[Lurking Around London] : Ein2

OK, so it’s been a little while since I last updated anything here. The problem with being world-famous <shifty eyes> is that you need to be careful about what you say in public. It may come back to bite you in the butt when you least expect it.
I suppose, however, it would be permissible to give a big update for those who are interested.

I’m just about to finish buying a house. Completion date is this coming Friday. It’s located about 10 minutes away on foot from my current location in Lewisham, so that’s still in south-east London.
It’s a lovely three-bedroom end-of-terrace house with a conservatory and a decent-sized back garden that looks like it will be great for BBQs in the summer months and for the cats to frolic about in.

For those of you behind on things, I’ve been living in London since last July when I moved here from Brighton. Stephen and I got very amicably divorced last year and he’s now back living in Canada, although he did promise to come visit “early in 2008″. His definition of “early” apparently is a little different than mine, given that it’s now April. (-:

I’m currently intermitting from my Ph.D. at the University of Sussex while I try to decide what I’m going to do about that and earn money or become rich enough to finish it. In the meantime, I’ve been continuing to do work at the Open University here in the United Kingdom, including chairing a cohort of Singaporean students for TT381: Open Source Development Tools, moderating on TT281: The Client Side of Application Development, and writing course materials and assessment questions for those courses. At the beginning of May 2008, I’ll be starting a position as an associate lecturer on a new course: T320: Ebusiness Technologies: Foundations and Practice, which I’m looking forward to.

My life at the moment consists a lot of running around like a chicken with its head cut off as I run between meetings in Milton Keynes to finishing marking to developing face-to-face tutorial content to last-minute re-writes of guides to install Apache/MySQL/PHP for Windows to filing change of address notifications with everyone I know to trying to sort out the moving process to being scared about how much money this house is costing. Oh yes, and I sleep–sometimes for even as many as 7 hours.

Life’s not really about to get much simpler. In the next 30 days I need to move house, clean the existing apartment, plan and host a tutorial for M150: Introduction to Data and Information, mark a whackload of end of course assessments (ECAs) for TT281, start moderating on TT381, and read through a whack of new course material for starting tutoring on T320. That’s plus whatever’s required for Transcena (Canada). Piece of cake!

In fact, I’d better stop writing about it and get to it. Perhaps I’ll post pictures of the house another day.