Go Go Go!!!!!!

I was woken up rather rudely this morning by my cat. She decided that I had spent long enough in bed (it had only just gone 10am, which on a sunday I feel is quite an acceptable time to still be in bed) and thought it would be a good idea to tickle my face with her whiskers. She wanted the bed to herself. Begrudgingly, I agreed with her that it was time to get up, as I had enough stuff to do today. Especially as it is a race weekend. When there is a Grand Prix on, everything must fit around those 3 hours.
So, I plodded out into the garden to make a start in things. Opening up the shed revealed a very nasty surprise; a wasp building a nest above the door. Now, as a rule I spend as little time in the shed anyway, knowing the size of the eight legged creatures that live in there, but I needed to root around to find a suitable way to dispatch the wasp. I grabbed the first aerosol can I could find, which happened to be fly filler, and commited waspicide, eventually. It takes a lot of fly killer to kill a wasp.
First thing to do was to sort out the pump in the fish pond, or that was the plan anyway. Unbeknown to me, Our neighbours were setting up a bonfire, with lots of damp grass and wood. When I could no longer see the house from the bottom of the garden due to the copious amounts of smoke pouring over the garden fence, I gave up on the garden and headed back indoors to set myself up for the race, with my laptop.
My brother has found out on many occasions that watching a grand prix with me, when supporting anyone but my beloved Vodafone Mclaren Mercedes can be hazardous to your health. He is a f.., f...f, red car fan, I can't even bring myself to type it, I despise THAT team so much. When I was at University and Schmuck was still driving for them, my house mate (also an avid VMM fan) and I used to gather up all our old course notes, barracade ourselves in the tv room and bombard the tv with paper balls everytime a red car appeared. Now, I can't really get away with that at home, despite my brother working most weekends. My parents don't look favourably on me throwing balls of paper around. However, the next 3 hours are what save me from needing a gym membership. I don't only watch the race, i'm driving every single car on the track, screaming "OVERTAKE HIM!", "GO FASTER!!" "WHAT ARE YOU DOING, BLOCK HIM!!". Everything else can't really be published for public viewing.
All this screaming is accompanied by much arm waving, moving of feet (as mentioned, i'm driving the car!) and general other movements that could be construed by anyone else as me having some sort of fit.
Despite all of this, we only finished 4th and 12th. But, the car is looking better, its getting quicker, soon we'll be back where we belong, on the podium.
However, the excitement doesn't finish there. Its been a British Touring cars weekend too. Lets call this more "contact" racing. Plenty of bumping and bashing, bodywork flying off, cars on and off the track, brilliant stuff!
And next weekend, I'm back at Brands for the first time since october. All I need to do now is survive the next 5 days at work...

catching up...

You take 2 weeks off work, then on your first day back you feel as if you've just started the job for the first time. You swear that all of the equipment is in different places, you have to think twice as hard when setting up surgical kits for certain operations, and when it comes to suturing up something yourself, its takes three times longer than it should because you are mega slow and having to concentrate so hard its painful for anyone watching you. I'm sure a holiday is meant to refresh you, not knock 4 years of training completely from your brain! Just shows how long since I last took a proper break from work!
That pretty much sums up my first 4 days back, retraining myself on my theatre duties. Oh, and having my appraisal at work too. I will admit that this was something I had been dreading for sometime, for one reason or another. I did not sleep very well on wednesday night because that was all I could think about. But it actaully went worryingly well. I am pretty much now in charge of the lab, and Andy and I are working on a grand plan to become masters of cytology (well, he will be, I'll just agree with whatever he says, he's got a book you know) and save the practice lots of money by doing more work in the lab. not sure how well that will go down with the other vets...but will keep the number crunchers happy!
Also, I thought it would be a good idea to write out a to do list today, just so I can make sure i've caught up with everything. Its 23 items long. some of it it the usual weekend jobs like cleaning the car, but others just seem to have accumulated. I'm sure I did half of them before I went away.
Plus, Only 3 weeks till i'm back on the race track. Jump straight in with a big meeting too, the A1GP, plus support races. Back to spending my weekends getting covered in grease, gravel, mud choking on tyre smoke and dealing with angry drivers who swear it was everyone elses fault but theirs that they crashed! I love it, and I can't really think what I would rather spend my weekends doing now i've started this...

back home...

Yep, it all finished at midday on sunday when I landed back at London heathrow, terminal 5. what a fab place that it is, everything is so quick and easy, much better than Los Angeles.
Everything is now unpacked and sitting in various places around my room, and i'm trying to work out exactly where i'm going to put everything.
My lasy blog finished as we were leaving the hostel to go down to long beach and board the cruise ship, and what a cruise it was!! 4 days of fantastic music, dancing, parties, dressing up, etc. and Cabo in mexico was a lovely place, would love to go back there again. Had a nice swim with a dolphin called Frieda, and a cuddle with a jaguar cub. It was a shame we only got to spend a few hours there. The cruise back to LA was a little....bumpy is the word I guess. It felt like a cross channel ferry ride, it was that rough. but we still had the music to keep us going. The last night (heroes and villains night) was the best party I have been to in a long time. John mayer actually DJ'd for the first couple of hours. Also, the fact that not too many people were dressed up made my friend and I very popular, everyone wanted to have their photos taken with us!!
By the time we got back to LA we had kind of worked out what we wanted to do for the rest of the week. That didn't last too long. we made a couple of good friends on the cruise who live not too far away, and they were in LA too so we met up with them a few times. We went back to universal studios again, walked along sunset boulevard, did a bit of shopping.
Now its all over. Back to reality and back to work (big whoop for that, not.) Plus, I still need to watch the first 2 races of the F1 season, and then my first event at Brands Hatch is in 3 weeks, can't wait to start that again!! I hope my orange gear still fits, think a diet might be in order...