Saturday 5th December 2009. Dear diary, what a day it's been. Started off in a hospital bed with IV antibiotics being pumped into my arm and ended the day in a DJ dancing to "It's raining men" on the dance floor after my first christmas meal of the season. Life with cancer can sure give you extremes!
And I lasted until about 10.30 on our Saturday night out. Not bad I thought but I was glad to get home to my own bed that night.
Sunday was a wonderful lazy start without the need for an early morning alarm call but the lie in did cause me to calculate a time shift for the antibiotics I needed to take. 4 tablets four times a day, an hour before food or on an empty stomach. Not getting up until 10 am on the Sunday morning subsequently called for mental calculations on how I was going to fit 16 tablets into the rest of the day with the restrictions on having to take them an hour before food!
Result was typical of my logic. Take first lot at 10.30am then, having decided that we would go out for a Sunday lunch, we were off to the local Toby Carvery for 12. Second lot mid afternoon (on an emptyish stomach) then third lot at 7pm before a late tea thus leaving the final tablets to about 11pm before climbing the stairs to bed. Not a perfect fit between tablets and food but it sort of fitted the rules!! :-)
Monday morning and I needed to go into the office. But not for a happy reunion as I needed to make someone redundant. Never a nice thing to do, especially just before Christmas, but it is one of the downsides of running your own business. There were tears and I felt like pooh. It was even worse when they told me that I'd been the best boss they had ever had and they fully understood the circumstances. Help, it would have been better if she had got mad and hated me! Being given a huge hug from someone you've just made redundant just cracks you up. At least having cancer seems to have made it ok for me to show my emotions.
Just worked the half day as per doctor's orders and I made sure I was eating well and went out for a walk in the afternoon as instructed. Still felt bad about the morning but, sadly, it had to be done.
It was soon Tuesday and it was a day of doing this and doing that. The "that" included some good work stuff. We have just been asked to come up with some ideas of what to do with three basements on the site of the old steelworks in Ebbw Vale. Sounds simple? Well these basements are massive, three of them, about 100m + long and about 16m wide and, on average, about 8m deep but some 15m deep in places!
The whole steelworks has been flattened to make way for a massive regeneration project that includes a new hospital, school, college, park, leisure centre, housing and business units. And we had to come up with ideas for these basements! Oh we get some fun commissions! I will let you all know our ideas when we firm up on them, that wont be that long as we have to complete the study with designs, costings, programmes and P&L projections all by the beginning of January!
On Wednesday I met up with a couple of the team working on this project in a hotel just near the Chievely services on the M4 to go through my basic ideas and concept so that they could start their part of the work towards the Jan deadline. The meeting went well and we had "a plan" by the end os the session that should see us complete on time.
Back home along the M4 I needed to keep to time as we were off out to a friends house that evening for carols and mince pies. The festive season had certainly now started. Having only been in the village a year we were very pleased with the invite as it would allow us to get to know even more of the locals. We already love our little village because of it's great community spirit and the more you join in the better it gets!
And so we found ourselves slouched in a sofa drinking tea, eating mince pies and singing christmas carols. And it was all the ones we all know from our childhood, none of this new lot that nobody knows the tunes for.
Now it's a small world folks. Even Disney has a song and show based on that idea and our little carol singing get together would prove that again. Sitting next to me with his wife was the retired police sergeant from the village. A man from the valleys with a typical Welsh Male Voice Choir timbre. So I ask him, "are you going to the Eisteddford next year?" "Oh yes" he replies "it's in my home town Ebbw Vale on the site of the old steel works"
This I knew as we had to design one of the basements at the steelworks so that it could be completed and up and running for the Eisteddford in July next year. So I told him about our task for the basements on the site. "Well", he explains "as a young student I helped dig those basements, we were given the job of gunning out the clay at the bottom. Dirty work but it paid well for us students."
"And I used to work at the steelworks" his wife added. "I walked there every morning for my little admin job as a young lady just out of school and the air was so thick with dust from the steel making that I needed a shower by the time I got to my office"
It certainly is a small world and I ended up getting some fab background information about the steelworks that would add that little extra to our ideas. You just never know who you will meet in life.
So that was the end of Wednesday and a good day it had been. Would Thursday be as good? Well it would start with a meeting with the bank of England so it had some promise...
More later folks!
Andrew xxx
