June 2004 Archives
... well, nearly three weeks. But yesterday I saw my son after he returned from his holiday in Spain. And boy was he ever tanned. He even had white marks on his feet from where his sandals had been. He looked so fit and healthy it was unbelievable, and spent the first fifteen minutes telling me about how he went to an aqua park and slid down a tube filled with water into the pool at the bottom. However after more questions and answers he turned round and said "That's all I want to say about that for now." Ok, so that was me put in my place!
Unfortunately it rained all day so we couldn't go out anywhere, but we watched Lion King 3 on DVD in the afternoon. It's a surprisingly funny film, well worth watching. Kept him and my niece quiet for an hour and a half, anyway!
As it's been a while since I'd seen him I thought I'd get the camcorder out again and take some video of him. But after filming him telling the story about the slide at the aqua park I reviewed the tape and found it had black horizontal stripes across the screen. "Use Head Cleaner" it said. Bugger. I raced into town to get a head cleaner. "Certainly sir, that'll be twenty pounds" said the helpful man at the shop. "Jeez," I thought "this had better bloody well work at that price.." Get home, put the cleaner tape through the camera, no better. And again, and again. I'd just about given up on it and resigned myself to sending it off for repair (two months after the warranty on it had expired, which is par for the course) I decided to just record some more stuff for five minutes or so to see if it would work. And it did, thankfully, but I'll be very wary about the next few things I record on it. But the worst thing was that by the time I'd got the camera working again a lot of the spontanaety had gone and, well, there just wasn't anything happening that was worth videoing. Pity.
As a treat he spent Saturday night at my parents house. We'd got him into bed, read him a bedtime story and then waited for him to finally fall asleep. Ten minutes later, he came downstairs, asking for a bedtime snack. Cheeky devil, we thought, but to be fair it had been about 4 hours since he'd last had something to eat. My parents had some guests round, playing cards. "Can I watch you play?" he asked. "No, we need peace and quiet so we can concentrate on the game," he was told. He then walked off the other side of the room (I was already in the kitchen making him a snack at this point) and I was later told that he muttered under his breath "Well, if I had something in my mouth I wouldn't be able to talk, would I?"
Priceless. That's what I've missed over the last three weeks.
I thought I was being pretty much on the ball when I made my last post. However the following day I saw that pic and half a dozen others splattered all over a double-page spread in one of the UK National newspapers. Ah well, for a few hours there I was cool and trendy. (And no, I didn't post it later then change the date-stamp on the post!)
Let me get one thing straight. I'm not the least bit bothered about football, some might even say that I'm not all that patriotic either. But like 98% of the country, last night I watched England get kicked out of the Euro 2004 tournament after losing to Portugal 6-5 on penalties. And just in case anyone's reading this in 5 years time and wants to know the reason behind this little photoshop effort, Beckham punted the first penalty waaaaaaaay over the bar and almost into orbit.
And I posted this here partly to see what would happen when I uploaded a picture to the blog...
Update 2007: I've removed this picture as someone else decided to hotlink to it and was stealing all my bandwidth. I've half a mind to replace the picture with a thumbnail saying "I'm a thieving twat"
I mentioned in a previous post how much spam I was getting to my old domain. Since then the number has gone up dramatically, rising to 8000 a day sometimes. Most of these were the same message sent to several different made up addresses within the domain, so I'd get the same junk email a dozen times or so. Well, enough is enough. Before I went away I altered the settings on the email account so that all emails not specifically addressed to me go straight into a junk mailbox which will start to reject mails when it has 500 messages in it. Should take about an hour to fill up hopefully. Since then I'm only getting about 75 crap emails a day, and my spam filter is catching all but 4 or 5 of them.
That's a lot more manageable.
My son, ex-wife, her new boyfriend and some other members of his family are on holiday in Spain at the moment. They're in the second week of their holiday at the moment and are due back on Friday night. I'll see him again on Saturday.
I've really missed him over the last couple of weeks (the last time I saw him was the Monday before he went away, which is over two weeks ago now). Part of me really enjoys having some time to myself, and part of me wishes he'd been here the last couple of weeks.
