life at lochaline street

So, aleisha arrived on tuesday morning which meant I had to get up at 4.30am! It was aleisha's first ever plane flight so I was a bit concerned when she didn't appear for an hour after landing. But then she came out smiling and said that not only did she have a good flight, but that she loved it!!!!??? who loves flying long trips??? crazy girl. She even slept for the first 8 hours of her second leg and woke up to find there was only 4 hours left.... if only we could all be so flight-friendly. Anyway, my new work let me have the day off, so after getting leish settled & freshened up, we headed out to see the sights.

It was a fantastic day - the previous day and week had been overcast and rainy, but tuesday was blue skies and plenty of sun :) I took leish to the tower bridge, followed by the houses of parliament and westminster abbey. Then we had lunch and I took leish to Primark (which she loved!), and then after a quick rest at home we walked up to Holland Park to see some squirrels... which we did :) We had dinner at home and then watched the Champions league final between Liverpool and AC Milan, which AC Milan won. All in all, she's loving it over here and left this morning for Germany to meet with Fran and drive down to Italy until next wednesday.

We were delighted to hear that the Maroons came back from half-time to win the first state of origin which I proudly stated to the 3 other aussies at work - all from Sydney.. however they didn't really care :( Work is going well - this is my second week now. Nice bunch of people and great to work somewhere where the majority of people are actually British and not all aussies and kiwis!! I'm working on a project at a company owned by Sky. Sky have a speak/see/surf offering, and our company does the Sky Talk part of it, so I'm learning all about provisioning of phone services etc. There's 6 Java developers, 1 PL/SQL developer and the system is a mix of Java/Spring MVC/Hibernate and Oracle PL/SQL components, so needless to say us Java devs are pushing to rewrite the PL/SQL components into Java...especially since they're using TDD and it's hard to unit test the non-Java components.

Today Morgan went to the Microsoft UK headquarters to do a presentation in front of all these Microsoft & other companys' technical architects! He was a bit nervous since he's only been using Sharepoint all of 3 months and had to present his issues & solutions with trying to integrate it, but I hear it went well, so I'm proud :) Anyways enough with the technical talk...

That's probably about it for the moment. We've got a long weekend this weekend, so hopefully we'll get up to something fun then :)