We’ve now been in Fredericton, NB for nearly a week now. Only one more day before we pull out and head back to Ontario again. It’s been a good week here and Nana Shirley has had a great time with the kids. The kids have been staying with her in her condo while Yuki and I stayed in the guest suite they have in the building. It’s been so nice for us not to have to wake up to the kids each morning hahah not sure Nana Shirley can say the same thing though Mind you, she does have “Minnie” her little dog that needs to get up every morning about 5 for a walk outside.
I must get some more pics of the girls with Minnie as well.. but she’s pretty skittish of the kids (and adults too really).
Continue reading to see about the trip to St Andrews…. (photos from the day are in Canada – 2010 – Group 3.
Well that’s what I’ve been doing, well trying to when I get the time. I’ve been managing to get out a couple days a week at lunch time when time and weather permits. I’ve been keeping a walking log which shows the route I’ve walked and distances as well as a my total walking distance. You can see the spreadsheet by CLICKING HERE.
On May 1st I managed to get a few hours to get out alone and go walking. I’d planned a 3.5mi walk but it turned out to be a 5.5 mile walk. What a great place to go walking. There were two separate wooded area’s. Once was Archers Wood
About this wood
Parts of Archer’s Wood are believed to be remnants of the original British wildwood, a ditch and bank in the northern section is a scheduled ancient monument and, true to its name the wood was a sanctuary for highwaymen. Even today you look to the north and imagine a 14th century Cistercian monastic grange that once stood there. Flat and easy to access, the site is dominated by oak, ash and field maple and served by a figure-of-eight network of rides so it’s great for gentle walks. Be sure to stroll along the main ride to spot the rare and beautiful wild service tree – and look out for foxes, woodpeckers and nuthatches.
A woodland gem in England’s least-wooded county, expansive, impressive Aversley Wood is well worth the steep trek (sometimes boggy in winter) required to reach it. Believed to date back to the Ice Age, it is one of Cambridgeshire’s largest ancient woodland sites and a full tour is not for the faint-hearted – but very rewarding, with impressive fenland views.
You can see the full route of the walk with notes along the way by going to www.stepwhere.com. I’ve been using this site for storing and planning my recent walks. You can see all my public walks by going to my user name, M1XZG. The process I’ve been doing with the site is planning the walk online and loading the track onto my GPS, then, when I’m out walking I record the actual track I walk and upload that to www.stepwhere.com.
To see some photos from the walk of the woods you can CLICK HERE for my www.flickr.com gallery. Here are a couple of the photos.
If you get out walking why not share your routes? Also, why not check out www.walkingforum.co.uk – it’s a fantastic site for all manner of walking discussions.
Wow, I’ve just looked at my blog and haven’t posted anything since Nov 2009?! ? WTF is that all about anyhow? Lets see, what’s happened since my last posting? Well, I’ve returned from South Africa It was a great trip, ran longer then originally planned but it was good.
We’ve all suffered through Christmas and of course New Years, so Happy New Year eh?
Well, that brings us to today now. I’ve converted back to Windows (it was a sad day yesterday). I’d finally had enough of Ubuntu. It was a series of issues that forced me back to Windows … apps that stopped working, funny things happening since upgrading from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10, that was a mistake for sure and generally speaking I just grew tired of missing functionality in Ubuntu when everyone you deal with uses Windows. Oh well. I’m not running Windows 7, 64-Bit, finally making full use of the hardware in my laptop. The only “issue” I have right now is Win 7 doesn’t seem to support the ACPI power management stuff.. so, as a result when I pull the power and run on battery the only performance tuning that happens is the screen dims but the CPU’s run full out and thus drain the battery at an alarming rate. I’m sure I’ll find the correct drivers for that issue at some point.
There’s not really much else to report I suppose. As usual, check out the photos on our flickr account for new photos and videos. Such as this one, Lisa playing her piano..
I hope I’ll have some more interesting things to blog about in the future.. just sort of lost the desire to blog.. hoping it comes back.
We are back home now and glad we decided to not to stay an extra night. The threat of possible bad weather (rain) was enough to send us packing today as was originally planned. On the way home we drove through a hell of a rain storm that brought along with it a 10 or 11 degree drop in temperature. It went from 22C to 11C in about 5 mins.
