A Bolt from the Blue

One of the great things about being a parent is how your child continually surprises you. It's also one of the least great things. Yesterday Phoebe surprised us both enormously by locking us out of the house! Let me set the scene...

I was cooking a roast dinner for Sunday lunch and had a few minutes to wait while the oven heated up enough to pop the Yorkshires in. Earlier in the day we had moved the furniture onto the lawn so I could pressure wash the patio and clean the bits underneath it. Standing in the kitchen looking out of the window with a bit of time on my hands I suggested to Hayley that we should quickly nip out and move it back. She agreed, so we ran out the back door grabbed the stuff and moved it. I estimate we were gone at most two minutes. When we returned though we found we couldn't open the back door! It seems that in addition to her obsession with closing doors, Phoebe has discovered a new game called "turn the handle of the bolt." Hayley was a bit stressed about this but I wasn't, after all, I had my house keys in my pocket, so I nonchalantly strolled round the front, smiling to myself and tried to open the door. Unfortunately we routinely bolt the front (and back) doors before going to bed and sometimes fail to unbolt them the next day until we actually need to open them. Needless to say today was one of those days and it was still bolted. Oh dear, I thought. Still, not to worry, it was a sunny day and the Lovely Hej is a fresh air fanatic, so I went round the back of the house again planning to clamber in through the inevitably wide open kitchen window. Sadly, no. As I mentioned, I had been pressure washing the patio so of course all the windows at the back of the house had been firmly shut to prevent muddy water spraying into the kitchen and subsequently not reopened.

At that point I realised we had a bit of a problem. We had a small child running round the house unsupervised, a roast dinner that needed imminently taking out of the oven and no access to the house or even any way of summoning help. I wasn't even wearing any socks! There was a faint glimmer of hope though, Phoebe's bedroom is at the front of the house and so her window at least hadn't been closed as part of operation Mud Stop. Unfortunately it's upstairs and we don't have a ladder, but nevertheless, there it was, taunting us with it's openness and promise of access, if we could just get up there.

With nothing to lose at this point and seriously pondering which window would be the cheapest one to break I went over to our neighbour to see if she had a ladder. Fortunately she was in and she did! I breathed a huge sigh of relief, until I actually saw the ladder that is. It was a step ladder and nowhere near high enough to reach the window. Undaunted, I thought I may as well give it a go, after all it's not like I had a lot of options, and soon discovered that (and don't try this at home kids) by standing on the handle of the ladder I could just stretch high enough to get one hand through the window and grab the edge of the windowsill inside the house. I was at a really awkward angle (the window is above the border and the only solid place to put the ladder was to the left of it) with the window frame digging uncomfortably into my arm and the external windowsill hanging over my head making life even more difficult.

I'm not entirely sure what was going through my head at this point, in fact I can't really remember much about it at all, but basically I must have decided to just go for it and found myself jumping sideways and upwards off the top of the ladder with the aim of getting my other hand through the window to join the first. The next thing I know I was dragging myself up the wall, over the windowsill and into the bedroom, headfirst, with fortunately only a few scrapes and bruises from the variously jutting window sills and frames for my trouble. With a quick pause to give a thumbs up to the anxious audience below I bounded downstairs and opened the front door. Hurrah! The day had been saved in a death defying Spiderman stylee.

The only casualty was my Grim Challenge T-Shirt, the newest t-shirt I own, which got fairly well shredded when I dragged myself up the wall and over the windowsill. I consider it a small price to pay.

And so, dear readers, the moral of the story is this: keep practising the pull-ups, some day you might need them for something!

A Farewell to my Chinese Commenters

I admit to being a little slow on the uptake here, but I've only just noticed that all the comments in Chinese are actually spam pushing various dodgy porn sites. I was obviously a bit dubious about them, as I wasn't exactly targeting the Non-English speaking Chinese demographic, but hadn't noticed that all the dots at the end of the posts were actually links to the aforementioned dodgy sites. Ahh, well they've gone now.

Still, they had some lovely things to say, at least according to Babelfish:

"Reads your BLOG article, is really a joyful matter"
"The human wants to study forgetful, is unpleasant forgot, only then can be joyful."
"The good tribe standard needs to share with the good friend--Thanks share"

I'd like to think that my articles are joyful too, who wouldn't? And now that I think about it, maybe I should study forgetful to be joyful. And while I'm doing that I suppose there's no harm in sharing with the good tribe.

So all in all I think everyone benefited. I got some helpful advice and they got a bit of free advertising. The weird thing is some of the comments do sort of seem relevant to the posts, I'm afraid though that's almost certainly just a coincidence.

Edit:
Oh the irony, my post about deleting all the Chinese porn spam has been Chinese porn spammed. Apparently "Young and strong not diligently, the eldest child person is sad." Wise words for us all there. So, unfortunately, I've had to enable comment moderation.

Arrrgh! Volcano!

OK, so it's not like there's a volcano in the back garden, although it did smell a bit like it this morning. No, this is much, much worse. I had been planning to blog a bit about Dara O'Briain who we were supposed to be seeing in Woking last night. But no, the stupid Volcano had to go and spoil it for everyone with its big clouds of ash. Dara is currently stuck in the Isle of Man, the gig may or may not be rescheduled for sometime in July.

Grrr.

The New PC

So, I had to buy a new PC...

I was in a bit of a rush so I ended up with this mean looking one because the special silent case I wanted was going to take 10 days to arrive.

But it's rather excellent. I was a bit worried that all the mesh would mean that it was going to be really noisy, but in fact the opposite seems to be true. Because there's plenty of airflow the fans don't need to work so hard, which means the major cause of noise is eliminated. Unusually for me, I didn't go completely mental on the spec and stuck with a Quad Core i7-960 (3.20GHz) ,12 Gigs of RAM (only the 1866 MHz), a Rampage II Extreme motherboard, dual Radeon HD 5850 graphics cards and a Raid 0 boot drive. Most people would consider that a fairly extreme setup but for me that's quite sensible and restrained. I could have gone for SSD drives, a 980X Extreme processor, 5970 graphics cards, phase change cooling, well suffice to say I could easily have spent a lot more. It's probably just as well I was in a hurry.

I did switch the original CPU cooler (a CoolerMaster V8) for a supposedly super quiet Freezone Elite Pro. I sort of wish I hadn't to be honest. It's certainly a better cooler and there is a huge degree of nerdy satisfaction from having not only a liquid cooled CPU but one with a thermoelectric chiller. This means the CPU can be cooled to below ambient temperatures (a standard liquid cooler can only cool to temperature of the room) which gives me extra nerd points (and I get double for fitting it myself.) Unfortunately it's a lot noisier than the V8 despite the claims on the side of the box which is very disappointing and realistically I'm not going to be really needing super cooling most of the time.

Still, the V8 actually looks pretty funky sitting on the desk...

...gehog News...Hedgehog News...Hed...

We here at HNN take our job very seriously. So it's with great excitement that I can now report that we have had a sighting. The hedgehogs are definitely back. Not sure which one though, it was too small to be Harry and not stripy enough to be Harriet, so it was either one of the twins or a completely new one.

More hedgehog news as it's made!

Beginning of the End?

I'm almost too embarrassed to admit this, but I have recently developed a taste for the old lady's tipple of choice, the G&T. Surely I'm too young and possess too many Y chromosomes to start drinking them? Well, obviously not, given that I already have.

Oh dear.