Lovely Weekend Followed By More Trauma

Had a lovely Saturday - met up with Charlie and Celia, neither of whom I have seen for years. Celia is living in Darwin now and sees Steve and Kerryn quite often. Charlie is soon to join the workforce as an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon. How exciting!
We saw a play called The Last Confession, which stars David Suchet and is about the events surrounding the mysterious death of Pope John Paul I. Taffy also came along. It started off quite slowly, which is not good after lunch for the nap reflex. Several people around us did not come back after the intermission. It picked up, though, and I was on the edge of my seat by the end even though I had a general idea of what was going to happen. The portrayal of politics in the Vatican was intriguing. One thing that none of us knew was that Pope John Paul II was a compromise candidate.
I was to fly up to Aberdeen on Sunday evening to attend offshore safety & survival training on Monday to Wednesday. However, due to my miscalculation of time, the taxi driver taking a bad route and crazy traffic, I arrived at Heathrow 1.50hrs after I left home (usually takes 1hr-1.15hrs) and missed my check-in time by 5 mins. What made it worse was the the flight was actually delayed by an hour but they still wouldn't let me on. :-( So, rebooked my flight for the next morning and went home again (which took 1 1/2 hours) to annoy Taffy, who thought he had the house to himself for the night. Up again at 4.15am and back to the airport. Got to the training centre in Aberdeen at 9.45am to be told that I had missed 1.45hrs of training and it was not possible for me to join the group as the training was structured as theory, practical, theory, practical. Come back another time. (!!) They eventually put me in another group that had theory all day on Monday and I had a make-up session on Monday evening to catch up on what I had missed in the morning.
Perhaps because of all the running around, I came down with a cold on Monday night (second one since I have come over - have been averaging 1 every 2 years or so for the last 10 years), just in time to do the lifeboat/raft sessions on Tuesday and the helicopter crash simulations on Wednesday in the pool. Great. Despite that, the training was great fun, especially the fire fighting and the helicopter crash simulations. I had to struggle to keep my mouth shut and not say anything when people were complaining that their suits were filling up with water even though they are supposed to be waterproof. When I finished, my entire torso was still dry. :-)
Having a chat with Vera, Steve K & Sandra on Thursday, potentially having dinner with Kong Suk Por's sister on Friday (she is coming down to London for the weekend) and Vicki is coming to stay with us from Saturday.