If It's Nae Scottish...

Things are exciting here in merry England because I finally got around to planning the mini-trip that Michelle and I will be taking when she arrives here. She arrives on Tuesday morning, December 20 and we leave at 9:00am on December 21 for our bullet-train trip up to beautiful Scotland. We'll be staying in Edinburgh for three nights, literally less than a 10 minute walk from the Edinburgh Castle, pictured above, and the Royal Mile. We're also figuring out if we have time to ride up to Stirling to see the battleground at Bannochburn, where my 20-greats grandfather Robert the Bruce defeated the English in the early 1300's. It doesn't matter what we end up doing, just the chance to experience Scotland after a decade of wanting to go there will be amazing, even if it's cold and raining (which it very likely will be).

In work news, Ross Hill left the club last week for his new job at Arsenal, meaning that I was the man in charge. I will also be doing the same thing this week as Ross' full-time replacement doesn't start until a week from tomorrow. It was a good thing for me because it has given me more responsibility and has forced me to do things that I haven't had a chance to do here yet, such as organizing a small presentation of the team's youth team bus to the youth team by the bus' sponsor, Essex Ford. Making sure that everyone was there at the right time and went off without a hitch was up to me and I'm proud to say that it went very smoothly. Be on the lookout for an article on that showing up on the Blues official site this week.

As I mentioned on the blog on Thursday, I got the experience of watching a photo shoot with our new PA announcer, the lovely model Kelly Burgess. That also was a great experience, but for reasons I won't go into!

On the pitch, Southend beat lower league opponents Barnet to advance in the world's oldest knockout tournament, the FA Cup. They will have a home match on the first weekend of December in the second round, with almost 20,000 pounds in cash up for grabs for the winner. Not to mention that in Round 3 all of the big clubs are entered into the pool as well, so the chance of drawing a home match against Manchester United looms as well. So here's hoping round two goes well, even though I'll be gone by the time the match is played.

Well, I'm down to about 5 or 6 weeks left on the job before I finish here in England, and I've already begun the job search, but nothing has materialized just yet. That's all for now, looking to hearing from everyone!