Friday, 22 December 2006

White Christmas?

In the dark early morning I cleared the ice off my car while my neighbour Linda did the same to her car. She informed me that our planned excursion tonight was off as the bell-ringers had got their dates mixed up. Or something like that – my brain takes a while to warm up in the mornings. Anyway, I managed to pass the message on to Jackie.

By the time I arrived at Watford the weather was quite mild but the white fog remained; there has been no sign of the sun or stars for several days. I don’t think this is quite what people have in mind when they talk (or sing) about a “White Christmas”.

Tim from WBC Property Management arrived at 9:00 am as promised with a copy of the Woodside Community Association’s lease. It is dated 1958 and confirms that the freehold is owned by WBC.

Odds and ends

I talked to the people at Volbase about our adoption of their database sometime early in 2007 to manage our contacts and QA processes. Volbase will provide us with new installation disks and licences early in the new year. We will then load up onto Volbase the results of our current exercise to produce a new Community Directory for Watford. It will be a big change for us, but will enable us to deliver a much better service to our member groups.

I then chased up a missing CRB check. This check was originally requested in July. Then it was lost in HCC’s systems until October when it was finally forwarded for processing. The whole process should take “six to eight weeks”. To give HCC their credit, we have often had checks back within three weeks. But this particular check has now taken twenty-five weeks and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. Meanwhile, there is a chap who has waited nearly six months to take up a job offer.

Then a telephone call from Mary at the West Watford Community Centre about their funding from WBC, who are keen to see groups in West Watford working more closely together. Mary and I talked for some time and, following discussions earlier this week with the Indian Association and the African Caribbean Association, I am convinced that we need an initial informal discussion about community cohesion with interested groups.

Homework

I will address this in the new year. For today, I was too busy preparing for the Christmas break. I had some last minute updates for our website to organise with Maria, then taking backups of several directories so I can complete work at home over Christmas.

I have taken a full backup of the accounts which need to be reviewed in detail. Our bookkeeper Priti has kindly bagged up the supporting files too: what fun I’ll have unwrapping those at Christmas! We have a trustees meeting on 1 February and I need to make sure that the financial information is accurate and up to date.

I have also taken backups of all the files on WBC’s proposals for new lease arrangements as I need to get a final report completed by 8 January.

Finally, I have taken copies of all the latest available Compact documentation from Watford, Herts and the world beyond. Just in case I get bored.

One last thing

At 3:00, I warned everyone that the server was going off. I tried to reboot from the operating system on our HDD to see whether or not I could salvage our old Microsoft Exchange settings for Outlook. No luck. I took out the old HDD and installed a new one. The rebooted the server again, and everything looked fine. I left at 5:00. I’ve plenty of work to keep me happy over xmas. See you in the New Year.