Tuesday 10th January 2006, 03:13

Yet another large gap between entries (nice that people are still bored enough to check back now and then though :-p). At least I have a reasonable excuse this time, I've had little time to pause for breath in the past month or so. Moving house, starting a new job and flying to the States for the first time all within a few days of each other has just been crazy.

So anyway, I have a flat...on my own now, after *someone* dropped out on me :-7 But it's probably worked out for the best, given I can leave all my junk everywhere and not have to worry about it. Of course I'd probably have to unpack some of it first, given I didn't actually move in until the day before I started work it didn't leave much time to pack stuff away neatly. Thankfully this is where parents who know how to do things like assemble furniture and put things in drawers come in very useful. The flat is nice, fairly small but perfectly adequate for my needs, and a 10-15 minute journey to work is pretty sweet.

The new job has been great so far, in that I haven't actually had to do anything. A couple of days induction included a Ricky Gervais video on company values (okay so I never really got The Office, but it was fairly amusing), and being told that we weren't allowed to abseil off the top of the buildings. Shucks. Otherwise it's just been a great deal of trying to remember faces and names, admittedly with limited success but I'm getting there.

The flights out to the States were fairly uneventful thankfully, and there were plenty of distractions on the plane (though I can't decide whether the little map that constantly informed me we were at 36,000 feet was a good thing or not). Definitely had it better than the sales and marketing grads who missed their flight, and then had a catering van crash into the next one. Whoops.

Over here has been fun, currently staying in a pretty nice hotel in Bellevue which is ten minutes or so from Seattle. Some things are taking a while to adjust to (four lanes of traffic each way pretty much everywhere, customer service that's actually genuine), and we found time to visit the Space Needle on Sunday which was entertaining. Today has mostly been catching up with the grads from the other 35 countries or so involved in the scheme I'm on, and sitting through a barrage of PowerPoint presentations whilst attempting to assimilate at least some of the information coming my way.

Anyway, apologies if this post has been less than exciting or coherent but I'm still shaking off the last of the jetlag. Hopefully I'll get the chance to pause for breath and write something better when I get back to the UK. Oh, and happy new year all (especially to those who I didn't see or don't remember the party :-p)