Thursday, January 31, 2008

Cooking the Books

Watching Five at the moment and Sherrie Hewson is ruining the programme at the moment...funny faces and 'accidentally' getting chocolate pudding on her nose! Just fuck off. Jeremy Edwards is trying to keep control of the whole affair but just seems to rush from workstation to workstation looking panicked! I don't know if its a repeat but they're making Christmas Puddings...

Stuck for something to do at the moment...K is at a work's do (last day before maternity leave tomorrow) and TV's a bit shit. Although Whose Line is it Anyway? is on back to back on Dave so I'll probably watch a bit of that.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Old skool gaming

You may have noticed the new widgety thing at the left side of my blog...this is a helpful tool from BoardGameGeek showing a random selection from my game collection. Not video games but BOARD games...I've gone all old school!

Spurred on by a marathon (well 4 in a row) games session with Em & Paul at Christmas (the excellent and very reasonable Carcassonne if you were wondering) my interest in board games has been reunited.

Despite toy shops (I'm looking at you Toys R Us) now focusing on electronic gadgets it would appear that the board game world is still going strong and I've been immersing myself in it once more (and rapidly filling up that space saved by shipping out all my old board games to my parents).

Current games on the bought and enjoying very much list are (in no particluar order)...Zooloretto, Lost Cities, Alhambra, Ingenious, Ticket to Ride Europe and others. Most of these work quite well as 2 player games (especially Lost Cities & Alhambra with the mysterious 'Dirk' sticking an oar in) but I'm itching to teach others and play totheir full potential...consider yourselves all warned! But bearig in mind that these games are all designed to be learnt in about 5 minutes (it took less time than that to teach my sister -in-law how to play TtR:E, so it must be easy!)

I may add a few to the collection in Feb but then its a case of no spending for the foreseeable future! With K having only maternity pay I'm going to have to stop buying crap! Ohh the responsibility!

Imminent Arrival

OK so we're 44 days to go and the house is being prepared in earnest. When I say earnest that it what I really mean! It has kinda stopped being a joyful occasion in my mind to an almost feeling of dread of the responsibility and how we'll cope with it all!

Last night's trip to Mothercare World was as eventful as previous trips. This time the pram car seat (for our bizarrely discontinued, then not discontinued 'travel system') wasn't working properly. We can tighten for a smaller baby but not loosen...this leaves a small problem in that our baby is probably going to be bigger than a barbie doll! (which is the only thing that will now fit in it as I played with the tighten function before realising the untighten function didn't work!) Fingers crossed we don't have the baby prior to 4th Feb when they come back into stock! We seemed to pick up a large selection of nappies and a huge playmat that caught our eye (stuff buying clothes and cotton wool, let's get the toys in!)

There's still a list of things to get and we seem to be relying on a vast truck of baby clothes as gifts as we are kind of short in that area...I suppose when we know what sex it is will help in that area. Other than that everything seems to be taken care of. K finishes work in a few days and I think it can't come soon enough to be honest. The tiredness has started to hit her a bit and most days she comes home looking a bit wan!

Work have also been great for me as well. My home working is all approved and I'm just waiting for for them to install my business line on Friday and for my new office chair and IT equipment to arrive. I've also been very prepared and put together a Paternity Leave plan making sure that the 'very important work that I does' will get done (they'll probably only need a chimp and a spreadsheet and they'll be sorted). I also get a quite generous 2 weeks paid leave to cover it off...I might be screaming to get back to work after a couple of days!

I suppose its all got a bit more 'real' as we visited the Pen's at the weekend to meet their new arrival (4 months old now). They seemed to know exactly what to do at all times and seemed very much more organised and grown up than I remember them being prior to A's arrival. They seemed unfazed by crying, poo and the fact he was on J's breast more than he was off it! (maybe that's just my hazy recollection!) I imagine that after a few months we'll probably look competent as well.

I was looking through some old pics and realised that I haven't been tracking teh bump very well. Here's a couple of pics to show the current progress.

This one was taken 7 weeks ago...

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And this one 4 weeks ago (Christmas Day! And aren't I mean forcing my pregnant wife to do the washing up on Christmas Day?!?! To be fair I did remove the customary chains for the photo!)

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Rest assured she is even bigger now and is set to enlarge before the month is out!

A pleasant diversion

Weird hand drawn thingy courtesy of 1up's 100 Free games 2008

Wokka-wokka-wokka


pacman cupcakes
Originally uploaded by hello naomi.

Saturday, January 19, 2008

Portal Antics

For those of you that have played Portal this will be hilarious...

Friday, January 18, 2008

Sunday, January 13, 2008

The Final Countdown

Its early on a sunday morning so what am I doing? Yes thats right I'm on the computer! K is staying in bed for a bit I think...which is good news as I think she's really starting to feel the whole 'exhaustion of pregnancy' thing. She did go a bit of a funny colour in Morrison's yesterday so I've got to take extra special care of her at the moment.

We're now into the final 8 weeks of the pregnancy and things are moving on apace. Antenatal stuff starts happening soon and K gives up work in 3 weeks time. The pram arrives shortly as does the cot, but we have managed to get a moses basket and a small selection of clothes (we don't yet know the sex of the baby). We're hovering around a very small selection of names but I think it'll be a case of waiting to see what the baby looks like before we make any final decisions.

K's brain is definitely on the fritz too....a side effect of pregnancy I hope and not of things to come generally. A highlight example is when she was on the phone to a preacher and in a panicked voice said "I'll just go and find out what the readings are". She then put down the cordless phone and ran upstairs. A few minutes later (the cordless phone still sat downstairs with a patient preacher at the other end) I went upstairs to see what she was doing to find her desperately trying to get the printer to work to print something out. It was at this juncture that I gently pointed out that she could either pick up the phone sat next to the screen she was looking at, use the cordless that was in my hand and just read out the information from screen to printer without the pesky time consuming printing!