Where has all the blogging gone....

Well it's been 4 weeks since my last post - the longest blogging break since I started writing this in October 2007 I think. A number of reasons for that. First, I took a couple of weeks off work in August, one of those was for my annual pilgrimage to Whitby Folk Week, and I know how much some of you look forward to the obligatory morris dancing picture following that, so here it is - the wonderful Seven Champions Molly Dancers, straight from the Frittenden Treacle Mines.

Look at the colour of that sky - it was like that for almost the whole week we were there!

I suppose the second reason for the break, is that I just don't seem to have had a lot of time. I'm spending a lot of time during the day getting out and meeting Heads of Department. I decided I would visit each head over the summer, and I've almost made it, just a few more to do. The other thing taking up time, especially in the morning, lunchtimes and evenings, when I often write this, was walking. Back at the beginning of the summer, a stalwart walker in the department suggested that we enter a team in the Global Corporate Challenge, so I volunteered. Seven of us formed the Trekking Techies of CiCS, and set out to see how far we could walk in 100 days. I was used to walking between 10,000 to 12,000 steps a day, and originally set myself a new target of 13,000, but to keep pace with the others, and with other teams, I soon upped that to 16,000 and in the last 40 days did 18,000 a day.  When you get all your steps from walking, I don't cycle or run, this can take up a lot of time! Many evenings I got home from work and then went for a long work to get my steps up. But it paid off, and we came third out of 75 teams entered by the University, and depending on when you took a snapshot of the final results, we came about 780 out of 42,000 teams worldwide. A very respectable result. So, thanks to George, Dave, Andy, Steve, Jenny, Tessa for being great walking companions.

So now I'll get back to blogging and telling you what I've been up to. I'll try and post a couple of catch up posts in the next couple of days to get up to date.