Friends, Festivities & First Aid

This weekend was brought to you by the letter 'F'.

Fun things to do were like buses this weekend - they all came at once. We were already double booked for the weekend when we received a surprise invitation (not an 'invite' - I'm not American) to a Gala Dinner near Southampton to celebrate 25 years of Dyalog APL. APL stands for "A Programming Language", and it's a very concise and mathematical way of telling a computer what to do. Dyadic, the company responsible for Dyalog APL gave Adam his first job, and sponsored him (and so indirectly, me!) through university - it really was very lovely to be invited to the celebration.

The trip there took us very close to two of my friends and co-designers from Do Crafts - Liz & Becky. Liz was demoing just half a mile off our route to the fancy do, so Becky & I met there for tea and chat. It was lovely to see them both again and a treat to watch Liz demo - she had some really beautiful projects in her samples, and I feel a bit of homage work coming on! Thanks to Liz for not minding me bundling in with a camera, and thanks too to Becky for taking time out of her busy weekend of DIY to come and meet me. I did take a piccy of us, but didn't notice that I should have had the flash on, so we're a bit blurry

The gala do was great - nice to have a chance to dress up, and to see that it is possible to feed so many people with very good food all at once, but of course the main thing was that it was so nice to see people we haven't seen for such a long time. The only snag with driving home from a do that's a couple of hours away, is that you ought to go home a couple of hours before you're tired, and I tend to go from bouncy Tigger mode to power saving mode in the space of about 5 minutes. I hit critical tiredness on the M25, so I did a bit of a creative route to keep me awake. To bed finally at 2:15, and even washing my make-up off didn't stop me falling asleep as soon as I laid down.

Going to bed that late (or early) isn't that unusual for us, but getting picked up at 8:30 the next day definitely is. Adam was still in bed when I set out for Sandy to do my First Response course for my Rainbow Guider warrant. I now know that CPR is easier if you know 'Nellie the Elephant' and have a whole new repertoire of icky stories that I won't share, other than to say that if you have a nipple or belly-button piercing, you'd better be sure you never need a defibrilator. There's now only my own laziness of writing up my book of evidence between me and my warrant. Oh, and the sticky problem of how someone rabidly opposed to organised religion gets round a promise that includes the 'G' word of course...