Save the world, buy a country

Greetings fellow bloggees, its back to the normal stuff unfortnately from the last few weeks worth of fun and tension, but not for long!

The rest of last week was spent calming down after the stoopidness that occured on the monday, but luckily we had plenty of work in for me to take my mind off things. Thursday night was spent at the Packhorse as normal, but this time we were slightly light, as some of the guys were on their hollibobs (see Gareths blog for details...but not yet, read mine first!), but the remaining 4 of us had a good laugh and was a pretty good night, especially as I got home way before midnight, which is a rare occurence nowadays, as I usually have to drop people home, and then chat for hours on end about nothing and everything, but still, a good night anyway.

The bank holiday weekend was spent outdoors in the main. On Saturday morning we decided to paint our decking, which has taken a bit of a battering this year with the rain and is in a fairly exposed position in the garden, so it gets alot of the sunlight, which doesn't help it much. So, after cutting back the amazon rainforest round it, and clearing the decking area, I got to work with mom ready with the broom, as every gust of wind brought some more leaves floating down onto the new paintwork, which was fun in itself! Actually the whole thing took about 20 mins to cover completely, all down to a very nifty spongey-brush thing on the end of a stick that we got from wickes, which made the paint go on really well, and due to the sunshine, the decking dried out in about 30 mins, which was excellent.

The afternoon was spent at Villa Park, watching a very enjoyable match against Fulham. We didn't turn up in the first half, but completely destroyed them in the second half, proving Jimmy Greaves theory of 'a gem of two halves', how right he was!

In the evening there was nothing on the telly, so we watched the 2nd pirates of the carribean again, mainly this time to see the beautiful islands of St Vincent and the Grenadines, and Dominica, where we were oohing and ahhing about where we're gonna go next march, which was suitably enjoyable!

Sunday we spent finishing off the decking and the garden furniture, which didn't take too long, then had a barbie on the evening, our first and last of the 'summer', and on monday, we didn't do very much at all, well I did because it was nose-to-the-grindstone time, as I had to get some coursework done as I am slightly behind where I should be in my course.

This week has gone pretty well. Got loads of work done at......er.....work! But the highlight for me, surely has to be an email the office received from one of our managing partners. Now, I must explain something to you first, on our intranet at work, we have a section where we can ask the managing partners anything, or suggest ways to improve the office etc and they usually come back with fairly inane but useful answers. Now, every week there are at least 3 or 4 questions about how we are going to improve our 'green' credentials round the office, as amazingly and stupidly, people still leave their computers on overnight, and refuse to throw paper away, even though the ratio between paper recycling boxes and people is abou 6:1 (seriously, we could count them as staff!).

So, an email came round yesterday from one of the managing partners with great fanfare (well, as much fanfare as you can have in an email without using a picture of fireworks), saying that from our original target of being Carbon Neutral by 2010, we are Carbon Neutral....NOW!

Right then, this came as a fair old surprise to me, as I'm fairly sure the fact that some morons still don't recycle paper, or turn their computers off at night, means that we have the carbon footprint of a small african nation, however how silly I was.

The email went onto say that they had managed this by sponsoring a project in the Ruhr Valley in Germany, which captures escaping methane from disused mines and uses them for electricity, which they have worked out, offsets the amount of pollutants we throw out at the firm.

Ok lets get this straight, instead of actually reducing our carbon footprint, we have merely bought something that will basically make us feel better, as they save just as much energy as we waste. My god, I wasn't aware it was that simple, I thought we just had to 'do our bit' and help ourselves, but obviously there is a better and simpler way. Just buy something that is environmentally friendly, and bobs-your-uncle, everyones a winner and the world is saved!

......I'm not sure they could have missed the point any more!

To be fair they have also set out guidelines for us to be more environmentally friendly, and are going to appoint 'Environment Wardens' for each floor in each office, implementing a system where the power is turned off on a computer and monitor if not in use by 7pm and a couple of other things, but surely it would be better to do that first, then sponsor the anti-cow-farting thing in Germany, then announce we are carbon neutral in a year or so. Obiously not!

Personally, as one of the biggest producers of methane in the world, I think everyone should sponsor a cow and teach them to stop farting all the time. That has to buy us at least another 50 years before the world turns into a barren mess!

So from the ridiculous to the severe, and my 'wonderful' medical 'problem'. As previously blogged, I went to the alex hospital for a check up and they gave me an appointment to come back and have a poke around with a camera, which is less than pleasant, as you can well imagine. Well that appointment got cancelled (fairly sure i told u about this), and so now I have another appointment to go back in....this coming monday.......


.......eep!


So I shall leave you with this thought, however badly your week starts off, I can assure you that theres a good chance I will have had a worse one!