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The Family Bandwagon

Our family is spread out across the country and across the world, and what better way to keep in touch than a collaborative digital journal?

Sunday 26 August 2007

The weekend once more; where'd the week go?

The weekend has come around once again, and I just wonder where the week went!

Work has been okay, fairly standard really. I still don't have a confirmation of what I'm going to be doing in the long run (well, I know which project I'm on, but I've asked for a clarification of roles because at the moment I seem to just be passed tasks from every which-way). I spoke to a guy I'm working with on configuration management (no, not quite a management position) and he said he'll probably be taken off that ... which will just leave me? That could be fun, as much as work can be called "fun".

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The real fun, of course, happens after work and on the weekends. We've finally got the phone line and Internets (it's not a big truck, it's an inside joke) connected, although even that has been an effort and a half. We still need to talk to our ISP about the speed -- 500kbps instead of the (theoretical) 8Mbps. Yup, that means our connection is 1/16th the speed it should be; the speed we're paying for. Regardless, having the wacky web has meant Dee can do her job application-y stuff from the comfort of home. We hope to have some good news by next week ;-).

This last week we have been very good with our pennies -- planning to live on one salary for as long as is needed (although I'm hoping not long -- Dee said she's going to buy herself a Wii when she gets a job, yay!) -- and it's actually been really, really good. For one thing, we've not been eating out (much cheaper) but best of all we've been cooking from scratch! There are so many markets and stalls around here that it is in fact cheaper to just buy the raw ingredients and put it all together ourselves, including growing our own veges out on the balcony. The food really has been awesome -- we even managed a barbecue one fine night. Yup, loving the balcony.

More cheap-osity -- about half-way between my work and home is a college or University or something, because there's a little street that is always filled with trendy students eating (and being students, drinking) on the cheap from one of the student-focused eateries. One day this week I met Dee there and we sat on wooden bench seats eating hamburgers with every type of salad we could find, all for £3.50. Okay, it doesn't sound cheap when you do the conversion back into Aussie dollar$, but it really is (consider that a normal sandwich from the bank canteen -- subsidised canteen, mind -- can cost around £2.80).

This weekend is a long weekend, but because we're being cheap (and because there is a mass-exodus from London on long-weekends) we're not going to either Brighton or Stonehenge, which were our two preferred options. Instead, we went to the London Science Museum (Dayna would approve, ;-))! For the cost of a bus then the Underground back home (too tired to walk to and from the bus stop :-D) we saw all manner of crazy science stuff -- the history of medicine, flight, computers, mathematics, stuff about the future of physics (the Large Hadron Collider will smash particles at higher energies than have ever been done before, hopefully shedding light (heh heh) on the nature of gravity. Dee thinks it will blow up the world. Hmm).


Today we're off to the markets again -- what a surprise! -- and then may catch a Horror movie in Leicester Square as it's the annual FrightFest here this weekend. Guess I better go jump in the shower, huh?

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More photos in my new Life In London photoset, including a couple of the new apartment.

3 comments:

  1. Okay, so we rethought the FrightFest because the tickets were £10 a pop and decided to have our own at home instead. We put candles around the place, turned off all the lights and watched "28 Weeks Later", courtesy of the Internet. Heart-stopping!

    Today we went to the Tate Modern and saw some free modern art ;-). Loving this frugal thing! We're regular frugal fraggles, us.

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  2. I challenge anyone to read the phrase "frugal fraggle" and not immediately start humming the fraggle theme to themself.

    Or maybe I've been playing the "Find old tv show intros on youtube" game a little too much ;)

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  3. Is there a fraggle theme? I think we have a couple of Fraggle books.
    great to hear from you Glenn. This jajah is very handy. Thank the boss Damien.
    We finally connected the set top box and found we couldn't get the ABC because it's encrypted and the other channels were no better than we normally got. We'll return the box the Dick Smith. When the digital channels are all that can be watched, we'll get whatever is necessary.

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