Happy Christmas to all readers of the RMTWeb Blog. This is my first year away from home, and I am currently working on Christmas day at The Cottage Hotel & Restaurant. I have to be there in one hours time to get things ready for Christmas day dinners, so just enough time to post this Christmas message. Getting the hotel all set up ready for Christmas Day customers to arrive. All the tables look really great.

Merry Christmas!

This year has been quite an adventure, with starting Brunel University in West London and having what feels like a full-time job as a waiter at the same time is exhausting. I've been doing a lot less programming in my Computer Science degree than I was expecting, in fact we did a lot more programming on my tec course. I've learned a lot of HTML which is really useful, but its not real programming. That said, its been very useful as I've been using it to migrate all my old diary entries from floppy disk over from text-only format in to HTML pages.Most days in December I have been working from 2pm through until midnight. I usually get one day a week off, but not during holidays, all the staff have been helping out a lot as the housekeeper keeps being off, and sometimes the chef doesn't turn up for breakfasts so I have even had a go at making those too!Today for Christmas dinner all the waiting staff drank bits of champagne out of tea cups, after several of those I really did feel rather tipsy, but not so much that it impaired my ability to silver serve, so it wasn't that bad!After all the hotel guests and the manager went home we had the whole hotel to ourselves as staff and had a huge meal and lots to drink too!"Mr Woo" attempts smoke rings. So much fun chilling out after Christmas day dinner finished and having a huge staff meal in the dining room. Emma and I have ended up spending loads of time in the reception this past week. Its always quiet on a Sunday night, and we ended up messing around with my digital camera - she is so lovely! Her and her Mum took me out for a meal one evening to a Harvester - it had a huge salad bar, was lots of fun spending time with Emma outside of work too!