UKOUG 2010 - My Personal Account

I'm not sure whether I was very lucky this past week or very unlucky.

Debit
It took me 14 hours to get from Edinburgh to Birmingham. That's almost a Hotsos Symposium trip!

My skin condition flared up which meant I was in a thoroughly miserable mood and had to miss quite a few presentations as I hunted down medical supplies and took care of it.

In a decision which seemed ridiculous even at the time, but was understandable, I decided that alcohol, bath-water and emollient oil were a good combination and so slipped and badly sprained my wrist which led to the rather unedifying spectacle of Alex Gorbachev tieing my shoelaces for me the following morning. It was a good job I managed the rest of my morning dressing routine myself but it was a close run thing! It seems to be getting a little better now.

I had my elbow twisted into making an utter fool of myself in front of many hundreds of people in Hall 1 as part of the evening Pantomime!

I only attended the first two days which meant, along with my unexpectedly late arrival on Sunday evening, I missed out on catching up with tons of people I planned to.

Credit
In the end, I managed to actually get to Birmingham, then to London and then back to Edinburgh. Others weren't so lucky.

Of the few presentations I managed to attend, most were excellent. More on those in a seperate post.

Thanks to many very generous sponsors and then the UKOUG's organisation of collection buckets and depositing the funds into my Movember account, my final fund-raising total was £1,202. Many thanks to all those who contributed, including those I'm unable to thank personally.

As always, the time I did spend in the company of old friends was well-spent.

At least, unlike UKOUG Chairman Ronan Miles, I did not agree to dress up as a naughty nurse. Hats off to him for joining in the fun though. I would praise Lisa Dobson but, as she pointed out, she's a Geordie and usually dresses up like that on a Friday night anyway

Balance
On balance, as usual, it was probably just normal life, not particularly lucky or unlucky