Roma!

Yay! We’re in Rome again! And we’ve even got all of our luggage back!

We set out relatively early on Sunday morning. A taxi to Edinburgh airport at 07:00, to catch a flight at 09:15. The plane was quite small, and we had window seats. The caterers were on strike at Charles De Gaulle airport, and there was no hot food on the flight. There was some fromage frais, some juice, and a bread roll, none of which Alex was terribly happy about eating. He grunched for a bit longer after this mealoid before falling asleep for the rest of the flight; he was out cold when we carried him off the plane in Paris.

(Note to self: Paris CDG airport is not a place you want to let a baby crawl around unless you’re happy for him to get utterly filthy, and for him to be sticking discarded cigarette butts in his mouth. Pretty airport, but basic cleanliness–let’s not even go as far as hygiene–is not their top priority. And no changing facilities in the men’s toilets, either.)

The flight to Rome was a re-run of the Paris flight, except we decided not to even try the cold mealoid. It gave us just that little bit more space for Alex to throw himself around in.

By the time we got to Rome, we were thoroughly ready to get to the hotel, rest a little, and have something to eat. No such luck, though. We stopped off at the toilets before going to pick up our luggage, but when we got to the conveyor belts, neither of our bags were there. We looked all around the area, and waited for a while longer, but in vain. They were gone.

Sudden flashback to two years ago, when we were last in Rome. Our flight didn’t get in until late in the evening (on schedule, though–not because it was delayed), and my bag was missing. Abi had hers, fortunately–only mine was gone. And we didn’t get it back until our way back from Rome: it had ended up in Heathrow with no luggage tags, and it was only with some measure of luck, and some very helpful British Midland staff that we found it.

Since then, we have made a point of sticking to three key rules when packing for a trip:

  1. Always stick a piece of paper, or luggage tag with your name and address on it inside your bag. The lost luggage people do open the bags, and if all other tags manage to get removed, this one should still be there for them to find.
  2. Always cross-pack your bags. This way if one bag is lost, at least you both have half your clothes & stuff to go on.
  3. Always pack a toothbrush, toothpaste, and at least one change of underwear in your carry-on bags.

Unfortunately, rule 2 is no help when the airline loses both your bags, and we forgot about rule 3 this time.

So we went up to the lost luggage department, left our details, and hoped for the best. Last time round, British Midland furnished us with a very pleasant toiletries bag each, containing spare underwear, toothbrush, toothpase, soap, and even some deodorants. This time, nothing. (Points against Air France, here.)

At this point we were starting to dread that this was going to be a repeat of our last trip in other ways, too: last time in Rome, we arrived at our hotel to find that they had no record of our reservation. Fortunately, this was because of administrative incompetence on their part. They had booked us into their (slightly more up-market) pensione instead of their severely basic backpackers hostel. Not that they told us that at the time, though. It meant trudging through the Termini area of Rome at a dodgy hour of the morning. Not the most pleasant thing in the world.

But luck was on our side here. Pensione Panda had our reservation. Unfortunately, they didn’t have a cot for Alex. I had asked for one when I made the booking, but the telephone conversation was half in English, half in Italian, and some misunderstanding must have happened. We’re nothing if not competent improvisers, though, and so we put him together a small bet made of a folded-up spare blanket and bedcover. We put this in a corner, and walled a third side in with a small bench turned on its side. Perfect!

We had been too tired to query the lack of cot when we arrived. But we checked with them the next morning, though. And althought they didn’t have a cot as such, they installed a single mattress in the place of our makeshift bed, all nicely made up with sheets and a pillow! For all three nights so far, Alex has slept all the way through the night. (Last night he kept us awake with his coughing fits, but at least he slept fine.)

So there we were in Rome, with no luggage. But because of our previous experience, we knew just what to do! There’s a department store called Upim just next to the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, where last time I’d bought replacement clothes for the whole trip. We got us some clothes to last us through the day, because we were still hoping that our bags would be returned to us. (Surely all tags couldn’t have slipped off both bags. We reckoned that they had been mis-shipped somewhere together, in which case they should be findable.)

