Category: Family

Posted on

This weekend was really good

This weekend was really good. It started with a relatively early departure from work on Friday afternoon (about 5 o’clock). Abi was in town, after having been out to lunch with Angela, followed by a bit of a wander and some coffee with my parents. We met up in Starbucks on Princes St., and I took B, leaving Abi free for the rest of the evening.

Before heading home, though, I pleaded with Abi for an indulgence. I have been wanting a new games console for some time now. After having played Gran Turismo 3 with Richard and Dave a couple of weeks ago, I decided that Playstation 2 was the way to go. Last year, I wasn’t convinced of the quality of the games available, but seeing some of the title around now–GT3 being the prime example–it’s clear that the PS2 is becoming a mature platform, with truly next-generation content.

Any console is going to take time to come into its own. I had been thinking strongly about getting an XBox when it comes out, because essentially it is similar to a PC, and it is less likely to have such a growth curve. But on the other hand, for this same reason its games are likely to have a desktop PC slant, and I already have one of those. I’m sure that a year after launch, XBox will have a wide range of great titles available. But by that same time, PS2 will have had even more time to mature.

I guess I’m just not an early adopter of games hardware…

Anyway, by the time I got home, fed B, and had some dinner myself, Friday evening was mostly gone. I didn’t get the PS2 plugged in until almost 10 o’clock! But right up until bedtime I had some highly excellent racing fun.

Now here’s how I know I’m a “grown-up”: when I woke up on Saturday morning, I didn’t run downstairs to play games straight away. In fact, I didn’t switch on the console again until late that evening.

I woke up feeling like I could use some exercise, and I wanted to spend a bunch of time with B. Abi was planning to go out to IKEA with Ange & Ange mother, and I was going to take the bunny for the day. So just before noon, I strapped on our cool new backpack, and B and I walked down to Cameron Toll to do some shopping.

The plan was to get some milk and bananas for B, and maybe some new fruit or vegetables for him to try (Abi had suggested some squash or pumpkin). In Sainsbury’s, I discovered that I felt like doing some cooking for Abi and me as well, so I bought a whole bunch of lovely stuff: a stack of chillies, shiitake mushrooms, celeriac, butternut squash, and much more.

On returning home, I did the washing up, and then started on a mega kitchen cook-off. I put together four dishes:

  • For Saturday evening, baked frogs legs with lots of garlic and parsley.
  • Also for Saturday, a chunk of beef, roasted in some red wine, and accompanied by roast winter vegetables: potato, sweet potato, celeriac, butternut squash, garlic and shallots. It’s the first time I’ve ever cooked celeriac, and it was delicious.
  • For Sunday, the start of a voodoo chilli. I had four pork chops, from which I stripped the rind and fat, and which chopped up finely. I heated the far in a pan, and then tossed in an onion, seven indian bird-eye chillies, a cayenne pepper, a scotch bonnet pepper, and a pile of cumin. Then the meat went in and cooked for a long while, followed by a couple of tins of kidney beans. At one point, the air was so heavy with chilli, that Abi couldn’t come into the kitchen without coughing. Excellent!
  • With the bones of the pork chops, the shiitake mushrooms, and some left-over chicken stock, I also made a hot & sour soup.

We watched Shakespeare in Love over dinner, and afterwards I caramelised some bananas, and we had them over ice cream. Lovely yum!

(Some Gran Turismo 3 happened at the end of the evening. You don’t think I was going to go a whole day without it, did you?)

Sunday was much less active. We just hung out around the house, watched TV (there was a good documentary on Discovery Civilization about the World Poker Championships, and Farscape is in the middle of a grand story arc right now: this was the episode where John gets Scorpio’s chip removed from his brain), played with B, read books, and I raced cars around Rome. I finished off the chilli with some tomatoes, and had several bowls of the stuff. My digestive system promptly went into shock, and I suffered a sore tummy for most of the night. All in all, it was a great day, and a great weekend.

Posted on

Days away

We’re back from a few days away. On Thursday we drove up to Aberdeen to spend some time with Grandma McLean. On Friday we trundled around Deeside, ending up at the Gairnshiel Lodge. The Lodge is located about six miles out of Ballater, just before a humpback bridge. When we drove over that bridge last year, we were met by a horse charging straight at us. Nothing quite so interesting this time, though.

Saturday, we went to Mum & Dad in Murthly, and spent the day there, before driving back late in the evening. We would have stayed the night, if B hadn’t been sleeping so poorly. In Aberdeen and at Gairnshiel he woke up in the middle of the night (2/3 am), wanting to be fed. Strange places, restless bunny. He settled fairly easily in his own cot last night, and didn’t wake up until 06:30 this morning.