I know it sounds selfish of me, because if I was still married I'd be seeing him every day and wouldn't have anywhere near as much time to myself as I have at the moment. But beggars can't be choosers, and I'm looking forward to hearing his stories of the trip, some of which will no doubt end up on this site.
I've found a new repository for my online photo galleries. It's part of the www.fotopic.net site. They give you 250Mb of free storage space, which is good enough for me :-) I've put a few of the galleries up there now, others will be added over the next day or so.
I've been away the last week, which is why the updates have been a bit thin on the ground. Non-existant, in fact. I spent the week in Anglesey, staying at a very nice bed and breakfast, and taking part on some of the coastal walks as part of the Anglesey Walking Festival. This is the fourth time in five years that the festival has been held, the hiccup being during the foot and mouth crisis. Here's the diary for the week:
Monday
After my alarm clock went off at 7:30am I finally woke up on the stroke of 9:00. Not a brilliant start to the week! Loaded the car up with bikes, suitcases, cd's, rucksacks, sandwiches and anything else that I thought I might need. I left the kitchen sink at home though. I enjoyed an extremely pleasant drive through glorious sunshine all the way across the north coast of Wales, the only downside being that I couldn't easily stop to take photos of the scenery. Arrived at the B&B at 12:15 to be greeted by a young man who told me that the proprietor had just gone out for a couple of hours and he'd put me in the room he thought I should be in. Not a problem, I thought, I could go out on the bike for a bit to pass some time. Took a ride to Cemlyn bay which was, in the early afternoon sunshine, absolutely beautiful. Certainly beats being at the office, I thought to myself. The waves were lapping gently on the pebbly shore, the terns in the local bird sancutary were chirping and squawking away, and the sea was blue and calm. And I thought to myself for the first time this week, you don't need to travel halfway round the world to look at a breathtaking scene. I took a little walk up the hill to have a look round, and straight in front of me was a huge industrial looking building, completely ruining the view. I later found out this was a nuclear power plant. H'mmm.
Upon returning to the B&B I met the proprietor (a lovely lady by the name of Mel) who told me that I was indeed in the right room. So I unpacked and got in the car to start the first walk of the week. This was a four-mile walk around the Penrhos Coastal Path, near Holyhead. While driving to the meeting point I was thinking I had to get something to eat at some point, and as luck would have it I came to a set of traffic lights and straight in front of me was the Valley Hotel, with a big sign outside offering food all day at reasonable prices. That'll do for me, I thought, and the sign wasn't wrong, either. The walk itself was a gentle stroll on the flat, which is a good way to start. There were about 30 people on the walk, and with clear blue skies, blue seas, cliffs and a strong smell of garlic in the air at one point, it was extremely pleasant. The walk started at 7pm and finished at 8:30 - not bad at all.
Tuesday
This time I managed to get out of bed when the alarm went off! Following a very hearty breakfast I set off in the car to the start point for the second walk, this time a six-mile hike starting at Llaneilian on the north east coast. Stopped in Amlwch on the way through and got myself a bite to eat for lunch - you never know when a sandwich would come in handy! Again there were about 30 to 35 people on the walk, and we set off at 9:15am. We climbed a bit, then a bit more. Followed by some more uphill walking. Then a bit more climbing. Just when I'd had enough of getting higher and higher, we stopped for a mid-morning snack (good job I'd also brought some chocolate with me!) at Mynydd Eilian, which stands 177 metres above sea level. The views were spectacular. After a 20-minute break it was downhill to Amlwch port and lunch at 1pm at the Harbour Visitor Centre. A well-earned one hour break there! Finally back to Llaneilian for about 3pm.
I was planning to do another walk in the early evening so I went back to the B&B for a shower and a change of clothes. As I had a few minutes to spare I lay on the bed and closed my eyes. Next thing I knew it was 6:30pm and I'd missed both the last two and a half hours and also the start of the next walk. Ah well, never mind. If you can't have an afternoon nap when you're on holiday when can you have one!
