A slight case of overblogging

Really productive week at work - I'm training my colleague Julia up so she can cover the most of the postmaster parts of my role once I'm on maternity leave, which is quite rewarding, but John and I also managed to get a new server up and installed and running as a replacement for the very elderly hardware which was doing our virus scanning and giving off repeated temperature warnings from the CPU whenever it had any mail to process! Plus I've made a bit of progress on some documentation which isn't even really my area but has become my problem which is also good - though it'll be more satisfying when it's finished.

At home by contrast it's been a pretty lazy week - watching Sherlock (the BBC version) and The Inbetweeners (series 3) on rental from Lovefilm, playing some more Minecraft and so on. I pre-ordered the new XCom game online and got a free copy of Civ V with it, which led to some amusement (but not much progress) on evening - and having spent all night downloading it I've spent this morning playing the XCom game. It's definitely quite good fun :) Whether it's 30 quid and 12GB of download worth we'll have to see. No baking this week.

Now 19 weeks pregnant and this week's vegetable is a giant tomato - well, it says "large tomato" but I've never seen one which is 15cm across. I'm pretty sure I may have actually felt the baby move now too! Not enough for Mike to feel yet. Just over a week until the next scan! With a birthday ceilidh for a friend to look forward to in the meantime. While bump is getting quite a bit bigger it's not slowing me down much yet and I don't intend to let it stop me! Weight gain suggestions from the US have now been plotted on a graph and my gain so far is nicely between the upper and lower suggested amounts so far. Still eating sensibly (she says while tucking into an apple :)

In today's fit of doing something useful though I rang our mortgage provider up to arrange a new deal for when our current fixed rate runs out in December - to make sure we don't default to their standard variable rate. Rather bemused to note that they do a quick valuation of your property themselves using a computer model and that took about £14K off the expected value of our house - meaning we no longer had a good enough Loan to Value for the deal we wanted. Turns out that if you ask they can do a more complicated version though, which they do warn you could be even worse. Provided it gets a high enough confidence score they can use that instead - and in our case it did - undoing the £14K reduction and adding a further £25 on top! Given it makes 0.3% difference in the available rates it was worth asking, but I do wonder how many people just believe the first computer and don't even ask!

You can catch up on any ranting I make midweek either on Facebook or twitter. I won't repeat my thoughts on bad cycle facilities or union action here.