Happy Father’s Day to all the Daddys out there! I had a lovely huge card from Anna & Tim, a relaxing couple of little snoozes, and a few drinks. Nice to chill out 🙂
The paddling pool got it’s 1st outing this year. Tim & Anna seem to be enjoying it. It was also Muska’s first weekend outside of the in-laws’ house!
This is another compilation post culled from a couple of tweets, to try and balance things out a little on the front page.
Anna Proudly Displays Her And Tim’s Handiwork (and footwork!)
Once again, this is a quick summary of a few tweets and photos from yesterday. I’ll also add some pictures that Lara and Marina took.
Lara organized the event, with the idea of it also being an alternative to the Queen’s Birthday Party that most of us have been attending every year here in Astana. With John and Inessa now gone from Kazakhstan, our QBP invites have not magically appeared, so Lara decided to have an alternative QBP/Jubilee celebration. We toyed with the idea of renting a yurta out by Metro, but the cost and prohibition on bringing your own food or drink (there is a cafe at the same location) meant that we held it at a park near Highvill, and then moved on to Dan & Lara’s flat afterwards. Lots of delicious food (marmite sandwiches, mini-beefburgers and some Long Island Iced Teas were my personal highlights), and we had various forms of entertainment. The bits I remember were Dan finally playing some Green Day on his guitar (and I think Paul also played on his guitar), some Dombra-playing, and a game of Which Monarch Am I?
OK, I’m publishing this post now, otherwise it will sit as a draft forever. I’ll try to remember to add a few picture titles later.
Remembered that because I have the TwitterTools plugin disabled right now (still got a couple of thousand posts to manually tag, and with the plugin activated, each newly tagged post would initiate a tweet) that a few tweets and associated pictures have not yet made it to this blog…
The first three are from Chubary last weekend, at the in-laws.
Irina, Tim And Anna On The Swing In Chubary
Anna's Garden House, Freshly Redecorated
And Turn To The Right
Here we have Tim chewing on one of his toys at home…
Tim On Our Carpet
And here we have a couple of quick videos I shot whilst attempting to compare direct YouTube uploads to videos sent to PockeTwit’s configured video service (I had to change from posterous as there are still “technical issues” when trying to use their domain here in Kazakhstan). The first is lower resolution, via PockeTwit, with the second one being from YouTube.
Finally, there is this video shot in Hapyland (the renamed Babylon children’s play area in Mega). I had already taken Anna on her first ever dodgems (bumper cars) ride, but she wanted to go again, so Irina took over driving duties. (Luckily) Anna couldn’t reach the pedals, so she was a passenger with occasional steering assistance. In true Kazakh style, one naughty driver can be seen using her mobile phone as she drives 🙂
[edit]
Having turned the plugin back on, it apparently picks up old tweets and automatically publishes them here, sort of making this post a little redundant. As I’ve now written this out and embedded the pictures, I’ll just leave the old tweets as plain text, and publish this as planned.
