Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know!

I received a call from my wife as she was leaving the hospital. She attempted to describe exactly, and in great detail, exactly how the consultant extracted a sample from her wrist to biopsy. All the time I was yelling at her, “Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know!”, but she pressed on with great glee. I guess she decided that if I couldn’t share the pain, then I was at least going to experience it mentally.

I’m not going to attempt to describe what is actually wrong with her wrist but it does sometimes swell to a disturbing size and cause great discomfort to her, so she has got it looked at and it looks like it will require painful and debilitating surgery.  She will likely lose the use of her right hand for a number of days which will make things a little awkward for all of us.

My part in this to do more housework, apparently. She always says I need to do more housework, which I never feel is fair as I do a fair bit of tidying and cleaning, loading and unloading the dishwasher, making the beds and dealing with the rubbish and recycling, and I am the one with the full time job. However, this time she means I need to do nearly all of the housework, which is understandable really.

It’s a bit worrying really, as should my wife be unable to do much with her right hand, she is going to find looking after out kids difficult, which means I may need to take time off work to help out. Unfortunately, we live in a small maisonette and cannot afford short term child care on only one salary. My wife works part time with variable hours.

Anyway, it did mean I had to take today off, so I was able to watch Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire with my daughter who has just finished the book, my wife insists she reads the books before the movies, and then I was able to attack the kitchen.

We have lived in this house for about seven and a half years and have put up with a small and messy kitchen for all of that time. My wife  complains that it is messy because it is small, but I suspected that it is messy because she doesn’t throw anything away. Three bin bags full of out of date food from the cupboards have proved me vindicated in that assertion. It is still a mess but at least we have more space in the cupboard to hide it in.

A miserable New Years Day

We were supposed to be going for a walk in Richmond Park this afternoon but just as we were about to leave, my wife mentioned it was raining. Now, being the eternal optimist, I assumed it was that dreary kind of drizzle you usually get so when  my daughter said she wanted to go anyway, I said I would take while my wife would stay with my son, who absolutely hates rain.

When I say walk, what I meant was that we were walking but my daughter wanted to ride her bike. I am a bad father because I still have not gone out with her enough on her bike for her to remove her stabilizers. She’s eight. So I went out the back door to get the bike and found it tipping down. Cue apologies and sobbing.

So now we are all dressed up with nowhere to go. Brilliant start to the New Year.

Mice, teeth and telephones

I had a dentist appointment today. My previous appointment had been cancelled due to it being booked under the “wrong dentist”, which was discovered at the time of the appointment. It wasn’t a totally wasted trip as I had been booked with a dental hygienist beforehand anyway, but it would have been a little awkward to admit to my boss that I had taken a couple of hours out of the working day to have my teeth cleaned. I had to pay £45 for the privilege of having my gums bled and being taught to use dental floss.

Today was the day they were going to remove a large part of tooth and replace it with something that looks vaguely similar, but before that there was a mouse to dispose of. It wasn’t dead. We don’t believe in killing cute little creatures just because they inadvertently started sharing our living space. Well, we didn’t until my wife found a huge hole nibbled into a new pack of bagels. Now it’s war. Yessiree, that is probably the last mouse to be chauffeur driven to a patch a green area well away from our house and released where, I’m sure, it made a beeline to the nearest occupied building before dying a hideous death in a snap trap, or eaten by owl. Good luck to the owl who wants to eat this one though, what emerged from the trap was rather wet and bedraggled. My normal method of checking if the trap has an occupant is to shake it gently, but I think this mouse was of a rather nervous disposition and consequently, had urinated and defecated liberally inside. After I looked inside the trap, I just threw it into the nearest bin; I would not be needing it again anyway.

After the dentist visit, which turned out rather a straight forward affair, after the tribulations of the previous visit, I returned home to wait for the cable guy to come and fix our telephone line. It had been crackly ever since it was first installed and then we discovered almost two weeks ago the dial tone had disappeared. The first email was responded to after five days with a message that it looked OK to them. After buying a cheap phone to verify to was not our current cordless phone (which is wasn’t) and the realisation that we still got a dial tone from the unused BT socket (thus rendering the need for a second phone redundant as a test), I emailed them back saying, no, it’s definitely you. And now we have a working phone with no cracking. So that was a result.

An odd day for turning 41

Yesterday was my birthday. I am now 41. Odd that birthdays have become such non events nowadays; I think my kids were more excited about it than I was.

It was an early start as my daughter was going to Littlehampton and had to be at the school at 8:15am. As that is the time I usually leave for work, it made sense for me to take her. However, not much time for opening cards and presents, so that would have to wait.

After work, I came home to pizza and potato wedges and a shop bought cake, in the shape of the TARDIS. I was pleased to note that it had Matt Smith as the Doctor and was a Victoria sponge, my favourite type of cake.

For my presents I received a cushion with a Dalek and R2D2 embroidered with a heart  between them, which was a little bizarre, and a Wii game called Family Trainer which included a dance mate although none of the games appeared to be dance games. I also received a box of chocolate brazils, which are my second favourite chocolate only beaten by Ferrero Rocher. The Ferrero Rocher are a guilty pleasure as I am certain they are not really marketed towards someone like me, i.e. male.