And lo! Before the end of the day, as we were back in the hotel getting ready to go out to dinner, there was a knock on our door, and the hotel receptionist was there to tell us that our luggage had just been delivered! Most excellent!

Since then (and even before then, really–Alex has taught us to be quite flexible) we’ve been having a great time. Last week, the weather forecasts were saying that we’d be getting clouds and possibly some rain. Since we’ve been here, we’ve had nothing but glorious sunshine. It’s only today that it’s been really warm, though. 26 degrees, yum….

(Oh, and somewhere on the trip to Rome, a wee carton of orange juice burst inside our bags, and all over my mobile phone. We discovered this around the same time as our luggage failed to arrive, so imagine how happy we were feeling around then. It looked like the phone was a deader, but fortunately since it has had time to dry out, it has recovered most if its fundtions. The keypad is still flaky, though. But on the good side, I never cancelled my phone insurance from the Carphone Warehouse when I first got my phone almost two years ago. So if it does’t get any better, then I should have no problem getting it repared for free, or getting a completely new phone as a replacement.)

All is well. Rome is lovely, as always. I’m wearing shorts. Alex is wearing a red floppy sun hat and banging himself on the forehead with a piece of plastic he’s just managed to remove from the air conditioning unit next to me here at EasyEverything.

Cooooolll….

Ebay and Opera

I’ve just gone and got hooked on Ebay. Silly me. I’ve been to the site many times, usually as a result of people pointing out weird or cool items, but I’d never bid on anything until last week.

I’m going through a bit of an intense drumming phase right now, and a few weeks ago I got the idea that I needed some electronic drums. Needed. I love having the full drumming noise of my kit, but as we live in a semi-detached house in a quiet neighbourhood, I tend to have the quiet muffle heads on most of the time. With electronic drums, I could still play quiet, but have the full-on sound coming through a set of headphones.

Anyway, as a brand new kit would be reasonably expensive, I decided to look around on Ebay for secondhand equipment. Not to buy immediately, of course: just to see what the availability and prices were like…

But I got caught up in searching around to see what else I could find. And then last week, there was a hardback copy of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars up for auction. Even though the book didn’t have a dust cover, the opening bid was a ridiculously low £10. So created my user id (sunpig), and put in a bid. And right until the very last minute, I had the high bid, at £11.50. And then I got sniped. This is an annoying practice where someone will place a bid right before the end of the auction, giving other bidders no chance to respond with a better bid of their own.

There are two ways to deal with sniping: you can give in to the Dark Side and become a sniper yourself, or you can make sure that when you place your bid, your “maximum bid” is genuinely the maximum you would pay for the item. Ebay’s proxy bidding system will make sure that your bid stays as low as it needs to be. You will only go up to your maximum if other people are bidding against you, and they raise the auction to that level. And if it turns out that you still get outbid by a sniper then you can take solace in the fact that they won the auction because they were willing to pay more than you were–not because they used a frankly underhand tactic.

It’ll still smart, because if it’s something you really wanted, you’ll have got your hopes up. But that’s just the way auctions work. And thinking carefully about setting yourself this well-defined maximum is probably good practice for another reason: you are less likely to get caught up in a crazy bidding war. (As anyone who has played the Amber role-playing game can probably attest…)

So what does this all have to do with Opera (the web browser)?

Well, as I described in my review of Opera, one of its best features is how you can take a folder of Bookmarks/Favourites, and choose the commans “Open all folder items”. This will instantly open up all of these bookmarks, each one in its own window.

And this is a great thing for Ebay, because you can bookmark your favourite searches, and then re-do them all in one swift action! Ebay has a built-in tool for storing your favourite searches, but if you want to view them all with this, you’ll still end up clicking on a lot of hyperlinks and buttons. With Opera, you can perform all your favourite searches with a single click.

Opera rules, it really does. And Ebay is cool, too. But: must…not…get…carried…away! (Thinks back to a couple of years ago, when on weekends we would systematically scour all second-hand and charity shops in a selected part of Edinburgh, and then come home with anything up to 70 or 80 SF paperbacks in a single day…only 2 or 3 of which we would ever read.)

