Sarah Rules

We return to our hero sitting on a train to Edinburgh having just eaten a breakfast ciabatta, listening to Idlewild to get her in the Scottish mood and getting ready to write a post about her Christmas holidays.  She can’t remember all the detail and she’s having trouble mustering up enough strength to trawl facebook for photos.  Here it goes.

I was back home in Essex for nearly a month!  One month of no labs, no silly sleeping patterns and no programming.  Blissful it was.  I know I’m going to miss things out as I stopped using my calendar over the holiday but the things I can remember are as followed.

I attended the event “Winning Women In Technology” hosted by J P Morgan.  Basically about 20 women at various stages of computery degrees (I was the youngest) came together at the J P Morgan building to listen to talks, give presentations and learn from and learn about women in technological roles and how they got their, their tips, their experiences, things like that.  It was a very informative day and I got to see a trading floor.  That was exciting.  50 men, seven women, two golf clubs.

Then Center Parcs!  It was Sarah (White’s) yesterday (we’ll call this her birthday message).  She was 21.  You will notice a lot of this post involves celebrations for said birthday.  Anyway, he birthday began on December 14th when we went to Center Parcs hooray!  We had the lovliest of villas to stay in.  Super lovely.  We all had en suites and televisions.  Also, in the games room (yes, there was a games room) there was the hugest TV in history and a PS3.  How exciting no?  We also had a sauna but it wasn’t working.  Because of this the lovely people at Center Parcs gave us all free entry to the spa.  So the next day after two dance classes (get me drunk and I’ll show you the routines I learnt) we all went to the spa.  Between the steam rooms, turkish baths, saunas and pool I got drenched and dried out a million times that day.  All very relaxing of course.  But the coolest thing about the spa was that out on the balcony there was a huge water bed with pretendy fur throws on it.  After a very quick dash from the doors to the bed we were warm but watching our breath in front of us.  Outside in the woods listening to birds, watching planes fly and the sun go down.

The weekend was mainly made up of trips to the spa and swimming pool.  Saturday evening however was party games evening.  Sarah’s Mummy and Daddy had prepared so many games!  After splitting into two teams we had to complete some bush tucker trials.  After being blind folded and told a suitably gruesome story about where I was about to place my hand I had to find three stars.  I found two and with the help of my team the third was easy to reach.  I completely beat Sarah at it.

There were also some challenges involving eating some very yucky things.  Seaweed crackers, cheesey balls with cola bottles.  Needless to say I was glad I only had to put my hand in cold spaghetti!

Later on in the night we were told to choose a member of our team as a model and then given red, green and black tissue paper, some cotton wool, sellotape and glue.  We were given five minutes to turn our models into father christmas!  After much hilarity and extra minutes being added because Sarah’s mum and dad were having so much fun watching these were the results.  Our team won.  Clearly.

On Sunday night we all went out for a meal.  We were easily the noisiest table in the restaurant.  It was a very fun evening fueled by alcohol and helium and finishing with a go on the indoor children’s play area and attacking Phil with the soft toys for tormenting us all the whole weekend.

Phew.  How exciting was that?  I’ll continue the rest of the holiday later.