Friday I left work early after getting the testing done – that was all a bit chaotic with only me in the datacentre and not in the office, and Phil and the boss in meetings all day.

Mum & Dad came over to Blighty and I went down to Nanny’s on Friday night to visit. We went out for a nice curry, we all had the same thing – chicken and prawn balti spiced up to Madras. There was loads of chicken, not a lot of prawns, but it was really nice – with naan and pilau rice. Sore arses ensued the following morning.

Dad’s new car is lovely – its all electronic, seats, windows, 6-CD changer, the works. Nanny seemed to be up and down as far as her health, active one minute, then tired-looking the next.

Saturday we went to Worthing to do some shopping, then went to Chichester and onto Ferring to look for a manual for Dad’s new car, we visited the old “Big Steak House”, home of the 32oz steak – however now it’s kind of a posh winebar affaire with no steaks, although the mixed grill was nice, and I introduced Dad to Adnams beer, which is the local brew I drink in Ipswich. Then we went to Asda and did some more food shopping and packed the cars.

This morning Dad woke us all up at 5am, he’d been up for hours apparently, so instead of staying for lunch with Nanny I decided I might as well drive home and go back to bed when Mum & Dad left for Dover at 7:30am.

Its been years since, me, Dad, Mum and Nanny had been together I guess, it was nice, and meant that I didn’t get bored for my last weekend in England.

Mum phoned earlier and said that their GPS was happily navigating them through Paris – its Sunday so worth going that way as the traffic is not too bad and it is quicker. I expect they’re home by now as they were at Chateauroux over an hour ago.

This afternoon I watched a bit of Free Jimmy, which I thought was going to be a kids cartoon, but turn out to be a Norwiegen adult cartoon that was really naff – about a bunch of crooks and tree-huggers trying to catch a circus elephant. Then I watched The Other Side, which had a really good plotline and would have been much better had it had a budget and not been an Indie flick. It was about a guy who escaped Hell to find his killer and help his girlfriend.

Finally I watched The Last Mimzy, which was a nice family movie about kids given special powers by a box they find on the beach. The other day I watched Knocked Up, which was a pretty naff film, which I thought was going to be a romantic comedy, but seemed to be a drama, as it wasn’t funny or even lighthearted.

I just upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.2.1, which is a bugfix release with a couple of security fixes and no new features. The upgrade procedure is getting better and better – now I just copy across my custom stylesheet, config file and make a small change to the footer, which I should probably automate with a diff-patch, but can’t be bothered 😉

Only five days of work left now, Friday I’ll be going back to Nanny’s before leaving for France on Saturday morning!