I swear that dog thinks it’s a cat.
Category: uncategorized
Things are moving waaaay too fast
Jaysus, my head is spinning! We have approved quotes for removals, and we’ve contacted estate agents and solicitors for the house sale. The property isn’t even officially on the market yet and the agents have contacted us about a lady wanting to view the property this weekend!
GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
I’m having a crap day, so here’s a ramen fairy
This girl has noodles for hair and lives in a bowl of soup. Your argument is invalid.
The nerve of some people :(
Ben wanted to take his bike to nursery this morning. This is actually useful because it – generally – means that it’s easier to get him out of the house and get him to nursery in a timely fashion. I say usually because last time he faffed around so much that we missed the bus. Today, to avoid this, I left the house early. We ended up at the bus stop with about 10 minutes to kill so, instead of letting him ride up and down the sidewalk, I took him into the Tesco express car park because it would be easier to keep an eye on him and there would be less risk of him hurting himself.
As he’s riding along in circles at the far end of the car park, being a good boy and having fun, some yummy mummy drives up in a Land Rover that she obviously can’t park. I moved Ben out of the way when I saw her trying to park but apparently that wasn’t enough for the busybody woman because she made a detour to tell me that “it’s a bit of a bad idea, letting him ride in a busy car park, don’t you think?” and looking at me like I’m some sort of moron for letting him do it. Idiot woman. I was so gobsmacked by the cheek of it that I couldn’t even come up with anything to say.
50 activities every child should do before they become teenagers
How many did you grow up doing?
More than four in five adults say their children spend less time playing outside than they did at their age, according to research by the UK’s National Trust. So, in an effort to entice youngsters away from their TV screens, the charity asked children to name their favourite outdoor activities.
The initiative followed a study that found if children do not form a connection with the great outdoors before they are 12, they are far less likely to later in life.
ADVENTURER
1. Climb a tree
2. Roll down a really big hill
3. Camp out in the wild
4. Build a den
5. Skim a stone
6. Run around in the rain
7. Fly a kite
8. Catch a fish with a net
9. Eat an apple straight from a tree
10. Play conkers (a game played using the seeds of horse-chestnut trees)
DISCOVERER
11. Go on a really long bike ride
12. Make a trail with sticks
13. Make a mud pie
14. Dam a stream
15. Play in the snow
16. Make a daisy chain
17. Set up a snail race
18. Create some wild art
19. Play Pooh sticks (A game played in Winnie the Pooh, where you drop a stick off the upstream side of a bridge to see whose comes out first downstream)
20. Jump over waves
RANGER
21. Pick blackberries growing in the wild
22. Explore inside a tree
23. Visit a farm
24. Go on a walk barefoot
25. Make a grass trumpet
26. Hunt for fossils and bones
27. Go star gazing
28. Climb a huge hill
29. Explore a cave
30. Hold a scary beast
TRACKER
31. Hunt for bugs
32. Find some frogspawn
33. Catch a falling leaf
34. Track wild animals
35. Discover what’s in a pond
36. Make a home for a wild animal
37. Check out the crazy creatures in a rock pool
38. Bring up a butterfly
39. Catch a crab
40. Go on a nature walk at night
EXPLORER
41. Plant it, grow it, eat it
42. Go swimming in the sea
43. Build a raft
44. Go bird watching
45. Find your way with a map and compass
46. Try rock climbing
47. Cook on a campfire
48. Learn to ride a horse
49. Find a geocache
50. Canoe down a river
Having a bit of fun with fonts
I tried a tool called myscriptfont.com to convert my handwriting into a TTF font. It’s not half bad. The letter heights are a bit all over the place. but the results are still surprisingly good considering it took me the whole of 5 minutes to do!
Canadian provinces, explained
Click for full-sized picture.
tap tap tap… is this thing on?
Testing, 1…2…3…
The Loin King
Making it official: We’re moving to Lausanne!
I’ve been wanting to yell this from the rooftops for a while, and now I can! I’ve been hired as a senior software engineer in the Nestle Institute for Health Sciences’ bioinformatics team. I start in July, and that means that Katy, Bean, the cats, the dog and I are moving to Switzerland :)
I’d sent an application a while ago when I was looking into what was available out there, post-EBI, but hadn’t really heard anything back. Then, out of the blue, I get contacted for several hours of phone interviews, followed by F2F interviews in Lausanne. It’s been a bit of an emotional roller coaster for the last couple of weeks, oscillating between “yay, OMGWTFBBQ!!!!” to “shit, what the hell have we done?!” Logically and emotionally, the upsides outweigh the downsides, but it’s still going to be a major upheaval and a sharp shock to the system. I mean, how many times in a lifetime does a job pop up out of blue and then you move to another country?
The project itself is insanely ambitious, and there’s going to be lots of work to keep me busy and happy. The project has been described as “hiring the team that will design and build a plane that’s already flying”. I’ve spoken with a few expats that are either in Lausanne from the UK or in the UK from Switzerland and they’re all mostly positive about the quality of life. There will be a bit of culture shock (everything is SO BLOODY EXPENSIVE!!!!!) but we’re actually looking forward to it.
So yeah, watch this space, because in the coming months, I might be losing my mind trying to get everything sorted out to ship all of us over there. The plan, once we’re all settled in, is to get Bean ready for school and for Katy to become a lady of leisure for a year or so while her french improves to the point where she can be a care worker again.
Oh yeah, we’re also looking for a house with a spare bedroom, in case anybody wants to come over for a visit :)