Evening meal was at the Douglas Inn, a two-minute walk down to the main road from the B&B. Even though they were showing Euro 2004 on the big screen, there were still only about half a dozen people in the place. Which suited me down to the ground, as I don't give two hoots about football and even less about beer-swilling football fans!
Wednesday
Big walk today. Nine miles from Llanfaethlu via Carreglwyd to Porth Swtan then up the coast to Cemlyn bay with a coach back to the start point. This was the busiest walk I'd done so far, with about 45 people attending. The walk lasted all day, not getting back to the B&B until 5pm. Once again I had intended to do another walk in the evening, but blisters on my feet made me think again about that one. It also made me think again about doing another walk on the Thursday! The day started off cloudy but cleared up later on. Besides, you don't really want it to be scorchingly hot when you start a walk as you'll only end up getting hotter and hotter. At one point I turned to the person behind me and said "this just goes to show you don't need to travel halfway around the world to see beautiful scenery" only to be given the reply "Actually, I'm from California."
Evening meal was a very tasty but distinctly unhealhy burger and chips from the cafe in Llanfaethlu (not that there's anything unhealthy about their food, all I'm saying is that there are healthier things to eat than burger and chips!)
Thursday
Giving my feet a chance to recover today. Those 1000-mile blister-free socks I spent a small fortune on last week obviously weren't as good as they were made out to be, but never mind, eh? Got in the car and just headed here and there, hither and thither, this way and that, taking photos of anything interesting I saw along the way. Which wasn't a lot, I must admit. So no photo gallery for today I'm afraid. But it made a change from walking! Ended up at the visitor centre at the power station, thinking I must have been scraping the bottom of the barrel to find things to do. I was pleasantly surprised there, as it turned out to be rather interesting.....
Friday
Came home. End of holiday. Boo.
A couple of months ago, I bought a digital camera so that I could take some pictures of the landscapes I saw while out on my walks. So far I've taken about 600 pics with it and I'm on my third set of batteried. Note to self - must invest in a set of rechargeables!
Anyway, I've just collected a set of prints I've had made up of some of my favourite photos, and I must say I'm extremely impressed. I can't tell that the prints were made from a digital camera (at least to my untrained eye) and although I ordered 58 prints, the shop charged me at the special offer price for the first 50 and then normal price for all the others, so it all came to about a fiver less than expected.
Now I really really must get round to updating the photo gallery...
Since I'm not working this week I thought I'd have a go at watching the transit of Venus. As everyone knows by now, this is where Venus moves in between the Earth and the Sun, and you can see a little black dot moving across the surface of the sun. What's so special about it, is that because Venus's orbit is tilted in relation to Earth's orbit, this only happens twice every 243 years, or something.
So I got a piece of card, put a small hole in it, and held it up to the sun. I put a piece of A4 on the ground to see the image on. H'mmm. Well, I saw an image, but it was just a blurry white circle about a centimetre across. Nowehere near clear enough to see a dot moving across it.
I'll try again next time I think.
Today we went back to the new play area in the park. Offspring seemed to have a good time, despite the fact that it rained a bit when we arrived, and most of the new play area was cordoned off with signs saying "keep out - closed for improvement". I mean, they've only just built the thing - don't tell me all the sand had clogged up the pipes or some kid had drowned in half an inch of water. I think it was more of a disappointment to me rather than my son though.
After we'd finished on the park, we went to the horticultural centre as my mother wanted to look at the plants. There weren't any. Well, not many. While we were looking at the lack of plants, son was running around and having a race with himself (don't ask). Next thing I noticed he was climbing back up a small bank with a very sorry look on his face. When he appeared at the top I could see that his trousers were covered in algae up to his knees. Exactly the sort of green algae you find covering a small pond, for example.
And boy, did it stink.
Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos
not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
Have you ever been to a Wiccan baby-naming ceremony? No, neither had I, until earlier tonight. It was certainly different, to say the least. Nice walk in the woods, though!
Pics to follow as soon as I've bought some new batteries for my camera!
