Busy couple of weeks..

..down here on Peachbottom Farm.
Work, I am afraid to say, has been uber busy. On top of the usual hetic work load I had a wedge of stuff to do as part of the ongoing work to have mobile bearing knees reclassified in the US. I am also doing presentations to the IMechE and IEEE this week, and these things dont write themselves. And just to top it off I had a cold last weekend!

Bah Humbug!

In other news we have had a new member enter the herborium. Allow me to introduce Bert Speed, date palm seedling of some renoun! I will keep you up to date (pun) on his progress.


D was here to stay last week, it was her first time in the big T so she was naturally a bit phased by what a busseling metroplis it is. She did day trip to Oxford which is nice.



D's visit was a follow on from what was a bit of a highlight in the social calander which was Sue's **th birthday party in Manchester. Held at the local catholic club it was like Phenoix O' Nights. Cracking time was had by all, band were very good players and the fella calling the sets on the ceile was absolute star quality. I had a pain in me head from laughing. I've put the piccies up on the .Mac site.


Hope to re-establish some order in my life again over the next few weeks as blog and German and having grown up conversation with Lisa have suffered a bit of neglect

Open the pod bay doors Hal

Nuremberg

Off to the old Man of Ger again. Been a bit slack with the old blog and also pretty slack with the German lessons. So unless I meet a small girl with a yellow hat and one shoe, it might not get used.
Reason for the slackness has been mainly to do with the FDA. Thursday was spent following a webcast of a meeting which ruled on acess to the US of a resurfacing hip device and Friday was spent working on a mobile bearing knee reclassification document. Which ment Saturday I was shattered. Drat you FDA for stealing of my powers!

Scrubs is not a documentry

Today I did some knee instrument training with some scrub staff in a NHS hospital in the midlands. It was a stark contrast to the Clinic in Dusseldorf, and not in a good way. Organised chaos, with poor facilities, overworked staff - coupled with glaring examples of where money is bleeding out of the system, usually due to some short term cost saving idea or some pet project of some grand fromage. But sorting out the NHS is a rock that better men than me have perished on.

In other news I have started learning German again as I have every opertunity to use it at work and I can see myself being over there quite a bit with the various projects I've got on. To this end I have bought myself a copy of Rosetta Stone
and have promised myself faithfully to do 1 hour a night. I'll post updates of my progress.


...and finally I would advise all to check out the JCB song . Top quality song, great back story, wonderful video and all round top website. Made me smile, a lot. (Quick Note: My Firefox browser did not like it, whereas KDE and Safri like it fine, so YMMV)

Tour de Tetbury

Yesterday the boy nagged and nagged until we brought him out on the bike. He was reasonably happy with his new "hat" and was well up for getting into the new bike seat. Seat is now mounted on what was Dr. JP's old bike as it is the only one in the stable with carrier mount points. During out extensive outing there was not a peep out of the boy, but when we got home he was very excited and wanted to tell us about the whole experience. This involved a lot of "ru-ru-ru" and showing us how the wheels go round and round. To Jules all things that go round and round are objects of great wonderment.