port7 – co – uk

So I finished work yesterday for Xmas, and it truly has started. This morning we got our Xmas delivery from the Veg Lady, I have been out and picked up the turkey from the local butchers. It’s a big beast at 16lb, I asked the butcher to remove the legs and bone them, so I can make some nice small turkey rolls with them (stuffed with pork and apricot stuffing).

I am now chilled out in the front room, Star Trek the Motion Picture is on TV, Niamh is sleeping on the sofa next to me, and life is great!!

One of the best things I love about Xmas is chilling in front of a good film with laptop at hand, its even better with your first child next to you!

So we are looking at where to go for some holiday next year and don’t really want to go out of the country with Niamh just yet. So we have decided on Cornwall as a destination, so we are on the lookout for some nice baby freindly self-catering accomodation…

Anyone got any reccomendations?

Eat, Sleep & Sh*t, that is my life at the moment, well not mine Niamh’s.

We have been home since Friday evening and been getting into the looking after baby lark. She seems to be eating loads at the moment, pretty much every 2 hours, so its hard to get things of our own done like eating and sleeping! Still it’s worth it, Nimah is great. Her poo has just turned yellow which I am told is a good thing!

Niamh, makes her Internet debut…

So the baby is on it’s way, Julie is in Labour and we are both tired.

As we went to bed on Friday night (27th Oct) she was complaining of the baby pushing on more nerves than usual. Over the past few weeks the pressure on nerves in her pelvis had been increasing, but Friday night it was being a little bit more of a sod than usual. But we didn’t think much of it even though baby was due the day before on the 26th.

Next thing I knew, I was being prodded awake by Julie at 6am on Saturday morning with the imortal words ‘Mark I think its starting’. It is now nearly 10am on Sunday morning and I have had about 3 hours sleep since then. She had a ‘show’ on the Saturday morning at about 2am and had been getting pains in her lower back about every 10 minutes, thats what made her think it had started.

So the baby is not hear yet, but it has been quite a ride so far. We called the hospital on Saturday but they kept fobbing us off saying that they didn’t even think Julie was in labour, they were saying that she merley had a trapped nerve as the pain was in her lower back not her belly. That didn’t seem right to me, the fact that the pains were rythmic and there was a show seemed like labour to me. It really confused us as we were doubting ourselves that we really were in labour.

It eventually got too much, they had reccomended taking baths and some paracetamol or cocodonol, I had to run out at midnight and grab some paracetamol from the garage, but that didn’t help at all. So I eventually at 5am Sunday morning took her to the hospital, as I wanted them to see her in person. After some prodding and poking they confirmed she was having contractions, in labour and was 2cm dilated!

So they gave us some hospital strength cocodonol and sent us home. Thats where we are at the moment, I have dragged the mother-in-law over so that she can sit with Julie while I grab some sleep, and the cocodonol is taking the edge of the pain.

Like I said it’s a ride, the worst thing was last night when were were not sure if we were in labour or not, but now we know it makes things better somehow.

Anyway, just needed to blog to get it out, I am really exited.

More news later!!!

Baby is due 1 week today!! (26th October)

It’s scary and exiting at the same time, well scary for Julie as she has to push the bugger out! I keep trying to ply Julie with hot curry and pineapple as that is supposed to induce birth. The sooner it comes out the better in my opinion, as the baby is not considered premature from 36 weeks onwards anyway, so there should be no problem in it comming out now

Time to book some holidays, we are currently considering 2 options for a Holiday in May.

One is Key West in the Florida Keys and the other being the Maldives, the criteria being we want somewhere sunny, somewhere I can get a few dives in and somewhere Julie can catch some rays, and somewhere not too hectic.

If anyone has any opinions they would be appreciated!

Well, back from Sharm-El-Sheik all tanned and burnt. Would I go there again? Yes! Would I stay in the Hilton Sharks Bay? Maybe. Would I use Sinai Dive Club again? Yes!

We flew out on Monday 2nd November, and returned on Monday 8th. The flights were OK, typical Med type shuttle. We flew out at 10am and the return flight we left at 5pm, so they were reasonable times, though on the flight out because we arrived in the evening there it felt like we wasted a day. Our room was nice a clean with a view of the Red Sea, there were no roaches or anything like that which is the main thing. Most days we just chilled out on the hotels private beach, it was really nice and we were in and out of the sea as the snorkelling was amazing there being a reef about 2metres from the shore. I only managed to get 3 dives in on the account of a case of Montezumas Revenge 1/2 way through the week. Though the dives I did were amazing, really loved them. I did 2 shore dives and 1 boat dive.

While I was out there I was sad to hear that Fred Dibnah has passed on. RIP to one of the characters of the past few decades.

A strange mixed week, a few different things have happened that might be OK to blog about.

* We got a new carpet! It arrived on Wednesday and we are happy with the result, the colour was a bit of a gamble with the new wall paint, but we think it worked out well

* I am moving from Zen to Bytemark for my broadband provision. I was due to be disconnected from Zen yesterday on the 28th, but my connection is still active. I think this is because my router keeps the connection up constantly, so they might have removed my entry from their RADIUS servers so if I disconnected and tried to connect again it might fail. But as my current ‘session‘ has not dropped I am still OK.

* The new bed is due tomorrow! The old one has served us well for the past 7 years and so we think its time for a new one

* I think we will be moving from Debian Woody to Ubuntu Breezy for our new depot PC image. The reason being we are wanting to have things like nice handling for people plugging in Digital Cameras and more hardware support for the range of PC’s we are now having to support. We could have used Debian Sarge for this, but to get all we wanted we would have had to pinch bits from Etch and Sid. So instead of having a platform that is a patchwork of several different distro’s we have just one single distro to manage. Will this be the largest corporate deployment of Ubuntu yet? It would be interesting to hear of others that have done something similar

* I was informed by the tax office that my tax code is changing for the worse, meaning Gordon Brown will be getting more out of me! They claim that they didn’t know I was getting the fuel allowance! So UK Plc is taking more money from me and yet my brother over in Canada is being given money from his government! I need to move out of this country!

Interesting week all in all….

Well its that time of year again, and its my Birthday I am the grand old age of 33 and its not good. I don’t like growing old, I still feel like a kid. Anyway what did I get? In no particular order: Tin of Thorntons Special Toffee, a new Flece Jacket, a Casual shirt, a Crumpler ‘McBains Baby M’ laptop bag, Season 5 of SG1 on DVD, Revolution OS, a big jar of Jelly Babys, a weight watchers cookbook & some dark chocolate. Roll on Xmas!!