It is Saturday and another week is over.  It has been a hectic week.  It started off with Hubby going to Bahrain for a project we are doing there.  He left on Tuesday morning and when he left I had my week all planned out – peace an quiet and loads of time to do nothing!

I went to Women’s networking diner / evening on Tuesday night.  About 60 of us meet once a month at a restaurant.  There is normally a guest speaker and a charity supported on the evening as well.  With Hubby gone, I was not looking at the time all evening so was much more relaxed.

I woke up early on Wednesday morning (4.30am in fact).  I couldn’t go back to sleep so I got out of bed and went into the office – I planned to do a couple of hours work.  Kids are on holiday so there is no school run either.  (Isn’t it funny how you spend your life wishing you could sleep in and when the occasion presents itself you can’t). My PC had downloaded some updates over night and wanted to do a reboot.  So while this was happening I looked around for something to do and suddenly felt the urge to clean out our storeroom.  2 Hours later I had finished and was really impressed with myself – it was like I had achieved a personal milestone.  I then went and had a long relaxing bath.

A friend called on Monday evening asking for some help on a tender document for AFCON 2013 that had to be submitted by Friday afternoon.  Me, being a nice person, kindly agreed (sucker!).  I had already requested all the relevant details but of course I had still received nothing by Wednesday morning.  All I really had to do was compile all the information ready for submission – easy peazy.  I re-read the tender documents and took down the relevant notes and sent off some more emails nagging people for the information.  I didn’t realize what a big job this would be.  Firstly there were 2 tenders and not 1 and they wanted 1 original and 5 copies of each and there were 2 parts to each tender.  So this amounted to 24 files of information that had to be compiled and copied and punched and sorted etc etc.  But as I didn’t have any of the information yet from the team, I couldn’t proceed.

I met some associates at noon on Wednesday at a HP demo centre.  They were considering buying a Latex Printer and wanted my opinion.  So I spent an hour drooling over this machine.  Watched it print and have decided I really want one – no idea what I would do with it but I want one!

Then back to the office to see if anyone had bothered to send me any information for the tender documents.  Needless to say, my inbox was empty.  So I sent off some more emails begging.

I had my weekly meeting with my IT staff on Thursday morning. Then it was back to concentrating on the tender.  I was now getting annoyed as people were not sending me the information I needed.  Finally some stuff started coming through on Thursday afternoon.  At this point it was crunch time.  In order to get the 24 files out by Friday, I would have to work late.  I eventually seconded Son no 3 and 4 to help and we worked until midnight on Thursday copying and filing the information we had.  There was still a lot missing but nothing more could be done.  I was promised the balance of the information by 8am on Friday.

I collected Hubby from the airport at 11am on Friday and rushed back to the office to finish the tender documents.  The rest of the information came in dribs and drabs until 2pm on Friday.  At this point I was in crisis panic mode.  I eventually got everything boxed up and someone collected the boxes to deliver.  She delivered the boxes 10 minutes before the deadline. Whew!

My body was now in agony – I have Un-diagnosed Soft Tissue Rheumatoid Arthritis in my hips.  I take a pill for it every second day and it is usually not a problem unless I push myself physically.  I could barely walk I was in so much pain.  So Friday evening was spent uttering the words OW every time I moved.

Feeling much better today and plan on spending the weekend doing nothing!