He’s been a bit grumpy this afternoon, though. I wonder if he’s missing all the constant social stimulation he’s been having over the last few days?

He’s in the front pouch, screaming his head off as I’m writing this. He’s getting too big and active (not to mention too heavy) to be carrying him around in the pouch all the time, though. So on Thursday, before we headed off for Aberdeen, we stopped by at Mothercare and bought a baby backpack. Big success! B loves it! It puts him up much higher than he is accustomed to being, and as a bonus it allows him to play with our hair.

He’s asleep in the pouch now.

The trip was a nice break, but it was emotionally exhausting. Abi and I were both struggling to deal with the events in the US; not just the attacks themselves, but how people, and especially our so-called leaders are dealing with them.

In the car, with B asleep in the back seat, we talked about a lot of things: our families, our countrymen, war, global capitalism, poverty, human nature and the “selfish gene”. Probably some of the best intellectual discussions we’ve had in a long while. And although we’re still both feeling very depressed, I think we’ve hit bottom and are on our way back up. For now. (Abi’s in the kitchen with the light box. Last year’s winter was a struggle for me too, so I think I might also start taking some light soon.)

Song for today: Zero 7 — Destiny. The chilled out beat fits the slow gloominess of the afternoon. “When I’m weak, I draw strength from you.”

B has gone through several stages on his way to crawling. First, he was just pushing off randomly with his legs. Then he started coordinating the legs, and bringing them up under his hips. His arm strength came later, but he couldn’t work the arms and legs together, and so he ended up moving backwards! All the while, though, most of his progress has been by bursts of frantic leg action. This afternoon, in his lovely and soft new trousers, was was on our shiny wooden floor. His hands could gain purchase, and the rest of his body could slide freely. And for the first time, he pulled himself forward. Cool!

And finally, some thoughts on the current polical situation (turn away now if you’re easily offended):

  • When president Bush talks about a “War on Terrorism,” the terminology and rhetoric sounds sensible because we are used to hearing the phrases “War on crime” and “War on drugs.” But when politicians talk about the war on drugs, they don’t generally mean sending warships, planes and troops to Colombia, and carpet-bombing the coca plantations on another nations soil.

    The “War on social problem X” rhetorical construct is now being used a smokescreen to cover up manoeuvres in preparation for military action. For the US, waging war on terrorism is much more acceptable in the international arena than, for example, declaring war on Afghanistan.

    We need to beware of a “bait and switch” being pulled on us: we (I’m talking Europe, here) cannot allow ourselves to be dragged into a real war, against targets as yet unnamed, under the guise of tracking down and prosecuting specific criminals, who so far remain unidentified.

    Fortunately, European leaders seem to be taking a stance against president Bush labelling this criminal investigation as a “War”.
  • The media are severely distorting reality.

    What we’re seeing on TV is not what is really happening. The news channels have a vested interest in showing forceful and shocking images, and telling dramatic stories. They have to, because otherwise we wouldn’t watch them. They need to make us watch them to ensure their survival, and they make us watch them by appealling to our rubbernecking fascination with tragedies that happen to other people.

    They can claim all they want that they are showing their footage and commentary because of public interest. To a certain extent, this is true. But we must also remember that the news editors report to managers, who report to boards of directors, who report to shareholders. If CNN had not devoted 100% of its coverage to last week’s disaster, people would have lost money, and lost their jobs.

    The media are driven by innate human selfishness.

    The counterweight of human altruism is provided by the rescue workers, and everyone at ground level who has given aid, blood and money. Eventually, the media will cover this as well. It doesn’t make them as much money, though.
  • Abi has pointed out to me that on certain on-line forums, anyone who does not speak out in strong favour of immediate action, or who favours a moderate course in addressing the socio-economic and political causes of terrorism rather than their aftermaths, is being flamed out of the water, labelled as a troll, and called anti-American. Well, guess what? That kind of arrogant, superior and nationalistic attitude is precisely one of the reasons the US is perceived so badly in international politics. Think of Microsoft, and its blatant disregard for honesty, fair competition and legal strictures. Now multiply that up to a global political scale. The US is big and powerful enough that it can generally do as it pleases.

    Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

    With great power comes great responsibility.

    How do these two statement tie up? With great difficulty, and much pain. Striking back is quick and easy, and satisfying in the short term. In the long term, it will be disastrous unless the US also shows that it is willing to learn a lessons from this disaster. This will be made all the harder because any steps to take on board any of the terrorists’ grievances will be seen as giving in to them.

