A very baby weekend...

Hope everyone enjoyed their bank holiday weekends (despite the dreadful weather), ours was *extremely* baby focused (even more than usual, if that is even possible)...Saturday morning was baby swimming (as usual), the new (and final) term starts next week, without a break (worse luck) as I think we could all do with one - half of every Saturday, every week is starting to become something of a drain...

Saturday afternoon my folks took Thomas off for a few hours while Flyingpops and I had some well deserved rest assembled new Ikea units and re-arranged the entire living room into a more "baby proof" format (or so we thought), attempted to put up one of our (brand new boxed) boot sale bargain stair gates across the entrance to the kitchen (but the drill battery was flat)...and then Thomas came back from my folks having gained the ability to slowly move around the room in small shuffles (albeit backwards) and hang onto the side of sofas (etc.) but thankfully went to bed early letting me snooze the rest of the evening on the sofa in front of Simon Cowell (et al)...

Sunday saw us drive to Crawley retail park (in the pouring rain) and charm a (very patient and helpful) young member of staff to carry a succession of car seats out (through the downpour) and then struggle to fit them in the back of (a three door and *rammed* with baby things) Poppy the Beetle...at the end of which he then had to carry the huge cardboard box out and actually finally fit the one we decided on - the Maxi Cosi Priori XP - all part of the service...in the afternoon I cooked the aforementioned pasta and finally fitted the semi-permanent stair gate to block off the kitchen...then proceeding to stub my toe three times in a row (after wedging it open) by forgetting it was there... >X0

It now stays shut...

Monday we tried to fit another stair gate (actually at the top of the stairs this time), but it was too short by about 3cm (how annoying), so Flyingpops ordered us a free extention piece and then tried to find us a car that's slightly more baby friendly (don't listen Poppy!)...we considered several times taking a little walk, but hail or rain kept putting us off so in the end we just spent the day at home, playing as a family, during which Thomas managed to find his first DVD - my fault - which he introduced to his lethally sharp teeth (RIP DVD - although I'm lucky, as there was an Xbox game right next to it) - so I'm moving my Xbox up next to the telly as soon as possible (after that little learning experience)...and when the sun came out I managed to get the BBQ up and running and cooked myself some spicy BBQ pork ribs (which were delicious) - oh and I learned how to hang a mirror with picture wire (if you ever need such a thing done, I'm now an expert)... ;)

So not what you could call a relaxing weekend...but we certainly got a lot closer to being ready for Thomas being more mobile...

West Wittering Beach

So just a few pictures from our (fairly short lived) trip to see what the beach at West Wittering was like...

...and actually, it's easy to see what the fuss is all about...you can imagine what it's like in summer, these beach huts all filled with families...

- absolutely miles of beautiful beaches -

- and out in the harbour a constant procession of watercraft -

- it's just a really beautiful place-

- just a shame I couldn't have had more of an explore thanks to the knee, but I certainly got a good idea of what the place was like...we will check out more of it next time we visit... ;)

Sorry Guys...

...for not posting - serious knee-cartilage related soft-tissue flare-up caught me by surprise over the weekend, exacerbated by whacking my knee on the corner of my metal pedistal under my desk three times in a row (training our new chap, so sat in quite the wrong position for speedy desk tucking - ouch!), dashing the commute home to start the break as soon as possible, followed shortly by an hour and a half sat in an incredibly uncomfortable position in the car on the way down to our weekend break...anyway, whatever it was that caused it I've ended up being practically unable to walk (again)...I honestly think we would have been forced to cancel the break completely if it wasn't for the fact that we *knew* the house was still going to be in total chaos (bathroom no-where near done), and that between Flyingpops and I, the whole process of even packing the car up to come home in a hurry would have been a complete farce...as it was, it was pretty hilarious (although *only* in retrospect - and this is no joke, we were hefting things to one another out of the second door (the one without stairs) at the head of the caravan to save bending and stretching, Flyingpops holding in the Bump, gasping and me clutching at my knee making the odd indecent outburst)...heaven only knows how we got it all done...

Can't fault where we went though, despite the medical "issues" stopping us exploring terribly far afield, it certainly looks like an amazing part of the country - pics and stories to come, once I can lean toward the keyboard without grinding my teeth in pain...and thanks to Emily! Don't know what we would have done without the blissful rest afforded to us...trying to cope with all this *and* the builders taking over the house? I can't even start to contemplate it...! Once we got back to civilisation, we just decided to give up on home completely instead heading straight to Oxted (where we had kipped all last week), although this time, instead of being resident for house sitting and watering duties, thanks to my folks actually being home, it's a bit more like us being looked after for a while...so thanks (very much) Mum and Dad too... :)

Phew...

