Aspirations

Yesterday I had a meeting with some people who work for another organisation but I do the bulk of my work with. Two of them applied to get promoted and got turned down, which was not good news. It therefore looks like they both might have to find new jobs in the near future, C is already going and I applied for that job I was interested in – so our merry band (and perhaps more importantly, the work we are doing) might be heading for a sticky end. If they are all moving on, I really think that I should try even harder to find a new job, as there is no way I want to be covering the work of four people!

Anyway, I have made some progress on finding a surveyor. I have had three positive responses (out of six enquiries) and it is really interesting to see how different the responses have been, and their quality really affects my perception of who I would be tempted to use. It’s not just down to me, of course, as my neighbours will have to pay part of the bill as well, so will have to make the decision as well. I have a clear favourite out of those I have heard from though (but have no idea what his charges would be…).

On other matters, I am reading the Three Musketeers at the moment. It is a very long and wordy book (which is not necessarily a bad thing). I do think it could have been decidedly shorter if Alexandre Dumas had got on with the plot a bit quicker. I did struggle with it at the beginning because I kept imagining the characters were dogs. Check here, if you have no idea why I would struggle with that…

I have also found a website that is useful for listening to audio books for free, which includes my current read. It is books that are outside of copyright (so published before 1923). It’s called LibriVox and volunteers record chapters so that anyone can listen to a whole array of books. You can volunteer if you want. I think most of the readers are probably American so it could add a new dimension to have a few British accents. Great service though.

If you are into the written word then you might like to take a look at this staircase. I would never make it to the top of the stairs! It’s in London somewhere so maybe I should go and find it. I don’t have any stairs where I live but perhaps this is what I should aspire to.