Internal Server Error

what the voices in my head tell me to write

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Its been a while

But I am back.

One of the main reasons I have been away is that I have a new job. No more being the webmonkey in the corner at ingenta. I am now the slightly more senior webmonkey in the middle of the room at Patersons.

Ingenta made the very generous offer of "move to Oxford to work, no extra pay and no chance of working from home or take redundancy". Let me see now.... I could barely afford to work for ingenta despite having hardly any bills when I was in Bath. So... "I will take the redundancy please".

So after a bit of gardening leave and a few very annoying interviews and experiences with recruitment agencies I am now working for Patersons developing material for their websites and internal tools.

It's been interesting so far with a lot of new systems to learn. Hopefully some of the experience I gained at ingenta will be useful too.

Of course the other thing to talk about is the garden. The gardening leave did come in handy and its looking really good. Had some great rocket out of it the other day as a first crop from the veggies and some of the other stuff wont be far behind. The flowers were great this spring too. Well last year it was basically bare earth in the spring but this year we had tulips, daffodils, crocus, anemones and aliums in profusion. The tuilps were especially showy but I really like the aliums they almost look like fireworks bursting. Hopefully we will have some more food to eat soon. I reckon either pea shoots, radishes, lettuce or maybe swiss chard will be ready in a week or so. Possibly even spring onions.

We have been using our ingenuity too. I bought a little drip feed irrigation system from Tescos for a tenner and use that to water most of the containers. Then we noticed a length of hosepipe that had been lying around for ages. No one wanted it so I stabbed lots of holes in it and its now laid out on the veggie bed as a soaker hose. I can do most of the watering whilst sat on the new bench or better yet laying in the hammock I got Rae for her birthday.

Freecycle really came up trumps too. I got about 1/2 a ton of gravel for free to go along the bottom of the garden so we dont get muddy going to the new greenhouse and the wormery. Then Rae picked up a 3 tier planter thing and some hanging baskets the other day.

The other big bit of news is that we are moving house. Without leaving the building though. Hopefully in the middle of August we will be moving into another flat in the school. Its bigger and also more private. No more living next door to a bunch of screaming schoolgirls. Rae already has plans for decorating and has sent off for about 100 colour samples, or so it seems. The interesting thing is it actually has a lightwell in the middle. Nick and Karen dont use it for much but we are going to use it for houseplants and bringing on early plants for the garden.

Well thats quite enough of all that for now.

Labels: garden, work