team retreat

After all the papers had been submitted for the Jamaica conference, our team headed up to St Jacut de la Mer for a retreat. We stayed at what used to be an abbey, and had a bunch of meetings about the general team direction, with a couple of special guests thrown in, including Mariano from FT, who I worked with on HUTN. The technical discussions didn't really excite me very much, partly because I'm not overly enamoured with the details of the software process (I'm a "narrow-minded technocrat", as a former co-worker once pointed out), and partly because I think I was in need of some downtime. On the Wednesday afternoon we went for a walk, but the weather went from Breton-miserable to actual rain, and our effort to put 17 people in a 10-person pub resulted in a less than ideal ambience.

On getting back Thursday night, I headed over to a friend of Liz's place, for an apero before a planned trip to see a Ska group in the Rue St Mich. We never got to the rue St Mich, and I was pretty hammered when I got home about 3am. Drinking games which you require to sing French songs are not ideal for someone who doesn't know any, and I paid a high price for my ignorance. The fact that I mixed my drinks with a reckless abandon didn't help either.

As a result of this foolishness, my trip to the prefecture happened much later than I had intended, and my afternoon at work was largely spent holding my head.