The Random Bad Luck of the Snell-Pym’s (by sarah)

Sunday was the day of our departure from Highgate back to the rural sticks of Gloucestershire and what happens? Al becomes ill - he is headachy and cant think that straight and felt a bit feverish. A few paracetamol sorted most of it out so that about 5 hours late we could actually set out for our trip to Essex to pick up the Jeany who had been visiting mum and dad as this week mum starts her radiotherapy so Jean has spent most of christmas etc... with them.

Once Jean was picked up we headed out onto the road once more and all was going well until....

We discovered M25 south to M4 west interchange was closed - arg! Never fear we thought there'll be some sort of way to loop back on ourselves so that we could go via Reading instead of Oxford or there'll be diversion signs and we'll be fine.... hahahahahahaha. Well there where diversion signs and they took us to a round about where it was obvious that we had to go round and double back on ourselves - easy right? Well it would have been except that it was one of those major ones that has lanes that spiral outwards and you have to pick the correct lane for your destination - except there is no such lane for doubling back on yourself so that we where having to guess and suddenly we where one lane too far over and before we could correct it a barrier divided us off and we had no choice other than to follow the route - to Heathrow Airport :/

We thought there must be some round abouts where we can turn around surely? Right? There's always round abouts - this is England.... no round abouts - we thought we'd found one with lots of glittering lights on short polls around it but no this turned out not to be a round about and took us into a one way system which lead us to a carpart - with barriers that had a minimium charge of £2.30 for half an hour. No way to reverse, no where to turn around - nothing so we paid our £2.30 and left.

This then took a turn towards the strange (especially as the previous night we had watched a Stephen King film) we where directed into a tunnel that looked like was too small for cars and was father long and square in cross section with a green circle lane right down the middle of it and signs sayng the cyclists had priority. Once in this system we had no coice of where to go so we entered this tunnel in the van and too our relief exited without any creepy horror movie antiiques!

We then resumed our journy on wards towards Gloucestershire only now Al was starting to feel sick again - combine this with our windscreen washer deciding to die and random greasy dirt appearing on the windscreen and we where stopping more than we normally would 🙁

We got home about 3 ish and pretty much fell into bed. I awoke in time for us to get Jean to nursery and for me to go to Cheltenham to do the mirade of things that needed to be done today but... it never happened becuase it turned out that I had slept through Al being sick and he was doubled uo with stomache cramps and weak and pasty looking. Not good. After some thought over why he was sick and I wasnt seeing as I am the one who gets sick not him we worked out that he had typed out the contence of the left over non-alchoholic mulled wine I had made on saturday. He had drunk a mug of the stuff with the dregs of the spices and CLOVES that I had used - and becuase time was short he'd downed the stuff including the sluge that contianed all the CLOVES I had put a brew for about 15 people :/

Can anyone else see where this is going?

Yes - I have managed to poison my husband with CLOVES - he says its not my fualt but mew :'( It took until about 4 this afternoon before he could contemplate eating anything at all and he still hurts. Of course this has put us realy teally behind for the week and doesn't feel like a particually good start to the new year :/

Sunday after Christmas (by sarah)

The Sunday after Christmas we all went round my aunts again this time for a sort of kids christmas party - here are some pictures - warning it contains bobbles and wiggles and squiggle so cuteness over load for those who like kids and puke fest for those that hate them or find them annoying 🙂

Bah, back to Rails! (by alaric)

Gah. I was happily thinking that I was slowly getting rid of my last Ruby on Rails projects, when I've ended up on another one. Despite extensive hype, Rails is a bit of a dog... Ruby has some niceties, but also has a lot of misfeatures, and the implementation is still maturing. But Rails is dreadful, dreadful code. It helps you if you're working within its limited model, but as soon as you come across a problem that doesn't fit into that model, you're quickly working at pretty much the same level as PHP and everything else: writing Ruby code that is called upon an HTTP request and has to output some HTML back, albeit with access to a reasonable template language... And it's full of bugs and gotchas that keep you up all night screaming "Why doesn't this wooooorrrkkkkk?!?!?!?".

