Work

I spent a lot of time on a data analysis project at work this week.  Friday evening was the EY Christmas party, which was okay- tasteless food, crowded bar, some dancing, plenty of networking.  I went into the office on Saturday and took James to the Soho Pizza Express Jazz Club for (surprise) pizza and jazz to celebrate his birthday.  On Sunday we went to his aunt and uncles house for a family dinner.

Only a week and two days... only a week and two days...  I should make myself an advent calendar.

Love always,
Melanie

It's the most wonderful time of the year

... Unless you're in London, where it's been raining for most of the last two weeks.

Last weekend James and I visited one of James's old WoW friends currently doing a degree at Loughborough University. (It's pronounced "Luff-bra".  I was calling it "Lock-borough".)  We were well fed and lazy.

This week we celebrated Coffey's birthday (twice) with drinks.  I made a lemon-meringue pie.  Beyond that, it was an uneventful week.

The first half of the week I was on an audit client (Associated Press) in Camden Town, which is the wildest place in London.  Go google it.  It's made up of a series of open-air markets and permanent mini-stores opening to twisty back alleyways.   There you can find any type of alternative, goth, punk, or sex fetish outfit imaginable.  Girls with faces of 60% metal stand in the streets with signs advertising body piercing shops, while across the street dudes who looked like they swam in a sea of open Sharpies advertise local tattoo parlors.  To get to the AP office, you must go down one of these alleys until it dead end with a dumpster on your left and a giant black gate on your right.  After scanning your ID card, the gate so that you can climb the stairs behind it and emgerge- ta-dah!- in front of a very typical newly refurnished brick office building.

Yesterday James and I made Thanksgiving dinner for some of our friends, and today I laid on the couch wrapped in a comforter researching DSLR cameras.  It was a great weekend.

Love always,
Melanie

Lazy Melanie

I had just about decided to forget about this blog for a while and have a week of, but the guilt of not writing got to me. This week was pretty normal. On Friday James and I celebrated our two year anniversary by going to Mildred's, which is an amazing vegetarian restaurant. This weekend I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10 and (completely legal, courtesy of my student ACM membership) Windows 7. Getting the drivers for the Sony-specific features of my laptop took most of the weekend, blah blah blah blah.

Eh, fuck the guilt, I don't feel like writing. There's plenty of more interesting things to do (like sleep).

Love always,
Melanie

English Holidays are Fun

Sorry for the late post Sarah, I decided to make brownies instead of update my blog. I've started to bake a dessert to bring into the office weekly. Next week will be cupcakes, lemonbars, or possibly something with key lime- any votes?

On Saturday James and I met with some friends to see the Guy Fawkes fireworks. Leaving the house was like a scene from Dawn of the Dead. At the end of the street was a solid stream of people blocking the road from side to side, heading to the heath.

The heath (hence "Blackheath") is a giant open grassy area in the middle of the town. It's attached to Greenwich Park on the north. A few roads and many pedestrian paths cut across the heath, but beyond that, it's just dead grass. The popular legend is that the heath was used to bury the excess bodies leftover from the Black Plague. However, Wikipedia claims it's just a patch of poor soil that gravel is extracted from, causing huge pits, which were then filled with wreckage from WWII bombings.

Anyway, Blackheath hosts the largest gunpowder plot fireworks display in London. The display was pretty good.

Love always,
Melanie

Boots and Cookies

I'll keep this short because I have a sudden urge to watch "The Matrix", and the final hours of the weekend are quickly approaching. This week, I

• Succeeded in making a web demo of a data analytic piolot project actually do something using my amazing (*cough) C# skills,
• Was given even more work to do as a result,
• Went to a geeky Symbian Foundaton party with James,
• Became addicted to Scribblenauts (a new Nintendo DS game),
• Bought two beautiful new pairs of boots from the Clarks Factory store for £45 (one pair of Gortex/brown leather winter boots with leaves on them, on pair of nicer brown leather low-heeled work boots),
  
• Made white-chocolate macadamia nuts cookies with hazelnuts instead of macadamia nuts because the grocery store selection here is a bit slim,
• Presented these cookies to my friend Aliki as a birthday gift at her Halloween party last night,
• Spent two hours getting to the aforementioned party when it should have only taken an hour because we missed our train; spent two hours on night buses getting home because TFL are liars and there is NOT a 1:30am train from Charing Cross.

