I'm off to Bristol tomorrow. The university has been participating in a benchmarking exercise for e-learning (I went to Warwick last year for part of it). To mark the end of the benchmarking exercises, there is a celebration event at Bristol tomorrow. Originally Louise was going to go too, but she has fallen ill today so she can't go. Even if she is better tomorrow, she is going to the states on Friday for a conference and said she had some work to get done before then. I don't think this thing tomorrow is a big deal, but it is unfortunately almost 3 hours away by train, so I will be travelling a lot of the time.

Recently I've been busy with my two courses, which started two and a half weeks ago. I am taking the courses Information Literacies for e-learning and Communication and Discourse Analysis. So far the communication one has been a lot of work (10 readings in the first 2 weeks), but they are easing it up some now. It is also a lot of terminology and theory that is completely new to me, unlike the ones last semester. Hopefully afterwards it will help some with research I want to do though, so it is a good opportunity for me.

Christmas in England did not result in too many surprises (like the pantomime in Jersey), but did mark one unique occasion: my first time driving in the UK as a licensed driver. It was successful in that I didn't hit anyone or anything with the car. Didn't really have to do anything fancy though. I drove on three different trips, one of which was quite long on a really narrow coastal road. It was challenging in that the lane was extremely narrow with a dirt bank on the side, and the speed limit regularly changed from 20mph to 60mph as you encountered random tiny villages during the drive. Was generally quite fun though, and filled with lots of bird-watching stations, so no doubt my parents will want to go there if they ever make it to Norfolk.

First half-week of work was pretty uneventful, though it was hard to get myself motivated at times. Not many other people in the office or at the university for that matter, so communicating with people generally had to be ruled out! Still, managed to get some stuff done, and this week should be more normal.

The strange thing that happens this week is that I am starting working for one of the four faculties two days a week for the whole semester. They had someone hired last summer to do e-learning but she left in December because the boss is a bit insane. So I am taking over some of the work she did until they can get a replacement. I'm also tasked a bit with sorting out this boss, though he is quite crazy. Should be a challenging but interesting time. Will be different getting heavily involved with one faculty rather than looking at the university as a whole.