Anglesey: super convenient and very relaxing

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P1000803Well I confess… I’m surprised. I expected wind – well we got it in gale force levels.  I expected rain – we got that too in its horizontal form.  I expected cold – and it got pretty cold.  What I didn’t expect was glorious sunshine and beautiful scenery!

It sounds a bit like I work for a marketing company, but considering the convenience of a ferry to Anglesey, it really is a nice break, even in late October.  Fantastic Edwardian castles (Edward 1st – 13th Century), extremely picturesque beaches, a lighthouse or two, a pier or two, and enough muddy puddles to keep Sam jumping for hours… oh and a hot tub back at the cottage.  Great week.  Need to do more.

P1000787

Lovely weekend in York

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Just on the ferry back from Holyhead. Had a lovely short trip to York, after a super short flight over to Doncaster. Spent Saturday morning emptying stuff from the loft, then the afternoon at beautiful Dalby Forest. Finished the day with a meal at not-so-beautiful Scarborough, before a scenic route home (genuinely pretty route, illuminated with lovely sunset, punctuated occasionally with “I think I’m going to be sick” type comments from the lady in the back row).
North Yorkshire really is a fantastically beautiful place.

Ben’s first successful turn on a bike

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Bob riding bike successfully for the first time without stabilizers

Well, it took a year or thereabouts, but finally Bob has gotten back on the bike without stabilizers, and with a little help from Gary he’s built up his confidence and can now turn corners, set off by himself, and stop by himself (most of the time).  Last year’s episode, when I recording him also riding successfully, scared him so much – because of the dog chasing him – that it has taken us a whole year to get him back to this stage, and even now it took a heck of a lot of persuasion.  That said, he got to grips with it in the space of about an hour, spread over two days.  Not bad really.

Almost forgotten how to blog

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Hello old friend… in new shiny clothes…  I noticed today that WordPress 3 has just released and being the cutting edge kinda dude that I am, I thought I’d better upgrade.

It’s really rather devastating to see that it was November last time I posted anything.

How can I summarize all the time in between?

Well… Clearly I’ve been busy.  Even Facebook isn’t getting much attention.  160 characters in Twitter from time to time when I’m travelling, but not a lot more.

We had a good winter, by which I mean it proper snowed several times rather than just being damp.  We had uber low temperatures (lowest in decades).  Half the country ran out of water in the middle of January, because so many people left taps running to stop pipes freezing (only in Ireland could a thing like this happen).

Spring didn’t appear until about 6 weeks later than usual.

Did Christmas in Dublin – I cooked and Nat’s family came.

Spent a week or so in Oregon in February.

Lexi lights broke in March… Lexi garage said they fixed them… They lied.

Drove to Cork in early April for long weekend… Lexi broke more on way back.

Flew to Holland for our first re-union and had lovely day and night.  Flew onwards to Oregon again.

Volcano erupted… Trip extended… Went skiing at Mt. Hood… Stayed another week… Flew home…

Four days later, flew to Orlando with Nat and kids.

Fantastic holiday with my parents… Did Disney parks, NASA etc… Can’t wait to go again.  Shocked by incredibly low house prices.

Got back… Took Lexi for NCT (MOT)… She failed due to lying b*stards that didn’t fix lights, plus a warning light for optional safety system.   Took her back to Lexi garage: idiots swear there is nothing wrong with the lights, even though there clearly is and I blind people every night.  Lexi garage refuses to pay for replacement computer board for safety system.  The saga continues.  Lexus Ireland – so much for service.

And that brings us more or less up to date.

Must do better

Diggerland, Dinosaurs, “Th” and “Me too”

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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.

Boy to man… or at least “helper”

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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.

Awesome day!

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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.

End of Ben’s first week at school: Where did the years go?

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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.

A warm welcome in Springfield… and social networking the old fashioned way.

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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.