No Halloween for me, it's not something I celebrate - in fact, my late grandmother would have regarded it as shockingly blasphemous, I rather think my mother (nearly 80) regards it as mildly blasphemous and, even though I've become accustomed to other people going crazy celebrating it, I really wouldn't do it myself, it must be the subconscious influence of generations of Lutheranism!

Itis interesting that, working for an American company, anything religious is frowned upon, we are not even allowed to have a Christmas party, it has to be a holiday party, yet they have a big Halloween bash every year. A couple of the extremely religious Roman Catholics from our Paris office complained about this, and got told that Halloween was nothing to do with religion, it was an American national festival! Oh dear. Never mind, in Paris we have a Christmas party anyway - it's fine for the two or three extremely religious RCs, the moderate or lapsed RCs (the majority) and the lone Protestant (me), and we just don't tell the Americans.

Anyway we are too busy this week for any parties - yesterday I worked from 8:30am to 8:30pm, then went home and did QOTN inside part while watching "Bleak House". I would like to try and finish that inside part this week, let's see how we go, it may be a struggle if the hours are long all week. Then I tend to go home early on Friday and collapse. I know David goes home and sleeps all weekend. He is having hell today with the General Ledger, poor guy, and he did not sleep last night, so I imagine he will disappear for a bit this afternoon.

I am just ploughing through a huge number of UAT problems and general problems arising out of customisations, my goodness, some of them are obscure. I regularly have to notify stuff to our Product group, and it has to go via a very dim man in Paris. The one whom I get on really well with, because he comes out with gems like "ze French ladies do not work in IT and take men's jobs from zem, zey are very feminine and prefer to stay home to look after zere 'usbands". You can imagine what I think about that! Jerk! You can see that with mental faculties like that, it is fairly difficult to get him to understand complex metering problems.

We also got a new spreadsheet from the users, this one is a list of things they need to be shown, most of which they have been shown about a thousand times already........... my goodness.

Did I mention also that the French project is in chaos? Gil went outside for a cigarette, and slipped on wet ground, and he has broken his right arm very badly indeed. He will be off work until the end of November, as he needs further surgery. Obviously it is very painful. Guess who his replacement is? That's right, the one who took my job when I had to come back down here. I had a very lucky escape, I believe she is having hell. I am doing what I can in answering questions from the new people on that project, so that she can do other things. And poor Gil - not only is he in pain, but Sylvain doesn't seem to have grasped that the doctor has forbidden him to work, and is trying to make him work from home. He can't write or type, and I really think his wife has enough to do without being his secretary.

Well, I shall go back to testing, and try and get through a reasonable amount before 8:30pm. I can't see it being possible to leave before then, I only hope I am OK to do some QOTN when I get home.

Forgot to say, I have ordered the remaining thread for Catherine Agnes, some more needles and some Q Snaps from Sew and So in the UK, they should be here in a few days. Much better than those companies we won't mention that either no longer send to Cyprus or say they have stuff, but it turns out you have to wait three months for it.