Published on
September 20, 2009 in
General.
It’s Sunday evening, which must mean we’ve managed to survive another weekend – yay for us 
Saturday was the usual mix of swimming, shopping and a little housework. Oh, with a certain 9-year-old’s birthday party thrown in for good measure. I’m not particularly secretive about the fact that I dislike these events, but this one wasn’t really that bad. The kids all behaved themselves, and I actually managed to learn a few of their names and have something approaching conversations with them. Well, OK, it was food time and they told me what sandwich they wanted, but that’s progress for me.
Today was time for more shopping (for Mrs H anyway, I stayed home and marshalled our little darlings), a walk, and then (a delectable) Sunday Roast with the in-laws.
Oh yes – these walks. We’re surprising ourselves with this. Since our trip to the Lake District, we’ve been taking ourselves off for weekly walks. We’ve invested in 3 Landranger OS maps (178, 179 and 189, fact fans), and spend 5 minutes on Saturday evening deciding on a suitable spot, and then 2 or 3 hours on Sunday walking. Surprisingly, we’re enjoying it. More surprisingly, with the weather not looking too promising this morning, we still headed out, and we still had fun. Who’d a thunk it?
If you want to keep tabs on where we’ve been and what we’ve seen, there’s a new link over there on the right with the oh-so-imaginative title of ‘Walks‘. It takes you to a section of this site where I’m trying to record where we go along with any notes and comments and so on. The Google maps with overlays of our routes are nothing clever on my part – they come from Everytrail.com, a site that lets you upload GPS tracks from a variety of sources (I use my lovely phone).
Now… I’m being told I’m only typing here to avoid jumping on the Wii Fit thingie to be told how fat I am. It’s true, but I can delay no longer…
Published on
September 16, 2009 in
Photos.
A little old, this one – taken during a trip to Leeds Castle this summer.
(Click for full size, or here’s an iPhone version)
Things James has now:
- Hair. Enough to go curly when it gets long, and to look worryingly ‘Hawaiian Sunset’ in the right light. Or should that be the wrong light?
- Teeth. 3 at the last count, with more coming. He’s had 2 for what seems like an age, but the telltale signs of proper teething started about a week ago and he’s now sporting a nice big upper incisor to go with his 2 lowers. The scarcity of teeth hasn’t really stood in his way though, as he half-munches & half-gums more or less anything we give him, including apple, raw carrot, chips, banana.
- Shoes. He’s not walking yet, but he’s nearly there. To help him on his way to full mobility, we’ve got him a pair of slipper-ish shoes to wear whilst he’s taking his tentative assisted footsteps. With a steadying hand or two, he can walk, and there are moments when there’s no physical reason for the handholding. Around and about the house, there are the odd moments, say when he’s standing, holding onto the sofa, when he forgets he can’t stand on his own, and lets go of the sofa; there follows a couple of seconds of standing before the brain kicks in saying “Oi, you can’t stand yet”, and down he goes. It feels like one day he’s just going to ‘decide’ to walk, and he’ll be off.
- A temper. He’s turned into a proper little person, with good moods and bad moods, and times when he’s happy to sit playing with a cardboard box, and other times when he needs constant interaction. When he’s in a bad mood, and he doesn’t get his own way, we get the full on “laying on back kicking the floor” screaming ab-dabs. Our usual reaction is to smirk a little, wait for him to ‘get over it’, and then carry on. It rarely lasts for long. We keep telling him he’s a little early for those terrible twos we keep hearing about. He doesn’t seem to care.
- Words. Just a few, but the available vocabulary seems to grow each week. He has recognisable versions of ‘Hello’, ‘Bye bye’, ‘Mama’, ‘Dadda’, ‘Harry’ and ‘Brother’, as well as a very expressive ‘Oooh’, which can mean a number of things, including “That’s new”, “I want that”, “I’m excited by that” and so on. We also get nodding and shaking of the head, although not always in the right places.
- Waves. This is a real charmer, and he knows it. If he’s being cheeky and wandering off somewhere where he probably shouldn’t be, he’ll try to buy some time by giving a little regal wave on the way out. Strangers in the street get the same treatment (sometimes accompanied by his ‘hello’).
In general, he is a happy, inquisitive little soul. He’s growing in personality all the time, and acquiring new skills at a blistering rate. I’m well aware that just about every parent in the land would say something similar of their own offspring, but I make no apologies for that. Our boy is special, because he’s ours, and we love him to bits.
Published on
September 13, 2009 in
Photos.
(Click for full size, or here’s an iPhone version)
Published on
September 11, 2009 in
General.
Derren Brown’s “How To Win The Lottery” thing was obviously* a camera trick. The lack of perspective change during the fake ‘camera shake’ was the big giveaway to me. I didn’t actually spot the ball moving.
And now I sound like one of those conspiracy theory nutters. Oh well. I do believe the Moon landings happened though, ok?
A few people seem to agree with this theory – here’s one of them.
* Almost, kinda, mostly obvious. I think.
Welcome back, fair reader(s).
This site has been offline for a little while thanks to those nasty people who, as far as I can make out, exploited the fact that I thought I knew better than any of the decent anti-virus solutions out there, stole my FTP password, and then modified several files on my webhost to include dodgy <iframe> fragments. The blog you’re reading now just broke when they did that, as they managed to make one of the crucial PHP files into a PHP file with syntax errors. A couple of the other sites I host here continued to work and – unbeknownst to me – started to include hidden content from dodgy servers in Russia (judging by the .ru domain name). Sorry about that.
A short time after this happened, the good guys at Heart Internet disabled my hosting account. Unfortunately for me, they did this whilst I was away getting wet in the Lake District, and since getting back it’s been enough of a struggle, frankly, to fit sleeping and work into my days, without the added timesink that is de-hacking a website.
I’m all de-hacked and enabled again now though, with a slightly tidier looking hosting account. I seemed to be accumulating a collection of retired sites which have now been consigned to the great /dev/null in the sky. Hopefully – hopefully – fretnoise.com will be around for a while without incident, and may even sport some proper entries.
Stranger things have happened.
To get the ball rolling, here’s one of the good photos from our trip to the lakes. It’s (part of) Castlerigg Stone Circle, just outside Keswick (Google Map). There is actually a full circle – it was just hard to get a decent picture of more than a few of the stones at a time thanks to all the pesky tourists…
(Click for full size, or here’s an iPhone version)
Published on
August 1, 2009 in
Blognews.
I’ve just installed WPtouch 1.8.9.1, which makes this blog look really nice on an iPhone, iPod Touch or BlackBerry. Or at least it claims to – I can only test it on my iPhone. It makes it look like this:
Snazzy, huh?
Published on
August 1, 2009 in
Blognews.
Tada! Welcome to my new and (not actually) improved blog, freshly re-installed after some daft hacker mangled one of the Wordpress include files to the extent that the dodgy link that he’d gone to so much trouble to include on all my pages couldn’t be rendered at all.
Anyway, here we are with a fresh install of WP. Please let me know if anything looks broken and/or dodgy.
Grr.
Welcome to Wordpress 2.8.2, which seems to have broken my K2 theme. Bah.
…and updating K2 to 1.0-RC8 seems to have fixed it. Phew.
