigid processes around what for me is a pretty natural way of thinking, so once I'm through the learning curve of understanding those processes I should be ok. End of next week, I reckon. It's sort of fun, in a challenging kind of way.

One of the things I'm having to learn about at the moment is unions. See, as a child of the Thatcher era, I know nothing of unions in practice. All I know about them is that getting rid of them left a lot of working people rather exposed but meant that more senior people could make more money, or something like that. Anyway, the unions are alive and well in Ireland, and one has to tread extremely carefully when entering a business to potentially effect change. I've horrible visions of the Irish fondness for kneecappings and the like, but I'm told that doesn't happen nearly as much these days.

I did actually write a big long blog post last week, typing it into Notepad and intending to paste it in when I next got online, but I decided not to expose you all to what was a fairly downbeat entry about how bored I was and how over this whole working away from home thing I was. True, I was getting a bit sick of crap TV, no swimming and no Kiwi, and any city's pretty much the same old boring nonsense when you're there on your own (as I was for much of last week, effectively), but I decided in the cold light of day to count my blessings etc. I went for a run the next morning south through the canals of Dublin, with all the hedges sparkly with dew and the morning sun just starting to warm up the cobbles and everything sort of popped into perspective.

Flying back into London on Thursday was a real eye-opener, can't tell you how good it was to get back to this city which, despite all its failings I really am starting to love. Was truly amazing to walk out of the tube later that day into the Kiwi's arms and get back HOME, where there are unthreatening pubs and normal money and decent food and reliable internet connections. She made a brilliant paella on Friday night too, fantastic thing that she is, having batted those lovely lashes at the fishmonger in Notting Hill and come home with some of the fattest tiger prawns I've ever seen. I'm a very lucky chap.

So, lunch today at the best pub in West London, the Temperance just by Putney Bridge with some friends of ours who've just announced that one of them's in a family way, and then an early night and doing it all again next week - we have pivotal workshops Tuesday and Wednesday, including dinner out on Tuesday which apparently might stand a chance of changing my opinion of Dublin cuisine. Presumably this means it's not in one of the thousands of kebab shops which seem to be the cornerstone of Irish foodiness. Here's hoping...