November 4th, 2009
Before the memories fade, I thought I should document the last week or so’s events…
We’ve just got back from a week in York celebrating my mother’s 60th, father’s 61st, sister’s 19th and son’s 5th birthdays. All went well, but a couple of things seem to have stuck in my mind…
1. Diggerland is a fantastic place to take a 5 year old for two reasons…. The first being simply that the 5 year old gets to do what every 5 year old wants to do…. drive real diggers, all by themselves in some cases. The second reason is that their thirty-something year old dads get to do exactly what every thirty-something year old lad wanted to do when he was 5 years old too!
2. Dinosaurs continue to be the nightly read, and I’m starting to get quite well educated about them now… I can even pronounce a few of the names! The questions about them, however, are getting more and more difficult to answer.
3. Bob is having a great deal of fun trying to re-learn how to pronounce “Three”, “Thunder”, “Thing” etc. I was starting to get a bit worried about “Tree”, “Tunder” and “Ting”, and after Bob made the keen observation that people in York say it differently to “everyone else”, it seemed like a great time to try. 
4. Sam seems to be in a particularly cute phase… “Meeee tooooo!” seems to be the phrase of the week. Everything that Bob wants or says he has done, she says “Meeee toooo!”. She also has caught the advertisement disease from Bob…. “want dat for my happy birthday” has been heard far too many times from her (and him) in the last few weeks.
Note to self… must must must update the pictures soon.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
October 4th, 2009
The last two Sunday’s have been really special in an ordinary kind of way (if you know what I mean).
He’ll be 5 in just a few weeks, but he’s just made the grade as a genuine help in the garden, as opposed to a hinderence to getting stuff done.
Last week, out of sheer despiration and weeks of fiddling with my wireless network, I decided I needed to run a cable round the outside of the house. To most people this may seems like an easy task, but to me it might as well have been building a house.
Anyway, we went swimming on Sunday morning and Bob got to do his first ride on the 3 big slides at the NAC. Then to McD’s and on to Maplin to get the bits.
A dash home later and we were running cable and drilling holes. Naturally I didn’t have long enough drill bits to get through the wall, so Bob and I had to go back to the shops again.
By the time it was bed time, Bob and I had crimped our first cat 6 cable and had a gigabit network running from one end of the house to the other, albeit with cable just hanging in the gutter.
Then a week later, we had good weather again, and while Bob started the day in bad form, he soon got going and after lunch we were outside again.
We managed to hammer cable grips in the wall with no injuries (Bob handing me the grips) and he got to climb the ladder a couple of times.
When done, we cleaned the car and made. “Magic” rainbows with the power hose pointed skywards.
All in all, two lovely Sundays at home.
Tags: Ben, Bob, Car, James, Network
Posted in Ben, Bob, James | No Comments »
September 13th, 2009
Well it really was an excellent day today, where we experienced the “Old Wive’s Summer” at first hand. It was probably one of the nicest days of the year, and certainly the best in several months. We managed our first real bike ride around the outskirts of the village, with Sam on the back of Nat’s bike, me on my old bum-shattering racer and Bob on his bike (albeit with stabilizers again… he’s been afraid to ride it without them ever since the dog chased him on his first outing without them).
In the afternoon we intended to have the water slide out for them, but got hit by the age old problem here… no water… not a drop. So to keep them happy, we inflated it and let them bounce around in the sun on a dry water slide. Ah well, they enjoyed it.
Stringing them out until bed time was a huge challenge because they were so knackered, but we made it.
Without doubt one of the best days of 2009 in Ireland. I just hope we get another weekend of it, because I’m on my own with the kids next weekend.
Posted in Ben, Bob, Family, James, Nat, Sam | No Comments »
September 4th, 2009
At the end of the first week of Ben’s first week at school, I find myself struggling to get my head around the fact that he is growing up so fast.
Perhaps a little worryingly, when asked what he did at school (in his 2 hours a day that he has been going this week), on two of the days he’s said something akin to “Nothing that I like. Boring stuff.”. Let’s hope that improves. There are a lot of kids in his class, and you have to wonder how any teacher could keep that many kids “entertained”.
What makes me more sad, though, is the fact that he doesn’t get to go home at the end of it. Instead he get’s on a bus along with about 15 kids, and goes on to afterschool.
It’s a long day for a nearly-five-year-old, and even though it is no longer a day than what he’s had since he was 6 months old in creche, it’s clearly been tiring him out much more.
While I don’t think I could ever cope with more kids, I do think I’m starting to understand why some people just keep popping them out. It is hard to think that you’ll never get these early years back, and it feels even worse that I’ve spent almost all of the 5 years working, rather than playing with him.
Ho hum… I suppose life goes on.
