Rob's Ego Trip!

Ben's really got the hang of this sleeping through til gone 6 lark and it's great! For some reason, I've been really really tired today though :(

Jon had a party today at a local community centre. It was nice and relaxed. Zak's father welcomed us and we discovered plenty of food, a bouncy castle and lots of "running around" space. Jon had a great time :) The highlight was as the end though, when Zak's father showed off another skill and made balloon animals for all the kids. Jon asked for a dog, but got a "giraffe dog" as the neck was slightly longer than intended! Five minutes later, he burst it and had to go back and ask nicely for a new giraffe!

We've also been doing some organising and building on Georgina's clear outs, by starting on the filing cabinet. We've got rid of lots of bits of paper rubbish and hopefully we'll be able to actually find the stuff we are looking for now!

Two amazing things happened today:

1. Ben slept through to 6:30!
2. We got ADSL at work!

Not a bad day all in all.

Ben had his second set of injections this morning(DTP, I think). He's not had a good day though as he's hardly slept. As a result, he's absolutely knackered now and is screaming the house down. Fortunately, Georgina's just gone up to see him and all is silent at the moment.

Hopefully he's fallen asleep...

8 years now and still going strong! If anything, this marriage lark is getting better.

Emails received today: 446
Emails actually for me: 0

:(

Haven't blogged for a couple of days so a quick round up of what's been happening.

Yesterday, Mum and Dad came over to see Ben and Jon. Jon especially enjoyed their company as they took him to the playground. As they were here, Georgina and I took the opportunity of free babysitting and went out to see Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. It was an OK film, but there were enough niggles that we spend the drive home and a good hour or so talking about what was wrong in our view! The main problems were the characters of Lupin and Black (not enough "presence") along with a disjointed plot.

It was still great to spend time with Georgina alone :)

Today Jon's been hell probably because his Grandparents spoilt him last night by letting him stay up late!

One for the "cock ups" department:

Girl given dead foetus in bottle. I cannot fathom how a nurse/doctor at the hospital could have possibly done that to the girl!

However, NOT The Odeon Website is!

I took the day off today and we all went on a Nursery day trip to Hatton Country Park (a children's farm).

By coach...

Note to self: go by car next time.

(the park was good fun though!)

Got some more pictures done today. The biggest problem is going to be time as there's not many non-working days left in July!

Jon was invited to Sophie's 4th birthday party at Toy City today, so we all trooped along :) It's interesting how timid he is compared to his peers though. Most of them were throwing themselves down the slides and into the ball pits, whereas Jon wanted his hand holding. He seemed to have a good time though, even if he didn't eat much of the food.

PHP 5 has been released! Time to do some proper Object Oriented coding :)

The hard disk at work died last night :( Today is spent trying to get some sembelence of a working environment...

*sigh*

It seems that our quest to get broadband is one long series of delays. Apparently the install date for our area of 21 June is incorrect and the transmitter has not yet gone live. I wouldn't mind so much, but another member of the same company gave me the impression that it was up and running!

I so wish that we could get ADSL here.

I do like The Register!

We've just watched Bowling for Columbine. It's probably quite controversial over in the US, but to me it was mostly thought provoking. Clearly Michael Moore had an agenda related to the NRA, the media and the Work-for-Welfare scheme (or whatever it's called!)

I kind of expected it to be really anti-gun, but then there was a section on how in Canada, over 33% of the population own guns, yet there is hardly any gun-related murders. Certainly, made me think that Canada would be a nice place to emigrate to! They don't need to lock their doors! Clearly the amount of guns in the US is not the issue that Moore's blaming, more the "system".

It appears that there inaccuracies all over the place as noted here. There are other sites too. This is Michael Moore's response to the criticisms levelled at him. Both articles are worth reading.

Best points for me were Marylin Manson came over really really well as remarkably bright and able to think for himself. Might have to investigate his music! Also, the reaction of K-Mart to a "stunt" with two Columbine survivors was to remove the sale of bullets within 90 days. This was a great reaction and far more positive than he was expecting and it's nice to see a corporate do "the right thing".

Whatever "the truth", it made me think a bit about gun crime in general and personally I still prefer that Britain doesn't have guns in every house.

I'd like to be able to leave my door unlocked though...

Trying to come up with imaginative pictures to this thing is hard!

Another one...

Cheating by doing an easy one today...

This wasn't actually in my plan of out of reach, but when I saw Jon trying to build the last bit of the tower, I had to capture it. Jon wasn't too impressed that I was busy taking the photo rather than helping him though!

I thought I'd have a go at doing 26 Things. I've set up a category in the photo album, but it's not really geared to this problem. Maybe I'll actually get my act together and write a new CMS system for this site...

Anyway... first picture is "Through". It's taken in the grounds of my workplace. I just like the chair being out in the warm sunshine and the route to it being in the cold shade.

Scary this social engineering, isn't it?

I've bee reading Three Shoes, One Sock & No Hairbrush over the last few weeks (intermittently!)

This bit makes me think about the nature of our society:

"By the time I got pregnant with my second child, I knew my days of full-time work were gone, if not for good, then at least for the next five years. I had down-shifted my expectations to accomodate the previously unimaginable reality of being a mother, of loving my children, of being needed by my children. I am resigned to working less than I'd like, earning less than I'd like, achieving less than I'd like and doing more housework than I'd like."

The bit in the bold (my emphasis) is the "problem bit". (I can understand the concept of someone doing too much housework than they'd like to do! :) However spending more time with your children should not mean you are achieving less in your own eyes or in the eyes of society. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be the case. Nurturing a child (or more usually, more than one child) through the first 5 years is an achievement it it's own right. I find it quite sad that only wormen with jobs are recognised as "achievers", even by authors of books about bringing up children.

Fascinating conversation on Radio 5Live today between a Labour and a Conservative about their respective education policies. The Conservative spent most of his time saying "this is what's currently wrong and this is what we are going to do to fix them". The Labour man told us what was wrong with the Conservative's ideas.

I still have no idea what Labour's plans for education are, other than they involve "choice".

Whatever that may mean.

One thing the Liberals have got right is their observation that most of us don't want choice; we'd rather have our closest school/hospital/doctors to be very good. This I agree with; I just don't see how it can be acheived without some ability for parents/patients to vote with their feet.

Do proper research into complexity of project before taking it on...

Government News Network

Listening to 5Live today, I learnt that there's a Thunderbirds film coming out! How did I miss this fact before?! There's so many good films out/coming out in the next few months that we are unlikely to see at the cinema though. Roll on the DVD release...

Nothing much has happened this weekend in the-Allens' household. Chores have been done and children entertained.

Sent Jon back to bed this morning though. He came into our room and the normal time and started whinging about having to get dressed. I gave him the choices of getting dressed or going back to bed for an hour. He didn't want to get dressed, so I put him back in his bedroom. I don't know if it's related, but he's been a nice cheerful little boy today (mostly!) which has been a pleasant change.

A great actor passed away today. Everyone else has provided much better tributes that I could ever hope to.