Turns out I’ve got your standard viral conjunctivitis, which I probably picked up from some snotty three-year old. The doctor’s given me some antibiotic eyedrops just in case it’s bacterial, but mostly I’ve just got to wait until it clears itself up.

So for the next few days, I’ll be doing my rock star impression, wearing sunglasses 24/7. I’m so cool, I can hardly stand myself.

Well, you know what they say about counting your chickens before they hatch. My former employer, SAIC, had announced their intention to IPO early in the new year. But this week, they announced that there was a delay to the entire process as they delayed their stock-pricing announcement from 9 December to 23 December on the back of a $61m loss due to a contract with the 2004 Greek Olympics.

So, fingers crossed that everything still goes smoothly in the new year. I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t put down a down-payment on a new Porsche quite yet. Still, it’s a $1.7bn floatation (‘the next Google’, they’re calling it) of a $6bn/year company, so while this hits our quarterly earnings quite hard, it’s a blip in the longer term.

I hope.

It’s been a week since my Christmas party, and I must admit I haven’t had much free time to update this website. Like everyone else, I find myself inundated with things to do this time of year, and not enough hours in the day to get them all done.

We’ve finally finalised our plans for the Christmas holidays. Aude’s parents and brother will come here for Christmas, then we’ll all head to the south of France for the New Year’s celebrations. While we’re in France, we’ve arranged to spend some time at a spa.

Which has become the subject of much ridicule. Aude and I were looking through the list of treatments available. With her help and translation, I booked what we both thought was a unisex massage. Except it wasn’t. Apparently, the massage that I thought I wanted turns out to be a ‘draining massage designed for overweight women’. See, you never realised what dangerous territory these international relationships could be!

I’m afraid I haven’t got much exciting to report over the past week. Last weekend was mainly filled with running errands and doing last-minute Christmas shopping. Aude and I went out for tapas on Saturday night and brunch on Sunday morning, but that’s about as wild as our weekend got. Oh, and I got most of my Christmas cards sent…

The rest of my week has been extremely busy at the office. I managed to make it back to Canterbury on Wednesday night for a Christmas celebration with several of my old colleagues from Pfizer, and was rewarded by catching an eye infection (diagnosis to follow – I’m off to the doctor this afternoon to have it checked out).

Still, it’s nearly Christmas, and I guess I should consider myself lucky to have been chosen as Rudolph’s trusty sidekick. He’s the red-nosed reindeer, and I’m the red-eyed consultant. It’s just a damned shame that the fluffy animals get all the credit.

Okay – here’s my mini-rant. I went to fill up my tank today, something which I’m having to do every other day with my current commute, and here’s the damage:

For those of you who don’t have a calculator in front of you, I’ll save you the trouble — that’s about $126.76 to fill the tank, every other day. Or nearly $1200 per month in petrol alone. I earn a fair living, but that’s a staggering amount. Imagine the impact on someone who earns average earnings of £22,411 ($39,702) per year.

So next time you whinge about your $2.50/gallon gas, spare a thought for me, okay?

Well, it’s that time of year again — Christmas parties relentlessly coming one after another. Last night was our ‘team’ Christmas dinner, held at a Lebanese restaurant in London. We had a great meal, ate way too much food, and capped the night off with a shisha.

They decided it would be funny to take a picture of me with my head in a cloud of smoke. I figured it was only polite to oblige.

Well, last night was the Axon Christmas Party, which was held at the London Zoo. It was actually a much better event than I expected. We had a champagne reception in the ‘Bug House’ before heading into dinner. Dinner itself was unremarkable (but I wasn’t expecting much — catering for 600 people is never going to be haute cuisine), but they laid on a comedian after dinner who was hysterical.

Aude and I hit the blackjack and roulette tables afterwards. We seem to have different styles of gambling — mainly in that I win money, she loses money. See, this is her losing at roulette: