The 11th of March saw us visiting my Dad over in Evesham, and later some friends in Cheltenham. Apparently Anna had already had enough of being held that day, and she seemed to want to thoroughly investigate her Grandad’s house – she was barely a couple of months old when last there, so we can’t blame her for her curiosity. Anyway, we have about four videos left of Anna in Britain I think, and about fourteen more photo posts left to publish. I’ll try and complete another four or five pic/vid posts today.
Jul 26 2010
Stairy Prisoner
One of the few advantages with living in a flat when you have a baby is that you don’t need to worry about stair gates. I don’t know if you can get them easily here in Kazakhstan, but as soon as Anna was mobile and willing and able to start clambering up a step or two back in Britain, Mum got one. This turned into a great attraction for Anna who wanted to know how to open it. Despite a lot of vigorous shaking, pulling and drafting in Gwen for her expertise, Anna didn’t manage to make it up the stairs. So, here with the final shots taken on the 5th of March, Irina had noticed that Anna was looking quite cute up the stairs at her, so she grabbed the camera. I think it was Irina on the stairs, it might have been me?
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- Why Do We Lock You Upstairs Daddy?
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- But How Did You Escape?
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Jul 26 2010
And Then On To Kazakh Photos And Videos…
OK, so this week WILL be the week I catch up with a lot of Anna’s photo and videos from Britain. I have a few of the video based posts ready drafted, but I haven’t yet uploaded the photos. As I’m trying to keep them in date order, I’ll need to crack on with those. In the mean time, I have a few more posts that mention things like reviews to write as well, I just need to stay focused and write them all out. With the World Cup over now, I have less distractions/excuses to go out for a drink, so hopefully this week will see a large chunk of the backlog of posts published.
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Jun 24 2010
Looking At A Kinect
Most times I don’t find myself wanting an add-on for a console or gaming device for a PC very strongly. Microsoft’s Kinect (formally codenamed Natal) is starting to tempt me already though. Hopefully it will be available by Christmas, at least in Britain.
May 28 2010
List Too Long For A Tweet
Unless you are @janeslee, or have a particular interest in which books I’ve read in the last three or so weeks, you can probably safely ignore this post. If you are janeslee, do I know you in real life?
I just noticed that you were in Wales, and despite my current location being Astana, Kazakhstan, we are based in Swansea when we are back in Britain.
Anyway, as you may guessed, my answer to your query of “what you reading that’s keeping you intrigued?” wouldn’t fit within 140 characters, so I’m writing this here and will reply to your tweet with a bit.ly link to this post.
John Birmingham – Final Impact
Jasper Fforde – Something Rotten
David Gerrold – The Man Who Folded Himself
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky – Destination: Amaltheia
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky – The Final Circle of Paradise
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky – Prisoners of Power
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky – Roadside Picnic
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky – The Time Wanderers
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky – Poor Cruel Folk
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky – Monday Begins On Saturday
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky – The Gigantic Fluctuation
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky – Spontaneous Reflex
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky – Probationers
Harry Turtledove – The Man With The Iron Heart
I haven’t found a very well stocked English book shop here in Kazakhstan suddenly, these were all read on my MP4 player than can read plain TXT files. (Obviously I own all these books in paper form back in the UK, and wouldn’t dream of downloading e-books otherwise… /end-arse-covering)
May 26 2010
Grey Hat Hackers That Aren’t Active
Who can tell what has changed in the last 11 months, but officially (see this article), the British government has the means to carry out cyber-attacks, but does not use them for industrial espionage. Whilst giving this explanation, it was made pretty clear that the UK believes China and Russia (amongst many others, I’m sure) do illicitly obtain information to assist national or major companies in their respective territories. Whether government employees or private contractors do this in Britain is not really a argument for most I think, but it would be interesting to hear the excuses given if Lord West was caught out and somehow such commercial spying was ever traced back to officially sanctioned groups or individuals.
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May 24 2010
Stoned Wallabies And Decoy Spiders
Continuing the clearance of old news stories and images that have been stuck in draft posts for a while, here we have a couple of articles from the BBC. The first is about stoned (although to me that only infers weed, not the other substances mentioned) wallabies creating crop circles see here. Whether they would ever approach the geometric designs that some (in)famous hoaxers in Britain did is highly arguable, and I would have loved to have seen some aerial shots of the damage done/art dislpayed by the wallabies. Also worth a quick scan are the mostly tongue in cheek comments at the end of the article.
With the second article we have a species of spider that builds life-sized decoys to distract predators from eating the real McCoy. I also seem to remember an old article in New Scientist on how spiders under the influence of different substances spun a wide variety of altered web patterns, but I can’t seem to find the bookmark or draft post for that.
May 19 2010
The Years Aren’t So Kind To Some
So, below we have three images, see if you can guess who they are…
Exhibit A
Exhibit B
Exhibit C
If you are still wondering (I will assume you don’t live in Britain if the last two stumped you), click the read more link below for a few more faces
Apr 27 2010
Anna’s Birthday Bubbles
OK, I think I’ll skip my normal routine of providing the date that photos and videos were taken of Anna. The next few Anna’s Photos and Anna’s Videos posts are all based around her birthday, which is the 21st of February. If you’re reading this over on her blog, please assume the same date for future posts with Birthday in them 🙂
One of Anna’s presents was a bubble blowing machine. As she hadn’t seen proper bubbles before (ignoring bubble baths), we wanted to buy something that would produce a lot of them, with less mess than the normal setup would involve. Going outside, with Anna suitably covered from the cold (should any Kazakhs be reading this, the weather was a LOT warmer over in Britain than in Astana), we turned the machine on, and waited to see if it would catch Anna’s attention or not…
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Apr 17 2010
These Boots Are(n’t) Made For Eating
Alternative title might be “The introduction of Zimmer Framer to the Russian language”…
This clip was shot on the 18th of February 2010, when we had just got back to Britain. Anna was (and to a point, still is) at the stage where most items of interest need to be tasted at least once. When they are new food items, this isn’t a problem. When they are Anna’s own shoes, this can cause a little concern. Anyway check the video to see Anna tottering around in the kitchen, and the soon to be classic phrase (in Russian) of “Anna, where is your zimmer frame?”.
Just to explain quickly, although Anna quickly found herself happily walking and running around Mum and John’s house, she would sometimes find a large (just about) movable object to push or drag around with her on her travels. In this case, it was a stool that she liked to direct around the kitchen when she was walking. The noise wasn’t exactly the most pleasant to encounter, but the look of joy on her face when she found she could reorder the places of furniture was certainly something to behold…
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