It’s not getting any better, but it is only day two of The Pox.
The Pox Arriveth
August 25th, 2009 1 Comment »Chicken Pox that is, not one of those Shakespearean types. Poppy has been under the weather for a couple of days with a raised temperature but today the spots have appeared. She caught it from one of her friends a couple of weeks ago so it’ll do the rounds with the other children in the village too I imagine… and Joseph has it too! He doesn’t have a temperature or anything, just the spots but I reckon we’ll be in for a few nights of sleep deprivation.
Joseph's Tree
August 24th, 2009 1 Comment »We received a letter through the post today advising us that the Welsh Assembly Government have planted a tree on behalf of Joseph.
‘Plant! A Tree for Every Child in Wales’, a Welsh Assembly Government initiative, is a new and exciting project that aims to plant a tree at specially selected sites across Wales on behalf of every child born or adopted in Wales from the 1st of January 2008. This unique pledge of a tree for every child in Wales aims to give the young people of Wales a positive step towards caring for and improving our environment.
Apparantly said tree is at “Coed Ysgubor Wen, near Tywyn, Gwynedd” and they even give the OS grid reference SH 625 063 which looks like this:
Find-a-trig
June 14th, 2009 3 Comments »What a busy weekend. My friend Pete (probably reading this on an RSS feed no doubt) came over to visit and so Friday evening ended with a mixture of Indian and Chinese grub. Pete then suggested that a suitable activity for Saturday morning might be a nice walk around the hills behind the village – a suggestion he may be living to regret. That was all the incentive I needed, and I kitted myself out with full mountain gear – overkill for sure but I haven’t used it in over 12 months so it needed an airing. Now you’ll need to check out the map for this bit to make sense:
We walked out of the village (failing to find the quicker exit straight in to the fields) and back towards the park. My intention was to find the trig point on top of Ton-mawr, marked at 319 metres in the map. Once we got just past the fort and along-side the forest we started to look for a way in – there must be a path to the trig point somewhere cuz it can’t possibly be inaccessible can it? Anyway, there was a path on the map running North of the trig point and I hoped that would have a footpath bearing south once we were on it. But, it looks like this search will have to wait until winter. The path was so overgrown, like over waist height for me (ankle height for Pete) so we carried on and went around the hill instead. It was a nice walk, 7.6 miles so a good walk-up for a planned trip up Snowdon again in couple of weeks. And I got to test out the compass on my fancy “Pro Trek” watch for the first time, very useful for a quick bearing… But back to the trig point. Once back home I did a bit of research… Should have done that before really but never mind. You can see from the Google Maps photo that there are three paths carved in to the forest, so I located the 1:25k scale map of the same area and you can see three white lines in the same shape. Not paths as such, but non-wooded areas that can only be seen on the larger scale map.
Hmm, the trig point lies right along one of these “paths” apparantly. I may go back later this week to investigate as I have the week off work, but even zooming in as close as possible reveals very little. There are a couple of white dots I suspect may be the trig point but my biggest task will be fighting my way through the clearings! I must find it… I need to visit my nearest trig point! Yes. I am sad, now you don’t need to point that out in my comments section!
Right… other news. Poppy is sick, and has tested the water resistant qualities of the laminate in the hall, Joseph is doing okay and feeding and growing and crying and feeding lots more. And I have a Java exam tomorrow so will get back to my revision.
Baby Gadget 1: Baby Monitor
May 24th, 2009 No Comments »
The first baby gadget – The Motorola BM500 Video Monitor. The most important feature of this baby monitor is that it is digital and wifi friendly. It runs in the 2.4Ghz range but limits itself to a channel of the same bandwidth as a standard wifi channel. The fact it is digital means that video can be easily encrypted making it difficult for other local baby monitors, video senders, or wireless security systems to ‘hack’ in and view the signal. It has night-vision infra red LEDs, a night-light built in, temperature monitor, can play lullabies remotely from the camera in Joseph’s room, and lets us talk back to him to tell him to shut up. Oh yes, and it has a 3.5″ colour LCD screen set in a parent monitor that looks like something taken from the new Star Trek film set. It works pretty well so far, especially the VOX mode which keeps the monitor and speaker off until it detects sound in the room with the camera. I’ll let you know if I change my mind on it though!
And yes, that is Joseph on the screen in the picture above.