I love bullet points. They make it look like I put some real effort into this post!

Love always,
Melanie

Boring

Who wants to suggest a new title for this blog? My current one just fails.

Mmmm Cheesecake!

I made a cheesecake on Saturday, and some strawberry sauce to go along with it. Mmmmm!

On Tuesday I went to a lesson with the London Swing Dance Society near Aldwych. I did an intermediate Charleston with some crazy kicks and direction changes. Fun stuff! Now I just need a partner who can dance (it's not really James's thing).

This weekend I had my first driving lesson on the wrong side of the road. I was more than a little freaked out- the roads are narrow, the parking spaces are small, the breaks are sensitive and I had no idea how big my car was (tiny). Yesterday I went to a town near Brighton for James's sister's housewarming. It was so nice to see the ocean again. I've missed it since June.

That's about it for me- lots of cooking, baking, some dancing (but not enough), and now some C# at work! My day goes by some quicker when I'm programming.

So how is everyone?

Love always,
Melanie

Ahh-choo!

Dammit! I forgot to post last week! But as no one scolded, I suppose it doesn't really matter.

I'm getting over a nasty cold and sound somewhat like Kermit the Frog. It's be great, I finally have an excuse to sleep as much as I'd like. :-)

This past week and the coming week I'm working on LastMinute.com in Victoria. It's nice to have normal work hours. I've been doing logical access and change management walkthroughs, which I haven't had the chance to do yet. I'm also doing EY Mercury scripts, which is just looking over the results of SQL queries or Unix scripts. Not my favorite thing in the world. Honestly, I can't wait to move away from Channel 1 (Audit) work into the more techy advisory stuff.

What else is new? Umm... I found a decent swing club in Aldwych that has Lindy lessons on Tuesdays. They do a funny slower side step rather than a back step, but otherwise it's still fun.

I went out for a co-workers 21st birthday last night, but went home early on the last train from Charing Cross because I'm getting old.

Love always,
Melanie

No Change

I knew I forgot to do something this weekend. Sorry for the late post!

This is my last week in Bristol, yippee! On Saturday James and I went to IKEA to get furniture. Our flat looks great. We're having a house-warming party this Saturday. I was supposed to meet up with my old friend Tricia (we wrecked havoc on London together at KCL in '07) this weekend, but we failed (twice) at doing so. James and I did end up at a little basement Jazz club in Greenwich on Sunday evening, which was good fun.

Someone remind me to take the pictures off of my camera this weekend. (As in remind me in a few days, don't be a smart ass and remind me now to do it later.)

Internet At Last

I'm still at Bristol during the week, but we moved to the Marriott at the city center. It's next door to a huge shopping plaza that opens 15 minutes after we leave for the Orange client site and closes about an hour before we get back to hotel. Lovely. The Bristol attractions all operate on simlar schedules. On the bright side, there's plenty of restaurants. While staying at the Hilton on-site, we had carvery every day.

Friday evening I went out with my awesome ITRA grad friends. Unfortunately, we went to Clapham and visited the a club without a dance floor. Woot... It took nearly 2 hours of night buses to get home. (I did get hit on by a middle aged black man while waiting at the Elephant and Castle N89 bus stop. He'd loudly say something polite and conversational, like "Coming home from a night with friends?" then add under his breath "Yeah, come home on my bus baby, you know what they say about black men is true.")

Yesterday I... what did I do yesterday? I don't remember. Not much. Today was James's nephew's first birthday party. I still don't see the point of a first birthday party. The kid had no idea what was going on.

