It's been a while

Sorry about that everyone, I've been a bit busy of late and so haven't had a chance to sit down and post.

Well, most of you are aware that we are looking to relocate back to the Birmingham area. We were looking at Lichfield, but it's a bit bloody pricey. The houses carry about a 25% premium over Chelmsford. Lichfield is however quite good for us as the Trent Valley - Euston run is only 1 hr 20 mins. This means that I can stay working at Pioneer until after I have finished the move and then take my time finding "the right job" in WMidds. Hopefully being back near our parents will be good for George, them and us. At least we won't be short of babysitters!

Sarah has started working part-time at M&S. She starts at some crazy hour in the morning and so gets up at 5.30am, fortunately she is quite quiet. She was going mad looking at the same four walls every day, so getting out and working is really good for her. The cash will come in handy as well with Xmas just around the corner.

Speaking of Xmas, George is getting very excited about it all. We went and bought a tree today, and we let him pick out some decorations for it. We haven't put it up yet (it's too early). However, we also bought one of those three foot, fibre optic trees and we have put it up in his room. He gets so excited when it is turned on, it's great.

Barney is getting very big now, he must be 5-6 stone, I can barely carry him.

Other than that it's all work work work, as usual. I went on a Project Management course last week. That was pretty good but very hard work. The course was residential, and we were starting at 8.30am and running through 'til gone 6.00pm and then we were expected to read in the evenings. It's hard to be learning for that many hours a day.

Anyway, it's getting late, and it's work tomorrow so I am going to sign off now. I promise not to leave it too long before I post again.

Long time no post.

Please excuse me not posting for a while, I've been a little busy.

I am going to make a much bigger post soon, but in a nutshell :

• Chris & Stu got married
• George & Barney got bigger
• I got a bit balder
• Work didn't get any better
• The weather got colder and wetter
• We all got a little older

Thanks,

R.

Whooo hooo

It's Holiday time!!!

I'm off work for a week! YEEEEEEHAAAAR!!!

The little feller has gone caravanning with his Grandparents and Jessica so it's a week of selfish fun for Sarah and I.

There's nothing like getting up when you like really is there. I mean, the only thing we need to get up for is to let the dog out, and that's a five minute job that you can virtually do without opening your eyes. The added bonus is that it only takes one of you so the other one doesn't even have to leave the warm snugness of the duvet.

And what's more, WE CAN GO OUT!! And no need to plan it six weeks in advance. All the good stuff that you didn't know you had when you didn't have children has returned for one week only (get it while stocks last).

So what are we going to do with all this free time? Redecorate the dining room perhaps? Or maybe Tidy that room that needs a good going over? NO!! absolutely not. It was suggested, and I gave it a firm, but fair "Sod that, I'm doing 'us' stuff, not dull stuff". So we're playing it very much by ear. We have a night booked at Billesley Manor (that place where we did the marrying thing) on Thursday night, but other than that, it's chilled out time.

This morning we got up about 10.00 (hee hee, ten 'o' clock, that's just great!) and decided to get a little breakfast at Bluewater. So off we went. A little light Brunch, and some easy, gentle, no kids type shopping later we came back and let the dog out for a wee. Sarah's just gone for a lie down, probably more because she can than she needs it, and I've watered my plants and decided to do a little blogging.

Tonight, we'll probably just go for a beer and a bit of food, or maybe get a DVD or maybe even go to the movies. I believe that the Bourne Supremecy is on and it looks quite good.

What else is new? Well, work is pretty dull at the moment. Pioneer (whom I work for) is an Italian owned organisation, and in Italy everyone has August off, it's simply not worth being in the office. I keep expecting tumble weed to blow across the office floor, it's that deserted.

Barney is bigger still. He's lying next to me, snoring as I type this. He is very well behaved and is ninety-nine percent there on the toilet training.

Speaking of which, George is virtually out of nappies. He only as a nappy now for the nights, and many mornings when he comes into us, his nappy is dry. It's always the first thing he does. He comes into our room, rips off his nappy, and throws it at me! It usually hits me pretty squarely on the head, so you can appreciate how happy I am that it's more often than not, dry!

He had a sports day at nursery this week. We have some photo's - I'll post them soon. Sports day, well not really, more like a load of 2-3 year olds running around in random directions. More like Athena rather than Athens.

One really sensible thing we've done this week is to get a scanner. That means we can throw away all these annoying, bulky Bank Statements, Bills and various other documents that we've been hoarding. I'm slowly working my way through them all. Scanning them in, burning them onto DVD, and shredding the original. If a scan is a good enough document for us to keep for VAT and Tax purposes at work, then I am assuming the same is true for home. It's a damn site easier to find them too as I've filed them by supplier and then named the files by date. Does anone need any packing material?

