The McKenzie’s Blog…

Well, that is to quote a line from 99 Luftballons (99 Red Balloons - English) by Nena.   The fireworks held at Cottenham Primary School this year were great.  The kids had a great time as well.  It sure was cold though, only 9C but with the wind and being mostly exposed to the wind in the school grounds it was quite chilling and everyone was well cold by the end of the show.

You can see all the pics and the videos from the night by CLICKING HERE.

Waking up this morning it was a spectacular day out there.  Not a cloud in site and nothing but blue skies and Sun, but cool, 14C on the outside temp. 

I decided to take the kids to the Linton Zoo, south of Cambridge.  We’ve been there a few times before.  It’s a nice little local zoo.  We heard a talk about the tigers they have, the youngest one which is just over 2 years old will be sent to Sweden for breeding.  Apparently it’s quite common for zoos to pimp out their animals for breeding purposes

Here are some of the pics from today, see the all the pics at Linton Zoo Pics

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.

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 »

Yesterday I took a walk around part of Grafham Water, however my GPS logging of the walk didn’t really pan out.  Some have considered to be a pretty great and impressive person, but even I can’t walk on water, I don’t consider that a failing though because I like to swim, and well it tough to do when you can’t get past the surface

Anyhow, I took a load of pics which you can see if you CLICK HERE.  Some samples of the pics.