UK Letter Home August 2004

Welcome to the August Edition of UKBound.

We purchased a new car seat for Seth, so he is now a little higher and able to look forward. He hasn't said it in as many words, but I think he likes the new seat. At least now we can see what he's doing, and he can't get away with making his famous Mr. T face behind our backs. He's also able to look out the window, so his old view of the back of the seat has greatly been improved. We've found out that Seth really likes going around round-abouts. The faster, the better.

With Seth's newly found standing and stair climbing ability, he is now able to get up and down from the couch, and, with a little patience can go down stairs. He's a little shaky on the downstairs part (which makes us parents quite paranoid) so we watch him like a hawk when he's on stairs. We have installed gates at the top and bottom of the stairs, which keeps him at bay. This confuses the moggies, as they can get over the gates from the top down, but is quite harder to go from the bottom up. Poor moggies.

I had my mid-year review (yes, I know Q3 is almost over) and it was a lot better than my last couple. My boss seems to like me, so that's nice to finally get a little recognition. The policies and red tape are getting worse by the minute, and I'm just struggling along trying to just keep my head above water.

You might remember, I took out our mini-forest in the front yard. Well, it seems that we did a wee bit of over flower planting, and as a result, our garden has exploded into a multitude of colors. It looks very manic, but good at the same time. Some of the bulbs we planted are just now starting to bloom, so it is nice to see that all the work has paid off. The previous owner was kind enough to also leave a bunch of his old building materials such a concrete blocks, bricks, cement chunks around the back yard, so, each week I donate a little of it into the bin. I'm not sure what our binnies think of us. In the past couple of years, we have donated our kitchen, bathroom, closets, closeline poles (8 feet tall metal pillars with 50lbs of concrete), two 8 foot trees and misc shrubs, and all the insulation from our atic into our poor bin. I'll bet they have a pool to see what we throw in next. If the car dies, I'll probably throw that into the bin a fender at a time as well.

As some of you know, the worst possible thing happened to our computer. We had a serious hard drive crash, which wiped out two hard drives. As a result, all of my pictures maybe on the disks, but they are unaccessable. There are a couple of companies that can restore the data, but we're looking at £300-1000 to get it restored. So, for those of you that have already looked at my web site, that's all you are going to see for a bit.

When I took Kim to work one day, I noticed that the car was running a tad hot. On my return trip, the gage was in the red, so I stopped to take a look. Everything looked OK, so I removed the cardboard (yes, still using cardboard in the summer), and continued, but this only made a little difference. I called the RAC and found that half of my rad is blocked. And, all this after last month's expenses. I need a holiday to get away from it all, but cannie afford it due to all the work on it. OK, it's not that bad, but you know the feeling. Here's hoping that this will be the last of the repairs for a while.

I guess that's about it for this issue.

Brian, Kim, wee Seth and the moggies.