My daughter was apparently felt sorry for my pitiful pile of presents and decided to make me another from a couple of pieces of paper: a cushion and a paper Doctor.

The evening was rounded off with a rather pedestrian episode of Smallville.

I gave up an iPhone to give my kids bicycles

I made a decision. I will stop buying things I can’t afford. It sounds so patently obvious but we all do it, stick it on the credit card and pay it off later, only how many of us do? I know I’ve used my credit card telling myself that I will pay it back after I get paid, but then something else catches my eye and so my credit bill increase almost imperceptibly until suddenly I am paying two hundred pounds to pay off the minimum payment. Well, no more. If I want something I will now do the very old-fashioned thing called saving.

So, there’s this new iPhone coming out (you might have heard of it) and as I am near the end of my current phone contract I thought, I would like that very much indeed. My wife has a (quite frankly old-fashioned) iPhone 3GS which I have been rather impressed with so, with my new resolve, I started saving figuring that I could afford to buy one within a few months.

In the meantime, my daughter’s bike situation was coming to a head. She is six and a half and has yet to have a bike. My wife bought a wreck for a fiver over a year ago which then lay neglected outside out back door. When eventually we tried to get the thing roadworthy, we found we could not get any stabilisers to fit. So we turned to Freecycle , which is a noble endeavour, and found someone willing to give us their old bike, which turned out too big and also difficult to put stabilisers on. (Still she will grow into it.)

Out of desperation, as she really needs to learn how to ride a bike sooner rather than later, I bought them two new bikes. A 16″ purple girls bike for her and a 12″ red and blue balance bike for our four and a half year old son.

I think I will be waiting a little longer for my new iPhone.

Cable madness

We’re joining the 21st century and getting Virgin cable. Sure we’ve had digital terrestrial for a long time, from when it was known as ONDigital, but now we’re truly entering the realm of stupid amount of channels.

I actually decided to take the plunge because I was getting increasingly frustrated with my Internet connection dropping randomly and the mythical 8Mb max speed was slowly dropping to below half that.

Of course, if you take their broadband you have to take their telephone and you might as well get the TV, and the upgrade to all channels from the basic line-up is just over a tenner, so that all makes sense. In fact, the pricing is such that taking anything but all three services is actually more costly.

So I have to cancel my existing ISP, losing an e-mail address I’ve had for years which seems rather sad. Fortunately, we keep our telephone number.

Another option, which is really an essential for us, is a multi tuner hard disk recorder. We’ve had two Freeview one’s and I really can’t imagine doing without now, so we’ll be getting a V+ HD box. Which offers the additional benefit of High Definition (and 3D apparently!). Just a shame our 32″ HDTV is looking a bit poorly with a three vertical dark bars; sometimes you can barely see them and other times they’re glaringly obvious. (Also, neither analogue and digital internal tuners appear to work, not that we have much use for them).

All this brings me to the subject of cabling. Our TV is fixed to our (unused) chimney breast. I made a hole in the wall to pass the cables through so they are not visible and it has worked well so far. But I became worried about connecting the new box as I think I’ve already hit cable capacity.

Connected to my TV at present is: an aerial, DVD player and Freeview recorder via SCART, PS2 via component, Wii via composite and PC via VGA. And now I need to add HDMI and the hole just isn’t big enough.

I did think about getting a component switch box and connecting it to the DVD player and Freeview recorder using a conver; the cables seem reasonably cheap. Then I spotted that for the cables to work, the SCART must be capable of output component in the first place. Neither Freeview recorder not DVD player do, it is a pretty old DVD player now. There are SCART RGB to component converters but these are too expensive.

So I think I will be losing the PC connection, I don’t think I’ll have much use for it now anyway.

A cold office day

Great start today. Got into the office, looked at the nursery thermometer I keep on the desk and saw it was reading 14ºC. So a little chilly. Turns out a massive power outage knocked out the heating. It’s now mid afternoon and the office is a little more reasonable.

Anyway, I’ve restarted this blog and I’m going to try to make short regular updates to it. Well, they say third time lucky.

Coming up

It’s almost half past midnight and I’ve so much to write. I think this is why I’m no good at blogs, I start to resent the time taken to write them when I know so few will read it.

Why am I writing this then? I guess because it’s as good as any place to keep some kind of journal, and my intention is also to write those little tips I discover during work that will almost certainly by forgotten next time I need them. So I must persevere. Who knows, one day my blog entries could be found by one of my descendents on some celebrity geneology programme. Or maybe not.

Anyway, a quick precis (which I’m sure should have one of those funny characters in there somewhere but I can’t be arsed to look it up) of articles to come.

• Alternate Access Mappings in SharePoint, what’s the big deal?
• Multi server SharePoint configuration, how’s that work?
• KWizCom, WTF?
• Why are all my headings questions?
• Four go camping in the front garden.
• A trip to London to visit fish
• A bad Monday (with a happy ending)
• Seven Pounds (The movie)
• What the hell is with the clunking noise from my Linux server.