Tags: Ben, School
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
August 1st, 2009
Well it has been one mighty hot week here in Springfield OR, touching 41 degrees and not dropping below 36 during the day at all.
One thing that this trip really made me reflect upon was Social networking, in all its forms. What it really brought home though was the simple fact that good old fashioned face to face networking is irreplaceable. While Twitter, Blogs, Facebook and the rest might help us to maintain links around the world, there is just nothing better than spending a bit of time with people, shaking hands, having discussions, having a meal and drinking a beer.
While I hope the online versions will continue to grow, I hope we never get to the stage where real life gets overrun.
Thank you all in Springfield for a warm welcome in every way.
Tags: travel
Posted in James | 1 Comment »
July 23rd, 2009
I am writing this from Wordpress for Blackberry. It is a beta but boy is it cool. Now I can blog without having to be by a computer! Very cool!
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
July 4th, 2009
Well it’s July 4th, so what better time to give Bob a little independence. Stabilizers off, and off he goes. Our little boy is growing up! To add to the incentive to do it, a dog came out of nowhere and tried to bite his feet off!
Bob riding without stabilizers for the first time
Tags: Ben, Bob
Posted in Ben, Bob | No Comments »
June 12th, 2009
It’s been a mad week with rather a lot of unnecessary tension, a large proportion of which is due to the oh so fantastic British government.
The short story is that I needed to renew my passport and took it, along with the forms, to the embassy last month. That was the easy bit.
They said it would be posted to me and should arrive by the 3rd.
The 3rd came and went.
With travel coming up, I went looking for the embassy phone number on the 8th. No such luck… Two options, both of which require a credit card on a per minute charge, and both of which are in Scotland. They openly state on the Embassy website that it is outsourced to Careline Services. Fine, I’m ok with that.
They are overt about the charges… Hmmm I am ok with that.
They lie in the IVR about “We are experiencing unusually long hold times” consistantly (they are not “unusually long” if they are over 6 minutes and up to 20 minutes EVERY time you call.
But then…
When you get through they take your credit card number before anything else.
You start being charged by the minute.
What do you get? You get a nice bloke called Ewan, or a nice girl called Gemma, who can tell you…
SWEET F*CK ALL about the status of your passport. They simply have no information. They are kept in the dark and fed shit. The can’t make calls to the people that issue the passport. They can’t make calls to the embassy. They don’t know which postal companies are used to send out the passports, and don’t know the tracking numbers of the couriered or registered mails. The only way for an agent to find information is to send an email to the embassy “which has an average of 72 hours response time”. No wonder… the guy in the embassy doesn’t receive the mail until 24 hours after it is sent!
It is the only email system that I’ve ever heard of that is slower than snail mail. Maybe that’s it in fact… The british government print out all emails, send them by Royal Mail, then type them back in at the destination end. Unbelieveable.
Anyway the day was saved by a Benny Hill like dash around Dublin, a trip to the embassy, who had posted the passport 30 mins before I got to the counter (i.e. 20 minutes after I arrived in the queue to get to the counter). They suggested that I might catch it if I dashed 3 miles down the road to a local village post office that had collected the post bag and, would you believe it, it worked. I actually got my post while it was in transit. I’m sure that’s illegal in most countries, but I’m bloody relieved that I did.
Tags: James, Passport
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
May 31st, 2009
OK… Natalie is utterly sick of hearing me say it but WOW what a fabulous day it has been. Yesterday was lovely and we spent the day in the garden. Today just blew yesterday out of the water. I went for a bike ride with the kids this morning while Nat had her lie in. We spent the afternoon lazing in the garden while the kids entertained themselves on the water slide or in the sandpit. I cooked my second BBQ in two days and am genuinely just loving being at home. It helps that, being a public holiday weekend, it seems that absolutely everyone else is away and there has been no noise… not even from house alarms which are the bain of most summers.
I genuinely can’t remember two days like this. Nat reckons it has been at least 3 years since we had one. I’m not sure, but damn I hope we get more of them!
According the the weather forecast, we have a good week ahead. Fingers crossed!
Tags: Weather
Posted in Ben, Bob, Family, James, Nat, Sam | No Comments »
May 9th, 2009
April and early May have proved to be good months. We started the month with enough sun to hit the beach in Bettystown, and put up a tent in the garden (and sleep overnight in it). The middle of the month was punctuated by Sam’s birthday, which again got enough sun to get the kids in the garden. I spent a morning in hospital to be topped and tailed (I can’t think of a nice way to describe it), and found everything to be ok. And finally we get 2 weeks of holiday back in Tenerife again, which was lovely. I’ve reposted photos in the picture section (Holidays are spanning the April and May month folders). You can jump to them quickly here.
Tags: Beaches, Ben, Birthday, Bob, Holidays, Hospital, James, Natalie, Sam
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »