Although Anna could already feed herself by the 24th of February, back then she was still a little bit more messy by the end of the meal. We also don’t tend to need to worry about using bibs with arms any more 
Anyway, still working her way through all her lovely Christmas and Birthday presents, Anna, Gwen and I went for a little walk around the garden, and Anna had her backpack on. The dolly that came with it stayed indoors, perhaps she didn’t think it was warm enough?
Gwen performed her Anna guarding duties well, making sure that no harm came to her. Not quite sure what could go wrong in the back garden, but it was really nice to see Gwen acting protective over Anna.
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Anna Enjoying Her Pasta
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Gwen, Chris And Anna Testing Her Backpack
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Ready For Adventures
Tags: Anna, Backpack, Bib, Birthday, Christmas, Dolly, food, Garden, Gwen, Presents
Still on the 21st of February, (though now getting to the end of photos and videos from Anna’s birthday) here we have the ride/push-along car you saw in an earlier video, although this time you see it in extended mode, where a seat is added, and it looks more like a toy car than a zimmer frame
Anna Driving The Living Room Circuit
Final Lap
Tags: Anna, Birthday, ride/push-along car, toy car
OK, so I definitely need to clear some time in the next week or two, and try to catch up with a lot of posts (and photo editing) on this blog. Although my memory of my holiday last September may be a little hazy by now, I’m hoping the pictures will either refresh said memory, or paint a good enough picture to give you, the reader, enough of an idea. After that, we have our trip to Britain over Christmas and New Year, with Mum’s wedding in between. After that we have finally meeting up with Tom the pilot, contact being made with an American Jazz singer hopefully coming to Astana to play some sets locally. Finally, we have the birthday trip to Amsterdam (I may need to link to upcoming forum posts for the Coffeeshop specific info) and Britain again this April and May. I’m hoping that by posting this summary now, it will remind me what is missing, and force me into actually taking the time out to write a few words and crop a few piccies. To friends and family still waiting for those posts, thanks for your patience so far.
Tags: Birthday
No, not a reference to the seminal track by Melle Mel and The Furious Five (not Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel, as often quoted – this was a marketing ploy by the record label, who listed ‘Grandmaster’ as a track artist), nor Duran Duran’s version of said song. No, I’m happy to report that Astana has had it’s road markings reapplied. Drivers still don’t seem to exactly stick to their lane (or even stick to the principle of three marked lanes should equal a maximum of three real life lanes of traffic), but it does seem to have a small effect.
The reason for this being done now is probably the birthday celebrations Astana will be holding soon – many construction projects and visible improvements are being rushed through to completion in order to make sure all looks well in time. Sadly, they took down the rainbow road ornaments; DaveG had a point that they didn’t really fit in with the image of a modern capital city, but at a personal level, they looked pretty. Also, with the (necessary) ice scraping done all winter long on the roads, not only do the lane markings disappear, also the pedestrian (zebra) crossings have no visible clue left to their whereabouts. Now you could just cross where you know they are supposed to be, but the rainbow structures over the roads hopefully used to give some motorists a reminder that the pedestrians were supposed to try and cross there, and should therefore be avoided a little more often.
Tags: Birthday
Following on from the last post, this one is just a quick message to friends of ours. Seb has his birthday today, and though we did not manage to cross paths the last time I was in Britain, he knows he is in our minds. Lucian, who we met through Irina’s old work in Britain (PKL) has his birthday this Thursday, and we hope he has a great day. Dave’s Natalya has her birthday the following day, and we’re looking forward to meeting her again. Finally, although Dr. Natalaya’s daughter (Sveta) does not have her birthday until next Wednesday, I thought I’d post a congratulations a week early, in case I forget next week
Tags: Birthday
If all has gone to plan, today Ira and I are in Amsterdam, celebrating my 29th birthday. Or should that be 30th – the day you turn 1 year old, is surely your second birthday, 365 days (or thereabouts) after the day you were born…
Anyway, despite the meandering style of this post, I’m not writing this live from our apartment in smokeland Amsterdam – I wrote most of the next two weeks worth of posts whilst still back in Kazakhstan. I wanted to keep my readers coming back for more (if you stop posting for more than a few days, you are guaranteed to lose return visitors), and as most of my friends are too lazy to guest-post. ChrisD would be a prime example – 18 months later and still no sign of his post on holidaying in Astana. So, I finally got around to clearing out all the collections of bookmarks I’d made on topics that I wanted to blog about ‘one day’.