Happy 1st Birthday, Alex!


Alex on the climbing frame at the zoo 9
  

Alex is one year old today! We got up early for an appointment with Robin Cowie, and then we went to the zoo! We had a great time. Alex especially enjoyed the rhinoceroses and the giraffes, but the monkeys and penguins were fun, too. It was quite cold, though, so we didn’t stay around for the Penguin Parade. I guess we’ll just have to go back again when the weather is better!

Favourite Films

I’m going to draw a distinction here between films that I enjoy watching, and films that I think are “good” in some kind of objective sense. To take an extreme example, I think The Blair Witch Project is a unique, original, and extremely clever film, but I have no intention of ever seeing it again. (The final scene haunted me for months.)

Continue reading “Favourite Films”

Disease boy strikes again

Note to readers: Abi told me to stick a health warning at the top of this wee tale. If you’re at all squeamish about vomit and shit, scroll down to the bottom of the story for some pretty pictures of me and Alex! Otherwise, keep on reading.

Last week Alex was sicker than he has ever been. He was fine until about 21:30 on Wednesday (barring a hefty chunk of watery poo earlier in the evening, but that didn’t seem too out of the ordinary). He’d just had his bath, and was bouncing around happily in nice fresh pyjamas. And then I smelled sour yoghurt…

He had been sick on the rug next to my desk. Just a little vomit, but he had crawled through it before I got to him and picked him up. He had some on his face and hands, but he still seemed cheerful enough. The volume was small enough that I was able to wipe him clean, run some water over his feet, and pop him into another pair of pyjamas. All the time he was making bll-bvv noises with his lips and tongue, so we thought that he had just eaten a bit more at dinner than his stomach was capable of handling.

We came downstairs again, and he started playing around again. He was crawling around, but making tired noises, so we figured that he was getting a bit sleepy. I was sitting at my desk, doing a bit of surfing, and I took him onto my lap. Then–BLEURGH!–barfing all over my lap. And more than the last time. His new pyjamas were now covered in vomit, as was my lap.

I called out to Abi to say that he’d been sick again, and to bring me a towel to mop it up, when–BLEEEUUURGHHHH!! I lifted Alex into my arms, and as he twisted himself round to face me a fountain of puke rose from his mouth like an erupting volcano. It went all over my chest, my arms, his body, my chair, and the rug under my desk. It is possibly the most unsetting thing I’ve ever experienced. (And that’s including The Blair Witch Project, and that photo on Rotten.com.) I was soaked to the skin with nasty half-digested, yoghurt-smelling, carrot-chunked barf.

There couldn’t possibly be more to come.

Abi grabbed a whole bunch of towels. I stripped Alex and myself down and took him upstairs for his second bath of the evening while Abi dealt with the vile mess. Again, he seemed quite chipper, so we reckoned that he’d probably thrown up whatever was disturbing his digestion. After his bath, we dressed him in another set of fresh pyjamas, and Abi gently rocked him to sleep.

We laid him down in his cot on his front, in the recovery position. We figured that he’d tossed all his cookies (and carrots, and vegetable lasagne, and bread…), but we weren’t going to take any chances. So Abi went to take her bath, while I stayed downstairs and played some SSX Tricky on my PS2.

I was just tidying the console away when I heard a little BLEURGH! from the baby monitor. I rushed up to see how Alex was doing, and yes, he had popped again. He was lying in roughly the same position as we’d settled him down, but now his cheek was resting beside a slowly spreading puddle of puke.

He head me come into the room, and he started to cry. As I turned on the light, he made a feeble effort to sit up before barfing again–this time on the other end of his mattress–and falling down on his side. I called out to Abi, and pulled Alex up out of his cot. He looked really unwell this time. He’d recovered quickly after the first two episodes, but now he has wailing inconsolably, and seemed too weak to wiggle. I stripped him and cleaned his face while Abi called the doctor. (You call a central number, leave your details, and then an on-call doctor phones back).

