One week

That's how long it has been since I updated this - wow, that's bad.

Diet tracker - still doing it, not getting any results though, it's amazing how the calories add up in a day so it's worthwhile just for that information alone.

Genealogy - I have found and emailed a person on genesreunited who has listed my great-grandmother (my mother's mother) and all her siblings. Since her family disowned her for marrying my great grandfather it will be really interesting to get all the details of descendants and ascendents from this person, but she hasn't emailed me back yet, so I've hit a brick wall again.

Graham has done his network installation and its been successful so I am very proud of him. We celebrated with a bottle of bubbly on Wednesday night but because he had been working all through the night on Tuesday and hadn't slept much when he got home, he was too tired to enjoy it properly. We went out last night instead for some beers. It was supposed to be a beer or two but we got drunk quickly and couldn't stop. We ended up going to the Triangle for a curry and then after a meal I found myself, quite bizzarely, in the kitchen getting a lesson from the chef on how to make sag panir and afterwards we sat at the bar with the waiter Ali and debated politics, religion and general world affairs for half an hour until Graham got fed up and wanted to go home. We just missed a bus so ended up having another drink that we shouldn't have had and by then we weren't particularly comprehensible. Alex rang on the way back home and I can't remember the conversation well, but it was something along the lines of him still being really ill so going back to Cheltenham to recuperate and get new medication. So he is stopping off in Bristol for the night enroute, and we're going to spend the evening with him at his hotel tonight. Poor bugger can't drink though, probably a good thing.

Last weekend was quite pleasant - went out for lunch with Graham's brother on Saturday. He's split up with another girlfriend so is feeling a bit down at the moment. Then he went home to get some rest as he was doing youth camp this week and needed to reserve his energy, and Graham and I went on to have coffee by the harbourside and have a nice long walk around that area. On Sunday I went round to Kerrianne's house for dinner with her and her friend Jo. We ate and drank and got giggly then attempted to watch a video but talked too much through it, but that didn't really matter.

Work has been a pain in the arse this week - no one is doing what they say they will do. The firedoor which is going to be the temporary entrance to the library was supposed to be finished last Wednesday but now it won't be finished until next Thursday. People kept changing their minds about access to the building, so doors were unlocked and locked seemingly at random - people would get into the library one way, and then find that they couldn't get out again! It became a bit of a joke - getting in and out was a real krypton factor test, but it was really frustrating for us all. Now they've decided definitely that the easy way into the library is too much of a security risk, so everyone has to go a REALLY long way round - downstairs, through the bowels of the Chemistry department where all the labs are, up the stairs, past the admin offices...it's crazy.

And don't even get me started on David bloody Hughes. He comes into the library at the beginning of the week to see what work we urgently need doing - a bit of paint, some shelves screwed onto the wall - to get the Chemical Abstracts back on the shelf again instead of lying around in piles looking like sandbags and making the place even more untidy. All he has to do is ring Building Services to tell them and give them a cost code. We assumed he'd done it, but because email was down at the end of the week and he never answers his phone I couldn't get in contact with him. I phoned again on Monday, only to be told he had gone on holiday. Without telling anybody. I emailed Building Services to find out whether he'd put in the job request, and surprise surprise he hadn't, and I couldn't request the jobs because I don't have the authority or the cost code. So we had to contact Jennifer, who then didn't get back to me because it turns out that she didn't have the necessary code, and nobody replied to her to give it to her, so she had to contact David on his holiday to find it out. The short story is that the job request only went in today - 10 days after it was supposed to be done urgently.

Communications in this place officially suck - it makes me really angry. But I'm just venting here, I don't get stressed about it as I'm used to it. Who cares when I'll be in Canada next week!

I have contacted various people who we are going to meet up with in Canada - Dave and Trish, Paul and Sarah and families in Kelowna, Mandy, Jane and probably a couple who have just started a relocation business and want to use us as guinea pigs for free in Vancouver. Really looking forward to it. Oh, and we're thinking about going to see Beastie Boys in concert on the 20th as well since we're unlikely to be watching any hockey.

Bank holiday this weekend- 4 days off, hurrah! We'll probably go to Devon tomorrow to see Graham's granparents, and on Sunday there is an Asian festival on the Downs, and on Monday there is Ferrari racing at Castle Coombe. Then on Tuesday we've both go the day off so we're going to sort out holiday things and I'll get my haircut.

Diet

I have just started tracking my diet using http://www.medictra.com/medictra/diettracker/index.asp?MS=0&s=0. It's free and what you do first is fill in your vital statistics and set a goal weight (if you want to, leave it as it is if you just want to stay the same weight) and it tells you what the minimum time is to reach it healthily (mine for eg is 2 stones in 13 weeks).