Right, I'm now off to do whatever I bloody well feel like doing.

Well, as they say in Athens, μέχρι την επόμενη φορά.
(Until next time)

Rich.

It's too hot

It's crazily hot today.  So hot that the thought of going home on the tube just sounds like an absolute nightmare.  As an Englishman I feel compelled to complain about everything, and now the weather has warmed up a bit, I feel it is only right to moan about it!

However,  it is payday,  and I may stop off at Next (right by our office) and buy some shorts for the journey home.

So what has happened this week.  hmmm.  Not a great deal.  The dog, as ever, has got bigger.  George is now fully into potty "training".  Not that it takes much training.  He hasn't been doing lots of practise poos leading up to the main event or anything,  he's just now wearing pants,  and we ask him if he needs his potty every thirty seconds.

We went to a parent's evening at his nursery this week.  I wasn't really sure what to expect.  I half thought they were going to sit us down and discuss George's progress,  and I would be sat there with a surreal expression on my face thinking "What are you talking about he's only 2".  Another possibility was that they would just invite all the parents along,  put on some cheap wine and just let everyone brag about how much more important there job is than everybody else's.  When we got there it turned out to be a bit of a non-event.  We lingered a little before one of the Nursery Assistants (or whatever they're called) came over to us and showed us around.  After that we lingered for a bit more and then cleared off down to the pub.

I've not really done a great deal else this week.  I went swimming three times as I always do,  Sarah had a haircut,  I went to work, Sarah stayed at home, the world turned and we didn't fall off.

Sleep has been a little odd this week.  I don't think we've had a whole, uninterrupted nights rest once this week.  As a result I now feel completely drained.  What's more,  it'll not be any different this weekend.  I blame the heat!!

Happy Anniversary!!!

Hello again. 

It's Anniversatry week for Sarah and I and also for Mum and Dad.  HAPPY ANNIVERSARY MUM AND DAD!!!

It's Wednesday already.  Sorry about not posting on Friday but I'm a little busy. 

We have had a pretty good week (and a half.)  The dog is getting considerably bigger now.  He can hold his own against George.  This usually means that George starts playing rough with Barney,  Barney says to himself,  "sure I can do play fighting" and George starts crying.  I'm sure that eventually George'll figure out that the dog is getting bigger and stronger at a much quicker rate than he is,  but for now,  he hasn't.

We had a nice Anniversary.  Didn't do a great deal as it was a regular work day, but it was nice all the same.  We put George to bed early, shared a bottle of wine and had a nice relaxing evening.

We didn't get up to much at the weekend.  The weather wasn't particularly good and we didn't have a many ideas.  So we just stayed in.

Other than that,  a quiet week. 

Oh well,  back to work.

The week.

Well here we are again, another Friday. The weeks just fly by don't they.

This week has been good fun. Apart from being woken up by George at 6.00am for 3 days of the week and Barney for the other 4, it has been a nice week.

We managed to get out for a drink on Wednesday night, to the local. We had a spot of food and George ran around in the beer garden (That's a strange expression isn't it. If a Rose Garden is a garden full of roses and a Water Garden is a garden full of water...).

I have been training Barney to sit and shake a paw, and trying in vain to get him to fetch. He does the sitting stuff easily enough but whenever I throw one of his toys he legs after it and then just lies down with it and chews it to death.

I am quite happy that the weather has got a bit cooler. The hot weather means that you can't wear jeans, and when you have a puppy with a mouth full of needle sharp teeth you need some serious leg protection. His biting is lessening off now, but the sooner those teeth fall out the better.

George has been doing the usual routine, a bit like me. I go to work, he goes to Nursery. We have asked them to try and limit the amount of sleep he has in the day because he is up all night otherwise. Then he is woken early by the dog and he is really tired and iritable.

The garden is coming along nicely. I decided that it was time to go container mad. With a dog and a small child running around there is a need for semi-permanence that the container brings. I have been buying up all the cheap plants from B&Q and sticking them in the plastic pots they sell. I did buy a couple of the proper clay ones, but I was speaking to a lady in there and she said that not only were the plastic ones far cheaper and just as visually pleasing, but the clay ones had a tendancy to crack if the frost got to them. Seems to me that plastic is the way forward. The plants I have been getting look virtually dead, hence the cheap prices, but with a bit of dead-heading, watering and feeding, they spring to life. I have put together a couple of hanging baskets, and re-invigorated the big wooden barrles outside the front of the house by filling them with any leftover plants I have. I am testing a few different types of plants down the wall by our drive. There is not much sunshine there so I am giving the "Shade Loving" plants a go. It really is starting to look nice. All I need to do now is to train Sarah to water them all occasionally....

