The McKenzie’s Blog…

Yesterday we had a small gathering of friends around for a BBQ.  Everyone brought a different type of salad with them.  Everything was awesome.  Steve turned up like 3 hours late, but that’s par for the course for him

1)Rob at the BBQ

2) Left - Right: Debbie, James (Deb’s BF), Karen (Deb’s ex-roommate), Nick (Liz’s husband - we didn’t get a pic of Liz, sorry Liz)

3) Hamburgers and Sausages

4) Chicken Wings (Yuki), Chinese Salad (Yuki), Leaf Salad (Deb and James), Pasta with Tuna Salad (Liz & Nick) and Couscous Salad with Butternut Squash and other veg (Karen)

5) Salads again

6) What’s left of Yuki’s Tiramisu.

A good time was had by all!

Today after I finished work, I decided I needed to get out for a walk.  Emma was sleeping and Yuki was hoping to get some sleep before she started work in the evening.  Lisa didn’t at all want to have a sleep.

So, I decided to take her with me.  The question was where too.  I decided to take her to Wicken Fen again.  We’d gone there before (Wicken Fen…) with Lisa’s school.  That visit was good for the kids but we didn’t really get to see too much of the place.  Today when we went back we’d ended up walking about 1.25 to 1.5 miles around part of the area.  Lisa had a good time but sure was tired.  Surprisingly she didn’t fall asleep on the way back home.

There are some pics and a video from the day HERE - here are some samples.

Lisa’s case of Chicken Pox ended about 10 days after it first showed up, and about 5 days later Emma broke out in them.  Emma was quite upset the morning Lisa woke with her spots.  Emma wanted spots too! haha she was upset that Lisa had something she didn’t. 

We kept telling Emma she’ll get spots too and she had keep looking for them and tell us as soon as she found her spots.  The day they came, she came running to tell us she’s finally got spots.  About 2 days later she stopped liking them

Emma can’t quite say “chicken pox”, it comes out sounding more like “chin chin box”.

All in all both of the kids have come through this pretty easy.  Lisa has only one spot that was on the verge of getting infected but I don’t think it really did.  It’s quite large and still visible, but it is going away slowly.   Emma so far only has one that looks like it’s going the same way as Lisa’s, but we’ll have to wait and see how it goes.

I’m glad both have gotten it now and it’ll be clear before they go back to school in early Sept.  It also means we won’t have to deal with this ever again.

I’ve been working on this project for a few weeks (lack of time).  Basically, I bought a huge 120A/hr battery to go camping with and to use for other things, such as portable amateur radio work.

Well, that’s all well and good, but how do I connect things to it?  I wanted some easy way to connect multiple things to the battery without having to have a number of wires getting attached to the battery.

So, not wanting to spend ARM+LEG and either our first or second born to buy something already made, and it wouldn’t include the cig plugs either.

So, I made this:

Read on if you’d like to see the other pics .. or, you can just go and look at them in my Flickr Gallery

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s not really been too much happening that needed an update to the site really.  I’d taken some vacation from Aug 2 until Aug 13 with plans to go camping in South Devon for a week.  Those plans were cancelled when Lisa came down with a case of Chicken Pox 3 days before we were scheduled to leave.   Luckly I was able to get a full refund form the camp site.   We had to cancel as 80% of the reason for going to the campsite chosen was because of the included access to an indoor/outdoor water and leisure park.  None of which Lisa would have been allowed to enjoy because of her Chicken Pox.

I ended up spending the week at home with miserable weather and unable to really do anything productive as we couldn’t take the kids anywhere that they might expose people to the infection.

Thankfully I start back to work on Wed morning, albeit from home as I’ll be working a week of “early shift” (7am-3pm), and we always only work that from home.

Hopefully something more exciting will happen soon so I can post a proper update :)  We are expect Emma to get the pox within a couple of weeks as well, that’ll be fun t do it all over again.