Ages ago now - about six weeks or so my perants came up for the weekend and we went for a day outing at Crickly Country Park - there is geology, archeology and lots of wildlife there so it was lots of fun. I was also impressed with the visitors centre! though it needs a little cafe/shop thing really and the loos were a bit - hmmmm.
Jean loves collecting rocks!
Alaric decided he'd roll down the hill I can't remember why - this was on the back were the old Roman Hill Fort used to be.
Dad spent alot of time drawing cats and the like and reading all the notices - he was especially enamerred with the fossils and models at the visitors centre.
Jean became jellous of other children she found as they had hats and she didnt - this was how she ended up wearing Alarics fold-up hat!
I kept trying to photograph this poor creature but everytime it felt safe enough to venture out some one with a dog or small child would come walking through and scare it away again - hence no good pics!
The visitors centre had a giant snakes and ladders with velcro attatched to the wall and big cloth dice - Jean loved it though we did have a minor tiff about returning the dice to the little room were the game was!
I made a badge for Alaric at the centenary camp - I've finally got around to blogging about it over on Salaric!
He is now wearing this badge continuously on his coat of many pockets 🙂
Last night, I had a funny feeling there was something special about today... sure, it's our third wedding anniversary, but something else...
Oh yes. I'd agreed to go to Bristol about three months ago.
Quickly I checked the time I needed to be there - 1:20pm to 3:20pm - phew; I'd neither need to be up specially early, or be back too late to take Sarah to her writer's circle or stop off at the district scouting supplies shop to pick up some badges my Cubs had earned.
So what was I in Bristol for? The Criminal Records Bureau trial of their planned new identity checking procedures...
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As I mentioned before, I have a cloth badge sewn onto my coat of many pockets. Now, Sarah is an avid collector of most things, including such badges; she has bags and boxes of them, generally not sewn onto anything. I don't have the urge to collect like that, but I wouldn't mind a few more to sew onto my coat.
I wouldn't want just any badges sewn on, though; I'm not even keen on picking up badges from places I visit and sewing them on to mark the event.
I think I'd probably like some nerdy ones, to be honest. A NetBSD logo or a hacker emblem would be pretty cool. But I'd really like something Lispy, so I designed the following:
Now, I've found places that will make badges for you, but the minimum orders tend to be in the realm of 100, at a cost of 85 pounds or so... and I don't know if I can sell the spares on to anybody 😉 Perhaps I need to set up a "nerdy cloth badges" business...
The SVN source is available for download, BTW. It was made on a Mac and uses an Apple font for the nice curly lambda, but I'm sure other platforms will have a good font that can be used instead.
Yes friends it is back - today in the Snell-Pym disastor sytcom we have exploding taps and clonking vans!
Five in the morning sleepily I moan at Alaric fro having a shower that early. He grumbles at me for leaving said shower on. There was a brief pause and he gets up to investigate.
Not the shower, no lo! It is the squeacky cold tape downstair the washer had finially gone and water was jettosoning out of it at a scary rate. And so poor Al hurts his hand trying to turn the stop cock off.
Now we had known the washer was going due to the squeak in fact we had bought washers for the tape over a year ago but could not get to the washers to replace them. On top of that we could not get the stop cock to completely turn off.
Then there was some confussion later in the day when I thought Al had told Barabara but apparently hadn't been able to find her and she came around to ask if I'd been having trouble with the washing machine!
After alot of talking round in circles before things became clear it was a wait for the emergancy plumber - who fixed it in under five minutes - he said to be fair it was only an easy job if you had the right tools becuase they are stupid tapes!
He was also impressed with our messures to reduce the amount of water lost - ie we put on the fitting for the hose pipe with a penny in it and then cable tied it to the tape and placed tea towls over it to reduce pressure spray.
It was a nasty day as I had left banana chutney half made the night before thinking it would be a simple task to finish it today - sigh.
Then I managed to loose the work I had spent all morning doing on the laptop as it crashed whilst I was saving - it somehow lost the stuff I thought I'd already saved as well :/ The whole file thing - I'm wondering if I forgot to do intermediate saves or something - what ever the cuase I was not very happy as you can imagin!
The Alaric leaves the house to go and help at another Cub group in a sort of exchange thing him and one of their leaders has set up. But a few minutes later he comes dashing back in the house in a bit of a panic as the van isn't starting.
Clonk clonk and the lights go out - so this ment I found myself helping to strip some copper wire to fix the positive contact on the battery and wating Al sand paper it. To our emmense suprise it worked and the van started but I think we are now both just waiting for the next incident to hit us full force!
SIGH
Alaric, Jean, Sarah | sarah | 
Tue 17th Jul 2007 1:39 am | 
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