Month: November 2007

Someone else to mow the lawn? Excellent!

As seen at Petits Haricots and many other places.

Your home is a
Philanthropic Coder’s Villa

Your kitchen is someplace you never go, because you “have people for that.” There’s a Chocolatessen, which is rapidly becoming your favorite room of the house. Having one is also becoming a trend among your wealthy neighbors. Your master bedroom is the size of a small barn, with carpet thick enough to reach your ankles. Your study has every language reference book ever written, including now-useless titles like Learn Javascript 2.0! and C++ Programming for Windows 95. (Why are you keeping those?) One of your garages holds your collection of ferraris, and is measured in acreage.

Your home also includes a guest wing and private quarters for your servants. Your guests enjoy your home theater with 37 different sports channels. Outside is your hedge maze and gardens, meticulously tended by a team of world-class botanists.

And, you have a pet — a doberman pincer named “Warren”.

Below is a snippet of the blueprints:

Find YOUR Dream Home!

Would a rose by another name…

Katy might blog about today, but another thing K said needs noting down before we forget it. We were in the car and talking about trees that lose leaves, and those that don’t. K said “holly” but couldn’t think of any others. Katy suggested Christmas trees – “Ah yeah, fir trees. Oh and those vee trees too.” A bit of head scratching and gentle questions later, and we realised he meant yew trees.

Bowls great and small

Last night K said something I want to note down before I forget. The name of a small bowl or dish, according to him, is a ceramekin. Nice.

Later last night, J had a protracted and painful stomach ache which culminated in being sick. Fortunately he was in the bathroom at the time so the clearing up was not so bad.

In between the two was the news of the bowls-up over HMRC losing Katy’s personal information, the children’s and ditto for most families in the country. The only consolations are the ID card and child database being at least a bit less likely now and, I confess, watching a junior government minister squirm under a weight of very uncomfortable fact and professional opinion from Ross Anderson.

Musical Monday

Took ages to get the boys up and ready to go this morning (and even then they ended up having breakfast in the car 🙄 ) but we finally managed it and thanks to lack of traffic got to the Park and Ride just in time to miss the bus *sigh*
The sign said another would be along in 10 minutes, so we stood at the bus stop and waited… Twenty minutes later the bus came – by which time there was a huge queue of people waiting to get on, so it took ages to load up and we were no longer early or even on time 🙁
Ran from bus stop to venue, dodged large groups of school children and picked up tickets from Box Office, then nipped past aforementioned large groups of school children to get in, spotted the HE group right at the front (Gina is *always* early for this kind of thing – very handy 😉 ) and managed to join them, meaning we were led to seats right at the front, almost within touching distance of the orchestra 🙂
The concert was Meet the Orchestra (with “the Cambridge Festival Orchestra sponsored by John Lewis”) and it was fab! A spent much of the time gazing open-mouthed at the violins and a fair bit of it bouncing on my knees, while L was transfixed by the brass section, but also found time to admire the double bass and mysteriously was able to hum the viola part to at least one of the pieces without ever having heard it before – impressive! – and K now has definite ambitions in the strings direction. J was sitting nowhere near me, so I’m not sure what he liked best, but he certainly enjoyed the concert, judging by the volume of his chatter about it later 😀

Afterwards we had baked potatoes from the stand on the market, along with a few other CHEF families, then wandered round for a bit, enjoying being back in our old city, before heading back to the Park and Ride.

Home and music practice while they were in the mood 😉 but didn’t even attempt Maths, English etc 😳 then the children asked to watch Robin Hood, Men in Tights (or Pull Up Tights, as J used to call it 😆 ) while I cooked tea. Does that count as History?

Doctor Queue

Hmmm… how do you take a good photo of a child? I know, wait till they’ve been a bit overwhelmed by a packed shopping centre, a bit deafened by a show from an over-amplified Father Christmas, and waited in a queue for over an hour, and then take the photo. Fantastic results.

On Sunday we went back to where we used to live. After church we went to the big, older, shopping centre (as opposed to the big, newer, one that’s still being built, or the small, newer, one that’s mostly finished). They were having a Christmas Shopping Extravaganza – I refuse to call it a Christmas Extravaganza as it isn’t Advent yet (bah humbug) even though Christmas Shopping has already started.

To be down with the kids, they had science fiction characters walking / rolling about – a Tom Baker Dr. Who, Dalek, Cyberman, Tardis (who didn’t speak or move much), Chewbacca, Darth Vader and random alien with 3 heads. Some photos are on Flickr. You collected a stamp from each of them, and after at least 4 stamps you could visit Santa’s grotto. The queue for this was over an hour! They gave out the toys in the queue, which kept them amused for about 5 minutes – the boys chose a Spiderman pencil case and bits, and L got a book and a squidgy / stretchy green bat that she whirled around her head attempting to garotte anyone within range.

To give them their due, the children all stood the waiting very well, but an hour is a long time. At the far end (the thing we were all queuing for) was a photographer taking the children’s photos next to K9 and you got a colour print for free to turn the stamps thing into a Space Passport! Woo hoo! A managed to sit up OK and looked tiny next to K9.

The loud Santa Claus was off to be on the parade to the market square to turn on the lights, and the speaking children voted 2:1 to see this. Santa got a head start as we were still in the queue when he left, and so we just missed the parade by the time we got near the market. We decided to head them off by going to the market itself, and this was packed. I’m glad we were using slings rather than pushchairs as it was awful – lots of people, squashed in between market stalls, on cobbles, all trying to see the stage etc. We didn’t manage to lose J or K which was a relief. The local radio had some of their DJs chatting, an up-market boy band whose name escapes me crooned a bit, Santa was loud again and then we realised that the crowds were going to prevent the parade coming any closer, so once the lights had come on and everyone went Oooo! we headed back to the car.

The remedy for cold, tired, rained-on children was off course chips, so we stopped at a chippy and ate in the car. A had her first chips, which were well received. (No salt, vinegar, ketchup, mayonnaise, curry sauce, mushy peas etc. to worry about.)