Posted on

B is five months old

B is five months old today.

I also forgot to bring my phone and wallet with me when I left for work this morning. Once I got back to Cedalion after a visit to one of our clients, I called Abi and she and B came down to Leith to meet me for a late lunch. We bought sandwiches, and sat down by the bowling geen opposite my office building to eat, and to feed B. Autumn is on its way, but there was no wind, and the sun was warm. At just after 14:00 I went back to the office feeling full and rested.

I sat down with Craig to discuss the project we’re working on. We chatted through the relevant sections of code, and decided how to proceed. I went back to my desk, and settled down to hack away at my bits.

From behind me, in the room where the dev leads sit, Pete called to me: “Martin, come in here, you’ve got to see this.”

I went in. Pete was sitting at his desk, his face tense. James stood behind him. They were both looking at his monitor, and listening to a news report on the radio Pete keeps around for listening to the cricket. “There’s two planes crashed into the World Trade Center,” Pete said.

I looked at the screen. Internet Explorer was showing Sky.com’s news headlines page. At the top of the screen was a photo of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center, fire licking up around the top floors. On the radio, a shocked journalist explained how two aircraft had flown straight into the towers.

At first, I thought it was some kind of joke. You know, there are spoof web sites all over the place. The Onion, a satirical news site, makes its business out of lampooning news stories in a true journalistic style. I thought that this was a sophisticated site that had air time on a radio station, so that you could pull a friend colleague in, show them the site, and make them listen to a fake news report on the radio at the same time.

It would be quite a neat practical joke to pull. But it wasn’t. I scanned the URL to see if it was a spoof web address. It wasn’t. It started, appropriately, with “http://www.sky.com/”, so whatever web page I was seeing had really come from the official sky.com servers. It was true.

I don’t remember much about what we said immediately after that. The news was trickling in slowly. The word was that the first plane had been small, but that the second one had been a 737. I think we talked about how the buildings were engineered to withstand the impact of a plane, but that no-one would ever expect that to really happen.

I went back to my desk to try and find out more, but the main news sites (bbc.co.uk and cnn.com) were off the air. As millions of people tried to get their news feeds all at once, their servers must have been overwhelmed by the load. So much for internet broadcasting.

A small knot of developers stood around Kevin’s PC. More people joined the crowd, and I went over as well. Kevin had managed to get through to a news site, and had a video clip of the second plane actually crashing into the tower. As the footage rolled, and we all saw these images for the first time, the cries of shock went up: “holy shit!” “fuck!” Rodger stood with a client at a nearby desk, and tried to shoosh us, but we ignored him, and a few moments later the two of them gathered round and joined us.

Minutes later, more news. The Pentagon had been bombed. (At the time we didn’t know it was another plane.) There were explosions on Capitol Hill.

Most of us went back to our desks, and tried to work, but we were all distracted. We were all hungry for news. The main news web sites were all down, so we all tried our own favourite sources, and emailed or messaged each other when we found a snippet. Dave Winer was keeping scripting news up-to-date with headlines and pointers to other blogs, and I that’s where I got most of my initial information. I called Abi, who was still out in town with B, to let her know what was happening.

A fourth plane down, somewhere near Pittsburgh. And then one of the towers collapsed. It collapsed. I could hardly imagine it. That collossal structure–one of the defining images of New York–almost a geographical feature–gone. I was stunned. I called Abi again.

The second tower collapsed. The two towers hold tens of thousands of people. My mum & dad took Scott & me there in 1985. We ate in the “Windows on the World” restaurant on the top floor. I remember my ears popping as we rode the elevators to the top. Abi and I walked past it when we were in New York in 1999. We didn’t go up, but we had spend over an hour walking from midtown to downtown, using the twin towers as landmarks, and indicators of how for we still had to go.

It was clear at that time that thousands of people were dead (although, as I write this, at 22:45, no-one in authority has dared to make even a preliminary estimate of the fatalities). But more than anything else, it was the complete destruction of the twin towers that stunned me and brought home the scale of the tragedy. Comparisons are meaningless, but it was like someone had blown up the pyramids. It was like the giant space ships in Independence Day blowing up the Empire State Building, but this was really happening.

I don’t think any of us got much done the rest of the afternoon. By 17:30, I had a thumping headache, and I headed home. I had planned to defrost a couple of pizzas for comfort food, but Abi was ahead of me. On her way back home she’d picked up a large sourdough bread from Valvona & Crolla, and so we defrosted some venison sausages and bacon instead. Carbohydrates & fat. Comfort food. We were both stunned, and both needed comforting.