Well, I better go and do some work. I'll write soon.

Rich.

Inviting all others to join in the posting.

I have sent out invitations via the blogger software that I use to run this site to allow you all to add your own stuff, however they are suffering with mail problems at the moment and so I don't think they are getting the mails out.

I sent one to myself to test if it's working and I have received nothing, so I am assuming that it is broken.

As soon as they fix it I'll get the emails sent and you will be able to post your own stuff on here too.

OK - As Promised The Pictures

As promised in my earlier post, I enclose a link below to the pictures of the Barney! there's also a couple of Sarah and George in there too for good measure.

Hope you enjoy them.

Click Here For The Pictures

It's Official...We've got a new baby

We have a new member to the family. Barney, an 8 week old Golden Retriever joined our household on Sunday (20th June).

He is incredibly well behaved and has a two year old boy constantly following him around wherever he goes. He is not yet fully house-trained but does go outside if the doors are open (which they tend to be at this time of year).

George absolutely adores him. I think the dog adores George too. Basically wherever the one is the other won't be too far away.

I'll post some pictures shortly.

Spain 2004

Just a quick blog post to let you all know we had a great time in Spain.

We were staying in Marbella and the weather was fantastic. It was just Sarah and I, the little man stayed at home with Kevin!!!! He's fine, and so is George!

I have posted some photo's up onto a webserver if anyone is interested.

They are HERE. Use the coconut coctails at the bottom of the page to go to the next page.

R.

Photoblogging

It never seems to be simple enough to do simple things!

Blogging is a great way to keep a diary and share your goings on with friends family and the world at large. You can tell your story once, without doing a mass mail to all your pals, which is OK if they're interested, but a bit sad if they're not. With a blog, if people want to know what you're up to they can hit your blog, if not, they don't. Simple. But there's one problem. I have a digital camera and I want to "Show" what has been going on.

I know, I know, you can use Blogger's photoblogging service, but that requires me to download software that I don't particularly want to use and also to use Instant Messanger, which is banned in our offices. This means that the service is effectively useless to me.

I can see why Google are not keen on users just dumping photographs onto their blogs. The users may be stupid and decide that 32MB RAW image files is the only quality that is acceptable for their 400+ wedding photos. However, if they were to say here you go guys you have space for 10MB of image files, do with it what you like, that isn't going to rock the boat surely.

Fortunately I worked out this morning that Google actually DO let you insert images, so long as they're hosted elsewhere. What I hadn't realised is that I can actually put in HTML into these posts. So I can put in a picture using the IMG tag.

However, I have decided to dump photos onto separate sites so that the blog doesn't get bogged down when you open it.

The Ferrari Photo's are HERE

Wow what a day

As you may (or may not) know, it was my birthday on Saturday, and left over from the same time last year I had the present that Sarah had bought me to use up, A Ferrari Day. I hadn't booked it as soon as I got it otherwise I would have had to drive in November, not good for cars with 400bhp.

So I arranged the big day for May 22nd 2004, and what a day. It was held at Prestwick Hall just outside Loughborough. This is a bit of a trek for us from Chelmsford, but Hey, when someone's going to let you drive a 360 Modena Spider, you tend to not worry about little issues like that.

Let's get the worst bit of the day out the way first. The day lasted four hours. "Four Hours driving Ferrari's" you might think, but no, actually more like 10 minutes driving Ferrari's and 3 hours and 50 minutes standing around. However those ten minutes are amazing.

The weather was sunny and dry, perfect for trying to get Italian sports cars around racetracks, however this didn't stop some of my fellows from spinning, (perhaps that's why they called it a 360). The day starts with the usual briefing in racing lines and the standard do's and don'ts. "Do drive at 20 miles an hour max in the pit lane, don't drop the car into first gear instead of third by mistake on the way into the fourth corner, otherwise you'll leave the gearbox all over the track." etc. Then it's out into the sunshine to....

....drive Landrovers around a bit of muddy track while the other half of the room get to play on the track. Well, at least the really boring bit was out of the way first. then they take you around some cones in a VW golf with a football in a tyre on the bonnet, to check how smoothly you can corner a car. Pretty easy stuff for 90% of the people there.

