Dave’s Blog

It never rains, it pours.

The car, having failed it’s MOT, has thrown us into a transport induced mini-crisis. OK, crisis may be over stating it, but I’m in that kind of frame of mind. We clearly need a new car, however we cannot purchase one until:

1. Our driving licenses are returned from the DVLA with the correct addresses on
2.  Hwyel comes back from Cuba so we can get shot of the old car which is still in his name
3. We sort out where the money’s going to come from, which involves me having a good hard look at the state of my finances which always puts me in a ‘bear with a sore head’ kind of mood.

So we’ve borrowed Janet’s Fiat somethingorother (I suspect it translates as ‘only for small people’ or something similar) on which I’m not insured. Still, it gets us around.

Oh, and I have no idea how we’re going to shift the car we can’t drive from outside the house either.

Add to that the fact that it has become clear that my devil-may-care attitude towards the laminate flooring has come back to bite me firmly on the arse. The edging doesn’t cover a couple of the slightly more liberal interpretations of a ’10mm gap’, so a fair swathe of the floor is due to be hauled up in the morning, so I can replace the suspect plank, and then lay it all down again. That will be preceded by a walk to Spar to purchase the milk, bread and cereal we failed to buy from the supermarket this evening, so Sions can have her breakfast.

On top of these twin battles being faught, my psyche seems have weighed into the battle. On the other side. Yes, I’ve started getting the fear about September. Nothing that I know won’t be fixed by sitting down for a day and getting to grips with the boxes of stuff in the study, but I also know that I won’t get that day till the end of the week at the least.

Oh, and I’ve just found out the sofa that was being delivered by my brother in law on Wednesday evening is now being delivered tomorrow.

Did I mention that it had started raining?

Things are actually going pretty well in the DIY stakes. The walls of the snook are now a nice yellow colour, the minging carpet is no more and I’m about to embrak on my maiden attempt at laying a floor. In addition the garden is pretty much taimed, and today I even did some digging. Horrah. I’m sure there’s man points for digging.

We’ve also launched the baby guessing game over on facebook, inviting people to have a go at guessing the gender, weight and date and time of birth of young Ytbn (for some reason I only ever call it* that here…) So far 35 people have joined the group and we’ve got 15 guesses. I’ll probably come up with some kind of summary board on the Babi tab at davestacey.co.uk. Which reminds me, I need to figure out how to get an RSS feed for just one category for this blog…

* oops, just had to delete a gender specific pronoun!

I have been, I will admit, a bit crap at this blogging lark recently. Partly ’cause I’ve been busy and partly because I seem to have a bit of a mental block when it comes to blogging about the baby and massive guilt about blogging about anything that isn’t the baby.

So, while I continue to try and deal with my issues, here’s a few of my favourite Demotivational posters, collected at this site (thanks to Doug for the link)

World, meet Ytbn. Ytbn, this is everyone. Some of them may look a bit scary, but most of them are really cool.

It was definitely one of those moments, sat in the corridor staring at picture of my future child. Overwhelming doesn’t really do justice to the complete 360 my head did coming to terms with it. I mean, the news wasn’t new, it was just a new level of reality that I had to adjust to. Sions has had months of feeling rubbish to adjust to, and bond with Junior, but watching it on the monitor, refusing to move and then covering it’s head with it’s hand when it was prodded into moving was just amazing (I can already see which one of it’s parents it’s going to take after…) While for much of the scan the lady with the gel and the scanny thing (I’m sure there’s a title, but I’m just not sure what it is) was focussing on different bits (spine, heart, kidneys – we could actually see the kidneys!) the moments when she zoomed out and you got a sense of this little person in there, clearly trying to get some kip and being slightly disgruntled at being woken up was just amazing.
Anyway, everything seems to be in the right place, and we got a couple of photos to bring home and stare at! Then we wandered round Babies R Us, with me marveling a toys, and then on to Mothercare where the first baby purchase was made!

According to aicn, plans are afoot to make a live action Thundercats films. A brilliant revival of one of the finest cartoons of our youth, or a reciepe for money-grabbing suckage? I fear the latter, but in the mean time they’ve put the titles and the ‘lost’ introduction on the same page.

Thundercats… Ho!

I’ve just had an email from my brother with another load of Photo’s attached. Rather than upload them to my Flickr account (It wouldn’t do to have people thinking I’m more exotic than I really am), I’ve just set one up for him.

You can see his pics at http://www.flickr.com/photos/8615883@N07/ and they should also be appearing in the my contacts slide show over at my new protopage powered homepage (via davestacey.co.uk)

No, I haven’t switches sides and headed up the motorway in persuit of Mr Youngman. But I have rediscoved the brilliant TED Talks. The 2007 TED conference has recently been held, and they’ve redesigned their website. But randomly, as I hadn’t listened to the last few, iTunes had stopped downloading the podcasts, so I kind of forget about them.

So I’m currently downloading another 20 or so, and would heartily suggest you do the same.

ps. I also &#9829 wikipedia, which told me how to add the &#9829 symbol in HTML!

Sionedwyn has spent most of today sleeping. And somehow (probably my Spidey senses) I can tell this isn’t a ‘bugger off it’s Sunday’ kind of sleep, this is a deep down, properly tired, need to recharge kind of sleep.

Part of me is hoping this is a bit like when a caterpillar goes into it’s chrysalis and comes out as a butterfly. She’s sleeping through the transformation into the second trimester and any minute now she’ll wake up and not feel the urge to vomit.

It’s weird. Because she’s been feeling so lousy so far, what with the all-day morning sickness, the tiredness and the hormones most of my thinking time has been caught up with her, and hoping that the fabled ‘glowing’ second trimester hurries up and gets here! So when we sat down yesterday and starting flicking through the day-by-day book I got a real shock when I realised just how quick the little fella (or felles) was growing. Not a shock because I didn’t know it was going on, but just the shock you get when you focus on something that has been rattling round the edges of your consciousness for a while and realised it’s not quite how you left it.

So, for example, our baby is now about the length of a lemon (according to the amazingly brilliant ‘The Pregnancy Countdown Book‘), weighs about an ounce (28g) and (get this) by the end of the week his/her arms will be in proportion to the rest of his/her body. It’s sentences like that that make me realise just how strange the development of this thing is, and I still can’t quite put that together with the fact that this is all going on inside my wife! Maybe it’ll be easier to get my head round by the time the bump appears, and the little fella (or felles) looks much more baby like. What else? Well, apparently both Liver and Pancreas are excreting fluids (yum!) and he/she can now squint, frown and grimace (bodes well!)

I’m determined to post more often now the blog’s up and running again. Fingers crossed I actually manage it!

I think I’ve pretty much fixed it. The blog seems to be working fine now, and I’ve added a bunch of new headers and switched the new ‘random header’ plugin on. There was a baby related post lurking in my brain, but I’m too tired to do it justice now, so I’ll try and add it in the morning.
Meanwhile, some things I need to ponder…
Do I keep this as the default page at davestacey.co.uk, or do I use my new protopage instead?
Should I join Twitter, or is it just another web-based thing to get in the way of any productivity?
Am I really happy with this theme?
Who should go in my page of links?
What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?