Headings subject to change. This is really a reminder to myself about what I want to write.

We’re going camping

Something strange happened today. My wife bought a tent.

I used to go camping quite a bit with my parents when I was a kid and in the last few years I’ve rediscovered the joy of living under polyester again, going camping with a few friends. But, my wife is a creature of comforts and camping has always been well outside that zone. Until recently.

I think the tipping point has been that quite a few of her mummy friends have been camping recently and she has felt like she is missing out, so when I suggested that buy something for ourselves on out recent wedding anniversary, she decided she wanted to buy a tent.

It wasn’t a complete surprise; the change has been quite gradual, but I am slightly worried that image in her head is not going to match the reality. Anyway, I now have a tent to pick up on Thursday, I’ve booked a couple of days off work and she is now trying to book a place in a campsite in South Wales, near where she grew up.

I am both looking forward to it and yet, dreading it at the same time. My biggest worry is my daughter who has been known to jump out of bed and run into the living room if she as much as suspects a spider to be anywhere near her. She says she be fine. Hmm.

Legoland

Third post in and I’ve already broken the promise to myself to try to post at least once a day. Still, it really is not surprising considering what I was doing yesterday.

I had suggested to my daughter, Sydney, that we could go to Legoland on Saturday as there was a kind of mini festival going on at the weekend. In particular, Carrie and David of Carrie and David’s Pop Shop would be there, as well as a variety of people dressed as favourite childrens TV characters such as Bob The Builder.

However, as I have previously mentioned I’ve been ill for a few days previously and I am still not feeling one hundred percent. So when I woke up and had a big internal debate with myself whether I was well enough to take her. My wife can’t drive and had already planned to go to Hampton Court with our son, so the fall back position was that Syd could have gone with her. Despite a couple of concerned queries from my wife, I, probably foolishly, decided to take her to Legoland after all.

First though, Syd had her ballet class and, as is traditional, that meant the parents were allowed to watch. This means that we were unable to leave super early as we normally would do and probably why it took us over an hour and a half to get there despite being so close by. Fortunately, we had a CD of The Ting Tings in the car which Syd just absolutely loves.

By the time we got there, it was lunch time, and so, in a departure from tradition, we actually bought our lunch rather than bringing along a packed luch. It was surprisingly cheaper than I was expecting, but that may have been because I was feeling too ill to feel hungry.

So we sat outside and discussed life, the universe and pesky wasps that would not leave us alone while eating ham sandwiches and drinking apple juice. It’s always these sort of moments I treasure, when I have a some time with my kids with little interference. I think this is when you can really see the sort of person they are turning into. I think for many parents, eating lunch on a day out is a necessary eater of time when they could be doing something “fun”. For me though, this is the very reason for days out, to actually spend time with your loved ones away from the distractions at home.

After we had lunched, we tried to seek out the Legoland Live! event but after some aimless wandering gave up the search. Syd decided she wanted to try Legoland’s latest ride, Laser Raiders, so I dutifully queued with her for over hour, feeling distinctly queasy as the queuing area was rather warm and then, within sight of the ride, it broke down. Talk about frustrating. However, the engineers managed to fix it within ten minutes so that was all right.

The ride itself was great fun, where you’re in this car with the most ungunlike gun, shooting at various targets along the route. I must confess my competitiveness overtook any other considerations and I was shooting at every target I could see and got a decent score. It was only when the ride was finishing, whenI noticed Syd had not scored anything, that I realised I should have been helping her a bit more.

We then went on a couple of smaller rides in the same area before resuming our search of the Legoland Live! event. We found a white marquee with a stage but clearly nothing was happening in there and it was getting late. We were on the verge of going home when Syd remembered about the water park, Water Works, for which a new swimming costume had been bought specifically. So despite a headache that was brewing, we got her changed and she spent a nice hour getting wet.

By this point, it was definitely time to head home, so we headed back to the car pausing only to buy some popcorn and a bottle of water to ease my thumping head. As we walked across the car park, we suddenly heard the sound of a familiar song being sung in the far corner. It was Carrie and David’s Pop Shop!

We rushed over to find a large field with a large stage set up and there, on stage was Carrie and David! Hurray! We stayed and listened until the end of their set, Syd singing along to the words, me just having a lie down on the grass, and then, for the third time, we thought about heading home.

As we were leaving, they announced Bob the Builder would be back on stage soon, and Syd commented she would like to have seen him. I reminded her that she had already seen him once at the Science Museum but she said that was just someone dressed up like him. I’m not quite sure who she would have expected on stage but apparently he needs to be building something to be real. However, it really was time to go so we continued towards the car.

Syd had obviously had a very tiring day as she soon fell asleep next to me while driving home, so much so that I had difficulty waking her up when we arrived. I went straight to bed to lie down, waking up in time to put both kids to bed, before collapsing on the sofa where I fell asleep again. My memories of the rest of the evening are rather vague as spent most of it asleep but I eventually dragged myself to bed and woke up early this morning, thankfully feeling much better.