Where did that month go?!?

Hi family,

It feels like it's been ages since I wrote an update.. and after checking the last few posts, it's been more than a month! How did that happen?! And what have we done with ourselves since then?

The last couple of weekends have seen us in 'Spring Cleaning Mode' - we've taken a car-load to the tip and 5 bin-bags full of stuff to the op-shop. I've packed up half of my wardrobe (all of the things that don't fit me right now but that I want to keep) and Bruce emptied out at least half of the shelves in the store-room and moved around some of the furniture in the lounge. *phew* Clearly, this is all part of the 'get ready for baby' preparations and we know we've got lots still to do.

Speaking of preparations, for those of you who missed the photo on hangouts, here's the bumpdate. This was from last weekend when we were out looking at prams and cot-beds (note: it's still not warm enough for t-shirts yet.. not for longer than a few minutes anyway.) :-) This week I'm having a glucose test (fingers crossed for no gestational diabetes) and I think we're almost sorted for all of the 'big' purchases - car seat, pram & cot-bed. Now it's just all of the 'little' things we need to work out (and I don't even know what they all are!). And I realise that I need to get in-shape - I've got about three months to build up my strength and flexibility. Anyone got any good links/suggestions for programmes/stretches/etc?

Work has been keeping B & I busy, as always. We've both been travelling lately, with more to come over the next month.

Easter was a welcome break - we had a lovely quiet Easter at home and then headed up to Birmingham(ish) for Phil & Sarah's wedding. Phil and B have been mates for years, so B was a Best Man. Here's a pic taken by Gwen - I'm sure you'll agree that Bruce scrubs up pretty well. :-) The wedding was lovely - religious ceremony in a little church followed by reception at a hotel in the middle of nowhere. Good food, good company and we stayed at the hotel, so I didn't have to wait for B to be finished before I could go to bed. Yay!

After the wedding we headed even further north for a short-break with Vicki and Stephen. We stayed at a lovely little flat in Gatehouse of Fleet (Southern Scotland) and spent the time exploring castles and abbey ruins, spying on the local wildlife (we saw a seal in a field!), playing games whilst it rained, and enjoying wine, cheese and chocolate! I haven't looked through my "real" photos yet, so here are a few from my phone.

Caerlaverock Castle

Feeding the red kites

Sweetheart Abbey

The coming month is looking like it's as busy as the last - I've got two weekend conferences and at least two trips to North Wales! But we've also got two bank holidays in May (yay!) and I'm planning on taking some leave (not to go anywhere, but to sleep-in and relax a little). Next weekend is May Day and there's a local festival in Radyr and Morganstown - we might even see what that's all about.

What are the rest of you up to?

Back to work

Bruce and I were back at work this week. For me, that meant a trip over to Aberystwyth to talk to trainee teachers, a little bit of office work and two workshops for 14-15 year olds. *phew*
B spent the week looking at flights and stop-over destinations, with a bit of work here and there. ;-)

The result - we're coming to Australia!

We arrive into Melbourne at 10pm on Saturday 6th February and will stay over at the airport. We'll then make our way to Bendigo on Sunday 7th. Hopefully the weather will be warm - I'm bringing my togs and hoping for some swimming time! :-)

We leave from Tullamarine Airport at 4pm on Friday 19th February. Rather than flying straight back, we're stopping for 3 days in Abu Dhabi - which will give us a chance for more adventures and hopefully reduce jetlag a bit (since we're back to work on the Wednesday after arriving at Heathrow Tuesday night!).

So the visit is a little sooner than we thought - it was the best option to fit around work and everything. I know we spoke about flying in to Sydney and out of Melbourne (or vice-versa) but by the time we came to booking the trip, those flights had become stupidly expensive. That and the fact that Glenn, Dee & Jules need to move in February means we probably won't get to Sydney this trip. Sorry guys - we'll just have to video chat more.

