Sunday, February 01, 2009

Darwin to London

As the plane was descending into London I could hardly believe that what seemed like only moments ago I was enjoying a bag of grease from the Parap Markets on Saturday morning.

The last three months have been a blur of parties, celebrations, websites, new beginnings and the rekindling of old friendships.

Every morning was spent down at the Coffee Club for a couple of long blacks, maybe a bite to eat, and the conversational rantings of Paul Manning, Karen Stoddard, Bec Walker and myself (with the occasional special guest appearances of Skevos, Bok, Suzie and Lyoness). Big cheers to the Store Manager Anna and her young yet very capable Assistant Manager Lauren for starting our mornings off with a smile.

Lunchtimes started off at the pool for a bit of exercise before I caught the debilitating disease, slackbastardititis, and moved to lunches at the wok, sushi train, banyan tree and shenannigans.

Afternoons were spent at one place, Shenannigans, and thanks to some quick promotional thinking Power and Water staff now get Happy Hour there every day during the week. Often it was just the two beers in the afternoon, but every now and then someone had a problem we needed to get to the bottom of which required 4 pints.

Fortunately we worked out a plan to keep everyones drinks/shouts in order as well. If someone went three drinks up in a shout (purchased 3 of your drinks before you brought them one) you owed that person 0ral gratification. No matter how hard Paul and I tried, the girls would never let us shout drinks!!!

During all this fun that was being outside of work we still did get some things accomplished. I managed to make the Power and Water Internet site go live (although I had nothing to do with the colour scheme/design/navigation structure etc etc, please don't judge me ;), and built a new services based Intranet site using an Open Source CMS.

It's hard to come to grips with though. On Friday morning I walked to work in 5 minutes and broke into a sweat doing so. Tomorrow morning, Monday, I'll take a 30 minute tube ride into work and we're expecting snow. On Saturday I lived in Dariwn, a city with a population of 120,000 people. On Sunday I'm back to living in London, a city with the population of 7.5 million people.

I'll miss everyone in Darwin, a few much more then I would have first thought, but I'm sure I'll begin to slip back into London lifestyle pretty quickly. I've already got my grandpa slippers, tracksuit and hoody on....... a far cry from last sunday with a pair of boardies and a singlet.

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