Visiting, not kissing, cousins
No kissing before the age of 27. At least. Scarlett has been warned and seems to have taken my orders on board - she spent a lot of time screaming at Rémi last weekend when we visited Delphine’s cousin Julie and her partner Laurent at her (Julie’s) mother’s house in Sauve.
Rémis is now six months old and twice the size of Scarlett, poor thing; no wonder she’s terrified of the big bruiser.
We were over in Sauve to meet various family members and see our Pasteur/Pasteuse/Pastrice - lady vicar who will be officiating at the imaginary-friend portion of our nuptials this summer (August 23, you’re all invited). We’re supposed to be choosing hymns and texts for the service, and some will be in English and others in French. I’ve chosen the great protest song Jerusalem as the English hymn and a text from Winnie the Pooh
chrisward
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An actual post about actual computers…
Kids. Leave them alone for five minutes with your computer and this is what they do to it…
I was actually swapping in a new HD for my Macbook Pro, a 320 GB monster to replace the titchy 200 GB item with which it was supplied. I did this by buying a Western Digital external USB HD (that’s its red enclosure in the background), putting its HD into the Macbook Pro and then the Macbook Pro disc into the WD enclosure to use as a backup. After a frightening moment when the MBP wouldn’t boot (hadn’t pushed the RAM sticks all the way back in - rookie mistake, RAM always needs a heftier push than you think it needs or dare to give it) all is well. I used CarbonCopyCloner to copy the old internal disc over to the new external one before doing the swap and voilà , instant new HD.
The MBP has actually been poorly this week for the first time in its life (14 months old and counting now). Luckily I bought the extended AppleCare warranty to extend the regular 12 month warranty to three years, and it’s paid off; the left fan failed, unremarked by me, and subsequently the left I/O board overheated and failed, taking out the left two USB slots, the sound and the Airport WiFi card.s A quick search on the Apple website (the MBP still worked and connected to the internet via wired Ethernet) and I found my local Apple approved repair shop. Dropped it in Monday evening, collected it repaired Wednesday afternoon, no charge for a repair which would otherwise have cost me about €150 in parts and double that in repair person’s billable hours, i.e. more than the €367 I paid for the warranty last year. Bargain. And it’s a worldwide warranty too - break down anywhere, get it repaired for free in the local Apple repair shop, no charge.
So yes, Apples do break down. But as I’ve said many times in the past, you judge a company by how they put things right when they go wrong and in this case the service was exemplary.
I’ve been following David Allison’s move to Macs with interest, having done the same myself over a year ago. His latest post neatly sums up my thoughts. In fact while my MBP was away in the clinic I used my old Windows XP machine - another decision I made a very long time ago was to keep as much of my work online as possible so my computing life continued almost seamlessly - and found that I didn’t hate it. It worked fine. But now that the MBP is back, well, it’s turned off again.
chrisward
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Some sad news
Those who’ve been around here since the start will remember Anne Weale. She first contacted me when Dr Keyboard launched in The Times and was one of the very first testers of this site back in 1996. I’ve just learned that she passed away last October - I was looking up her e-mail address to write to her and found her website was gone. I’m sure we’ll all miss her very much.
http://bookwormonthenet.blogspot.com/ for her blog
http://www.romancewiki.com/Anne_Weale for the Wiki about her life.
My condolences to her family.
chrisward
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One for the real fans only
OK, this is a large-ish film, over 20MB; one for the grand-parents only, perhaps.
chrisward
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Auto-traduction
Attention: par machine, donc pas trop fiable… mais quand meme.
chrisward
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Film at 11
chrisward
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We’ve been home for 10 days now and are gradually settling into life as a ménage à trois.
Scarlett slept through the first few nights, a solid 10 hours and we were happily congratulating ourselves on our excellent parenting whilst joking that things couldn’t go on much longer this way. The chuckling experienced parents in our entourage all said it wouldn’t last. And it didn’t, Scarlett started demanding twice-nightly feeds and long periods of wakefulness after the honeymoon period ended.
Now, though, she’s down to a feed at about 0530, sleeping from around midnight to 0900. Delphine has also started expressing milk, so I can do those middle-of-the-night feeds to give her a break. Otherwise during the day she had feeds about every three hours, six or seven a day in all.
My parents came to stay over last weekend and it was a joy to see them with the grand-daughter I’ve owed them for so long (my mother’s words - well, almost). We invited Delphine’s parents, brother, aunts and uncles over on Sunday for a long lunch and to give everyone a chance to meet up before the wedding in August.
Everyone, of course, was delighted to see and meet Scarlett; and, as we’ve been warned, many had opinions to offer, advice to give and admonisments to dish out about how well/badly we’re caring for her. She is, it turns out, about to die either of starvation or cold - it’s a bit of a toss-up which will get her first. Even though the daytime temperatures haven’t fallen below about 23 degrees since she was born and she eats seven times a day (at the all-you-can-eat mother’s milk bar), we are aware that we’ll be brought up on child endangerment charges any day now.