Somehow I picked up a cold this week, so I've been taking it easy this weekend - I've got more travels coming up (Bath on Monday, Swansea on Tuesday..) but I'll tell you all about that next week.

*hugz* to all!

So much rain...

I've been here for nearly a week and we've only had a few days without some kind of precipitation. Fortunately there have been none of the giant hailstones that battered Melbourne, but there's been almost 140mm rain in the last three days! And I thought that this was a country of drought!! Good thing I know how to swim. :-)

Speaking of swimming, tomorrow Mum and I plan to start our "get fit" regime with a trip to the indoor pool for aqua-robics (or something).. luckily I'd left my swimmers here from last trip - and goggles too - so I'll be able to do some laps. It'll be good to get started doing some kind of fitness stuff.. I really need to work out a routine or something (like synchronised swimming? ..that would be funny!)

I'm afraid all of my photos are on the other computer and my phone isn't roaming well, so this post will be text only for now.

Someone else's turn to write now! Time to get this going again.

*grin*
*hugz*

Oscar's first trip to the pool

We have just gotten back from Oscar's first ever trip to the pool! It's been a bit cold and rainy this weekend, but the pools were indoor and heated, so it was quite warm when we got there.

Initially we took him into the baby pool. I'm sure mum and dad can guess his first reaction - he kicked around like he was in the bath :) However after a bit of that I think he realised he was somewhere different, and spent the remainder of the time studying everything he could with a detached expression of mild curiosity.

The pool we went to has these weird mushroom things which rain water down, and he rather enjoyed that. It also has a sea creature which sprays water from it's head and he really tried to grab that water, even though it just made it spray into his face :D

After a bit of a play in both the baby and the kids pool (he was a bit weirded out by floating I think) we changed him, wrapped him up and he instantly fell asleep. He's still asleep now that we're home :)

We didn't take any photos at the actual pool, but there are a few shots of his cute little outfit on flickr and facebook, so check them out :) He looks very tall in that first one..

Ken's birthday pub hike

Last weekend was a long weekend, and also friend's birthday, so on Monday we high-tailed it onto the tube and down towards Hampstead Heath. His name is Ken, and (strangely!) he went to primary school with Dee. Now, I hope at this point you're thinking something like, "Wow, they stayed in touch for that long!", but the truth is much more serendipitous ( may have already told this story) -- Ken was a student at Swinburne when Mark, a Uni buddy of mine, was tutoring. Mark recently moved to London and "dossed" at Ken's for a while. So at Glenda's birthday -- Mark's girl -- both Ken and Dee knew fewer people than everyone, so started chatting. So. Very. Bizzare!

Anyhoo, it was his birthday last weekend so we headed out of our precious safety-zone ("the city") to a suburb. Turns out they've got sun, people,  cafes, greenery! So we arrived at the beer garden and met some of Ken's friends, then I supped a wee dram of uisge whilst Dee enjoyed the red wine. We chatted, ate little nibbly things (calamari, salmon fish-fingers, lamb koftas) and generally enjoyed the sun -- although as the afternoon wore on it threatened rain.

After lunch (and a delicious chocolate cake courtesy of Glenda --  thanks!) we all decided to walk off the meal in Hampstead Green, a nearby park -- although it's bigger than any park I've seen in Aus, just like Hyde Park in London central. We wandered across field and dell and came across a fair! Ferris-wheels, skill games, spinny-aroundy and upside-downy rides! Dee, Ken and I all tried the archery. None of us won a prize, but Dee did have the dubious achievement of almost hitting a "carny" (i.e. fair worker) with an arrow! Remember kids: wine and bow & arrows don't mix. (I kid, I kid, we wouldn't want to get rolling drunk on a school/work day/night -- really, the carny almost got himself shot by ducking out in front of us to retrieve some arrows from the targets. I mean, come on! He was asking for one in the behind!)

