Yesterday saw Irina pop into town (Swansea) to look for some new work clothes, and get her glasses sorted. This left John and I at home with Anna. Despite initial concerns, free life insurance quotes would have turned out to be un-necessary, as she behaved very well, and didn’t start playing up once she realised Mummy wasn’t around. Ira has some new tops, contact lenses and glasses to be repaired and returned soon, Anna and I displayed an ability to get along just fine (useful to know as Irina will be going back to work once we return to Kazakhstan, meaning I’ll be looking after Anna at home all day.

Following on from the earlier Apple A Day post, we have three videos shot around the same time that the phot was taken, back on the 6th February. And still no one has poked me to re-insert the embed code for Anna’s videos over on her blog – AnnaMerriman.com! Anyway, I’ll need to leave the PC uploading the other videos for the night, so I’ll stop writing for now.

I wanted to post some videos of Anna and a few more pictures tonight, but either YouTube’s upload service is slow tonight, or Pipex’s performance isn’t top notch once again when it comes to expected vs. delivered speeds. Anyway, it is just a few moments past midnight here, meaning that in just over five hours (I think the time that appears on these posts may be set to Kazakhstan still), Anna will be exactly one year old! I’ll try to write more on this later, and eventually get the photos up, but for now, I just wanted to say a big HAPPY BIRTHDAY Anna! It barely seems plausible that this time last year I was about to head home whilst Irina waited for Anna to be ready to make an entrance, and that after a few hours, the fastest ever Clydach>Swansea hospital journey I had ever made was achieved!

We are hoping to go down and see my brother and Roz soon, before their baby arrives. Back when motorhomes (or at least one motor home) could be found outside Mum’s house, travelling down somewhere and crashing the night just required to the local vicinity to have a car park, and we were set for over night accommodation, but since the RV was sold, and the caravan isn’t around (I think at the caravan doctor/repair service again), Irina and I will need to figure out where we and Anna will be staying, which just leaves the decision on when to trek down to Falmouth, and also over to Evesham and Cheltenham. I think it makes sense to combine the two into one long trip, but with Anna having her 12 month immunizations shots quite soon, we haven’t nailed down exactly when the best time for Anna to be in long car journeys would be.

As you may remember, I recently mentioned that the update to the SEO Search Terms plugin recently implemented that any search terms used to find your blog that had not scored a hit in over 30 days would be deleted from the database. This obviously helps minimize the impact of the plugin on database size, but for those of us without huge amounts of search-based traffic, the lost data seemed a shame. The author has replied, and explained that although this feature request will be fulfilled in a future release, a stop gap measure would be to alter the following line

23 $sql = 'DELETE FROM '.$wpdb->prefix.'stt2_meta WHERE date(last_modified) < date(now()-interval 30 day);';

Just in case anyone has already installed this plugin, but hadn't been keeping up to date with the comment's on the plugin's page at the author's site, I wanted to mention it here as well.

When we move back to Britain properly, I will need to search around for cheap insurance for our car. For some reason, despite being 30 years old, driving a respectable Ford Mondeo, with at least four or five years of no claims bonus, third party insurance with fire and theft covered is still costing a lot more than it should. In face when the policy was up for renewal, I noticed the premiums had even increased a little! When we’re in Kazakhstan, the car isn’t insured for driving on public roads, but to ensure that my NCB keeps ticking over, the car is just insured for fire and theft on the driveway.