Anyway, I hope all who read this do so in good health, to my friends in Britain, I hope to see you soon (we’ll be near Swansea 25th – 29th April (approx.) then some time in Cheltenham and Evesham, before heading back to Swansea once more, as my cousin is getting married. 4th May we head back to Astana, so if I haven’t seen you by then, you’ll have to survive until Xmas again.) To friends elsewhere, I hope things are going well, and that our paths cross again sooner rather than later…
Tags: Birthday
I still have quite a few things I need to crack on with before Irina and I head off to Amsterdam for my birthday, and then on to Britain. In an attempt to keep my few loyal readers, well… loyal, I’ll be posting some mildly funny/entertaining videos over the next few days, as this doesn’t require much though on my part. Believe it or not, this blog, and related research takes up a fair amount of my working day!
Anyway I have already written two or three posts for each day I’m actually away (19th April – 5th May). By adjusting the timestamp, it should hopefully appear as though I’m still dutifully blogging away each day. I will try and check in here, as well as my e-mail, when possible, but if you have not left a comment here before, it is possible that approval of new comments may take two or three days.
If you have commented here before, unless you include my blacklisted words, your comments should appear immediately.
Anyway, enjoy the next few videos over the coming days, and my thanks to ChrisD’s facebook friends for originally bringing them to my attention
Tags: Birthday
Quick explanation for those of you who thought I had given up on posting here, or had no internet access – I am currently still deep in the process of setting up my other 18 sites. They were originally created as static (well almost, too long a story to recount here) pages, and whenever I needed to make amendments, it tended to take a long time. Deciding to swap hosts, I took the opportunity to also use WordPress as a CMS system for these sites. This has meant a fair amount of preparatory work; I am now manually importing each old article into individual blog posts, tidying up the strange snippets of code that snuck in here and there, and then finally tweaking the theme for each to get what I need. I’ve completed this process on about 1/3 of the sites, however in terms of work, I am only 1/5 done at max – some of the sites only have 50 or so articles to import, whilst the ones left are closer to 200 
Anyway, once this process is complete, I’m hoping to start earning some money from them again (the reason they were originally created), and any future amendments will be a lot easier to carry out, be it on an individual page, or site-wide. Until then, this blog will continue to be updated less frequently. Sorry.
I still have a large back log of posts to write here, ranging from the ‘missing’ book reviews, last year’s Amsterdam trip reports, and a lot of Eating Out posts, since meeting Oz Dave, Chris2 and Eric.
Finally, although not as concrete as I originally hoped, a trip to Amsterdam and short time in Britain is still a possibility around my birthday (4/20 for any American schmokers reading this 20th April for anyone else). Since the ACD (Amsterdam Coffeeshop Directory) forums are still down, and Channels.nl is getting ever more full of trolls, I decided to source a new site for reliable information…
Virtual ‘Dam is looking good so far (Nope, not another sponsored post, just happy to recommend the site to others interested in all things related to Amsterdam.)
Tags: Amsterdam, Birthday, internet access
There has not been much happening on this blog the past week; the main reason being that I have been working hard on converting my other sites to blogs. Also, we went out a few times to celebrate Ira’s birthday, and so I’ve not had as much time at the keyboard as usual. The process of changing hosts and manually importing old site pages into blog posts is quite intensive, but I’m hoping to earn some more money from my other 18 sites soon, so it will hopefully be worth it. Thanks to those that are still checking in to see what is new, your repeat visits are appreciated
Tags: Birthday, Ira
