Tag Archives: 2013

The one with even more excitement…

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So, when I last posted on here, I was busy setting up a Situation Room at work, bustling about supporting our team with the Typhoon Haiyan response in The Philippines. Since then, a lot happened very fast.

My colleague P was already out in Manila, and the scale of the disaster rapidly became apparent in the media, so we were all hands on deck.

There were all sorts of dramas – things like the media reporting that it had been 6 days and no aid had come through, people were starving etc. What they don’t mention of course is that all the roads were blocked, and a second tropical storm came through, leaving the airport underwater, and the seas were too rough for a lot of boats to come in, so naturally it’s incredibly hard to get any aid in anywhere! But that’s not quite as interesting as a headline…

Anyhoo, rest assured we were all working as hard as we could, and on Thursday night P emailed me to say that she thought they might need me over there too. So on Friday morning, I got up early, checked my email, and found that sure enough, I had been approved to go, with instructions to get on a plane as soon as possible.

I spent the whole of Friday 15th bustling about at work filling in HR forms, medical forms, insurance forms, and writing up some handover notes so they could backfill my post while I was on secondment, and after getting poked, prodded and vaccinated, I was deemed fit to travel and booked onto a flight for Saturday morning. Continue reading →

The one with all the excitement!

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Well well, it has been an exciting week!

So, some work-related context first: My manager C (now ex-manager) and I developed two water and sanitation e-learning courses on behalf of several NGOs in a consortium. It was a beasty piece of work that got bigger and bigger, and ended up taking us about 2 years to do.

However, we’re dead chuffed with the final products, which are available online here if you fancy taking a look (the courses are called Technical Project Management for WASH emergencies, and Information, Education, and Communication for WASH emergencies). We also managed to produce them onto CDs, and in French, and the feedback from staff out in the field has been fantastic. However, even better was the fact that we got shortlisted for an e-learning award! We presented our courses to the judges back in September, and were invited to the very swanky e-learning awards dinner to find out if we won. Our category was for ‘Excellence in content production – not for profit sector’, and there were 5 other organisations/companies who were shortlisted in our category. The ceremony itself is all very elegant and formal – black tie, including a champagne reception and a 4-course dinner at the Mariott hotel in London (Ooh-er Mrs!). The e-learning company who developed the courses with us very kindly paid for our tickets to this shin-dig, as well as putting C and I up in a hotel in London for the night. Continue reading →

Eggs is eggs…

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You’re never too old for a soft-boiled egg with marmite soldiers…..

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Plus I hardly ever get to use my awesome egg cups….

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Now if only I could perfect the art of actually making a soft boiled egg…. So far attempt 1 was hard-boiled and attempt 2 was semi-hard boiled….

Very disappointed in both Jamie and Delia….

However I will persevere – practice makes perfect!

Technological mystery solved!

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So, yesterday at work, a colleague of mine basically blew my mind. He also solved a little mystery that has been puzzling me for quite some time.

As all you avid readers and fans of my blog will know, I’ve had quite the rocky relationship with technology (and for those of you who don’t know, click on the “Technology” tag in the tag cloud on the right to read about the South Korean toilet incident, the library incident, the ceiling fan that tried to kill me, the clocks, the digital blood pressure machines, and the many many computer incidents…)

In other words, I kill technology. To date, I have: crashed countless computers (including 3 separate incidents where I crashed an entire room full of networked computers), killed a brand new electric lawnmower, a microwave, a large number of clocks, not to mention the toilet and fan incidents…. Continue reading →

Guest Blog post….

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So I wrote a guest blog post for ICYE-UK, the fabulous organisation I went to Nepal with, all about my thoughts on volunteering and how to get into International Development, which has been posted on the “Getting into International Development” blog.

Feel free to go forth and read (though I’m not convinced it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever written….)

Falling in love on the M1

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How could I have known when I woke up this morning, that today would be the day that I would fall in love?

I should probably start at the beginning. I had to be in Durham this week for a work thing, so I got a rental car to drive up north. It’s about a 4-5 hour drive, so the plan was to load up the car with all the equipment, drive up the day before, spend the night in a BnB, do the event the next day, and then drive back down south again.

So there I am, halfway up the M1, when it happened. I fell completely, madly, deeply, head-over-heels in love. Her name is Glenda. She has tinted windows, power steering and six gears (Six! My last car only had 4 gears! What does the extra one even do??). I know it’s unconventional, but never in my life have I driven an actual new car before. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever driven a car that was made in the same decade.

It was the smoothest ride of my life. It was like gliding gently over the tarmac in a cloud. All of the cars I have ever driven have been old and quite shaky, and getting up to 70mph on the motorway was a chore – you have to grip the steering wheel for dear life as each bone-juddering moment you assume the entire car is about to collapse beneath you.

But not with Glenda. Glenda drifts gently into 70 as if it’s nothing, even with the driving rain and miserably grim weather, cushioning your body in her ridiculously comfy seats, absorbing all the shocks while pumping out funky tunes on her awesome sound system. I never thought I could be sexually attracted to a machine, but Glenda may well have turned me. She is like champagne, and she makes every other vehicle I’ve ever driven seem like hot Bovril. It turns out that after all these years, I am a car person after all – I just hadn’t met the right car. I’m not even embarrassed about the fact that she’s a Ford Focus Estate and not some tiny little sporty number. She may be on the large side, but our love is pure and transcends such labels. Continue reading →

Another update from the world of Maya…

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Well well well, it has been a while, hasn’t it?

I guess what with not travelling so much anymore, and so on, that I just seem to have less to write about (other than my cats, but that seems to perpetuate the stereotype about sad single women in their 30’s and has inadvertently encouraged people to treat me as such, so I’ve decided to stop doing writing about my cats, no matter how hilarious they are).

Continue reading →