You see, the project is a major extension of a Rails project we'd mainly finished. We had the choice of rewriting the whole thing in something else (which would involve some time spent catching up with where we already are rather than producing anything new), continuing with Rails, or making a hybrid system, writing the new parts in something else while reusing parts in Rails (which would be a bit ugly).

Since the client wants to see interesting new things appearing after the first week or two, sadly, it had to be Rails...

Aunty Lizzy’s Birthday a.k.a. Boxing Day (by sarah)

Boxing Day happens to be my aunts birthday so we all went round there for a bit of a party boxing day - this was cool especially as two of my cousins had babies about 6 weeks either side of Jean. Add in my still school aged cousins and Rachel the new baby and it was full of a bit too much cuteness and definately far too many smelly potties!

There was also a nintendo wii which had alot of the sports accessories with it - much to my cousins Niels horror me and his girlfriend came a very close first and second in the bowling game where as he had about half our score!

Jean had a great time especially when she got a little fairy dress complete with gold angle wings - there where much cries of pretty dress - far too girly for my taste but she enjoyed herself!

Fred the cat was unfortunatly spotted first by Jean and then by Alaric - fortunatly he is a tolerant old thing.

At some point getting on towards the end of the everning a curly afro st gorges wig appeared which made its way with a fake beard and long witches noise left from halloween, onto a teddy bear. Then Jean found a tou pram and then said teddy was proclaimed - 'My Baby!' and thrust in said pram. Conor (or possibly Jordon) then stole the witches nose and well here are the pictures:

There was lots of food including some very tasty mediterian vegtables and stuffing balls that werent dry! Alaric also recieved more presants that he could happily sit and build 🙂

as everning set in properlly the babies begain to get very tired - mum and dad where actually stranded at my aunts place as once again their car broke down and my brother had to go and get them! This ment they stayed the night at my aunts with a Jean Jeany who slept quiet happily in a travel cot thats not her own.

Christmas Day At the Chateau de Pym (by sarah)

Christmas day begian for us in Highgate - Al had got me a bueatiful black highheel stocking with feathers and pearls all over it and purple glittery highheel shoe christmas decorations. Then to ungirlyfy things abit I recieved loads of dinosuar themed stuff which made me really happy - of course I'd managed to leave most of his presants in Gloucester so he only got a few old techniqual books and a cat money box!

We then packed the pie and christmas cake up and headed for Essex.

There we found what is possibly the most scariest santa clues ever!

For the meal itself I had made six glittery napkin rings - one for each of us - Jeans was the christmas tree, Davids the bualbal, mums the bell, mine the star, Alarics the holly and dads the santa hat (well he is the Hat Man after all!). Mum had made some snowmen christmas napkins for said rings to go onto.

The p0ie was baked and did Alaric proud - it contians fennel, quill pasta, spinache, pin nuts, red pepper, feta cheese, cream and marmite.

Probably Jeans favourite presant of the day was this puppet theatre that David had picked up in a charity shop - I got into trouble for playing with it too much though, apparently the wizard isn't dumbledore its merlin and apperantly Hermine is sleeping buety and Luna is goldelocks etc... I think they were all being very mean especial as I was singing the sing and every thing - snape snape severus snape - Dumbledore etc... (ok if I can find the link I'll post it later it was really funny at the time.

Alaric had bought her back some little planes with - Pretty lights mummy! - on them, from Dublin.

The night of mums operation I went and helped dad clean (him being a cleaner) and Jean came with us and fell in love with Henry the hoover of which there was fortunatly multiple ones so that we could still actually hoover! Anyway mum and dad got her this little henry which came with a dustpan and brush and all sorts of fun excessories - she loved it 🙂 I'm wondering if it would be seen as child labour to get her hoovering the house (once we have one again) 😉 Of course Alaric and David had to open the poor little henry up to see how it worked and if there were any brains in there!

As you can see the meal and excitement of christmas day resulted in Mum going for a sleep and Dad - well... Jean thinks sleeping people need teddys to hug 🙂