A reasonably uneventful weekend but a long one. Yesterday was a nice chilling out type day spent lazing around, watching films and eating. Fun stuff.

Well that must be a first, not only have I been shopping, but Christmas shopping, and three days in a row! I\'m not a great shopper, in fact, on the whole, I hate the whole concept of shopping, be it food, clothes, presents it basically sucks. But, shop we did, and pretty sucessfully I have to say with nearly everything sorted and still 3 weeks to go! Fantastic.

Well there we go then, another weekend over, another week beginning and only four weeks until we break up for Christmas! The snow was short lived although very pretty while it lasted. It\'s still extremely cold however, I have been forced to dig out my big winter coat.

After a lovely weekend it\'s back home again and work tomorrow, ho hum. A good time had by all Friday night, good luck Gem and Steve and bon voyage. Slightly jealous but not entirely sure I\'d want to do the whole round the world trip thingy, too many ties here.

The rest of the weekend has been spent window shopping and playing with visual basic. The later of the two I\'m finding frustrating in a fun kind of way. It\'s a bit like being back on MT262, knowing there\'s a solution but finding that it\'s evading you. Hopefully some sleep will see a clearer outlook.

Had a bit of a heart stopping moment last night. Silly me managed to pull the plug on my laptop while it was running without a battery. Laptop didn\'t like said power outage. Laptop decided to sulk. Big time. I was unable to boot into windows, safe mode, or any other option the handy f8 menu presents you with. The problem was eventually tracked down and the solution found (recovery console, chkdsk /r, if you\'re interested) but it took a further 1 1/2 hours to fix, 90 minutes of praying that it could be fixed.