Today is a good day. Not specifically for me you understand, but I am happy to bask a little in the reflected glory on this one. I may have mentioned somewhere that AM has been studying through the OU for the last 6 years. This morning I took an unexpected phone call from her - she's in the UK at the moment, whilst I'm here. The call was to let me know that the course result for her final module had been released and she had passed (as I thought she would). Not only did she pass the module though, she also got a 'Distinction' in her end of course assessment. I got the impression she'd surprised herself more with that than passing the module itself, or the important bit - she can now put LLB(Hon) after her name, she's passed her law degree!

It's been a long hard slog for her wading through many days and evenings of work, long distance, with at times rather scant support from her tutors. It's hard enough doing OU study in the UK when at least you can attend the tutorial sessions, or call the tutors at sensible cost, but doing it this way takes some doing - I know, I've been there, and on my last attempt managed to blow it rather.

Suffice to say that I'm immensely proud of what's she's done and love her to bits for it. Whilst she's not yet decided what she wants to do with it, or whether she'd like to take it further, I'm sure she has at last proved to herself and others exactly how capable she is - I always knew that of course. I'm hoping she'll find this a useful springboard to doing whatever she wants, as it's no less than she deserves.

VPH*

* Very Proud Husband

As you drive around Riyadh these days, it's hard not to notice that something big is going on - big vertically, big horizontally and big volumetrically. It's everywhere seemingly. Wherever a spare corner of land is to be had (there are plenty), you'll find a gantry crane or two, sometimes a dozen, sometimes hundreds festooning the skyline for miles. Off the back of the oil price of recent years, the Saudi's have had some serious wonga to hand and they have gone on an enormous spending spree, blowing vast sums on poured concrete in all directions.

In the main though, this hasn't gone on the frivolous and fanciful - not these guys - it's going on some significant infrastructure. The main roads hereabouts are being dug up, underpasses fitted neatly below the existing, traffic diverted down streets clearly never intended for it. At rush hour (most of the day), chaos ensues and minor collisions are common place, major ones a regular event.

The roads are in a way, just small beer. The big stuff at the moment comes in the buildings that are climbing skywards at an alarming rate. If you don't pass through an area for a couple of months, the chances are that on your return, you'll not recognise it. Here though, we're not talking individual buildings but entire complexes. All of the existing universities are expanding and there's an entirely new one going up next to the airport. For scale, the latter quite takes the biscuit. This is the blurb I found on 'The Princess Nora Bint AbdulRahman University for Women'

The project calls for construction of a new university for women. The university is expected to cover 8 millions square metres and located on King Khalid International Airport Road at north of Riyadh. The total built up area is around 3 millions square metres. The university will include administration buildings, 13 faculties, a 700-bed student hospital, laboratories, research centres, and residential area that include accommodation for students and staff. The capacity of university is around 26,000 students.

Source: Construction Week Online

Now I've no idea of the experience of most, but that's a quite staggering project. By all accounts, this will be the largest women's university in the world. Amongst the expats, it's already known as the virgin mega-store! This link to Google Maps gives some idea of the scale of the development, which is around 3 miles long and over 2 wide. That image is now 6 months old and I can assure you there's rather more on the ground than when that was taken.

Alongside this though, the Imam University is growing, as is the King Saud University. There is also the King Abdullah Financial District going up not far away - the aim here being to set up the largest financial centre in the Middle East and I've seen one comment to suggest that they've taken their inspiration from Canary Wharf.

You'd think looking at all this, that this was quite a widespread activity, but it's not. Everything I've mentioned can be seen from the route AM and I travel to go to the supermarket. Now admittedly, our chosen supermarket is a half hour drive into town, but they are all on a 10 mile stretch on the North-West of the city. I have no idea what's going on anywhere else in the city, but a drive to pick up the groceries couldn't possibly be any more impressive anywhere else in the world... or could it?

Just for the hell of it, I called into the Med Centre on the way to work this morning. Today's excuse being that AM wanted some stuff collecting and I thought I may as well get my usual repeat ahead of the trip to the UK for (Ugh!) Christmas. No problem you'd think, except that it looked suspiciously like they were waiting for me...

Medical type person: "Ah, I'm glad you called in, I need to speak to you"

Me: "Have the results have come back then?"

