Well, we’ve just arrived back from 2 and a half days in Wales. While we were there Jo (my sister) was looking after our chickens in our garden. Stupid things kept standing on the water dish so they were constantly thirsty. While in Wales we bought them a little dish that hangs on the side of the run, so that problem should no longer happen!

Anyway, we when we got back we had our first two eggs! They’re tiny little eggs, but it means our chickens are very happy (and so they should be narrowly avoiding a life in a barn!). Here they are:

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Maybe they’ll make a nice breakfast — although perhaps they’re too small!

Well, on Friday we had to miss ballroom so that we could go and receive our UKA medals for our salsa exams. I made some chocolate chip peanut butter cookies (coz I know Pete likes them) and also made some Indian spiced breadsticks with an indian spiced mayonnaise dip. Turned out everyone else had brought some stuff too, so there was piles of food. Thankfully there were quite a lot of people there to eat it!

It was a good night and we received our medals on a nice little plaque. Here’s some photos of us at the do (taken by Lin and Trev):

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Daisy and I dancing the Salsa.

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Daisy and I collecting our medals from our teacher, Barbara.

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Our improvers class!

A bit of video of the chickens, as promised:

Well, our chickens moved into their new home last night. They were a bit stunned at first, but they are starting to get the hang of rummaging around and things. They still follow each other around quite a bit and often just sit and huddle up one end of the run, but they all seems to be fine. One of them slept in the nest box last night, so they seem quite happy.

I shall get some video of them up at some point, but for now, here’s a couple of photos:

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Here they are in their new home

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Rummaging around in the ground

Oh my, it’s so so busy at the moment that poor Mr.Blog has been seriously neglected.

Daisy’s been really busy with her work, organising exams and rushing around like a mad-woman. It’s GCSE and A-Level season, of course.

I’ve been busy rushing around too. The new projects I’m on are kicking off, and I’ve still got the old projects hanging around from before, so it’s just been rushing all day everyday. I seem to spend most of my time in meetings, which at least has the advantage of making me a little more comfortable with airing my views in such situations.

So, I was up in Edinburgh from Sunday to Wednesday at one of these meetings attempting to be less shy and airing my views liberally (ha, yeah, right…).

Today I took part in an undergraduate project examination for the first time. The Union of Teachers at my University are causing a bunch of problems with this because they’re on strike today which means that a lot of undergraduates have had to have their vivas postponed. Fortunately, the other examiner was working today, so it all went off ok. Apparantly, some students in the Students’ Union have set up a thing called Students Against Southampton Lecturers Association… SALSA..

Which brings me neatly on to tomorrow night, which is our salsa medal ceremony. You may remember a few weeks ago we partook in effectively an examination of our rather dodgy dancing skills and passed both our Bronze and Silver levels. This means that tomorrow we’ll actually get the medals. Woo! Photos to come, of course

Also, we now are the proud owners of four hens! I haven’t seen them yet as I’m at work, but I’m reliably informed that they’re lovely chickens, and they shall move into their new home tonight! Photos to come, of course

This weekend we’re also off up to Wales to have a rather belated birthday celebration with Daisy’s Mum. I have no idea what’s planned but after having three days of concentrating in meetings and then socialising with people in the evenings, I’m thoroughly burnt out and need a good sleep.

Anyway, I really will try to keep this thing a bit more up-to-date. I’ll also try to get Daisy in on the act, as she’s always slacking in front of the computer wondering what to do next.

We have been blessed with some wonderful weather this week. It’s been up just past 20 degrees C, which is a nice change for the UK – in fact, that was probably summer gone already

On Tuesday night I flew out to Amsterdam on a Thomson Fly flight from our local Bournemouth Airport. It was pretty good – only cost £50 return including all taxes, and I got to choose my seat (unlike Ryanair). After a horrendously expensive taxi ride to the hotel (at least I can claim it back) I managed to settle down in my room, which was actually very comfy (€82 per night). In the morning I took a 20 minute walk to a nearby tram station and took the tram to the Free University of Amsterdam, where I was having a day in a meeting. It was a productive meeting, and ended promptly at 5 o’clock which is when I headed back to the airport. Rather a shame, then, that I didn’t get to see any of the interesting bits of Amsterdam.

We had a pretty usual ballroom lesson on Friday, followed by our salsa lesson. We had our medal test results this week, and all of our class passed! Daisy and I (and a couple of other of the improvers class) were considered good enough that the highest mark on the mark sheet (Highly Commended) was deemed too low, so we also got ‘honours’. I don’t know if this means we’ll get something else as well as our medals, or not

We have decided that the bird flu scare that the media have been perpetuating has died down quite a lot recently, so I’m sure our neighbours won’t mind if we got chickens at last! We’ve asked my sister, who keeps her horses at a chicken farm, to get some for us. Yay!

We went to the garden centre today and spent nigh on £80 getting new pots, compost and plants to make our garden look nice. Daisy has been wanting to grow Strawberries, so we freed some old strawberry pots from my parents’ hedge and are going to use those to grow some plants. Should be interesting!

Anyway, I’m half way through cooking a nice roast beef joint, so I better go and start getting the vegetables to go with it ready.