Then you fill in stuff about your lifestyle - what your normal activity rate is at work and at leisure and how long you sleep for and it calculates how many calories you should be eating per day to maintain your weight, then reduces that figure depending on how much weight you want to lose (500 calories in my case taken off the usual figure of 2250). Each day you fill in an exercise diary and it calculates how many calories you have burnt off doing a particular activity and so adds that to your calorie allowance (eg I burnt off 150 calories walking to work, so I can eat an extra 150 calories today if I want without going over my usual calorie allowance).

And the main part of the site is the food diary, where you add everything that you have had to eat and drink during the day. There are hundreds of foods in the database so you just click on the one you've eaten, tell it the portion size and it calculates the nutritional info. If you can't find what you want on the database you can add your own foods using the nutritional info on the packet and it then saves them for future use. It shows the nutritional info for everything you have eaten in a chart, with a running total of Calories, Protein, Carbohydrate, Fat and Fibre (but the fibre thing doesn't work because someone has forgotten to calculate the fibre for all the foods in the database).

And the thing that I particularly like about it is at the bottom of your daily food chart you have a pie chart showing the percentages of fat, carbohydrate and protein that have made up your day's calories, which is next to another pie chart showing the recommended percentages for a balanced diet (33% from fat (preferably as little saturated fat as possible), 52% Carbs, 15% Protein) - so I can see how healthy and balanced my diet is. It's great as I can put in all the info for my breakfast and lunch and then work out what I should be having for dinner - and I can add foods to the chart to test my meal plan out and delete them again and rethink if the pie chart doesn't balance like it should.

It's taking a bit of time initially, but once I have set up all my favourite foods so they are in my database (and you can set complete meals to if you have the same meal regularly) then it won't take any time at all - it's just a case of remembering to do it every day and remembering the portion sizes (there's a big difference between 6 walnut halves and 3 walnut halves!).

The results page gives you a summary of calorie calculations (though that isn't caluclating properly on mine at the moment so I am ignoring it and looking at the individual days diary instead) and the progress of your diet (including current and target weight (which you can edit daily) and bmi) . This page lets you edit your weight if you've lost any/put any on, and it also gives you the chance to put in your measurements and pulse rate.

The genealogy thing is still going too - I have contacted a lady who believes that her Grandma Ethel might be my Grandad's dad's sister or aunt, but it's a bit difficult to tell when I don't know my g-grandad's name! I have also been searching around the birth and marriage certificates in Co. Durham for that sort of period, and might be having a look at some census(i?) sometime later if I can find any online.

Genealogy

It's my new hobby as from today. I might get fed up with it soon though if I find I can't get any further. I have joined http://www.genesreunited.co.uk and actually paid the money to become an upgraded member so that I can send mail.

I have found that my cousins' cousin has put a few entries in there already, so I am trying to find out if she has got any further than me with the whole Appleby line. I doubt it somehow.

I was so stressed out last night because of work and bus drivers and rain. Even teletext was against me (don't ask). Tonight I hope to be a bit more chilled. But I guess that depends on how much banging there is coming from Graham and his dad trying to fix the tap pressure in the kitchen.

Hohum.

Rent

I hit upon the idea that we could sell our flat, put the capital into a high interest account, and rent something for the next 2 years so making money and getting rid of the hassle of having to sell the house when the time comes to move to Canada. Graham has worked out that he could earn £200 per month after tax by doing this and if we could rent a place that costs less per month than our current mortgage payments we'd be laughing.

You see we absoloutely adore our flat and its location, but we're scared that when the time comes to sell the flat we won't be able to sell it, or we'll make a loss on it - especially if the housing market crashes in the next 2 years, and/or we have to reduce the price in order to get a quick sale so that we can move to Canada.

We went to look at a furnished flat being offered for rent by someone at the university last night. She was offering it for £650 fully furnished from the end of October. It was fairly nicely done out, but the second bedroom was a tad on the small side, the lounge was a good size but didn't have enough room for a permanent dining table, and the location was not quite what we wanted - it would add another 15 minutes onto a walk back from town and would take even longer to walk to a pub around there.

We are trying to arrange to view a couple of flats within 2 mins walk of our flat, and I've seen one in Kingsdown that looks great. After we've seen what quality we might be able to get for our money we will probably get a couple of valuations on the flat, and then have a good hard think about it. At the end of the day we don't want to move, but as we're going to have to move anyway we might as well ensure that we don't lose money on the sale of the house, and with interest rates going up it would be preferable to be making more interest on our savings rather than shelling out more money on the mortgage each time it goes up.

We're just waiting for somebody to tell us it is the wrong thing to do. Everybody who we've asked so far seems to think that it is the most sensible thing to do.

Do builders work?

