Well, I remain in constant awe of the power of communication and the internet.

I was approached by a friend. Her sister lives in Houston with her family, but is new to the area. They’ve been evacuated for Hurricane Rita, but had been unable to find anyplace to stay overnight. My friend called me to ask if I knew anyone in Texas who might have a room.

Well, a combination of instant messages, e-mails, and telephone calls found accomodation for everyone for as long as they need it. This generosity is amazing enough, and helps restore some of my faith in mankind. But what’s even more amazing is that this accomodation was arranged in under an hour, from 5000 miles away. Any way you look at it, that’s awesome.

To those of you who contributed in some way — making phone calls, passing along contacts, offering places to stay — I’m grateful. I believe in karma, and I hope one day I can return the favour.

To all my friends and family on the Gulf Coast (and there are a lot of you), please let me know if there’s anything I can do. You’ll be in our thoughts.

There wasn’t much time to plan a birthday party. Initially I hadn’t planned on having a party because I thought I would be in Malaysia. Nevertheless, we had a small gathering here and drank our fair share of champagne. Pictures to follow!

Many thanks to all of you who’ve send cards or e-mail. I woke up this morning and looked in the mirror — there don’t appear to be any new wrinkles or grey hair. And people definitely aren’t treating me with more respect.

I must have been right all along. It is only my 24th birthday.

They say that the mind is the first thing to go….

Well, it’s a little overdue, but a few days ago I promised that I had some news. I finally handed in my notice at SAIC and will be starting with Axon at the end of October. I’ll be joining their Enterprise Performance Management team.

(Shamelessly copied from their website) Axon consultants design, deliver and manage business critical solutions which enable large organisations to reduce cost, improve service and deploy strategy. Typical Axon assignments involve 5 to 50 consultants for between 3 months and 3 years.

Axon has grown profitably every year since their formation and they now employ over 800 people in London (their headquarters), New York, Sydney, Kuala Lumpur and Dubai. They are the leading company of their kind in their market and their clients include many of the most ambitious and successful organisations in the world, such as BP, Transport for London and Kraft.

What a difference a day makes, as they say. Instead of rushing around frantically, packing and getting all the last minute details in place for my trip to Malaysia, I spent this morning lounging in bed. Finally stumbled out of bed around 11am to discover a warm, sunny day outside.

My biggest task today is the laundry. If I can manage that, I’ll have accomplished my goals. My secondary task is to find a parking spot for my car. My apartment came with one reserved spot — which is a problem when you’ve got two cars. Canterbury is a pedestrianized town, so parking is pretty hard to come by. I’ve got a lead on one spot — outdoor, but secure — but I’m really trying to track down a garage.

Aude told me that there’s a wine festival on in Calais — basically, they mark down all of the bin-ends at this time of year to make way for the new wines. Unfortunately, she didn’t mention this festival until this morning, by which time it was already too late to book. You know what they say about the road to hell?

So it looks like we’ll have a quiet day here instead. A few new shops have opened up here in Canterbury, all of which are calling Aude’s name, so we’ll go and have a look at what they have to offer. Canterbury isn’t a terribly exciting place, so we celebrate our little victories.

Now that I’m not flying to Malaysia (not this week, anyhow), I’m left with the rather daunting task of trying to arrange a birthday party for next weekend. I was sort of hoping that if I ignored it long enough, it would go away.

It’s been a busy day, but one that’s yielded some exciting news (well, exciting for me in any case). More details about this early next week.