You're the top...

You're the colisseum, you're the top, you're the Louvre museum, you're a melody from a symphony by Strauss.. * Now, I know that you all know how much I love Cole Porter... so I just had to plop a bit in there to salute some of my colleagues today - we had a team building exercise today, wherein the younger & fitter amongst us got to climb up artificial walls with coloured lumps on them, and some of us got to hold on down the bottom and 'belay'.  Hmmm.  I need to go & look up the link between 'belay that order' (as in the verb) and 'belay' as in 'stop', (the noun).


Why am I mentioning the difference, and how does it relate to where I've been?  Well, from Monday-Wednesday last week (yes, yes, I know, that was last week, but it's all relative) I was off on a course given by my employer, the tyrannical one I was ranting about earlier this month.  There were a bunch of people on this course who were university graduates, and who had been taken on by my employer into the graduate entry program.  All very fine.  These were intelligent, articulate people, who had obviously done well at university, and who were going to go on to be the managers of the future, and in all likelihood, possibly my manager in the future.   None of them knew what a noun was.   Please, please don't tell me that any of you don't know the difference between a noun and a verb, (or even what a noun & a verb are...) I couldn't bear it. And whilst you're digesting this, I'll just say that it scares the crap out of me that people don't know why it matters.


In other news just to hand, the course ran from 8.30am to 5.15pm.  I drove, leaving home at 6.45am the first day, and 6.30am the other two days.  On Tuesday, it took me 2 hours to get home.  It's 39 kilometres/24 miles.

Then, on Thursday and Friday, I started a new assignment (thank god the other one is over, one day when the Official Secrets Act waiting period is up, I will reveal all, but for now, be extremely grateful they make you wait 30 years before opening some files), at Parramatta. 

Parramatta is a bit further away at 47 kilometres/29 miles from home, and like a good citizen trying to reduce her carbon footprint, I've been experimenting with public transport.  I get up at 5.30am, leave home at 6.20am, arriving in the city at 7.20am, get on a train at 7.34, arriving in Parramatta at 8.14am, then a 10 minute walk to the office gets me in there at about 8.30am.  How can it take so long?

I'm quite sure you're all sitting there "she's gotta be kidding", so I'm not going to bore you rigid with the gory timetable details for the return journey.  Suffice it to say, last night it took me 2 hours & 20 minutes.
 
Needless to say I'm completely knackered when I get home, so something's got to give, of course, which is the blog, and sadly, the sewing!  My cunning plan to do an hour every night has just gone right down the pan, and I'm sitting here at 8.12pm wondering how long it is before I can go to bed... the good news is that this is only for 3 months, and I'm already working on the boss to see if I can do at least one day per week in the city, or better yet, at home.  I'm trustworthy, I would never work in my PJ's.  I might answer the door in my pj's, but I'd take them off to work.  You know what I mean. 


Anyway, after all that, I have to get back to the whole point of this (yes, yes, there was a point...) I met a bunch of really nice people today, we had a lot of fun and I helped some of the unlikeliest looking people climb really high walls.  More power to you, Andrea, you impressed the hell out of me!

Oh, and I made these on the weekend, but that deserves a page on its own, which is immediately forthcoming: