I arrived at the airport in the early hours of yesterday. Having been away for a month (the longest my wife and I have been apart since we got married), I have a lot of things to catch up with. I’ve cleared down all the personal e-mails already (if you are still awaiting a reply, please do resend your original message), deleted the hundreds of useless messages offering me dubious medication at cheap prices, and reconnected the portable hard drive I took with me.
Unfortunately I could only extend my return flight to a month from my leaving, meaning I’ll miss Gramps’ funeral on Monday. Our thoughts are obviously with the rest of the family back home. Before I left, Aunty Eileen sadly also passed. Once again, our condolences to everyone effected. To those friends that sent messages, thank you.
We do have some good news which I’ll go into at a later date; this happy upcoming event means Ira and I will be going back to Wales around November time!
Aug 29 2008
Back Home
Aug 19 2008
Quick Update
As you may have noticed, there have not been a lot of posts recently. The three posts below this were written ahead of time and post-dated, to ensure I didn’t miss any birthdays. However, the day before Ira’s Mum’s birthday was in fact also an important date – seven years since Irina and I were married back in Astana! Although we are not in the same country, I want her to know she is always in my thoughts, and I look forward to seeing her soon 🙂
Anyway, I am currently in Britain, having come over here three weeks ago. Gramps (Mum’s Dad) was very ill in hospital, so I came and said hello. Unfortunately, he passed away very recently, and I just wanted to say a quick thank you to those friends that have sent their messages of support. I will be returning to Kazakhstan by the end of August, and look forward to meeting up with our friends back East. Finally, congratulations to Jonnie, Seb & Con’s brother who recently got married.
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Aug 11 2008
Happy Birthday Genya
Today is Irina’s mum’s birthday, we hope your day goes well and that those around you make sure the day is a relaxing and enjoyable one.
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Aug 09 2008
Irina (the other one) Has Her 21st
Well, I don’t which 21st this is (lets be polite, and suggest perhaps the fourth?), but in any case, Happy Birthday from me and Ira.
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Jul 22 2008
Looking Nothing Like…
OK this post has a LOT of Flash objects and pictures contained within it, so if you are reading this text from the main page, either click the post title or the link just below to see the rest of the post. If I hadn’t done this, the home page would have taken minutes to load, at least for those of us without decent internet connections…
Continue reading “Looking Nothing Like…”
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Jul 18 2008
Off To The Salty Lake Again!
I have just heard from Irina that we are going camping again this weekend 🙂
This is the video I previously posted, recorded in 2006 when we first arrived in Kazakhstan. No humans or animals were hurt during the process of filming this clip, however a few innocent bottles and various non-animated targets were somewhat destroyed.
I can’t find a proper post detailing what we did, so I’m assuming this site was set up after the last trip there.
Having learnt my lesson from our last camping trip to the reservoir, I’ll be re-applying the sun block more often, and wearing my hat. Anyway, I’ll try and remember to write what happens, and who else was around, when I return on Sunday.
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Jul 09 2008
Mashed Up Government
The British government is putting £20,000 into a competition to encourage people to create data mash ups, especially within education, criminal justice and health areas. The fact that ministers have taken on board advice and agreed to something relatively new as the process of mash ups is encouraging. I’m no New Labour zombie, as previous posts probably show, but this time around I’m happy to tip my hat their way. Check here for the BBC article. I already had a look round the FixMyStreet site, and although in some areas there haven’t been any updates on outstanding cases for a while, it was interesting to see what sort of things annoyed people in the different areas of Britain I’ve lived in. For example, near Ira’s old work, it would appear they still have problems with kids riding motorbikes on footpaths, and over in Gloucester, a naughty resident did not put out his rubbish on the right days. Apparently house prices weren’t too adversely affected 😉
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Jul 02 2008
Good And Bad News For Wales
I read a report that back over in Swansea, they recently held a film premiere for “The Edge Of Love”. The movie was partially funded by the Welsh Assembly (via their Wales Creative IP Fund), who invested £700,000 in the Dylan Thomas biographical film. You can find a video interview with two of the stars (Sienna Miller and Keira Knightley) here.
Sadly, Wales is also in the headlines for topping the list of underage drinkers in the Western world, at least according to the WHO. Check the BBC article here. The sample size was 250,000 (I’m assuming that is in total, not just in Wales) 11,12 and 15 year olds. 15 year old girls in Wales were the most likely to have experimented with weed. As long term readers will know, I have no issue with schmoking personally, but the fact that so many young girls have tried it is a little surprising.
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Jul 02 2008
Car Alarms And Lasers
Last night (well, a couple of hours ago) was the first night of celebrations. The reason? This city’s (Astana) birthday as being the capital of Kazakhstan. Also, the president has his birthday around this time, so it is a joint celebration. Anyway there was huge firework display with some lasers. The sights and sounds all the way from our flat window was pretty spectacular. They will apparently be repeating the spectacle each night by the river, though whether it will be to the same scale remains to be seen. Hopefully Ira and I will manage to get a little closer sometime, and I’ll try and figure out which settings will work best on the camera. Probably not tomorrow, as Dave is coming over to get drunk catch up and listen to some of his new tunes discuss deep intellectual matters.
Oh, and the car alarms? In the car park near us, despite being a good 10/15 minute walk away, all the car alarms were set off by the bassy booms from the fireworks!
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