Friends, girlfriends and driving. Not all at the same time.

Earlier this month my friend Swiral came to visit, which was brilliant, then a couple of weeks later my girlfriend Kate finally made it up to visit, which goes without saying as superb.
While she was visiting we went up Cairngorm - taking the train as there was still too much snow on the ground and Kate didn't have winter kit with her. That and it was blowing about 40 mph and was -2 C in the carpark, let alone 1000 FT higher up the mountain. We did wander outside the doors at the top, but it was gusting around 60 mph and dang cold there, so rather than walking up to the summit we went to have some (somewhat over priced but rather good) food.
Kate told me that she loves castles so I told her that we were going to go for a drive, without telling her where we were heading. Our destination, the most photographed castle in Scotland, Eilean Donan. Featured in Highlander, The World Is Not Enough and almost every other film made in Scotland in the last 50 years. And no, it's not on Loch Ness - that's Urquhart Castle.

Worth a visit if you're up here. Worth a trip if you're not, but I think next time I'm going to either get a bigger car beforehand or hire one for the duration.
It was more wonderful than I can say to see Kate again, and it felt like she went home far too soon, but hopefully she'll be back soon.
Just afterwards there was an IAM (local advanced motoring ground) fun day at the local skid pan and driver training centre. We did a bit of skid pan work (as I'd done some a few months before the instructor skipped the instruction part and went straight to the "I'm not going to tell you what sort of skid I'm going to use, just correct it." part. Great fun actually), a bit of HGV work and driving and reversing a trailer.

As I got my licence after 1997 (about 7 years after 1997..) I can't legally drive with a trailer so I have no experience of driving or reversing one. Turns out, I'm not bad at it. Or at least in the situation we were using I did OK. All I need now is to get someone to cough up the £300 for a trailer licence for me. One of the things that made the day a bit more difficult was the presence of a herd of cattle, wandering all across the driving area and generally licking the other cars.

So, apart from some great cartoons and some "stuff" at work, that's been about it. I might be posting more about what's going on there, but for now let's just say that I'm not a big fan of the government, especially the treasury...
In closing, I'd recommend the New York Times best seller Turn Coat, but do read the rest of the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher first. And listen to Invaders Must Die by the Prodigy. No, I'm not on commission. Yet.

April, fool.

Yesterday being the first of April there was a fair bit of pressure on us to try to do something "funny" at some point. This was a problem. I was trying to think of something that I could do but nothing presented itself.
I was running out of time.
I drove over to give a brief at one of the squadrons, got ready with the usual banter. They asked what April fools joke I'd be doing and I responded with the usual "I would but as a corporation we have no sense of humour" (Men in Black misquote FTW!)
Got to the end of the presentation and on the last slide it came to me.
"For Friday we've got a front moving in from the west; and next week we've got the TV weather girls coming up for their routine defence rotation."

I managed to dead-pan the entire thing and the pure joy on the faces of the guys was beautiful. They started planning to re-arrange time off and asking me details such as which girls, how long they were staying and would they be visiting the mess?

After a few seconds I looked up, smiled and simply said, "Gotcha!"

Much good natured verbal abuse ensued and as I left the briefing room I heard someone (might have been the boss) clearly enunciate, with a hint of begrudging respect, "Bastard!"
(Today the squadron boss admitted he had been hooked nicely.)

Didn't quite work as well with the other squadron, but then again I'm not sure if they realise it was a joke...
I'm not going to say which squadrons were involved but I think it's fair to say that I am pretty dang happy with that one.