B was picking up on our distress, and he has needed lots of cuddle time this evening.

We’ve been watching BBC News 24 all evening. Most of the news has now broken, but the commentating is only just starting. And all of the nutcases are coming out in force and being listened to seriously. Comparisons with Pearl Harbor. Talk of immediate retaliation. But retaliation against whom? Terrorists in general, apparently.

Our “Western civilised society is under threat”, a former US State Department official said. Those italics are mine, because the implication is that whatever ideologies underlie the terrorist groups responsible, and whatever countries align themselves with those ideologies, are uncivilised. The spin is already working: “they” are not attacking attacking Western imperialism, or specific Western foreign policies and actions, they’re attacking freedom itself.

Never mind that these groups, whoever they are, probably think that they’re fighting for their own version of civilization and freedom, because ours is obviously the right way.

It’s war. With war comes rhetoric and propaganda. I deplore the attacks, but I don’t have to like the spin, the propaganda, and the inevitable fervour the media, politicians and other opportunists will whip up. Because we’re not at war with a specific organisation. We won’t be at war with a specific country. We’ll be at war with principles, ideologies and ghosts. The enemy will be smoke and air, and politicians can shape that into anything they want. Consider carefully who is the threat to life and limb, and who is the threat to freedom.

What happened today was a hideous crime. It was incredibly well organised and highly co-ordinated. There will be evidence. They will have left behind tracks and traces. Maybe this is Osama Bin Laden, maybe not. It behoves a “civilised” country to seek out the perpetrators, and to punish the guilty; not to lash out at whoever presents the broadest target.

The commentary on CNN is making me sick. I’m off to bed.

Posted on

Teething

It looks like B is starting to teethe. On Wednesday, we noticed a couple of small white spots on his upper gum, just where his incisors will be coming through. Apparently this is a sign that the teeth are trying to get out.

This is happening at the same time that we’re introducing solid foods into his diet. We gave him a taste of mushy banana a couple of weeks ago, but that bunged up his digestive system for 24 hours. And although he seemed to like the taste, it was quite an effort to keep everything in his mouth, and off his face.

Over the last few weeks, though, he has been feeding more and more frequently, and been getting more and more upset when he’s hungry. So since Thursday we’ve been feeding him banana again, and now he loves it! In fact, when we fed him this evening, he ate a whole banana (the second half mixed with a portion of baby rice), and was then still thirsty enough to take an entire breast’s worth of milk!

He must have been absolutely starving. Until this morning we had been feeding him small, careful bites, and giving him enough time to chew (or gum) it a bit before swallowing. This time, I had trouble keeping up with how quickly he wanted to eat. Each time I brought a heaped spoonful to his mouth, he would greedily suck it all in. By the time I was able to compose another spoonful, he had swallowed it all, and was getting upset that I wasn’t ladling it in fast enough. Wow!

We reckon he’s going to start putting on all the weight he’s been missing real soon now….

Posted on

Busy weekend

Busy weekend

On Friday morning, someone drilled through one of the water main pipes leading via Liberton to the centre of town. A large part of Edinburgh had no water for about 24 hours! Fortunately, although we live near the affected area, we still had our hot & cold running. But when I took the no. 7 bus to work in the morning, it took a detour around the flooded roads (it must have been pretty bad). Instead of going down Liberton Hill, it went down Kirk Brae instead. Friday was a lovely day, and this route seemed so pleasant that I though it would be nice to walk into town this way on Saturday.

And so we did. Although Saturday wasn’t quite as sunny as Friday, it was still warm, and we spent most of the morning taking a leisurely stroll with B in the pram.

There was a magnificent sight about two-thirds of the way down Kirk Brae. We came around a corner of this narrow and steep street, and before us we saw a view all the way to Edinburgh Castle. In the distance, the Castle looked almost like Hadrian’s mausoleum in Rome. A broad, tree-lined avenue seemed to lead all the way up to it, but this was just an optical illusion. But because of the framing of the view (houses on either side of the street) you couldn’t see what lay off to the sides of the avenue. We were free to imagine that the trees stretched out in both directions, and that the road was a straight line through a park like the Villa Borghese. With the warm sun on our backs, it was like we were back in Rome.

