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Thursday 2nd April 2009
Silverdale and birthday cake
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To celebrate my birthday, we went for a walk to Jenny Brown's point (Point?!) at Silverdale. I think we had cake and coffee at the Wolfhouse gallery. It's all coming back to me . . . I was at work in the morning, had the afternoon off and then there was a Round Table AGM at the Scarthwaite in the evening.
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Friday 3rd April 2009
Ribblehead
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Saturday 4th April 2009
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
Not much to say here . . . another walk around Williamson Park, A****** attempting to walk around one of the columns of the Ashton Memorial. Today was a bit of a blur as R****** hardly slept the previous night (ill? teething? a bit of both?), which meant no one else hardly slept the previous night.
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Sunday 5th April 2009
Fairy Steps
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I don't really have time to explain all this. We've been here before . . . Fairy Steps, which is somewhere near Warton Cragg, kind of . . . in a way. Near in the sense of a couple miles north of. |
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Wednesday 8th April 2009
I joined Round Table and all I got was this lousy tankard thing
 . . . which isn't of course strictly true. The tankard only arrived recently and is actually meant to be a trophy, but more about that later. It's only recently dawned on me that I joined Lancaster Round Table just over a year ago (well, technically, I didn't join, but was asked to join) but I think I've barely mentioned this on my web-site. That's kinda weird. I tend to find most people have either never heard of Round Table or have a bizarre/incorrect notion of what it is, but this is partly because most members of Round Table aren't exactly sure what it is either. So here's some clarity: Round Table is a charity that raises money through various means (erm . . . beer festival) and then redistributes this to local good causes. Round Table is kind of unique in that money raised is not subject to any kind of 'administration fee'. All the members raise money as volunteers, in their spare time. I guess there aren't many charities that can make that same claim. And that, in a nutshell, is primarily what goes on. There's also a social side to things and business meetings where we decide where the money should go, and who should do what, when and how . . . blah di blah, stuff like that. The tankard/trophy was given to me at the end of the last AGM; it bears the text, "Lancaster Round Table; The Change Challenge Tankard; Presented by Trevor Bargh; 1998" (where a semi-colon represents a new-line) and I was given this (I think) for . . . well, now how do I put this? I was given the trophy for implementing (or attempting to implement) change within Round Table (at least I hope that's the reason). See, membership of Round Table has been declining in recent years and no-one really knows why or, if they do, knows how to reverse the trend. See, when you strip out all the extraneous elements of Round Table (which is, I guess, what I'm trying to do), you're left with a charity that actively contributes to the local community, improving people's lives, but also a network of people getting together for social/sporting occasions (is clay pigeon shooting a sporting event?!) . . . That kinda thing should surely sell itself, if enough people knew about it.
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Friday 10th April 2009
Heron
  
We went for a walk in the morning (Bolton-le-Sands?!) and then went over to the house of James/Hilary/Henry in the afternoon. That's about as much as I can remember. We would have gone somewhere more interesting (Fell Foot Park, perhaps), were it not for the awful weather.
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Saturday 11th April 2009
Bolton Abbey
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Sunday 12th April 2009
35 repetitions of a four-bar bass motif
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Monday 13th April 2009
Easter egg hunt!
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Today we went over for lunch at my parents' house. This was preceeded by an Easter Egg hunt. M**** had bought these shiney egg things and put a few smaller chocolate eggs in each of them.
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Friday 17th April 2009
Glow-sticks
 
These didn't come out quite as great as I was hoping . . . maybe the exposure just wasn't long enough. Anyway, M**** had bought a load of cheap glow-sticks (something like £1 for 20) for Mouse's hen party. As 40 seemed a bit of overkill, we tested out a couple.
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Saturday 18th April 2009
Morecambe
   
So, we went for a walk along Morecambe promenade, starting out near the Battery (I often think this is a stupid name for something named after the power station; surely something more appropriate would be 'The Reactor') and headed vaguely towards Heysham, where loads of work had been done, re-laying the surface, putting in new water features, new lights, stuff like that. Looked pretty good, really. Perhaps bit by bit Morecambe may gradually be improved but there are a lot of 'bits'.
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Tuesday 21st April 2009
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Wednesday 22nd April 2009
Something more to do with Mouse's hen do
  
Me and M**** had spent several hours working on these - little cardboard boxes into which were placed chocolates, to be left at the dinner table of the restaurant where Mouse was having her hen do.
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Saturday 25th April 2009
Binocuments, lost and found and a yellow Thomas the Tank Engine
  
Today was an interesting day. During the morning, we went for a 'challenging' walk around Clougha. R****** was in the back-carrier thing throughout, and fell asleep after about half an hour. I say challenging as there were sections of this walk clearly meant for light-footed ovine animals and not 13-stone (give or take) humans, carrying a 10-month old child on their back. And by implication, A****** had problems walking some of these sections, so I had to carry him too. Hmmmmm. During one of those 'we have gone too far to go back' moments, having passed a kissing-gate, I realised my binoculars had gone and so told A****** to stay by the gate as I began looking for them. Couldn't find 'em anywhere, and so pretty much wrote them off. Let the hills have 'em, what the hell. Then A****** chirped up, "Daddy, I've found your binocuments," and at first I was wondering what on earth are 'binocuments' but not for long. A******, bless him, had found my binoculars. So, as R****** slept on, we followed a dry stone wall up to the top of 'Windy Clough' (I think so named because we were able to completely forget about the wind, what of it, until we got back to the top of the valley) and headed back down to the main path, and thence to the car-park.
|  After lunch, we played around in the garden for a while, then went inside when it got cold, playing dominoes, the magnetic fishing game, the ladybirds game, 'King of the Castle' and pretty much whatever games A****** wanted to play whilst R****** sat/stood in his play-pen, either watching with amusement or else playing with his own toys. A pretty relaxing afternoon, all in all. But then A****** kept going on about painting Thomas yellow. He had been making references to this most of the day, now that I think about it, but I had just ignored him or else not understood. It was only later on in the afternoon, as A****** had tidied away the dominoes that the insistence set in, "Daddy, I need to paint Thomas yellow now," and so I let him. Helped him, even. I think that was the fulfilment of something for A******, I guess. Who knows? Thomas painted, we had dinner, then it was bath time, then story time then bed time. Simple things.
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Tuesday 28th April 2009
Dunno what the title is . . .
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Today was notable for the 'earthquake' (can we even call it that?!) that occured at about 11:22. It was all very odd . . . I was sat at my desk, at work, just working away, as you do. Then, at about 11:20 (by my reckoning but what's a couple of minutes here and there?), there was this rumbling sound and the building I was in started shaking . . . almost as if an HGV or some other large vehicle was passing close by. This lasted for about a second or two and I didn't think much of it but then the building seemed to lurch (perhaps it was almost an up/down movement) in a very unsettling manner. My first thought was, "Christ, has something just blown up in the basement or something?" and then I thought, "This building suddenly doesn't seem so solid," and then everyone was like, "What the hell was that?" and much frantic searching of the internet followed. Word soon spread that the 'quake' had been felt throughout the campus and not just where I was. The British Geological Survery web-site soon (within the hour) reported an earthquake measuring 3.7 (Richter scale, blah di blah) somewhere off the coast, not far from Ulverston. So yeah . . . that was kind of weird. Of course, it pales into insignificance against the kind of quakes that effect other parts of the world. That's the thing with the UK: you don't need to worry much about natural disasters . . . hmmm . . . unless you consider a few inches of snow a 'disaster'. |
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