Project Sulfur went live on Monday – on time, on budget, within scope, and ticked the quality boxes. A rare thing indeed for a large IT project – five separate systems, quite complex integrations between each.

Feedback from external stakeholders has been very positive – one messaged our CEO to say the stakeholder-facing component was a thing of beauty. VeryHighlyPaidConsultant told the CEO he could recall a more successful program and in addition to the expected hurrahs for Bobs (Sponsor) and FCFC (Program Manager), name-checked Ringo (my SML IT counterpart) and I. Which was unexpected and great for the profile.

Of course the few loud and toxic dark forces in the business will never be satisfied and complain about everything (unkind people might say they still carry some bitterness about being overlooked for the project team).

The prospect of returning to the business is rather daunting. We’ve been working at a fast and structured pace for a few years now. SML is slow-paced chaos with occasional bursts of unstructured frenzy at best.

The past few weeks have been High Energy, weekends non-existent. It’s surprisingly challenging to wind down now that we’re done.

Fortunately we have a 3 day weekend and I have a week off later in the month – which hopefully will get work out of my head.

xxx

A few weeks ago we embarked on a somewhat ruthless de-cluttering effort to make space for the hideously expensive and possibly futile efforts to make us water-tight.

Nothing was off-limits. I discarded all of my itchy, static-y, ill-fitting garments and destroyed every diary and notebook I owned. The latter was utterly and incredibly cathartic!

We now have a much bigger hole in the wardrobe and had the not-delightful experience of having brick-coloured water pouring down the walls of the not-sewing room as drainage holes were drilled in the facade above.

Advice is to do nothing in the way of improvements to that room for at least six months until all types of weather have been thrown at it. I’ve scraped off the bubbling paint caused by the brick waterfall and will replace the sodden and ruined underlay (which was in a pretty ghastly state anyway).

Next up – replacing all the windows on the east side in early November, then possibly covering the upstairs balcony with some pergola type thing – this will hopefully reduce the extreme weathering which isn’t doing the leaks any favours.

xxx

Made Ottolenghi’s Iranian vegetable stew with dried lime last night. Tasty, but not a lot of bang for buck and likely not to be repeated. There was quite a bit remaining, so I’ll attempt to bubble-and-squeak that during the week.

I’m very keen to expand our repertoire of non-meat dishes, so the quest will continue, though perhaps with recipes requiring less exotic ingredients.

I cooked while Don watched I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Call me a philistine, but I absolutely loathed it.

xxx

The most excellent Dame Eleanor posted this quote during the week and holy goodness it’s on point:

“It is wonderful how much news there is when people write every other day; if they wait for a month there is nothing that seems worth telling.”

This is probably the biggest posting gap I’ve had for a very long time and I’m astonished that I once found something to post about every day.