Foreign Perspectives

Are you going for the sexy undies again or are you going to buy your girl some chocolate this time?

The downside of the undies is that men tend to buy something sexy whilst women are looking for something comfortable. The two rarely meet in the middle. Sexy stuff is generally tight and made of thin material but women are looking for comfy and this time of year thin material generally doesn’t cut it.

But why do they like chocolate so much anyway? These days a lot of it is to do with the marketing by the chocolate companies, hence the mass of those little heart shaped chocolates that you see around Valentine’s Day.

However, there are also chemical reasons behind the attraction of chocolate. It’s a sweet and we are all attracted to sugary things for a start. However, it also contains triggers for your endorphins (the “feel good” chemicals) which other sweets don’t. Finally, specifically for the women it contains phenylethylamine which is related to chemicals peaking during orgasm.

It’s been over six months since I last heard from my previous employer (who I’m still notionally working for) so I was a bit taken aback to get a phone call telling me of two potential jobs.

Even more oddly, both seem quite reasonable jobs too and not wildly out of line with my previous experience either which is itself quite unusual.

The first one seems like a normal systems analyst job for the most part. I’m a bit wary of it though as some parts of the job description seem to indicate that it’s aimed at an insider so I don’t really rate my chances with it.

Slightly oddly given my own situation the second one is a secondment which I’m sure will complicate life a bit and also has the problem that there’s an end date for it with no obvious route “back”. That said, it’s an almost perfect fit for me or seems to me to be anyway. Whether it’ll seem so to them is, of course, a different matter.

Whatever the result, if nothing else it shows that they’ve not completely forgotten about me.

The OU World Archaeology (A251) course is a peculiar beastie in many ways.

For a start, it’s a 30 point course which would normally mean that it would run either February to October or October to June. Instead it runs November to March which is a bit out of sync with other courses and also means that it runs at around a 60 point workload.

That “60 point” workload for a 30 point course means that it feels like it’s racing along, often at a headlong pace. Thus we covered the development of agriculture, cities and empires in three separate four week chunks and have an assignment every month.

The style of assignment changes radically too. The first one was the usual OU assignment based on the course texts, the second required a small research element outside the texts, the third requires a small amount from the texts and a lot of research and the final one looks like it will be all research. Quite a progression and one that finds me needing to do a lot more work for the third assignment due this week than I did for the previous two. The final one is supposed to run over three weeks rather than the one week for each of the previous ones.

On the whole though it feels more and more like you’re doing real archaeology, digging out information for yourself. The downside of that is that it means that this isn’t a course to be taken as lightly as many people do. It looks like an interesting course that you can just slot into even the tightest timetable but in reality it’s rather a full course with frequently massive amounts of reading to be done and increasing amounts of work to be done for assignments as the course progresses.

For all that, it is an interesting course. I just wish that they’d scheduled it over the normal 9 month timetable. That would have let me wallow in some of the topics it covers rather than just watch them race by.

That used to be the standard question when international phone calls first became commonplace several decades ago.

Frankly, with so little contact, there wasn’t a whole lot to talk about. Just as well really with the costs of international phone calls being at totally crazy prices back then.

It’s different now of course with international calls frequently being cheaper than even local rate calls. No, really: check the tariffs from your phone company and compare against some of the cheap calling services. Right now our normal local rate is around 7p a minute but it only costs us 2p a minute to call Australia!

However, despite the increased number of calls, the “what time is it” question still gets asked a lot in our household. You’d think we’d have gotten the hang of time differences by now, wouldn’t you?

We were all revved up for a decisive meeting with the solicitor this morning, nicely spruced up look, early departure to be sure to be there on time and all that. In fact we were so early that there was time for a really nice cooked breakfast which turned out to be surprisingly cheap.

Anyway, the appointed time arrived and a signature was collected. Well, these things always need a signature at some point, don’t they? Not too long after that we were called in and figured we were all set to go.

Well, it turns out that the other party couldn’t be contacted by their representative despite a number of attempts so the whole thing is adjourned until next week to give them a final opportunity. At the moment though it looks like the whole thing could fall through which is good for us though ’tis rather annoying to have had to collect everything together and for naught.

Which left us at a loose end quite early in the morning. All worked up to go for it and nothing to go for.

Oh well. At least it gave us a chance to have a relaxed morning for a change.