Well, opinions are like you know what; everyone has one and they’re full of…well again, you know what. “Yes, yes, thankyou, valued and valuable advice…” has become a pretty standard response. Thanks to Nick for offering that advice. And one years and years ago about nappy sacks - a genius bit of technology without which we couldn’t live.
I cooked for the families, of course, albeit nothing too exciting apart from a decent (even if I say so myself) terrine de foie gras à l’Armagnac et figues sèches. I only made it the day before so I didn’t have time to tasser, weight it down and compress it as you should so we ended up serving it with a spoon, but it still tasted good. Well, they managed to eat 1.5 kilos of the stuff anyway so I imagine they liked it. Served with Franck’s dried apricot chutney, so delicious all round. Roasted a couple of chickens and some rare beef (’Raw beef’ as my father put it), did a couple of salads (tomato and basil, rice and sun-dried tomato with a few figs, mâche, that sort of thing). Fresh fruit salad with an orange pekoe tea syrup and everyone’s happy.
Coming home with Scarlett wasn’t really as traumatic as I’d expected - it’s quite cool having her around and she hasn’t cramped our style much at all, although I do have a sudden hankering to go out to the cinema more than before. Soon our French Government-sponsored babysitting service will kick in so we may take advantage of that.
Although before then I’ll almost certainly be back off to Ireland anyway - some time around the end of this month, probably, depending on when my boss comes home.
Even nappy changing doesn’t freak me out as much as I’d feared; again, as everyone said non-bleeding-stop, it’s different when it’s your own children. I have managed to avoid deluging everyone with e-mailed Proud Father pictures though (I’m talking to you, David, and you, Simon). I used to reply with pictures of Daisy back in the old days, which confused and even annoyed some people. Sure I’m proud of and pleased with my baby daughter, but that’s no excuse to spam your inbox.
m/f
chrisward
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How to get a stage in a restaurant
Lots of people have asked me this; this article repeats what I’ve said to them in the past.
chrisward
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Scarlett
Baby Scarlett Roseline Eliane Rousée Ward, born at 1400 on May 1 2008 in the Urbain V clinic in Avignon, France. 3.370 kilos, 51 cms. Mother and daughter are both very well and dad is completely knackered. Blimey, I called myself ‘Dad’. Merde.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/13498074@N03
Delphine and Scarlett are in the clinic until Monday/Tuesday next week. I managed to get back from Ireland (pix of my house there on that same page) - Delphine called on Tuesday afternoon after seeing the gynecologist and said she was already two cms dilated; I spoke with my lovely employer (who offered to personally drive me to the airport!) who insisted I leave immediately or sooner to get back before the birth. I got a plane at 0700 on Wednesday morning, arriving home about 1530. We went out for dinner (nice and spicy tapas) and Delphine started having contractions at 2300 that evening. By 0330 they were coming every five minutes so we drove over to the clinic. And baby Scarlett was born at exactly 1400 today.
Delphine was up, dressed and walking around looking for dinner (what can I say, she’s French) by 1800, Scarlett had one feed from mum and spent the rest of the afternoon sleeping.
Voilà . Sarcastic comments, jokes and congratulations to the usual address.
chrisward
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Irish stuff
I have only ever been to Ireland before on press junkets, either for computer companies - and none of those since about 2001 - or, back in my much younger days, visiting the North to write about The Troubles. so my previous experience of the country has been either that they’re a bunch of ornery critters or that the place is filled with technology factories and posh restaurants.
Now that I’ve been actually living here for over a month, my view is slightly different, and probably even more strangely skewed. I live in a traditional cottage on the side of a mountain overlooking some of the most beautiful scenery in the country. I’m surrounded by deer and rain and not much else.
When I go out it’s to visit the butcher, the greengrocer, the fishmonger or the wine merchant or, as I’m doing right now, the giant Dundrum shopping centre. I’m here because, for the price of a cup of tea, I can have a free WiFi internet connection for as long as I have battery life - two hours and counting so far today.
The shopping centre - and what I hear on the radio - shows what ‘regular’ mortals do and think. Which seems, by and large, to be English. Or at least, be English in their habits. The shops and products I see here are the same as those I recognise from trips to London; the music on the radio is English and all the sports news concentrates on the English soccer Premier League. Irish sport is reported but always, always after the English stuff. Regular news is all about Irish politics and the miserable state of the health service here - frankly at times it seems like the Third World with stories of little old ladies being left, literally, to die on trolleys in corridors and children having a healthy kidney removed whilst the diseased one is left in. I paid €10.50 for a pack of homeopathic medicine that sells for €1.70 in France and a visit to the doctor costs €65 instead of the €22 I’m used to. People tell me that they routinely ’save up’ illnesses so they can get value for money when they go to their GP, discussing several problems at once.
I haven’t been out socially at all since I arrived - I’ve only had a couple of days off, in fact. That will change next month when I head off home for the birth of Scarlett, due on May 10 but whom everyone thinks will arrive early. Not too early I hope.
chrisward
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