Back in 1876 this was the family home.
Wikipedia | Scottish Places | Geograph.org.
Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Cumming Dewar is the ancestor on the family tree and he’s my great-great-great grandfather.
No idea where the obvious money went ..
In years past to stop the girls arguing over who had the biggest pile of presents before the actual day we would put raffle tickets on them as we wrapped them and put them under the tree. It also meant we didn’t have to hide them because they could see and not know what was what. Come the morning of the 25th they would get this tiny hand-sized stocking and in that were their tickets. They’d be so busy finding matching numbers and ripping paper off that the box size became irrelevant. It worked perfectly when they were little and we’ve kept doing it because they asked. This year they wanted something different. Not easy to come up with.
So on friday they get a piece of paper in the tiny stocking and that has a url. They go to their url and they find a question. Get it right and they get another question on another url. Repeat quite a few times. When an answer is revealed it could have a ticket number (because we still have those) or not. But they have to do some working out, digging through DVD’s or searching on the net. It’s quite difficult to think up enough questions.
Edit: It’s all going to be images, no questions. So if I take an image of the cast of a film from imdb all they need to do is identify the film. Or a weapon from MW2 – what is it? A company logo, a DVD cover, a slice of action from a video game, actor, personality etc. Possibilities are wide, compiling it is easy but it makes the task a little harder. Which is good. More fun to create.
I was overruled on two:
1. Doing the raffle tickets but their matching ticket would be rolled up really tight and pushed into a straw. Cut all the straws and a few boxes more in half and put all in a bucket.
2. Best one though – you know ball pool balls? I wanted to buy several sets of those (100 per set), make a small slit in some and push the ticket in there. And when they got up the whole floor would be deep in them. Now I think that would have been fantastic but J overruled me. But I will do it at some point, it’s too good a vision to not realise. And why would that be so good? Their faces when they saw it and the fun (torture) they’d have digging through the balls (slicing them with scissors) to find their tickets (and making a supreme mess).
I have decided to move the contents of my old /T2 blog into this one. Not sure of some of the finer details – like showing the posts as opposed to making them all private – but I’m finding some images that have memories.
Looking South on Stinson Beach
This was July 2007 just after WordCamp. The first picture I took was looking down at my feet as I stood in the Pacific Ocean for the first (and only so far) time. And then I took this which I uploaded to my old domain and sent Jacq and the girls the link. So the scene is nothing to look at really, the photograph is poor but the actions surrounding it were good, really good.
So, as I was saying, it’s not healthy here and D got ill. Jacq had rang NHS Direct who put her through to the pandemic line who took all the info and gave her the code needed to get the Tamiflu. I grabbed the ID needed for us both (she stayed home) and we headed off to the pickup point.
Just off the center of the city was the health centre we needed to be. It wasn’t urgent but then it was 4pm and the F1 was due to start at 5pm. So there was some incentive to ignore the scenery. Leicester is – some say proudly – a multicultural city. The problem is that other cultures may not appreciate what “sunday” is. What we expect is quiet streets, hardly anyone around, being able to move quickly. In this area of the city it was like Saturday. All the shops are open, kids wandering about, people stopping at junctions and having a chat while still in their damn cars and while it wasn’t a carnival it was certainly very lively in an old, slow, treacle-like way. Took us forever. Well, okay, maybe 30 mins longer than it should. I had by now given up on the F1 start and was hoping to see the end. We get to the health centre and I wander in.
I have to get past the “guy at desk” but he’s pleasant enough. Then use lots of foam on my hands to be sure I am “clean” and I go through to the waiting bit. After my repeating D’s d.o.b. a nurse comes over to me. I reckon she qualified in the 70′s. She’s pretty old and talks down to me. Her first question “So what are your daughter’s symptoms?” Eh? What? We’ve told NHS Direct, we’ve told the National Pandemic line and you wizened creature want me to tell you? “My wife has rang everyone, we have the code and I’ve left work to come and get it” (which was true. I had moved away from my keyboard). She accepted that. Then she shows me the leaflets, packet of Tamiflu etc and as I take the packet she sees my hand. “What’s that?” I told her it’s a steel ring. “How did it get there?” I was bored one day and wondered if I could get one in I reply (which is the absolute real honest truth). She then says it makes me look like I’ve been to prison and they are tracking me (that’s a new one) and from that moment on she talks to my hand. Really. Lots of “yeah, I will, she will, okay, thanks, we will, yes, uhuh” as she goes through the big words on the Important Piece Of Paper and eventually I get away. She was one strange staff nurse.