It was weird being in the middle of a green space and looking back towards the "urban jungle". It was also getting muggy -- the rain was on its way but taking its sweet time about it. We got to the edge of the park, grabbed some drinks from the supermarket and had an impromptu picnic in a field, while around us people threw frisbees and kicked soccer balls. Decided we'd come back another weekend and play tennis and/or lawn bowls! How sophisticated!

When the rain started, we bid adieu to Ken and company, boarded a bus and headed back home. As always, more photos here. (And I'm not if you need to be on Facebook, but Glenda put some photos up too.)

Samsung netbook is teh awesomeness

I am very impressed with Dee's new netbook (the Samsung N110) and Ubuntu 9.04 "Netbook Remix"! And for an old GNU/Linux otaku like me, it takes a lot to impress.

The netbook comes with Windows XP by default, and Dee played with it for a little while before installing the Ubuntu remix (UNR they call it) -- confusing, as XP can be, because each of the various hardware drivers seem to install their own versions of XP's built in functions: so there is the sound applet in XP, and an "Enhanced Audio" panel; XP's "normal" graphics settings and the "Intel Advanced Graphics" settings; built-in wifi and another whole menu of wifi tools.

She'd already decided to install Ubuntu, and I hardly twisted her arm! (Okay, I probably told her about all the good things that GNU/Linux can do these days ... and maybe cried a little.) Ostensibly, it was so she could a) have a terminal she understands (she's a UNIX-head) and b) install Apache Web-Server and do some web development for tracking our trip. So I think we were both happy when everything else -- graphics, camera, sound, wifi -- "just worked".

Installing was pretty easy: I downloaded an image and "burnt" it to a little USB key-drive thingy, then Dee set her BIOS to boot from it. A few screens of questions, mostly about where in the world you are and what time it is, then some waiting as it formatted the drive ('bye XP! 'bye Porpoise Spit!) and installed UNR. At the end, it asks you to remove the USB drive and reboot -- and when it reloads you have a nice shiny Ubuntu system!

Strangely for an operating system that is developed in a distributed way by people all over the world, Ubuntu feels much more integrated than XP did. Wifi connections are in the same place as wired ones, which is also where the "Mobile Broadband" connections are (which automatically popped up when we plugged in my mobile phone). The sound settings are in one place, although they're a little confusing with multiple "devices" (ALSA, OSS -- two competing sound architectures on Linux, which are both handled by the "umbrella" system called PulseAudio). The launch screen in place of a desktop is a bit weird but brilliant when you get used to it, and maximised apps share the little launch bar at the top of the screen for maximum screen "real estate".

(There are a few apps/screens which don't maximise and are too big for the 1024x600 pixel screen. That's annoying -- you have to ALT-click the window and drag it up to see the rest, including (usually) the "Close" button. Hope they fix that in an update soon!)

We also had to mess about with the wifi a little, as occasionally it wouldn't reconnect after closing the lid and "suspending" the netbook (i.e. going into low power mode). Turns out that removing and re-adding the kernel module fixes it, so Dee wrote two tiny shell scripts to do exactly that and dropped them into the suspend.d and resume.d directories ... UNIX/Linux is so ... logical! Sensible! Rational!

This morning she installed Skype, signed up for an account, and called Dayna and her brother with it. There was a little bit of messing about with the sound settings (to get the speakers to play, the microphone to work, and to limit any feedback) but the video camera just worked too. (Even our desktop computer required a bit of messin' to get the video to work and not crash Skype.)

The speakers and microphone on the netbook are good enough that we can Skype people without headphones, with clear sound and without any feedback. Skype were even nice enough to give her some free credit to call a "normal" telephone number (for a decent rate). We have our international calling solution!

So, now she is uploading photos to a new Flickr account to try that out. It's slow, but that's probably Flickr rather than the netbook itself. (I'll go back and add photos into our "speedboat down the Thames" post once it's done.)

The only way I'd be more impressed is if Samsung had shipped with the Ubuntu Netbook remix by default.