On Monday some builders turned up, loitered around for the morning and didn't do any work. Nobody could find their foreman. When someone eventually suggested phoning him they found that he was on another job and couldn't come, so they all went home. Meanwhile we spent the morning shifting furniture and stock around to make their "job" easier.

Yesterday the builders came and loitered around all day. In the afternoon the foreman decided that we needn't fence off the whole area, just a few metres square of it - so two blokes put up some metal barriers around the area they are going to initially concentrate on. Then they went home.

Today, no one is doing anything. Again. We need a firedoor built into our library and that was supposed to be their first priority - but nobody has turned up, and nobody has told us when they intend to start. We'll only know when someone starts drilling though the wall.

I don't understand how they can get paid for not being here, or paid for being here and not doing anything. I know I have a hard time justifying my job sometimes, but at least I actually do some work each day and sometimes I do loads.

Well, let's just forget that little moan for now, it's not me paying for it, so I shouldn't really be too bothered - and when they do start working it's going to be so dusty and noisy that I'll wish they hadn't!

Had a nice time in Cheltenham over the weekend. Went out for a curry with Liz and Kel on Friday and they seemed to really appreciate having time alone with me, rather than Graham being there, or me inviting half of Cheltenham along like I always manage to do when I come back for such a short time. We went to Taylors afterwards to meet up with Liz's bloke Leeroy and friends - they have been together a year and this is the first time I've met him. People seemed to want to go clubbing, I didn't want to, but they didn't want me to go home so we ended up compromising and going to the Two Pigs instead - which turned out to be a mistake as everybody wanted to be in different rooms (there was drum and bass out the back, cheesy chart downstairs, and indie hiphop and punk upstairs) and the guys were too drunk to really enjoy any of it. Bumped into someone I really didn't want to (Abi's ex James) who insisted on buying me a drink and talking to me, but all he did was slag Kelly off so I made my excuses and gave the drink he bought me to Leeroys friend Maxi (as it was his birthday). Later on James bought Kelly a drink, possibly to apologise for being horrible to her, but she freaked out and thought he had spiked it with something (possible, he is a bit of a weird one) - so I just told her to leave it.

Saturday was a bit more civilised. Went round to have a look at Clare's flat that she moved into on Wednesday - it is very small and in a location that she never really wanted to be in, but it's all she could afford (it was £95,000 as it was). It's great that she's got a place of her own after so long and she's really pleased to have her freedom. We drove to Montpellier to visit Caz, whom neither of us had seen for 2 years. Her rented flat is lovely - right on Montpellier Park - she and Mark have bought a house near Clare and will be moving shortly, and the are also getting married next August. It was really nice to chat with her and I hope to see her again soon - we shared a bottle of wine and then I went back home to see Graham and to help mum prepare for the BBQ. It was a perfect evening for BBQing and the food we made was nice - the only problem was that next door had an 18th birthday party going on for the twins in their garden so we had to compete with their music!

On Sunday we went out to a new Thai restaurant for lunch. The inside was very well done, with a waterfall in the entrance, wood panelling, gilt and elephants everywhere. They did a brilliant buffet with a wide selection of food, really nicely presented, and the service was very attentive. We all enjoyed it, apart from the fact that most of the food was pretty spicy so there wasn't enough contrast to the chilli taste that built up in our mouths!

All in all a very pleasant weekend.

It's hot

Very hot. And it is even hotter because this library has zero ventilation. It is hot sat at the desk by the doors with the fan on, it is even hotter when you are up a ladder deep in the bowels of the library, lifting heavy, disgustingly dusty journals from the top of the bookcases and transferring them to another room for disposal. I've been sweating my t**s off.

We're all rather panicked because building work is starting on the quad outside on Monday and as well as having no normal access to the library at very late notice, they sprung it on us that they want to start knocking through our reading room and the wall at the end of the library to put in a firedoor on Monday as well. We knew it was coming, but a little more notice would have been nice. We now have had to move so many journals and books around to make space for the building works which are going to do away with 33 m of shelving. All in one day. Ah well, at least it has given me something to do!

Ah, the trials and tribulations of a library assistant.

Don't know if I'll be seeing much of Graham this weekend. I am going to cheltenham tomorrow night to go out with Liz and Kel whilst he goes on this booze cruise in Bristol. He is meant to join me on Saturday but I can't see him coming down before the evening as he is sure to be very hungover, and also he needs to be at the end of the phone and easily able to get into work if needed, as loads of people are working over the weekend to prepare for this big installation next week that he has been planning for months. We are going out for mum's birthday meal on Sunday lunchtime, but Graham may be called back to Bristol before then. Hopefully not.

Never mind, at least the installation is going ahead and he will be able to go on holiday to Canada and install the network rather than having to choose between the biggest thing in his career and the biggest plan in his personal life. For a while there we thought the project might be so delayed that he would not come on holiday with me!