Get back home back going out and round the city which took longer (F1? What F1?) and stopping at a couple of pharmacies to stock up on sore throat spray, soluble painkillers. D is now (it’s about 23:00) starting to feel a little better. Her boss has been called and he has to complete oodles of paperwork and her interview tomorrow is looking dodgy. Not the best start to the week for her but then we all have one and then another and then … it’s how things are.
As for the F1, the BBC stream was interrupted many times so I’ve emailed O2 about my contract and I’ll move.
Eldest comes back from work (may have said she’s now a qualified lifeguard so she’s around a lot of people obviously) and is not feeling great, turns out to be flu. This was around a month ago. Youngest then gets ill with the same so we have 2 ill daughters. Then Jacq comes down with it. MS + a bug = MS gets worse. Eldest comes out of it, Jacq’s settles in for longer. Then I get it and the resulting feeling of ill and coughing (which I’m still doing now) means I don’t go to Canada. Youngest gets well, mine is lingering as is Jacq’s. 2 days ago youngest comes down again with what appears to be a raging cold – temp, coughing, sore throat. And today eldest comes back having been sent home from work for being ill. This is not a healthy house, not by a long way.
In other news …. Monster Hunter looks good, partway through the training there. FF VII continues. Just found a sealed copy of Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness so that’s me set with RPG’s for a long time indeed. Bored now with Burnout Paradise, Battlefield 1943 makes me swear far too much (“Do you have to keep saying that word?” says Jacq. “Yes” I reply “because he IS one”) so I’m going to play SOCOM: Confrontation.
I was going to write more but apparently we have to go get eldest some Tamiflu. See – it’s not healthy here!
Until her sickness do us part: why men leave ill partners
Men are seven times more likely than women to leave a seriously ill partner, a study has found. So why are males less able to cope? Times Online
I joined a forum recently for me. Nothing at all to do with Jacq. I joined one night in one of those brief moments where I (foolishly) believe that typing words into a forum can help. But in matters of the mind it cannot, at least not for me. It always struck me as odd that people will gather and talk about how they used to drink, what they drank, where they drank etc. Surely such AA meetings just reinforce drink? If you are going to stop, stop. Worked for me. Anyway, back to chatting online. There are a fair number of resources for mental health problems but they don’t actually fix anything. I’ve said before that I have a domain with a blog and I go there to rant about things, ponder, wail and everything else negative. Because you don’t know where it is the space is safe. I really can – and do – say what I want. And then I erase it some time later because the act of writing and publishing was good enough. But it doesn’t stop the same irritants happening again. Nothing can.
So in those moments – had one earlier whole going round Tesco with Jacq – “Hey, do you also seem to go shopping when all the other stupid people go? When people that cannot see wheelchairs are there? When people tut tut as you go by? When people just haven’t a single bloody clue how bad they make the whole experience? Won’t get out of the way?” – where I think talking to someone about it might help I have to realise there are only 2 outcomes: (1) the person agrees with me and we start ripping into everyone and everything or (2) the person says No and I call them an idiot. So it would not be constructive to talk, it’s destruction on both paths. Negative.
Maybe it’s the man thing – that we need a fix, we need the solution.
There is a phone downstairs and one next to me up here. Here is what happens when J calls me:
“Hi, sorry and I know you are busy and have work to do but the food will be on the table in a minute if you want to come down”
Here is what I want to happen when J calls me:
“Food”.
I just want the reason. All those other words just annoy me, they get in the way, it takes longer to say. She knows that I just want ‘Food” but finds it really difficult to reduce an entire sentence or two into a single word. And I cannot see her view either.
Sometimes someone from Social Services will come round and J will talk to them, tell them how she is etc. I have no idea why she does this apart from the woman thing about needing to talk, to share etc. I’m quite plain: “Will you help?” and when they say what passes for No – but they can’t just say those 2 letters – I tell them that there is no point, why are they here, they can tick the “Saw them today” box. Social Services? Complete waste of everyone’e time. They kill children don’t they?
So, back to the article. I wonder where and why these men talk? I have doubts they do. I suspect it’s just coping mechanisms because talking about something that cannot be changed in an exercise in pointlessness. It’s also wrong to say “less able’ because maybe we were never taught or never learned how to cope. It’s not a class in school but it is something you pick up from people you hang around with so if they don’t, you can’t learn. “less able” seems more negative way to say it.
