Wow - I got a Medal!

Just got back from Club. Tonight was the used-to-be-annual Awards, the last of which was at least three years ago now. Much to my surprise I won one. I got the "Best GM Flange" award for getting the whole party home alive in Celtic Double-cross!

Home again.

But I don't dare go to sleep just yet. I'm gonna try and stay up 'til ~21:00 tonight and get back onto UK time quickly.

Letters from America

Well, I made it to the US OK, and survived the jet-lag. For a day with that nmuch travel in, it went well. I got to the airport at 06:15 for a 06:55 departure, changed at Heathrow without problem (Terminal 5 is good!), and the trans-atlantic flight was, well, if not fine, as good as 8 hours on a plane gets to be.

Today we did laundry, lunch and doctors before heading off to Germantown Splash Park to meet Matt, Erin and Henry. Unfortunately, there was a little thunder and they closed the splash park, so we went to the playground acorss the road for a while. I'll try & post some pictures on the family blog soon.

Last day

Ok, today is going well so far. I was up on time, got the last wash into the dryer, then set off for Seascale for dinner at Mum & Dad's. The Potters and the Watsons were there as well, so it was a nice big dinner - roast pork, stuffing, roast potatoes and lots of veg, including a few of our courgettes and Dad's runner beans.

Dad loaned me his angle-grinder and we cut out the seized bolt on the spare tyre cage. I needed to get this done before I fly because while I can manage with the spare tyre in the boot when I'm on my own, once we have the whole family and all a bags in the car, there'll be no space for it.

Since Dobies hasn't managed to get us a replacement part yet, even though it's been over two weeks, I ended up pushing the tyre cage into place with Dad's little hydraulic jack, then wiring it into place with a coat hanger. It sounds very Heath-Robinson, but it is secure, and I can still get the tyre out if I need it.

After dinner, I picked Ben up and we did a couple of little odd jobs around the house for travelling, then went o to the big one in Ruth's room. I had wanted to put Ruth's curtains back up while she was away. The old rail had fallen down a while back. The bad news was that the old rail was to damaged to go back up - the good news was that we had a spare rail, only a little shorter, in the flat.

It took a while, but Ben and I got it up in the end. Proably the worst bit was when we thought we had everything sorted, but one of the hanging loops fell off and bounced out of the open window onto the kitchen roof. Fortunately we were able to recover it by taping Ruth's fishing net onto the end of a 7-foot pole and scooping it up. Here's a picture of the finished job, with fishing net...

And the packing is... (Saturday)

Almost done. I'm waiting for one last wash to run for a couple of shirts that needed stain-treating.

Apart from that, Ben's been over most of the day, and he's been a great help.
We've harvested loads of courgettes and a couple of dozen cherry tomatoes, planted out the sweet potatoes and salad-thingies, watered everyhting in the greenhouse, and done a bit of tidying.

After that, we emptied out the car, washed the rear seat-cover, vacuumed everything, and put the car seats etc back in again.

Then, we folded loads of laundry and put a lot of it away, and made chicken tikka masala for tea.

For a rest in the evening, I did the next couple of stages of putting WindowsXP on Mel's new laptop for her. It came with Vista, but Vista won't support her scanner or any of her printers.

Friday the 14th part 2...

Well, I got the light switch done, then made cheese omlette & garden veg for tea.
Unfortunatey, it's Sunday now, and I can't remember what else I did!

Friday the 14th part 1...

OK, got a severe lack of motivation going here, so to remove myself from distraction. I'm going to turn the electricity off. This way, I can't be tempted to compute, game, read* or watch movies.

I'm justifying such a drastci step by reming myself that I need to replace the failing bathroom light switch before it gets too dark.

After that, I'm going to see how many other jobs I can do before I have to put the power back on.

Lads' Night In

Wednesday was Lads' Night In.

Bowch picked up Chinese take-out, and he, Gary & I sat down for an eveing of cheesy movies. First up was a true straight-to-video classic, Megashark vs Giant Octopus. It was as bad as the title sounds, a horribly low-budget monster movie. The only member of the cast I'd ever heard of was 80's pop singer Debbie Gibson, who had the female lead role. She should really stick to singing. We enjoyed it immensely though, this was definately a case of "So bad it's good."

After that, Gary had to head out, and Bowch and I put in Homeworld, a sci-fi we knew nothing about. It turned out to be very good. A tale of a small group of space marines on a last-ditch mission to save mankind from shape-changing, mind-controlling aliens. Not much in the way of effects, but it didn't need them, as the plot focused more on the suspense and psychological drama.

Tuesday

Lets see if I can keep a log of useful things done of the the next few days - I'm trying to avoid the tendancy to be lazy and do nothing but play computer games & read.

So, how has today gone?

