Holty's World

Exciting and tiring weekend

Evening all,

This has been one hell of a weekend.  With all the travelling that I do i get very little time to do sensible things.  This weekend I have been sensible and bought a house.  £210,000 for a brand new 3 bed house just outside of maidstone in Kent.  I am finally growing up by getting a mortgage of £1100 per month.  This is a monumental amount of money and the thought scares me somewhat.

Anyway, the week has been hard going and very tiring.  I also played golf today and got very wet.  My parents insist on keeping their house at approximately tropical temperatures and I sit here writing this sweating from the heat.  I have told them the house is too hot but they disregard my comments.  Do all old people superheat their houses?  My grandparents do.

OK, it is 8.40 on Sunday night and I am going to bed.  How sad is that?  I have to be up at about 5am to drive back to London so I can go to work. 

Hope all are well

Andy

Back in Blighty

Well...  Indonesia was cool.  Glad to be back though.  All in all it was a fairly successful audit and I found that we had overpaid the auditee (one of our contractors) by $23,000,000 (which is a lot of money) give or take a few thousand. 

Anyway, long flights are bad at the best of times.  Yesterdays was even worse.  I had eaten something that disagreed with me.  I will spare you the details but needless to say the last thing I needed was to be on a fourteen hour flight from Singapore.  I did manage to get some sleep though which was very welcome.

The air hostesses on Singapore Airlines are pretty good looking too so that made the time go quicker.  Business class flying on long haul flights is definitely the way forward though.  A proper bed (albeit at an angle) and wide seat with plenty of leg room.  This is good.  Just a shame that I can't afford to fly business class when travelling for pleasure though.  Still get jet-lagged though and I was up at 4am today which is a pain in the ass.

I have the week off this week but will still be writing my report and issuing all of our audit findings.  Looking forward to just chilling out and relaxing.  Two weeks back in the country before I head off again so looking forward to some English cooking and normality for that time.

I am going back to watch Cardiff beating Middlesbrough in the FA cup.

A dark mood is beginning to engulf me.

Good Morning,

I am frustrated and ever so slightly ticked off...  I am currently managing this audit in Indonesia and we are reviewing a contractor's records to ensure compliance with the contract (mainly in terms of what they charge us).  This entails reviewing an invoice, checking the maths, checking that the charges are allowed within the contract and that the charges are all also in line with contract prices.

Anyway, one of my dear colleagues has managed to review four invoices in four days which when you have nearly 1000 invoices to review is not a lot.   I am currently steaming slowly and will probably explode later today.  I am usually pretty chilled out.

Anyway, enough of this self pitying nonsense.  The weather here is smokey.  The sun shines but there is a continual smoke in the sky.  This is because the Palm tree farms burn the ground to clear it of rubbish and then the small farmers do the same.  This means it always smells of bonfire.  Very strange.

I arrived here on the 10 Feb and will be flying back to the UK on 8 March.  Looking forward to the flight back as for once I will not lose the whole day.  I had the option of staying over in Singapore for the Friday night but decided that I would spend it in Jakarta as I went to Singapore last year (again only for two days as a layover).

I will let you know of any other interesting tidbits of info as and when I get them.

Peace dudes,

Andy

Sunday in Sumatra

Hello all,

Welcome to my first Blog post.  Whether I will get the time/inclination to update this in the future is debatable but we'll see.  I doubt I will update daily but who knows.

Anyway, I am on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia at the moment.   I am working out here and should be working at the moment but cannot really be bothered.  It is 15:20 on a sunday and there really should be better things to do with my time but there aren't...

I work for a US oil company and the area that I am staying in is like a compound.  The area is all very kind of 1950's American dream kind of surreal really.  Anyway, a couple of good things are that there is a bowling alley here which is free to use.  I can also play golf next weekend (once I work out how I borrow clubs etc) and this costs between £1 and £2 for a round which in anybody's book is fairly cheap.

Anyway, must crack on with some work otherwise my colleagues will have nothing to do on Monday.

Cheerio

Andy