Had a mad night last night, was planning to go to the Sung Eucharist at St Albans Abbey last night, which started at 8pm, but didn't actually manage to make it. I basically had time to get home from work, shower and drive to the Abbey. So, having got home, I got into the shower, which then packed up while I was in it! (I subsequently discovered it was the fuse for the loop that it's on - now fixed.) Most annoying, not to mention delay causing. I finally got out to the car, running late by this point, turned the key in the ignition, and the fuel light came on! So, I had to stop and get petrol on the way, making me even later. When I finally got to St Albans, I just couldn't find anywhere to park, ended up quite some distance from the Abbey, and ran towards it, got to the gates at about 7:53, only to find they were chained shut. I could see the lights on in the building, so figured they must use a different entrance for midweek services, so set out to try to find another entrance. At this point, the Abbey bell started tolling, I thought, for 8 o'clock. My heart sank. Thought I had missed the start of the service. When I looked at my watch, it said it was 7:55, which led me to think it had been running slow. When the bell continued ringing past eight rings, I realised it wasn't the case, and figured it must ring until the service starts. I had five minutes, the search for the other gate was on. Finally, with less than a minute to go, I found a sign, pointing down a side road, marked for the East Gate. I headed down this road and a few steps down it, the bell stopped chiming.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

I went home, couldn't face turning up late, slumped myself into the sofa, and gorged myself on duck chow mein - lovely.

Last Friday was our anniversary, and we spent it in Lancaster, checking out all our favorite coffee shops, pubs and restaurants up there, as well as taking some pics that are now in the photo gallery. Was a great time, and I was very pleased to see anti-war chalkings all over the place. Was somewhat disappointed though to discover that only seven people went on the march from the campus to the city centre. It seems that even when the entire nation is being engaged in politics because of this illegal war, student apathy still takes over.

This is my first entry since my colleague Sanjay's son was born - many congratulations to Sanj, and to Shree.

SuSE 8.2 is on the way, and I'll have a whole bunch of packages to go with it there's a lot of things waiting for the update to GNOME/GTK 2.2, including Galeon, Gnumeric, AbiWord, MrProject and The GIMP. As well as the very exciting Evolution 1.3 betas.

You can tell I'm bored when I get around to doing an entry to my diary ;) The trouble is that I haven't got around to automating this at all, so I'm manually transferring the bottom entry from here to the top of the archive, then putting the HTML template in place, all before I actually start typing.

It's Ash Wednesday today, I've given up caffeine for Lent, although I actually started the beginning of last week. Been drinking a decaf filter coffee that a friend suggested, and it's actually quite good. Also been drinking a lot of water, which I guess has to be good for me.

It's the last of our nights together as a whole church instead of cells tonight. Last week was the last of the actual training evenings, having a night of worship & prayer tonight. Then we have to start looking for a new cell group of course.

Amanda's parents are going to be staying with us this weekend, helping us fit a new shower, which will be nice, having a b0rked shower has not been a lot of fun. Plus, it'll be really nice to see them.