Forty Years

Today is my Mum and Dad's 40th wedding anniver- sary, so I thought I'd include a picture of them. The picture was actually taken last year when I saw them in the UK, but as I haven't seen them since then I don't have anything more recent.

It's the end of my weekend, so tomorrow morning it's back to work. Hopefully this week won't be as stressful as last week! On Thursday we discovered that the new furniture for the staff room that was supposed to delivered during the April break was going to be delivered this week, so as well as having to prepare and teach our classes we also had to pack up all our materials ready for the delivery yesterday. It's completely ridiculous as far as I'm concerned to have such major upheaval during the term, but because any unallocated money that hadn't been spent had to be spent before the end of the financial year (which ends this week) Colombo decided - in their wisdom - that the furniture had to be delivered this week! Of course we've never actually seen the plans for the new staff room, so who knows what the place will look like when I get to work tomorrow morning.

As well as the new furniture I was also busy sending lots of e-mails and having meetings with my boss about a training day that that had been organised in Colombo for next Monday. No-one in Kandy really feels like going down to Colombo for training - especially as having training on a Monday would mean those working on a Sunday travelling down to Colombo immediately after finishing class. In the end it was decided that if teachers really didn't want to go then alternative training would be held in Kandy later the year - if only we'd been given that option to begin with!

As well as the stress at work I also discovered late last week that there was a problem with the flights I'd booked for our July trip. The flight we were booked on from Abu Dhabi to Colombo on the return journey was cancelled, which now means more than a 24-hour wait in Abu Dhabi. When I called Etihad to find out what they were going to do about the problem I was told that because I hadn't actually paid for the ticket there was nothing they could do, which to me is a real cop-out. Someone was supposed to call me yesterday, but didn't, so when I get to work tomorrow I'm going to call them up to see what's going on. I've found an alternative flight with Emirates, but because Etihad fly to Bruxelles it was more convenient. With Emirates we'll have to travel to Dusseldorf in Germany, which although not that far from Liege is still further than Bruxelles. Will see what happens.

OK - time to start getting ready for bed.