At the foot of Kirk Brae we crossed the road and headed for the Royal Observatory. This is one of these places we’ve always been aware of, but have never visited. We didn’t visit it this time either, really: we just walked up Blackford Hill and sat on a bench and fed B. The observatory is surrounded by a nature reserve, and has magnificent views of the South of Edinburgh. People jog, and walk their dogs there. We chatted for a while with a woman who walks her three dogs there every day. B even stroked one of the dogs! (Well, Abi stretched his arm out and rubbed the back of his hand against the dog’s fur. It was still enormously cute.)

Once B was fed and rested, we headed back down the hill (noting the opening times of the observatory, and the fact that they are open for public night viewings in winter). We walked through more parts of Edinburgh we’d never seen from on foot before, and eventually ended up at the Meadows, with a pizza and a couple of bottles of refreshing beverage.

After replenishing our own energy sources, we snuffled around the shops on South Clerk St., and bought some books before finally taking a bus back home. By this time, B’s nappy had almost reached bursting point from all the smelly poo, and we had all got a good deal of sun. B mostly got it on his face. His little cheeks were all pink.

Most of the baby books will tell you that it’s a bad thing to expose their delicate skin to the sun at this tender age. I don’t think it did him any great harm, but he did seem quite uncomfortable, hot, and fussy afterwards. Who wouldn’t be? But this was his first experience of a minor sunburn, and it must have come as a bit of a surprise to him.

The up side of this is that he looks all bronzed today. It looks like he has inherited Abi’s skin colour, and her ability to go from pink to brown in the space of, oh, about two hours.

The down side is that he may still have been a bit dehydrated. Mum & dad & Scott & Ange were all round this afternoon, and B howled his way through pretty much all of their visit. After they left, we checked his temperature with a little colour-coded forehead thermometer, and found that he was slightly fevered. After carefully examining the label and instructions, we gave him a tiny spoonful of Calpol, which is paracetamol syrup for babies. Abi also fed him most of a bottle of water flavoured with apple juice, which he slurped down thirstily. Then finally he went to sleep for about half an hour. When he woke up, he seemed his normal happy self again.

So we’ve survived his first fever!

Also this weekend…

We trimmed the tops of the tall conifers in our back garden, which were blocking out a lot of our neighbours’ afternoon sunlight. Also, they look much tidier now.

And I’ve been installing Linux. Again. Mandrake 8.0, which is a damn sight better than any other version I’ve tried, but it’s still a chore. This is the third time I’ve installed it recently , and my practice of taking extensive notes is now paying off. It gets easier with every try, but there are still so many things that are difficult to configure, that you take for granted when running windows.

For example: fonts. Because Mandrake’s creators realize that a lot of their target audience is Windows users who want to try out Linux, they have included a utility (DrakFont) which makes it easy to import your Windows TrueType fonts and use them in most desktop applications. But will StarOffice make use of these? Hell no. You have to jump through hoops to convert these TrueType fonts to PostScript type 1 fonts, and then make StarOffice aware of the fonts separately.

This is a consequence of the way Linux works: you have choices. On Windows, you don’t have a choice of where you get your fonts. They’re part of the operating system, and all applications just use the standard Windows font functionality. On Linux, however, there are several “standard” ways of doing fonts. Application developers can’t be certain which will be set up on a user’s machines, and so they have to cater for all the different possibilities. Or they can invent a new one. Or they can use an obscure standard, and make users download a third-party tool before their package will install.

Most users really don’t want to be bothered with this–if they can even figure it out in the first place. Linux’s flexibility is its downfall in this case. If you want freedom from a proprietary standard (Windows), you have to put up with a multitude of competing “standards”. You gain the ability to tune your system to your way of life, but you lose the ability to take a piece of software and know that it will install off-the-shelf.

I’m still trying to figure out which way I prefer.

Posted on

B came this close to rolling over

B came this close to rolling over from his back to his front this evening. He had twisted his hips well past the vertical so that his legs were almost completely turned over, and he was lying on his side. But he just wasn’t able to get his arm out of the way, so it blocked him from flipping over completely. As usual, his lower body is preceding the rest of his torso in terms of strength and coordination. Shouldn’t this be the other way around?

We also measured him from head to heel today, and he came in at 66cm (26 inches). According to the development charts we have, this puts him just under the 98th percentile for length.

His weight, though, has consistently been tracking just below the 50th percentile curve.

Basically, he’s a bit of a string bean. Rather than normal chubby baby legs, he has thoroughly muscular thighs and quads. His favourite game at the moment is “standy-up man”, which is where I pull him up to a vertical standing position, and he wobbles and smiles and giggles. I don’t have to support his weight–he does all of that himself.

He doesn’t have the balance yet to even sit up unsupported, let alone stand without falling over. But I’m sure he has the leg muscles for running already…