It’s been madly busy at work and play recently. At work I’m working 50% of my time on two different projects, although unfortunately it means I really work about 75% of my effort on each. There’s something hard about swapping between one project and the next; I tend to work on one project for a few weeks then swap to the next. Another problem is when the bosses of these projects end up organising two major meetings in consecutive weeks. This means that one gets double the amount of work in the weeks preceding these meetings. Tomorrow the first meeting starts for me, which is why Grumpy has been a bit quiet recently.

One advantage of working on two pan-European projects is that one gets to travel around Europe quite widely. As I’m a relatively central in my group for both projects, it means I often get to go away. This is good if I can extend the trips for a short holiday, but not so good if I’m just going for a meeting, particularly as I travelling stresses me out. So next week, after 4 days in Edinburgh this week, I’m travelling to Barcelona again for another 3-day meeting. However, Daisy is going to join me later in the week in Barcelona and we shall have a nice week away from the city a little further along the coast towards France. I can’t wait for the rest.