- Bought new bulb for car brake lamp - normally I'd need a special trip to get this, but Halfords is within walking distance of NNL Workington, so I just nipped out in my lunch break.
- Got the last bits & pieces from the weekend out of the car.
- Gave the fridge a once-over for perishables, and started planning food for the week. I've got loads of eggs to eat up, so I had fried eggs on toast for dinner. Need to buy some milk though.
- Fitted the new brake lamp bulb. It took about 15 mins of Googling to find clear intructions, and another 15 mins to fit. I'm quite impressed by the fact I needed no tools, and could reach the required parts of the car fairly easily.
- Went to Parton & dropped in on Mel. We owe her for the help she gave us with packing, and I know she's got a lot of house organising and DIY to do, so I went over to help. Mel was having trouble getting started, so we hit the freezer together. It needed done before the bin men came on Wednesday. Mel's power had failed while she was away, and it was pretty rank No, it was absolutely foul. Scented candles & odour-neutralising sprays helped prevent gagging (barely!) but we got everything inventoried then double-bagged and put out for collection, then sprayed it down inside and out with bleach, and shut the door.

After that it was time for a long, long, shower.

Monday 10th of August

Well, Chrissy and the kids are off to the US, and I have a week to myself, (apart from going to work.) The only thing planned so far is take-out and cheesy movies for a lads' night in on Wednesday, but there's no shortage of things for me to be doing...

Ouch!

Just had to get 4 new tyres for the car. That was £200+ I wasn't wanting to spend this month....

Friday - 5/8 out of 10

Headace & energy-wise it's been 5 out of 10, but todays geekthrill raises it to an 8 - Battletech just got the UnSeen back! YAY!

http://www.classicbattletech.com/forums/index.php/topic,53514.0/all.html

Thursday - 6 out of 10

No change on the headace other than a bit of sinus ache to go with it in the morning. Clarityn helps with that, though.
Filtered my waste, disposed of some more empty bottles, and generally got on with cleaning out the fumehood. Got home to find Chrissy making chicken & leek pie. It was very good - I couldn't taste the leeks at all

Wednesday - 5 out of 10

Still got a headache, but back at work Paracetamol makes it fade out for a while.
Oh look, my waste bottle is precipitating ferric hydroxide again! Now I'll have to recondition and filter it again!

Tuesday - 3 out of 10

Off sick - horrible headache. It's been there a week now and keeps getting worse. Went to see the Doc. After being poked & prodded, was told that it was nothing major, use paracetamol and it should go away eventually. The he says he can confirm it's not an early sign of a stroke or brin tumor! Never occured to me to worry about either of those. I guess I just learned what a 1 out of 10 day would have been!

Monday - 7 out of 10

Didn't sleep well. Kids messed around about getting dressed. Headache again. Thank god you can still buy paracetamol by the thousand tablets in the US.
Work was OK - much waste to filter, and many spreadsheets to check.
Dinner in Seascale was good - sausages, carrots & cheesy mash.
Club went OK. I was caught out when the player who normally leaves early said he was staying 'til 11, as I had planned on finishing for 10:30, his usual leaving time. Improvising worked out ok, and I know where I'm picking up from next week.

Got a good geek-thrill today, but I'll post about that later.

Sunday - 8 out of 10

Father's Day - I got a bit of a lie in, cards from the kids, then everyone gave me a very nice back-rub. Wonderful. The lingering headache slowed me down a bit, but a trip down to Seascale for a cuppa with Mum & Dad helped. They even volunteered to keep the kids until bedtime and feed them, so Chrissy and I had some nice quiet time together. I made fish pie (smoked haddock, salmon and something white) and we cuddled up on the sofa to watch the first part of The Colour of Magic. Lovely

Saturday - continued.

I think 5 out of 10 was right in the end. Nothing bad happened, per se, but I went to bed at 8 with a headache.

Today - 5 out of 10 (so far)

Lousy night - David up a lot. Noisy morning. The kids were up early and making a lot of noise. A nice trip to Bens and a rest in the garden, but very tired and a big headache.

Today - 7 out of 10

A decent day today, but very tiring. Work was lots of preparation for waste disposal - filtering out trace solids, correcting pH, doing provisional beta/gamma counts and so on, and prepping samples for formal analysis on Monday. Then it was dinner at Cathie's, and home to get the kids to bed. Now I've got a bit of time for my self, and I'm too tired to start anything. I guess it will be a nice, restful early night.

Today - 10 out of 10

Assuming "today" started at midnight, rather than when I got up this morning, anyway.

Today - 3 out of 10

Well, that's how good today has been so far. I'm too depressed for details right now. Maybe later.

New Star Trek Movie

Wel,, we went to see the new Star Trek movie last night, and it was superb. The astrophysics was lousy, but that's just Hollywood, and Scotty seemed rather lame, but the rest was damn good.
I think I'd like to go see it again.

A new Windoze

Well, I'm giving the Windows 7 RC1 a try, using VirtualBox, since I don't have a spare PC of high enough spec...

My Saviour.....