MTP: "Yes, and we're not happy about this figure here"

He points at a circled figure two hours into my OGTT

MTP: "Normally at this point we'd expect to see your blood sugar levels coming down rather further than they have"

He calls the Doctor over who's sat at the back of the office shuffling paper

Doctor: "Well we've looked at this and there's no doubt that this confirms the diagnosis of diabetes, so you won't need to do an OGTT again"

I think they call that last bit a crumb of comfort. Bugger! Not what I had in mind, it seems that the body is disintegrating still further. The almost religious attempt at starvation last week before the test didn't help much then.

Doc: "Do you consume a lot of soft drinks and sugary foodstuff?"

Me: "No. I've known for a while that 'full fat' softies make me feel odd"

Doc: "Well it's not like you're overweight or have any of the other high risk contributing factors [he means I don't smoke], so given these readings, I'm not going to wait another three months to assess whether your blood sugar levels can be bought under control just by changing your diet. I'll start you on the tablets straight away."

Oh good, more fucking tablets!

Doc: "MTP, would you get a couple of packs of unpronouncible patented diabetes remedy? Now, I'd like you to start these with your largest meal of the day. They can have some side effects when you start them, nausia, light headedness, that sort of thing..."

Sounds just perfect, the very thing almost

Doc: "So start with one a day for a few days, then gradually build up to three a day. They help promote the production of insulin. As we get older, we all start to lose the ability to control our own sugar levels"

Thanks for the reminder. MTP returns with two large boxes.

Me: "Can I get my repeat too?"

Doc: "What do you have?"

I reel off the usual array

Doc: Ah well, we don't really like giving that one to people over 40 unless they've had this medical procedure done.

He mentions something involving a camera...

Doc: "I'll get a referral made up. There are much better things to take than those ones anyway"

That will be more tablets then will it? I suspect it might.

10 minutes later, I'm out of there, with a letter, a copy of my OGTT result and a bag containing five different types of drug counted out in hundreds. What a way to start the week! It's a good job nothing is going wrong any further down, they'd have me on the little blue pills in a heartbeat.

As you'd expect, AM is not happy about all of this. It seems that every time she flies out of the Magic Kingdom (like she will this evening), I end up finding out something 'interesting' about myself, like this. It would be fair to say, that I don't choose the timing, but I know what she means.

'Life's a piece of shit, when you look at it', or at least that's the way the song goes. I wonder when the next health turd is going to get lobbed in my general direction? Funny thing is, I don't remember standing near any fans...

Yet again, I find myself writing with less than an hour of the day left, with the minutes clocking down towards the point where actually I've not succeeded in completing a post for the day. You'd think that someone whose normal finishing time in the office is 16:00 and with a villa not 5 minutes from that office, might manage to come up with an assortment of words before midnight on a reasonably reliable basis. This is never quite how it pans out though...

1. I don't always get out of the office until later than intended - today was around 16:45
2. I spend some time talking to AM about our respective days
3. I catch up with the personal email
4. I'll sit on the sofa with AM and, as happened this evening, we both doze off for a good half hour or so, arms wrapped around each other
5. then tea has to be made, though I'd be lying if I said I do much of it, though I am capable of it, as AM often reminds me
6. whilst tea is being prepared, I'm trying to do a test install of a piece of open source software on my LAMP server
7. we eat, whilst watching Sky Sports News
8. I'll do a drink
9. Inevitably I'll end up watching CSI with AM, though it seems the most ridiculously signposted stuff imaginable
10. It's now 21:00 and I make my escape
11. I'm back at the PC doing the same install on the new webspace for the forum I'm doing some tech admin stuff for - it works
12. Now I'm doing an FTP download from the old webspace...
13. ...and then uploading the file into the new space
14. AM heads off to bed
15. A tap on the study window tells me I have a visitor - he wants to drop something off with me before he flies back to the UK, and we chat about work for half an hour
16. It's now 23:00 and I've not written, I've not been for a walk, I've not explained to the forum owner what I've been up to

Finally I start this post and I've not a clue what my topic should be - did nothing of note happen today? I'm sure it must have, but it all passed me by in a blur of near frantic effort somewhere along the line. I know, I'll do a list, lists are always a safe bet...