Further adventures in babyland

Lately Amon has begun to laugh a bit. It's heart-meltingly good and when he does it, we regularly just spend ten minutes singing and dancing, doing monkey impressions and beating each other up violently all in an effort to get him to repeat that little grimace.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

I spent an absolute age the other day boucing him in his chair and getting him to gurgle whilst pointing my camera-phone in his face. Even with the flash off, before the photo is taken a little red light comes on to take a light reading, and this always surprises him out of laughter. Except once. When the bouncy chair was bouncing too fast to capture it. Damn.

Nevertheless; More photos:

And some of family holding him:

Mum

Dad

Christopher

Beth

Actually enjoying my job

I've been setting up a conference and publishing a Good Practice Guide over the last few weeks and working long tiring hours (ontop of having a gloriuos baby boy to come home and care for).

It has been weird actually enjoying my job and when all this is over and I'm back to stationary orders and mis-management, I thoroughly intend to go out there and find a job I can enjoy like this all of the time.

Listening to SJ Esau on Last FM

I'm happy listening to my friend Sam (and people who are, apparently, a bit like his band). on Last.FM.

Try it! It may make you happy too!



You can find me here on Last.FM

Facebooked

Oh dear, I seem to have got hooked on Facebook over the last couple of days. How very addictive it seems to be.

Fortunately all my attempts to hunt down old Uni friends and school chums have fallen short, or I wouldn't have found time to write this.

Try it - it's the new Myspace! (oh ... dear.)

More homebrews

After the fun I've had making beer, I've gone a bit brewing-crazy.


I got some wicked old cider bottles for putting my beer in, they have glass screw-stoppers with rubber seals to stop them bursting. And they feel properyl 1930s. the problem is some of my beer's gone flat as some of the seals are probably from teh 1930s!

A couple of months or so ago I went out to the countryside where my mum lives and got a load of dandelion heads (it was St George's Day: the best day for picking dandelions, apparently) and oak leaves.
The Dandelion wine has now breweed and been bottled, and the poak leaf wine has finished bubbling and will be bottled in a month or two.


For my birthday my mum gave me a load MORE elderflowers (ontop of the stuff I got just before Amon's birth which I turned into wine and cordial and now I've got three bottles of elderflower cordial)

I also have a gallon and a half of ginger beer which I made at the weekend for my birthday (30th dontchaknow)

The Ginger beer tastes good, I used a really good recipe from CJ Berry's classic book about brewing. It tastes a bit lemony, fairly gingery and has a hint of cream of tartar - a substance I haven't quite figured out yet. My main problem is that I can't figure out how to kill off the yeast without making it go flat. This means that it slowly gets more alcoholic and I need to release the pressure in the bottles every day. I discovered this this morning when I took the champagne cork out of the demi-john it was in and all the CO2 that was liquidised within it turned suddenly to gas and with a whoosh which sent the cork rebounding off the ceiling spurted all over my living room.

Brewing's excellent fun!

The League of Apathy

So, yeah.
I founded the League of Apathy (yes, that was me!) back in 2002 and thought I should mention it to someone.
Umm, like, here's our* manifesto, which is a kind of work in progress I haven't yet finished.

League of Apathy Manifesto

1. The League of Apathy is the true way towards the enlightenment of people, betterment of the planet and all that jazz.
   
2. Note to self: Think of a second comment
   
3. Ignore idiots.
4. Get it wrong the first time and you're unlikely to be asked again.
   
5. Putting things off until later could be a good idea, unless it's too much bother
6. Things can be best achieved through the natural gestation of the apathetic.

to be finished later...

*I say "our", it's just me really, and I think Alex might have joined once. If anyone else wants to join the League, do let me know, and we'll, umm, have a cup of tea or something.