That's better

Well, after the doom and gloom of last week, this week has been a lot better. A lot calmer at work, and lots of social events to keep me busy.

We had our monthly sci-fi meeting, with a very interesting talk on manned space flights by someone from the Astronautics Association of New Zealand. John and I decided that rather than me coming home to eat, and then us heading back into town, we'd treat ourselves to a pub meal at the Occidental, just round the corner from my office, and on the way to the sci-fi meeting main reason for choosing - they have cheap food nights on Tuesday and Wednesday...). The pub was crowded, but the very helpful bar manager found us a table whilst we were ordering our drinks. We had plenty of time before the meeting, and it was nice to relax, have a chat and watch the occasional Dr Who trailer running on the silent TV behind the bar (the series starts here on the 2nd May - yay!) About 20 minutes after we ordered, the bar manager came out to apologise and say that our food-order had blown off the counter, and they'd only just found it - so to make it up to us, she was going to get us a free drink each! Given that the place was heaving, and we had plenty of time, we hadn't even started to wonder where our food was. But the free drinks were very nice, and our food turned up 10 minutes later - we'll definitely be going back again!

I had a great hockey practice on Thursday - we had a trainer in specifically to look at providing goalie coaching, so it was a very intensive practice, with a lot of diving to get me nice and bruised... That then translated into a very good game on Sunday - with only 10 players, we still managed to win 6-1, which after the disappointments of the last few weeks was a brilliant score, and will hopefully get everyone's morale up for the rest of the tournament.

We had friends round for dinner on Sunday, which was lovely - these were the people who very kindly lent us not only the mattress and bed-clothes whilst we were waiting for our stuff to arrive, but various kitchen utensils, all the stuff that you forget you are going to need. We had a lovely time, but not too late as we needed to get to work in the morning.

Today has been interesting - I woke up with a stinking head cold, and managed to get into work, only to be sent home at lunch time (my first day off sick in over a year). It is annoying as I had things which needed to be done, but as my head was nearly hitting the keyboard, it was the right move - I slept for a few hours this afternoon, and am going to have an early night this evening whilst John is out at orchestra practice (very frustrating as this is our first night back after three weeks off, and I was looking forward to trying out the new repertoire - however it definitely wasn't a good idea to try to play, nor to share my germs with the other members of the orchestra!)