Next it's onto the track proper, being driven around by the professional drivers in a Ford Focus WRC. Here you get introduced to the track and the racing lines, where to brake, where to floor it etc. Two laps later and your queueing up to drive the Ferrari 328 GTS. A nice car to look at, the 328, like Magnum PI used to drive, however, Magnum PI must have had tiny feet because even my size 8's required me to take my shoes off to drive it, the accelerator and the brake are so close together. Around the track it's not that much either, I think I've driven quicker cars on the road, but it was worth going out in to get a 'feel' for the lines of the track and learn the circuit.

Then came the big bit, the Ferrari 360 Modena spider. The guy who went out before me completely lost it on the entrance to the hairpin and span off the track. The professional driver in the car made him come straight back in. I got in and he said he had to do some paperwork so I'd have to sit there for a few minutes. I played around with the gearbox whilst he filled out the driving assessment for the previous driver : 'Can't drive at all' I remember seeing him write - Ooops.

Eventually I got the 'green light' and off we went. I took it tentatively for the first lap. The car makes an absolutely awesome noise as you go down the straight with your foot down to the floor, this huge screech coming from the exhausts like a Banshee who's just found out you've been sleeping with her sister. Then, very quickly I saw the first corner approaching, men of steel would have kept the foot to the floor until they got to the BRAKE sign, however, this was my first ever corner in the 360 and so I did the sensible thing and lifted off the power well before the sign. The pro driver said "don't bother braking until you're half way between the BRAKE sign and the TURN sign". "You must be kidding" I thought, but sure enough, as soon as you so much as rest your foot lightly on the break pedal the 360 clamps down like there's no tomorrow. After a couple of corners of this your confidence starts to build and you find yourself braking later and later. As for the cornering itself, well for me, it's like nothing I've ever driven before. You turn in and the nose comes across promptly, point at the apex cone and roll into the apex, then you squeeze on the power, slowly. You feel the power rushing to the back wheels and they do the best job they can to grip the track and not spin, but lets face it, 400bhp is a lot of grunt to contain. The feel is excellent though and you can feel if your pushing the pedal too hard and it's starting to lose grip. Thankfully I never actually span it, but I did feel it starting to step sideways a couple of times.

Overall the drive was great, if not too short. By the time you're starting to feel at home in the car and you start to get some real speed up, it's time to go back in. But I guess that's why, your confidence would grow, and grow until, snap, the back wheels overtake the front and you're wondering why there's grass clippings all over the bonnet.

So there you go, my first venture into motor journalism.

A great day.

Thanks.

R.

What's going on, Home Life version.

Well, home life is really becoming a good laugh with the little man.

He is now really getting a little personality. He loves this hot weather we are having, and spends most of the time outside in the garden. He has started kicking a football around, which is very funny and he also likes playing 'chase' with the rugby ball.

We've got a baby chair on the back of a mountain bike, and we regularly take him off on bike rides around parks etc. He enjoys this immensely. Me and Sarah ride around and he just sits there on the back going "What's that?" at everything. Everytime you go passed someone he shouts "Hello!".

The week before last we took him off to the Isle of Whyte for the weekend. A spur of the moment thing that turned out to be a great weekend. The IOW is a pretty nice place, but not that big. They have a small Steam Railway there, which Goeorge thought was top fun. "Thomas" he kept saying. We got in one of the carriages and he spent the entire journey with his head out of the window. When we got to the station at the end he pulled his head back in and his face was all sooty. Ahh.

I'm still swimming three times a week. I've recently achieved one of my goals and done a mile in sub 30 mins. I know it's not going to win me any medals, but you need goals.

Sarah is well. Looking forward to the holiday (Spain in June). She is still in the process of winding down her business. Anne Marie has resigned as a Director, and Martin, the other Director doesn't want to do it anymore, so the best thing is to sell off all the stock, shut the warehouse and draw a line under it. She still wants to run a business doing the same thing, we just need to take a look at how it is going to be done. Obviously with just Sarah involved it will need to be on a far smaller scale.

Sarah is currently keen on getting a Golden Retriever. I am not yet fully convinced but I am sure that she will win me over in the end. My concerns chiefly being that I may be allergic to the hairs, that I'll end up walking etc. it every day, that the whole house will smell of dogs, and that my suits will be covered in dog hairs. These points are not yet disproved.

Well, back to work. I'll keep you posted on what's happening.

Cheers,

R.

Introductory Post

As is the norm, this is the introductory post to the Linnell Blog.

A big hello from all in Chelmsford. Hopefully I'll be bothered to keep this up to date and it'll serve me well.

I'll be sticking up news, photos etc. so enjoy.

For now though, Hello World!

R.