Mar 22 2009

Driftwood, Seb And Anna

Category: Anna's Photos,Friends,PersonalChrisM @ 8:23 pm

The day (22nd March ยง) after Marilyn arrived, Seb came over to say hi to all of us, and so we decided to take a walk on the beach. As there are three main beaches within easy reach of Clydach, we had to decide where to take him. The Mumbles is possibly the most famous beach near us, but unless you time your visits with the tides correctly, there can be no sand left at all – just the wall and then the sea itself! This left us a choice between one of Swansea’s beaches and Port Talbot’s. Although Swansea itself is a little prettier and seen as more up market (relatively speaking) compared to Port Talbot, Irina and I had been down there quite a few times recently with Anna (and sometimes Gwen), so we hopped onto the motorway for a few junctions, and parked up along the sea front in Port Talbot.
As ever, hover your cursor over the image’s to see their title/description… You could do that, or I could just remember that I only need to leave the caption field blank on tweet posts that are displayed as asides. (Runs off to edit a few earlier posts)

ยง – Why this constant fascination with the dates photos were taken? In case the EXIF data is some how not retained with these JPGs, I wanted to ensure that in years to come, I could easily tell when the pictures were actually taken, rather than when the posts containing them were published. You’ll just have to put up with it for now, sorry…

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Mar 21 2009

Marilyn Visits To See One Month Old Anna

Category: Anna's Photos,Friends,PersonalChrisM @ 7:44 pm

Here we have Marilyn’s first visit to see Anna back in Clydach, on the 21st March – Anna’s one month (as opposed to four week) birthday! Which reminds me, I forgot to include the date on the last Gwen and Tummy Time post – it was a couple of days previous to these photos, so around the 19th of March. You can see Gwen in a pictures here, in one of her favourite positions, dozing next to an adult holding Anna, with Anna’s feet resting on her back ๐Ÿ™‚

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Mar 19 2009

Backyard & Playmat

Category: Anna's Photos,PersonalChrisM @ 4:19 am

Just a couple of days shy from her one month birthday, here we have all three of us sat in the backyard in Clydach (Gwen soon saunters into shot, but Anna isn’t so clear in that one)

Ira Anna Chris Backyard Clydach

Ira Anna Chris Backyard Clydach

Now six and half weeks old (at least in this photo ๐Ÿ™‚ ), we have Anna chilling out on her playmat.

Anna Smiling On Her Playmat

Anna Smiling On Her Playmat

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Mar 14 2009

Aunty Jean And Anna

Category: Anna's Photos,PersonalChrisM @ 2:13 am

OK, here is the first of the next batch of Anna photos. It was taken on the 14th March, back in Mum’s kitchen in Clydach. We miss all our family and friends back in Britain, and are already looking forward to this Christmas, when we hope to return for a short while.

Anna and Aunty Jean

Anna and Aunty Jean

I do have some earlier photos to post as well, but some of them may be repeats of photos already published, just taken on a different camera – this was the first photo I was fairly sure hadn’t been posted in one form or another already.

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Mar 11 2009

What Was That Last Tweet About?

Category: PersonalChrisM @ 1:11 pm

OK, so I was not necessarily planning to go and buy a holiday in a far off land, but the communication abilities of the older woman in the Travel House agency in Clydach did leave a lot to be desired. I needed to fax a copy of Anna’s birth certificate to somewhere in Kazakhstan, and rang up last week to ask if they offered this service. (We had only just thrown away an old fax machine ourselves). They said yes it was fine, obviously I would need to pay (as assumed, especially for an international call), and to pop in any time.
I popped in yesterday, and everything seemed fine, then the elder of the two ladies working there discovered it was an international call, and seemed struck down with fear that her boss would not allow this. I asked if this was company policy, or her own decision, she said hers. I asked for the boss’s number or head office, as I was sure a potential customer would receive a generally positive response from someone who actually knew how to talk to people.
She refused to allow me to see any of the numbers for people more senior than her, and basically wound me up. Did I expect the shop to stop working or inconvenience themselves in any way? No, I just hoped that in the 21st century, in a West European country, that customer handling/communications would have improved a little. Maybe the lady in question will attend training one day, or the politer young lady will be promoted above her, but I doubt it.

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Mar 10 2009

Stupid travel agents in clydac…

Category: TweetsChrisM @ 2:42 pm

Stupid travel agents in clydach can kiss my arse. tuckfards.

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Mar 06 2009

Tummy Time And Settling To Sleep

Category: Anna's Videos,PersonalChrisM @ 11:50 pm

So, as previously mentioned, I don’t have access to the hard drive with Anna’s photos on right now; I have decided to use this opportunity to catch up with some of her videos instead. These were taken back in Britain, as you’ll be able to see from Anna’s size.
This first one I think was recorded when she had her first experience of being on her front, rather being held/lying on her back. She has obviously come on leaps and bounds since this video – she can now roll onto her back by herself, and recently decided that rolling from there onto her back again would be a good idea! This increase in movement ability is brilliant – unless you are trying to change her nappy at the time, or she is falling asleep (we put her on her back as per medical advice, but sometimes she’ll flip over again and again. 8 months is apparently roughly an ok stage at which to leave them sleeping on their tummies if they really prefer it.)