Nearly time for us to start our mini-break...only one more day to get through...really looking forward to getting away and switching off for a few days, our venue is a borrowed caravan (thank you MEEM) located (not in the South West, as I had thought, but) in Itchenor, West Sussex (near Chichester)...it's a little village that sits looking out on Chichester Harbour (which is apparently one of the busiest waterways in England)...unfortunately, after the excellent weather we've been enjoying (sat in the office - bah) it's forecast to rain all weekend, especially bad on Sunday (what is it with us and mini-breaks in the rain?)...so we might have to do the usual, and find some indoor type things to do...!

Finks Links #65

Yay, another bank holiday coming up, and Flyingpops has texted saying that BBQ and beer are on the menu (woo hoo)! Unfortunately only a few links this week, thanks to the emergency cutting it rather shorter than we wanted, and the rest of it being about the busiest of the whole year so far, but there are a few really good ones to share... ;)

First up this week, the ultimate Star Trek Bachelor pad...

Teamwork... [pic]

Manhatten re-imagined into a ring world [pic and video]

Check out the Angels Knee Pillow (an interesting look at Japanese toilet etiquette)...

Physics! [animated GIF]

...and finally my first fail, and a late night snack fail...

More next week, have a great bank holiday weekend!

New Bathroom - Buying Tiles

We are *finally* getting our new bathroom...! The quote is in, the taps have been chosen and work is due to start in the next couple of weeks, this does of course mean that for the duration we will have some considerable upheaval to put up with (not least of which is having no means of taking a bath - I guess I'm going to have to use the showers here in the gym in Canary Wharf, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it)...So Saturday we spent doing the last of the little jobs associated with the upgrade - choosing the tiles - which (one would have thought) should have been reasonably simple, however, we really did end up going all around the houses...first stop was Rogers Ceramics, a little independent tile shop at Gatton Point, which was a really tiny place and didn't seem to have a single kind of tile for under about £25 per square meter (and as we needed 20 square meters that would have cost us about £500!)-

Next up we stopped in the Homebase in Reigate, nothing *really* grabbed us, but they did have nice plain white tiles for £7.99/m2 (or about £160 for the job) - so a step in the right direction...if only they had more than 4 boxes in stock we probably would have finished the process right there and then...

Anyway, we headed on to Dorking and Wickes next, where they had even cheaper white tiles (£6.15/m2 - or £123) and again (unfortunately) only 6 boxes in stock...!

Flyingpops went to the information desk and asked if they could order up some more, and the answer was no, they only way we could guarantee getting the whole lot from a single batch was to order them to be delivered, which would cost an extra £40! Most unhelpful...and so we ended up in Tile Base (just down the road from Wickes) -

- where the staff were extremely friendly and helpful (in stark contrast) -

- they had a *huge* palett of white tiles (all from the same batch) for £6.50/m2 (and it was "10% off day") meaning we got the whole lot for £117!  We even got a few sheets of embellishments for 99 pence each (down from £5)!

Flyingpops mum came (briging her estate car) to help us transport them all home (thanks Nanjan!), as there was absolutely no room in the Bug, and they are all now stacked up at the bottom of the stairs waiting for the work to begin! How exciting!

Finks Links #62

Gosh, I've been so busy this week it's incredible there are any links to share at all, but I do have just a few interesting bits for you...really looking forward to the bank holiday coming up, in serious need of a long snooze in the warm weather...!

Anyway, this was pretty amazing, give it a second or two to get going, the idea is to change reality into looking like it might belong in a video game, achieved by painting the old mint in downtown SF with 7 perfectly mapped HD projectors... [video]

Appeal to the inner James Bond in you with this tiny Sim card spy ear (basically a mini mobile phone with no speaker and auto-answer turned on, hide it in a room, ring it up, and listen to what is going on)... ;)

Thank goodness you live in modern times at the discovery of a 43 foot snake in Columbia which would have been able to hunt down cattle(!) (don't worry, it's only a fossil)... ;)

Laugh at what had better be an extremly good can of Pepsi... ;)

Check out German-born photographer Anna Skladmann's study "Little Adults" - a series of portraits, featuring the uncomfortably made-up and dead-eyed children of Russian elites...actually quite haunting...

The Top 10 supercar crash tests (ouch)...

