And so the weekend is over. This weekend was very busy for us with chores on Saturday and a visit on Sunday.

On Saturday, I caught up with my garden chores that had accumulated due to my USA trip and bad weather. I mowed the lawn, trimmed hedges and went to the tip multiple times. There’s still more to do, but the garden is looking much better and is much more ready for the winter. Georgina cooked a very nice roast dinner also which was very tasty :)

On Sunday, we went to Warwick Castle to meet up with Tim, Clare and Teagan. We haven’t seen them in a year or so and it was great to catch up with them. Teagan, in particular, is growing up and looking more and more like her mother which can only be a good thing. Warwick Castle itself was quite good, but the ghost tower event proved to be too scary for the kids. I particularly liked the displays in the Great Hall, like this one:

Finally made it to the end of the week. A relatively productive day as I managed to get some stuff done that’s been waiting for a good few weeks now. And it was pretty much all billable :)

I also managed to get to the post office to pay in a cheque which was nice. It was a lovely day; better than most of August in fact, so I spent a little while sitting in the sunshine too.

Today I managed to get some productive work done. The tiredness that I’ve suffered from this week is clearly over. This is a good thing as I have a very busy day tomorrow!

The biggest news of the day is that I’ve been accepted to speak at a PHP conference in Manchester. I’m really pleased as I want to get the experience and more exposure in the PHP community is only a good thing.

Ben had his first forest schools lesson today. He seemed to enjoy it, especially having to wear the yellow all-weather clothes.

Today, I took both kids swimming on my own as Georgina had a school meeting about a school trip for Jon in the summer. Swimming was good as the boys behaved well with Jon getting changed both times on his own. Ben starts next week, so was quite excited and said hello to Mark, his forthcoming teacher.

At work we have started making plans for opening our Birmingham satellite office. The current plan is to start next Tuesday and then I’ll be working up there two days per week – probably Thurs and Fri. As I had to leave early from work for swimming, I didn’t get to take any photographs though :(

I managed to get out at lunchtime for a short trip to Ashleworth Tithe Barn. I didn’t get any time to look around, so I’ll have to go back!

The boys had their school photos today which look good. I had a good evening as I fixed a bug in Zend_Config (easy) and learnt a bit about merging with Subversion (complicated)!

First day back at work was a fairly gentle introduction. I didn’t get much of what I wanted to do as there was a stack of little things that needed doing! I also managed to migrate our CVS server to another computer which is useful as we’re retiring the old computer in 8 days!

At home, Ben had his first full day at school today and loved it. Georgina also got all the chores done much more easily today… not coincidentally! So all in all a very good day all round. I didn’t get to go out at lunchtime, so will have to try tomorrow.

Having been away for a week in the USA, I’m now back. Today we took advantage of the weather and went to Hanbury Hall for a walk around. There’s a set walk that takes around 40 mins or so which is just about the right length. The kids then had an ice cream and spent some time on the playground before we all came home again.

Today was a little frustrating as I failed to buy a new camera backpack for my trip. As a result, I’m taking my old one, but it’s not as padded as I’d ideally like. We’ll see how it goes!

I went down to London this evening to see my parents and to be in London ready for leave early tomorrow. I’ve had a good evening with mum and dad – mostly talking trains with dad :)

My last day at work before the conference was fairly uneventful. I managed to clear up most of the odds and ends that I wanted to which was good. I even sorted out some extra stuff for Carl to help for next week :)

Having trouble installing the database software on my laptop at the moment. I’m hopeful to have solved it soon though.

Today a new hard drive was installed into my laptop. It’s really big! I’m sure that I’m going to get to at least June before filling it all up… As a result, I’ve spent the day re-installing the software etc and still have a fair way to go before everything is back as I want it.

Also, today I decided to check how much space was left on our main file server and discovered that it was a few hundred megabytes. So I also upgraded the hard drive in that machine to a bigger one that I had ordered last month ready to be done. So a task on “when I get around to it” list actually happened today – a big accomplishment!