Would have been more interesting to see an article where physical disability was a significant element as that changes things on a huge new level.
I’m going through backups at the moment to see what sort of mess they are in. I won’t be missing anything, I’ll just have more than one copy. Images. Finder tells me I have 25gb, ~16000 photos. I have 11gb, ~4500 photos uploaded to my Smugmug page. So … there are around 12000 that need some sort of arranging / deleting / uploading. What to do?
I was looking at using iPhoto (which I have. i bought iLife 09 just for iMovie so the rest is pretty useless. Got it off ebay cheap though so it’s not all bad. Yes, it’s legit). But from what I’ve read iPhoto takes a very very long time, does that useless ‘faces’ thing, it probably reorganises and duplicates like it’s crap cousin iTunes if you let it and it’s only any good if everyone can see it through my iPhoto. Which they can’t.
I briefly looked at Shoebox from Kavatunes but hit the same conclusion – if it’s only good for this machine then why bother? It’s not me who’ll look at them. It’s the girls, Jacq (we’ve been married 23 years today. Long time) and anyone they pass the information to. And should I die, what good would they be stuck in iPhoto anyway?
So after pondering things I can see only one option – throw everything up into Smugmug. This is a very good thing. Very good. No matter which option I chose there would be an element of tagging. No matter which I chose there would be some organising and equally there would be much pruning. But, and here’s the bonus, I can drastically cut down on other storage. Right now I probably have that 25gb stored at Amazon through Jungledisk. But if they are at Smugmug, why bother with that? And I can get a DVD of the images sent to me so Jacq can have that if she wants as well as the online viewing. Also, Amazon is around $5/month for storage so that’s $5*12 = $60 plus I pay $40 at Smugmug. $100. If I knock Amazon out and upgrade at Smugmug (video I think. I just bought a flip HD video camera) I would still pay $60, a saving of $40. So all I need to do is work on that 12000. That’ll take a while..
As the world’s population grows, competition for food, water and energy will increase. Food prices will rise, more people will go hungry, and migrants will flee the worst-affected regions.
BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | What is the 2030 Perfect Storm idea?.
I find this scary for 2 personal reasons: my wife and I, and our daughters. If you read other scenarios they point to 2050 and the exhaustion of oil. This isn’t one source, it is several. So if this ‘perfect storm’ does not happen then wars for oil will continue and intensify. The environment in which my daughters have grown up will change, will get worse. And in 2050 J and I will almost certainly not be around for them. That is scary and saddening.
P was ill in NY Sunday night, travelled back Monday, got to the house Tuesday. Woke later than I wanted Wed and started work. Eldest left home at around 3pm saying she’d get back to Sunderland somewhere around 6pm and yes she’d text when she got back. Taking the M1 north is straightforward until you get to junction 32. Take the right to the A1(M) and you are on the path to University. Go left and eventually you end up in Liverpool – like she did. She had not charged the satnav, thought she knew the way, it got dark, she got lost, was crying and then the car broke down. At that point she found out how useless her insurance was for an actual breakdown and the repair guy that came along ‘did the right thing’ and helped more than he should have done. He got her to his repair place. We zoomed up to Halifax where she had ended up. Left at around 11pm. Her car was very broken, not worth repairing, left there for scrap. Got her back by something like 3:30am. Out earlier to a local garage to get a new runaround – a T reg Ka. Not great but it’ll do for a second car. The mourning of her first car continues.
So with the time away, the oversleep yesterday, the rescue mission last night, car today and a long hospital appt for J tomorrow I feel so far behind. Oh yes – and I feel ill now too. I always get bugs that P gets – never fails.
All part of being a parent :)
D came home last Friday so she can help Jacq as me and P head to New York later this week. D brought back a bug which she gave her sister and now on the eve of going I’ve got it. I’ll be sitting on the plane infecting everyone with this chesty cold / headaches / general crapness. I will be Patient Zero on that flight..
Apparently it’s due to be -5 in New York this weekend. This will test my love of cold. Good bit will be seeing steam coming out of the manhole covers. Another good bit will be the coffee. Can’t think of a bad bit just yet.
P has the walks all planned. I have only 1 place I want to see – the cafe from the film It Could Happen To You. Lovely film.