Secondly, we have some video shot whilst walking Anna around the backyard in Clydach, trying to help her get to sleep.

There are quite a few videos of this, so if you’re viewing this on the front page, and don’t particularly want to see the others, no need to click the link below…
Continue reading “Tummy Time And Settling To Sleep”

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Feb 28 2009

Anna’s First Video!

Category: Anna's Videos,VideosChrisM @ 4:02 am

After YouTube banned my original account, (long story, the short version is I lost it due to short clips involving BBC material), I have finally got around to uploading some videos to my new account.

This post includes Anna’s first appearance in a movie (28th Febraury, on the sofa in Clydach, with Anna at just one week old), at least from Irina’s camera. I still need to hookup our proper camcorder and rip it to DVDs/YouTube etc. Anyway, enough of the text, onto the star ๐Ÿ™‚

Click the link below to see: A higher quality version of the same video, parts 2-6 from the sofa, and also Irina in hospital a couple of days before the birth. (The ‘HQ’ embedded version appears to just be the same video enlarged, rather than the HQ version available from the video’s page on YouTube.com)
OK, just press the HQ button to watch a better quality version.
Continue reading “Anna’s First Video!”

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Feb 23 2009

Gwen Has A New Friend

Category: Anna's Photos,PersonalChrisM @ 1:44 pm

After spending a couple of months guarding/accompanying Irina, Gwen suddenly found there was a new baby in the house. She seemed to adjust very quickly (this photo was taken 23rd February 2009), realising that whatever/whoever this new arrival was, we were all obviously giving a lot of attention to it, and that she was being very closely monitored whenever she approached this strange smelling bundle of joy. Pretty soon, Gwen was alerting us if she heard Anna crying, and dutifully following Irina around and around the back yard when Anna was getting some fresh air in her pram.

John Anna Gwen on the sofa in Clydach

John Anna Gwen on the sofa in Clydach

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Jan 12 2009

Belated 2009 Greetings

Category: Friends,Personal,Weather,WiFi,Windows Mobile,WordPressChrisM @ 3:36 pm

Wow, no posts in almost 12 days. That has to be improved upon, sorry. The (somewhat predictable) reasons for my online muteness were recovering from Christmas, seeing in the New Year, travelling around meeting friends and family, some of whom we hadn’t crossed paths with in a couple of years, friends coming over to sunny Wales to see the house for the first time, oh and also maintaining, repairing and improving four different PCs. Getting used to Vista from a technical support point of view has taken time, but I at least no longer involuntarily shudder when I hear the OS’ name ๐Ÿ˜‰
After flashing my TyTn II (Kaiser) to a custom WM6.1 ROM (it was working boringly reliably, something had to be tweaked/modded ๐Ÿ˜‰ ) and getting TomTom, music and voice commands to work whilst in the car, I installed Ubuntu onto Ira’s laptop (dual-boot obviously, didn’t think the love of my life would appreciate me nuking her Windows install), finally got around to properly securing the wireless network at home in Clydach, got the PCs all happily working as far as UPnP was concerned. This needed to be sorted as the internet radio I recvd. for Xmas could also play files on the LAN, and I was having issues just using normal folder sharing on a couple of the Vista machines.
Ante natal classes have been an interesting and mostly informative process, it is hard to believe we are now probably less than a month away from seeing our daughter’s face for the first time ๐Ÿ™‚ We now have a lot of the items new borns need, and even the pushchair/pram/car-seat optimus prime styled transforming thingy has turned up. Ira has done some more photo shoots with John, obviously centred around the theme of pregnancy/new life etc. See previous posts for the last published examples – though hopefully John will get around to adding new posts to his blog, and new photos to the gallery soon. Which reminds me, don’t forget to check out ConJoinery if you are in need of carpentry or joinery skills… when Con came over here for a few days, we got around to setting up a quick blog to promote his work, and showcase previous projects. It obviously still need more content, but the basic framework of WordPress 2.7 and useful plugins are in place.
After all that I finally noticed that this site is once again down to a PageRank of 0 (see many previous posts regarding Google and post links-for-money issues. Anyway, I now know why there is a lot less work around again. From n/a to a 2, then up to 4, spanked by google down to a 0, recovered to 2, then back once more to 0. As the only thing this alters for the worse is the potential income for this domain, I’m not crying into my cereal. The unique visitor numbers per day has been steadily bouncing between 250 and 600 a day, even when no fresh content has been added, so I know the search engine traffic, and regular repeat visitors have carried on regardless. It is a little strange to find out which of your posts are popular, and the search terms people googled to get there. If you’ve not already enabled AWStats on your site, it might be worth popping along to your CPanel interface and turning it on…

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