An interesting couple of days. Yesterday evening I went to a very interesting talk in the Old Library in the city centre on Brunel's impact on the South Wales landscape. I parked in our city centre depot and walked round with the afternoon shift supervisor, while being impressed and amazed by the speed at which large bits of the city centre are disappearing in preparation for our new shopping centre. It was a good opportunity to catch up with all the news from the depot. As we walked past the old Tabernacle chapel, there was a smartly dressed man in a mac hanging around looking furtive. Just as we passed he sidled up to the litter bin and slipped in a brown paper package. On leaving me, my colleague was rightly concerned and on inspection it proved to be a fine collection of porn!

The talk was excellent - to my surprise, half the Council seemed to be there. On taking a seat, my colleague A joined me (the champion raspberry tart maker) along with a friend of his from our IT dept. After the talk, then bumped into a colleague from Parks who was there with his dad, which was nice. Strolled back to the depot by which time the night shift had arrived and it was good to stay a while and have a chat and catch up with the news. I ended up staying there till around 10.40 before setting off home.

today was an interesting day at an APSE meeting. My colleague L was kindly giving me a lift (in his BMW convertible, how posh is that?) and was picking me up from home at around 9.20 this morning. Thinking I had plenty of time, of course the inevitable happened, I dawdled and by 9.18 I was in a frantic multi-tasking mode of applying makeup, drying my hair and finding a pair of earrings. Naturally,then L was late! Opened the front door, and was practically blown flat by a gale of frightening size with accompanying horizontal rain. Our bin bag(being very light) was half way down the street. Anyway we got to the meeting, not helped by a Nazi jobsworth in the hut guarding the Council car-park. Where do we find these people?

Meeting went well. J and I did a joint presentation on smoking related litter and listened to some other presentations on highways surfacing and benchmarking issues. Left there, came home, again courtesy of the BMW magic carpet and did some ironing. Then updated this. Also just had an email, confirming that on Sunday, a couple of old school cohorts are coming to lunch.
Am really looking forward to it, and also the enjoyable process of deciding what to cook. Hoorah! Weather has calmed down slightly and seems to have stopped raining, although it is still quite breezy.

Forgot to mention earlier, that last night as I was leaving work, I walked up the car park to the landfill overflow car park by the weighbridge. The nights are noticeably beginning to draw out now which is lovely. Anyway, the sky was a stunning deep blue with just a few early stars. Just as I left the top of the main car park, I noticed an owl hunting down the hedge line. The paler underside of the wings is quite ghostly and beautiful. I stood, entranced. The bird life at work is superb - I see so many species there, it is a real treat.