... And tomorrow I'm back to Bristol. There's once again no internet in the hotel, which is shit. (Hmm, that's a British expression.) On the plus side, I don't work during the day on Friday in exchange for being the independent arbitrator for the EuroMillions lottery at night.

I need life updates from everyone!

Real Work

This past week I started my actual job at my first client. Unfortunately, my client is located in Bristol, so for five weeks I have to be at Paddington at 8:30am on Monday and I get back to Blackheath at 7pm on the Friday. I'm not a fan of this schedule. It wouldn't be so bad if I hadn't just moved in, and if our Bristol hotel was in the city rather than being in the middle of nowhere. Despite being a Hilton, there's no free internet, and nothing to do except go to the gym (ewww).

My job itself involves doing walkthroughs of internal controls, testing a sample of data to ensure the control functions, and formally writing the results. For example, if there's a control in place to make sure that leavers of the firm have their account access removed within three days, we may test a sample of leavers from HR and ask for "evidence" (usually a screenshot) that their access had been removed. Not the most exciting stuff in the world, but if I stick with it, I'll be able to do more advisory work. My next assignment involves data marts, an assignment a new grad is very lucky to get!

Yesterday James and I helped clean out our old house in Wimbledon. Today I met Nic, Jonas and Nadine for lunch, a tour of Greenwich Market, and drinks. It was great to see them and talk about people we knew at Lehigh. Nic is from Bexleyheath, which is a short bus ride from Blackheath. It's a nice little irony, considering we meet at a schetchy nightclub in Bethlehem, thousands of miles from here.

British Telecom

I think I forgot to add that my new flat is without internet until Sept. 26th. This is mainly due to the monopoly BT wanting to charge £120 to "re-connect" our line, and Virgin Media having a very long wait list, likely because BT sucks ass.

So if you haven't heard from me, that's why. I apologize.

Use Your Imagination

Alright everyone, just pretend that I've been regularly calling/texting/emailing/messaging you over the past month and you know exactly what's going on in my life.

As I've completely failed to keep in touch, this blog is my way of saying "I'm sorry". Don't be offended that I'm not communicating with everyone I know personally, because a.) I wouldn't have enough time and I'd end up not communicating with anyone, and b.) this is more polite than copying and pasting, which I have been known to do on Facebook.

Now to the point. I spent this summer working as the Assistant Director at Skymeadow Girl Scout Camp near my home in PA. Like every other summer at camp, we were all overworked and underpaid, but I had an amazing time and wish I could to back. (I think there's photos floating around Facebook somewhere. Check out Ace's gnome, he tells all.)

I flew to London on August 9th and started work on the 10th. I spent the first and third week of my training at a posh (to use the British word) training center in Guildford. I was with 20 ITRA grads from across the UK and Ireland. Photos do exist, but most aren't very flattering. Please don't look for them.




Oh yeah, you may not know what ITRA means. Officially I'm an Associate with Ernst & Young -> Advisory -> IT Risk and Assurance. I help make sure that program controls are doing what they should do. For anyone not lucky enough to have CSB 311, in short, I do walkthroughs and testing of all of the controls between the user and the data for any application that has a material effect on a firm's financial statements.

This past week I was managed to get chargable work helping with a TAS (Transaction Advisory Services- different world than Advisory) project for McKenzie. Despite being told many times that EY only advises firms and never implements anything, I discovered that exceptions do exist. I spent the week fixing a few bugs and identifying far more in a .NET project. :-D

Last week James and I moved into a few flat in Blackheath. It's a sweet little town only 12 minutes by train from London Bridge (where my home EY office is), and our flat is just up the street from the station. If anyone wants pictures, tell me. The flat is still a work in progress. We're missing a few crucial pieces of furniture and kitchen supplies. Most of my decorations and homey stuff are under the basements steps at home in PA.

Will I stay at EY forever? Probably not, ask again in a few years. Will I stay in London forever? Probably not, ask again in a few years.