I’ve finally got the photos posted on Flickr now. The easiest way to see them all is by going to the Camping 2009 Collection. You can see we had a great time
While we were away I was blogging using my Nokia N97 phone with the use of Wordmobi (WordPress Blogging Tool) and QuickOffice 6. Entering text into Wordmobi is fine but there’s no spell check available in the tool. So, the process I used was to write up the posting content in QuickOffice and saved as a Word Document. Once it was complete and spell checked I’d copy the text and paste it into Wordmobi. This then allowed me to post direct to the blog and add the tags and whatever I wanted. All in all this process was very good and worked well for me. I had my laptop with me including my datacard and power source but never once turned it on during the week we were away. I was able to do everything I needed to using my phone. Other apps I used were the Facebook App that came installed on the phone and my favorite Twitter App – Gravity. I would have been online using Nimbuzz, but for some reason I just couldn’t get authenticated, but it worked fine from home, not sure what happened there.
I’ve received a lot of positive comments from people via various paths about my blog postings while away. Thanks for the comments and thanks for reading them too!
I really must try to blog more often… perhaps with the new found process using my phone I will feel more like it. Since moving from Windows to Linux full time on my laptop it’s not as convienent to use my one beloved Windows too, Windows Live Writer … truely a great application for blogging on WordPress sites.
Thank again for following our holiday and reading the site.
Right, well Easter is actually over, but I’m doing a blog posting now really just to put the pics of the kids online more then anything. The day was good, it started way to early though. Man the kids were up at the crack of dawn, if only it were the crack of dawn in the UK and not for say India .. shesh.
Thankfully, Yuki’s dad is here staying with us and he was looking after the kids.. Yuki and I managed to sleep in until nearly 9am, which was nice. In fact, we managed to sleep in until nearly 10am Friday and Saturday. I can’t even begin to recall sleeping in that late when vast amounts of alcohol was the direct cause of it. So can’t really complain much.
Anyhow, the day started with breakfast as usual.. then we sent the kids up stairs with their lao ye (grandfather in Chinese, it’s more specific then that, but trust me, you don’t want me to open that can of worms here and now ). Yuki and I took to hiding all the stuff for the kids.. candy, chocolate eggs, bunny’s, all sorts of rubbish haha. Then it was time to unleash the kids..
First, here is a quick tour of the hiding places of all the candy
Here’s a video of the “hunt” under way .. I love Emma’s comment at one point “I’ve got so many…”
Here are a few pics…
You can see all the pics and videos taken today by CLICKING HERE.
Enjoy the pics and videos. I hope to do more blogging in the future.. I’ve been pretty slack at getting out updates, but life has been full of upheavals that… well… frankly made blogging a chore.
Besides, I’m booked to attend WordCamp UK in July. It’s the second year for the event and the first year I’m going … it’s a weekend full of meeting other bloggers, some who do it for a living but most because they enjoy it (I assume anyhow). With enjoy luck this event will encourage me to blog more, or even just give me loads of ideas to make my blogging better (which frankly wouldn’t take much, I know I suck at blogging).
Looking for a change in where we take the girls to play, I got on Google and starting searching for alternative indoor play areas for kids in Cambridgeshire. Normally we go to either Funky Fun House or Cheeky Monkeys. They’re both great fun the kids love them, but sometimes you just want to mix it up a little bit. So while searching for places I came across Activity World in Peterborough. It’s not too far and was a nice day so the drive was pleasant.
This place was an incredible size! The actual play area was easily 5 times bigger then Funky Fun House .. And so much more to do there. You can see from clicking on the link for Activity World they have more pics and videos on their site which is why I decided to go there and check it out.
Here are some pics I took on the day, there are more in our Flickr Gallery ..
So, while looking for a small and light weight stove for hiking / SOTA whatever I decided to pick up a Hexamine pocket stove and give it a try. I usually have a Camping Gaz type stove but it’s big, bulky and you need to carry compressed gas cartridges with it. These themselves are big, bulky and can’t really just be chucked in a bin when they are finished as they are still a risk of exploding.
I’d really like a MSR Whisperlite but they aren’t cheap, however, they are very versatile.. best you read about them on the manufactures website (click the link back there). At some point I’ll likely get one of these, but not right now.
For now I’ll have a go with this Hexamine stove. This the very same one I have picked up for £4.00
To night I decided to do some timing experiments to see how long it takes to boil water in both my crusader cup and a small aluminium kettle. The Crusader cup took 6m20sec to bring 1L of water to a boil and the Hexamine cube held the boil for 3 minutes. Might want it to boil longer if you were sterilizing water, but just pop another cube of Hexamine and it would be good for another 9 mins of burn time. The kettle, which has a lid, only took 4m30sec and the same 9 min burn time on the cube so that means 4m30sec of the water being held at a boil.
A couple of pics and a couple of videos can be seen below.. click to enlarge or see the videos.
Well, now just have to try it out in anger one day in the field
Mind you, she does have “Minnie” her little dog that needs to get up every morning about 5 for a walk outside.
London/Stansted, UNITED KINGDOM
Entries (RSS)