A pretty boring couple of weeks

Well, it seems that life is settling into a steady pace while we're both studying hard.

Ian has been attending the Firefighter Academy religously on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, but he's already studied way beyond his current lessons. He has also been getting into some "proper" work though as he's been getting some jobs with the limo company. His first two trips have both been Friday afternoon pick-ups from Boston Airport. We're taking bets on when he'll pick up his first IAE customer But today he was in the yard for some training when they got a call from someone just wanting a ride to his friend's house, to sit around and wait for him while he watched the Daytona 500, then take him home. Ian was right place, right time! It's the easiest job going and Ian even got invited into the house to watch the race. Then an hour or so later, the client got driven home. A $400 cab ride but he was still a good tipper .

We've been spending a bit more time socially with some of Ian's firefighter friends. Last Saturday night we went out for a meal with Matt and Kristi (who's housewarming was a couple of weeks' ago) before Ian went round to theirs early on Sunday to watch the Aresnal game. Matt is about the only American we know who knows anything about football (soccer). This Saturday night Tony and Robyn were having a "burn" where old Christmas trees are, well, erm, set on fire. Good job there were a bunch of firemen present then It was supposed to take place a few weeks ago but it was too cold. It was hardly toasty now but it was at least bearable (with a nice fire to warm the cockles!).

Elsewhere there has been a baby shower for our neighbour Suzy who is due to give birth in a month. The girls all had to submit baby photos for a competition so Annalie put in the one of her at around 18 months with a black eye! Suzy was the only one who actually guessed it and a few people thought that Fi's photo was of Annalie.

Annalie's Masters assignments are slowly progressing. She is getting incredibly frustrated with JetBlue though, who still continually promise to get back to her to set up some time to go in and see them and take part in their new employee orientation, but she's still not had anything from them. She'd already decided that her last assignment before the dissertation would have to be switched onto IAE instead, which is a little frustrating.

The one ray of light though is that her university tutor has told her that deadlines are "flexible" enabling her to focus on getting the right results rather than trying to make do with what she can get in time. She doesn't really want to take the end deadline beyond the end of May though as she'd like to get it over and done with as soon as possible. And boy, does she want it over with?! By the time the end of May comes she'll probably be just about dead as the biggest air show of the year is during the second week of June in Paris and then there's a huge event in China that she's likely to be at soon after. So there's no way she wants to drag out the dissertation any more than she has to!

Seeing as Ian finishes at the end of May too, we're thinking that a weekend away is in order around that time. We'll have deserved it don't you think?

Work is incredibly frustrating for Annalie as well though as she's got an awful lot of meetings to go to and there's no one in her team that can do her work for her while she's not there. So she's trying not to work late to enable her to come home and study, but sometimes it doesn't work out like that.