Take a look around Russia's most modern nuclear power station... [pics]

...and last but not least, a great Undercover fail...yep, they'll never suspect a thing... ;)

More next week and enjoy the bank holiday weekend...!

Super Busy Easter weekend

Just to recap, not quite sure why I haven't got round to speaking about it before, but we have had one hell of a busy bank holiday weekend (and that definitely merits a mention), Friday morning was spent (in the pouring rain), smashing up -

- and skipping the content and structure of two garden sheds at Flyingpops folks' house -

- it took five of us four and a half hours (or 22.5 man-hours) to heave everything out of the garden, force it to fall into small pieces (with extreme prejudice) and then stack it neatly, and if that wasn't quite enough effort to go to for one weekend, we then packed all the baby stuff lurking in Dorking into Poppy the Beetle, that afternoon we returned to our house, moved the old freezer into the living room, moved the washing machine into the cupboard in the hall (where we had new plumbing installed last week to accomodate it), moved the dishwasher into the space left by the washing machine, brought in and installed a new tumble drier (an absolute revelation! No more, heaps of wet clothes all over the upstairs of the house!) on top of the washing machine in the cupboard (venting through a newly drilled hole in the brickwork), and then put our new freezer (front opening, three drawers) where the dishwasher used to be...the last job of the day (and one, that thanks to us being so tired, took about four times longer than it should have done) was re-hanging the door to the cupboard where the washing machine/tumble drier now live, so it opens in such a way that you aren't left trapped by the front door when you do so (why it wasn't like that in the first place I will never know)...and after all that, none of us could be bothered to cook, so we had a Chinese takeaway... ;)

Saturday we went and did the Tesco shopping early in the morning and then I spent the rest of the day moaning about my feet hurting thanks to the wellies I was wearing on Friday being about two sizes too small (got six blisters), Flyingpops and I went through all the kitchen cupboards throwing one in three items out (mostly extremely old soft drinks bought for parties and never disposed of, but also lots of out of date cans, bottles and packets, and the odd bit of ironwork or supurfluous container) then Flyingpops baked 60 fairy cakes and decorated them with icing, chocolate and sprinkles (eating 10% of them in the process)...Easter Sunday we went to my folks for an Easter chick hunt (a play on the theme - my "egg" was a lovely herb garden my Mum had planted up for me - thanks Mum!) lunch of lamb shanks in mint gravy with delicious sweet German beer on the side, and then we lugged all the baby stuff up to my folks' spare room (where we assembled everything, without instructions) to make sure it was okay, and went through bagfulls of clothes sorting out what we wanted/needed and what we didn't), and popped to Dorking Halls that night to watch Slumdog Millionaire (they got the volume wrong at the start and nearly deafened the audience - several groups of people actually walked out)...

Easter Monday we went to the local plumbers supply store to buy a part to fix a minor leak we had sprung during the move around on Friday (which I fitted when we got home), then popped to the dump to drop off the third of the kitchen we had stacked outside the front door on Saturday afternoon, and then we popped over to the local car boot sale looking for a baby monitor of some description (we failed, but I did score components to try and get my headphones working on my new flat panel TV - I gave up and ordered the bits from Maplin after about 20 minutes scraping wire, testing connections and straining to hear precisely zip coming out of the earbuds)...then we went *back* to Flyingpops folks place, this time for a lunch of roast beef and all the trimmings...

Feel like I need a holiday now! ;)

1st Wedding Anniversary

Wow...It's been a year already - our first wedding anniversary is this weekend! I've still got the day so clear in my mind, just as if it were yesterday, I guess things quite so intense and personal get extra weight when the brain is burning them into long time storage...which is nice... ;)

Anyway, by way of celebration we have got Friday and Monday off as holiday and are paying for each other to get away to Canterbury (actually, more specifically a tiny bed and breakfast in a cottage near a nature reserve to the east of Canterbury)...the visits we have planned are to the "Canterbury Tales Experience" (a sort of medieval theme park), the cathedral (and the rest of the town centre), then a little trip to Whitstable, where apparenty they are currently enjoying the start of the local oyster season (not that Flyingpops will be able to join in as shellfish are off the menu for pregnant persons)...and then back home, perhaps, via Dover to check out Dover castle and the secret WW2 tunnels underneath...should be a good weekend (even better if the forecast bad weather doesn't affect us too badly, but a lot of the stuff we had planned was indoors/underground anyway)!

Anyone been to this part of the country? Any suggestions for cool things to do over a long weekend?