I'd gotten myself into a pickle with an spreadsheet. I was revising the Karma Pool rules for my upcoming Shadowrun 3E game to make them follow a simple non-linear progression. I had decided that the first point would cost the normal 20k, then each additional point would cost 5k more than the last one. This gives a nice simple formula of y=2.4x^2+17.5x, where x is the number of Karma Pool points and y is the total coast.

Then I realised that for existing CHRs I needed to reverse the equation - if a CHR has already earned y karma, how many Karma Pool points would it be worth?

It turns out that solving that equation for x instead of for y is not as simple as I had hoped. I asked Chrissy to have a look at it for me, and she recommended asking Kathy in America, as Kathy is a Math(s) teacher.

After much hard work, Kathy tells me that the correct answer is x = SQRT((8x+245)/20)-3.5
I'd never have worked that out by myself.

Many thanks, Kathy!

Pieces of PCs

On Thursday this week, I did some cleaning out in the spare room, as the plumber who never showed up on Friday needed access to the radiators to change the valves. I don't have a picture of what it looked like before I started, but that's because there wasn't room to get into the room while holding a camera.....

Anyway, after throwing out several bin-bags' worth of rubbish, moving several items to other rooms, and stacking things more neatly (Thanks for all the help, Bowch!), I finally got to see for the first time in a year or two, how big my computer stash is.....I don't have an exact count, but I can say that this is all in addition to the six desktops and two laptops currently in use elsewhere in the house.

p.s. As far as I know, only 2 or 3 of these are complete PCs - the boxes of motherboards, expasinion cards, memory chips and disc drives will be needed for that.

Better cooling

Lost_Boy, the downstairs PC, has been getting a bit unreliable lately, so today I took the cover off for a look. It was rather dusty, so I gave it a good clean-out, then had a closer look at the cooling fans. The air-in fan on the front of the case was particularly clogged up, since the holes in the case are small, so I decided to improve the air-flow a bit. A quick bit of work with the tin-snips later, and the obstruction was removed. There shouldn't be be any more problems at this end now. {grin}

Let down again

The plumber was meant to come round yesterday morning to put the new thermostatic vales on the radiators. This is the last stage of the work payed for by the rennovation grant, and it shoudl have been done last autumn.

He hadn't arrived by lunchtime, and Chrissy called the builder who managed the project. He texted back later, saying he couldn't reach the plumber by phone so he would get him in person, and, "I won't let you down."

Neither of them ever showed up.

Is it a bad sign that I'm not surprised?

Sick and Tired

Flu strikes again. No, not me this time though. Chrissy came down with it Thursday night, and hit a fever for 104'f last night, but seems to be starting to recover a little tonight.

And to go with that, David, while basically healthy, has throw at least one monster tantrum every day since Monday, so I'm completely exhausted. I slept on the sofa last night to avoid getting flu off Chrissy and climbed all over by David, so at least I got some rest.

Next up, three children's parties in 2 days, two of them overlapping. Oh, and some housework sorting out the tumble-drier and washig machine too. Gonna sleep well this weekend - I'll be too tired not to!

A new game

Back at the Roleplaying Club tonight for the firstgame of the new year. Mechwarrior this time (2nd Ed). We are playing as members of the 4th Pesht regulars assigned to the garrison on Tarnby in March 3050. Five players in all, so the GM started us off with the four members of the medium lance in 2nd company engaged in wargames against a single assault 'mech to settle a bet between our COs.

It was a fun night. I knew what was due to happen in this portion of cannon gametime, and was having lots of fun ignoring it and playing dumb.

[it's later than I thought - will update another day]

Third time lucky...

OK folks, sorry about the repeated re-arrangements. After some discussion, we have decided to move Geoff's blog to it's own new address, and have the family blog at the lincoln-brown.blogspot.com address.

So, here are what should be the final locations for our blogs:-

Geoff - http://the-moles-revenge.blogspot.com
Chrissy - http://cmlfuss.blogspot.com
Family - http://lincoln-brown.blogspot.com

Changes for the New Year

Happy New Year everyone! We are now back in England, after a good visit to America, and on the Blogging front, it's time for a change. Rather than running two seperate blogs, we have decided to simplify things, by running three . We have created a new blog for Family updates and pictures, which we can run as a team. In the mean time, our personal blogs will continue with more me-oriented stuff without worrying about upsetting the viewers/readers who only want nice happy pictures of the children.

The new blog is located Here. Please let us know when you find it, and what you think of it.

Jet-lag

Or as I prefer to call it, Travle-Shock!.

OK, after 24 hours on the move, and 32hours with no sleep in my case, we're home safely.

Goodnight.

Going home

Well, we set off for the airport at 2pm tomorrow (US time) and should get home about 2pm (UK time) the day after.
We're about halfway packed - everything is together, just needs sorting into suitcases of equal weight.

So now it's time for an early night, and a good start tomorrow morning. It's been a good trip.