Well, my holiday and search for work is now over. Bob has a number of good prospects, and is working with an agency to maximise her options for landing a contract position in the next few weeks.
I've taken up the role of Senior Java Developer with Somo, in an office that is not only about 100m from the statue of Eros in Picadilly Circus, but has a view across the city, and down into the circus. In a way it's funny to describe my role as "a" Java developer, as I'm currently the Java developer. The company has a new product that's not entirely publicly visible yet, which was built by an external company. They've decided they want the product to continue in house, and so are going to build a team to carry it forward.
Next step: somewhere to live permanently. Stay tuned for further news.
It's been a full and crazy week. Monday night we went off to see Genticorum in the basement of the Slaughtered Lamb. Has there ever been a better name? Genticorum are a Quebecois trio, performing traditional Quebecois folk, and their own stuff, and are seriously awesome.
It's been a wild whirl of job seeking this week, and I have reached the end of the week with not one, but two offers for awesome jobs, and am now left with the tough decision of which I will choose. By the time most of you read this, I will have chosen, and hope to tell you about it. One of the jobs is up near Kings Cross station, and the other is around the corner from Picadilly Circus. As we went through there on Thursday afternoon, photos occurred:
The giant screens over the square had crashed, and we were amused to see not only was the media being delivered via Dropbox, but that some tech had remotely logged in to have a look at the logs in Notepad and was sitting somewhere saying "oh god oh god oh god how do i fix this?"
Eros, as ever, was unperturbed. I will have to get photos of the building overlooking this, where a trio of golden girls eternally dive into the crowd below.
And for no readily apparent reason, there's an awesome statue of four prominently male stallions apparently bursting from the wall. I would like to think they have names, but if I do take the job near here, will name them myself.
One of these days I will try to take awesome photos of what is awesome in the V&A. This is not one of them, and does not readily convey that this is a hallway full of the Renaissance marbles not spectacular enough to put in the main gallery. I wanted to go to the V&A yesterday in order to think about my quandary, although we did get seriously distracted en-route in Hamley's, and swamped by hordes of feral New Zealanders apparently rampaging through Kensington in order to celebrate Waitangi Day a few days early.
The thing about going to the V&A to think - or some of the other astounding places we have found - is that there is indescribable pleasure and comfort to be found in just sitting in, or strolling through, rooms filled with staggering beauty.
And in other news, we have finally had snow. It probably won't last, but while it's here we are enjoying it immensely.
Our garden patio became slightly less comfortable for eating breakfast in, and we strolled down through Hampstead to find coffee and breakfast, and throw snowballs in the common, detouring through the cemetery as we returned. I hope for more snow, and will be thrilled even when it turns to disgusting brown slush.
