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…
Apr 20 2008
Happy Birthday To Me
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Apr 19 2008
Almost Gone
We will be leaving for the airport in the next hour, and things appear to be sorted in time. Everything has been packed, I think I’ve replied to all outstanding e-mails, and this blog has two or three posts scheduled to be published each day we are away. We are in Amsterdam from 19th – 24th April, then on to Clydach until the 28th/29th April. From there, we go to Cheltenham and Evesham until 1st/2nd May, then back to Clydach for my cousin’s wedding, finally returning to Kazakhstan on the 5th May.
I hope everyone is OK, and that we’ll be seeing some of you soon 🙂
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Apr 14 2008
Congrats To Con
Conrad Robbins (aka Hydrophonics) made most of us laugh when we heard he was planning to take part in the London Marathon this year. There was even a facebook group set up specifically for people who didn’t think he would make it.
Well, he did. I don’t know the exact time Scratch that, click here for his official result – 4 hours 57 minutes and 4 seconds !
You can still donate, and if you are a UK tax payer, the charity can claim some extra money from the government.
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Apr 14 2008
Oleg Back In Moscow
Our friend Oleg is now back in Moscow, having spent some time here in Astana to sort out paperwork. We only managed to meet a couple of times, but it was good to catch up, and we’ll hopefully see each other again soon.
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Mar 14 2008
David Is Back!
Our local globe trotter David has recently returned from Turkmenistan on a business trip. Next time I meet with him, I’ll ask if he minds me using some of the photos he e-mailed over, as the scenery is quite impressive. It looks as though the new(ish) president of that country is not breaking the mould when it comes to creating and maintaning a personaliy culy. Dave travels quite a lot for his job, so I’m not sure when we will next hook up, but we’ve bought in an extra bottle of vodka ready 🙂
By the way, Chris#2 if you are reading this, you are welcome to visit on your own, you don’t need to wait for Dave to hold your hand, LMAO 🙂
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Mar 10 2008
Rain And High Winds Hit Southern UK
How are people? For those readers not in the UK, the south of the country is currently being hit by quite a bad serious of storms. Click on over here for a BBC report on it so far.
So, if you have a moment (and electricity and a working phone line 🙂 ), leave a comment, let us know if your area was affected by the 80mph+ winds or the rain and resulting flood waters.
As you can see from that last photo Cheltenham’s famous race course was hit by the winds, with some of the temporary structures in place for the National Hunt damaged. Swansea was also effected, so if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and phone around friends and family…
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Mar 07 2008
Happy News
… for anyone who knows Alex and Mat. You may remember Alex flew out to Sydney to be with her boyfriend, Mat, last year, and before leaving decided that she would actually live there! Well, as she has now made a post on the good news herself, I no longer feel bad about relaying the news – they have got engaged 🙂
She took advantage of a 29th February existing this year by proposing to him, and has he has his head screwed on, he said yes!
Check her Happy Announcement post for more details.
Feb 20 2008
Amsterdam Trip IS On
Almost all the details are now sorted… We have bought the plane tickets, paid a deposit on the Apartment, now we just need to sort out a pet-sitter again. Either that or re-unit Karra and Muska with their Mum (Dasha) and younger sister (Tishka) that they’ve never met. Ira thinks 4 cats in one house would be too much work for her parents, so perhaps Mira fancies trying out living on her own again?
Anyway, see below for a map of the general area we’ll be staying in.
Sadly Alex and Mat won’t be coming this year, as was originally hoped, as their flights cost even more than ours. btw, congrats to Alex – Dryad Musings has just got an Alexa rank… around 12 million, but that is better than the dreaded ‘no data’. At one point this site almost broke into the 200k region, but since then its bounced back up to the million mark again. Which is a little odd, as my unique visitors per month have been steadily increasing, but there you go. ChrisD (who doesn’t have a blog, so doesn’t get a hyperlinked name 😉 ) can’t come either, as his new work randomly tests its employees, and he is worried about passive smoking whilst he drinks.
The apartment we are renting has internet access, but it is wired, so unless Ira’s laptop comes for the journey, we’ll in communicado for a while (my PDA/phone has WiFI and BT, but is obviously lacking an RJ45 socket LMAO)
Anyway, enough on Amsterdam for now, I’m sure I’ll be boring you with more info a lot more over the coming weeks…
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Feb 13 2008
Sparse Posting
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.)
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Jan 31 2008
Happy Birthday Irina :)
Today is my wife’s birthday. She is at work right now, but we are planning to finally visit a restaurant with some friends tonight (we have talked about checking it out since Tom was last here, but not got around to it), another meal with her work friends and colleagues tomorrow, and then finally some of her other, less happy with mingling with others, friends on Saturday. Less cooking for her, though over here, people tend to pay for all their guests when celebrating, so we need to make sure we’ve enough in the right bank accounts 🙂
Anyway, I hope Ira does not have too busy a day at work, and that she enjoys the meals over the next few days. I’ll attempt to write a little on each restaurant, and we can hopefully use her new camera to snap a few shots.
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