Abi then took him into the bath with her to clean and soothe him. He just lay there with her, his abdomen sunk in and his face ashen. Abi said he looked like I did when I had my bout of winter vomiting.

The doc called back, and I talked to him. Apparently, Alex’s illness wasn’t unusual. Plenty of other children around Edinburgh were succumbing to it. The doc recommended that we keep him off solid foods and on clear fluids for at least 24 hours. He suggested we give him sugar water, or Dioralyte. We had been intending to give him some breast milk, seeing as it’s usually good for every other ill, but the doc said that would be a bad idea–quite difficult for an immature, and struggling digestive system to tackle. Clear fluids, no food.

Alex fell asleep with Abi in the bath. He looked awful, but at least he was resting. We took him out eventually, and put him in yet another set of pyjamas. While he’d been sleeping in the bath, I’d done my best to clean his mattress with antibacterial soap and water and bicarbonate of soda. It wasn’t a perfect job, but it would see him through the night in a relatively non-stinky cot.

Neither of us expected to sleep well that night. I woke up around 01:30, thinking that he was gagging again, but when I went through he had only turned over onto his side. We all slept through the rest of the night.

In the morning, Abi woke first. In my own half-asleep state, I heard her go through to Alex’s room, and then there was an exclamation of “Oh my goodness!” I snapped to full wakefulness and rushed through to join her. I thought something terrible had happened! But instead it was just a terrible smell…

Alex had thoroughly crapped himself. At some point in the night, juicy poo had leaked out of his nappy and coated the inside of his sleepy suit–and his entire body. From his neck to his wrists and ankles (for the sleepy suit had contained the damage) his lovely baby skin was encrusted with sticky, stinky poo.

And it wasn’t coming off with baby wipes.

So it was bathtime again, for the fourth time in twelve hours. This time I took him in the bath with me and got him properly clean. He was having a hard time waking up, and his head lolled about in my arms. He was very floppy, but at long last he had nothing left inside him that could come back out.

We gave him some sugar water, and I went out to the pharmacy to get some Dioralyte before I went to work. And during the whole of Thursday, he had only clear fluids. He wasn’t very happy about this, but on the other hand, he didn’t have much energy to protest with. (Oh yes, and I went out to Ikea in the evening to buy a new mattress for Alex’s cot. I wouldn’t want you to get the impression that we’d let him carry on sleeping on a barf-encrusted bed. I got a rubber under-sheet this time, too!)

On Friday morning, after a long day of nothing to eat, we gradualy reintoduced him to the idea of food. Abi gave him a Weetabix for breakfast (he usually has two), and he had some bread and yoghurt during the day. But then at around six o’clock he barfed it all back up again. By the time I got home, just after 7, he seemed very distressed. Rather than being sunken like on Wednesday evening, his abdomen was swollen and taut. When we tapped his tummy it resonated like a drum.

So we called the doctor again. And as we were waiting to be called back, Alex just got more and more upset–until he let rip with a series of violent farts, culminating in an explosive poo. He felt better after that.

When we spoke to the doctor, Abi explained the situation, and the doc gave us the same advice again: keep him off solid foods for another 24 hours, and keep giving him clear fluids to drink.

Alex struggled through Saturday, hungry and grumpy, but he did seem a lot healthier than he had just 48 hours before. He even took the time to stand up on his own for a good 15 seconds at one point! (He’s definitely getting started on this whole stand-alone thing.) On Sunday we gave him Weetabix…several times. He likes it, it’s nutritious, and most importantly he kept it all down.

We were a bit unsure about putting him into nursery on Monday, but he seemed well enough to go. As it turned out, he had a fine time. And when I dropped him off on Tuesday morning, for the very first time he didn’t cry!

I don’t think his spirit was broken. He’s back to his normal, happy, bouncy, energetic, scary, stubborn self. He climbs the stairs in under a minute now, and this evening he managed to pull himself out of the bath and up onto the rim of the tub.

Nothing is safe any more!

Disease Boy!

Disease boy huddles and cuddles -1
Disease boy huddles and cuddles - 2
Better again!