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Vic and I spent the morning at the hospital today.  After having two urine tests at the doctors that showed high glucose levels the midwife booked her in for a test to see if she had Gestational Diabetes.

We had to be at the hospital at 08:00 this morning and Vic wasn’t allowed to eat anything after 22:00 last night. Being a breakfast kind of person this went down like a cup of cold sick   

The test is quite bizarre – they take a blood sample, make you drink 500ml of a sugar packed drink (in this case Lucozade), wait two hours and then take another blood sample.  After 20 minutes the results were ready and in our case everything was fine – phew!

Fidget’s living up to her/his name and Vic is thinking that he/she has moved head down now (most of the time) She was getting quite uncomfortable with Fidget lying sideways and her belly took on some very strange shapes at times……

oh and my new macro lens has turned up at the shop :vbg:

Up at 05:30, a 350 mile, 7? hour round trip and I’m back at home only to discover that I got another POTD at www.digitalphotocontest.com The original looks a lot better than the one on the web, I think they compress the photos a bit more than I would have thought…….. This picture was about 15 minutes work in Photoshop. I was playing around one day and the idea popped into my head – I only entered it as a bit of a joke

YAY! – Vic’s back from Philly and seems to have really enjoyed herself   She didn’t seem to go too mad and even managed to buy me a top from Nautica between kitting Fidget out in Gap and herself in Lord & Taylor……. The main thing is she’s back though :vbg:

Man I have a couple of busy days ahead – on both days I have meetings that are four hours drive away 🙁  Eight hours driving each day – crazy! At least I’m busy though.

Just to finish the day off here’s a couple of recent photo’s.  They’re both taken on Kodak Ektachrome and scanned into the PC. I have printed them at about 8×10 and the shot of the bust looks quite striking. I have even got the hang of the matt cutter I got for my birthday so they have nice cardboard surrounds!

  
click the images for a larger versions

Well, I seem to have screwed up my photo’s section a bit 🙁 I was going to add a couple of photo’s but decided to manually delete the subdir I had just created.  Supposedly a rebuild via the admin cgi script should look at the directory structure and rebuild the indexes.  This didn’t happen and now the admin side of it is screwed up!  Oh well, it’s always been a bit flakey and has been neglected of late so I might have a look for another product…………

I’m also toying with the idea of upgrading to pMachine 2.2 which, knowing my luck will f*ck things up royally

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With Vic away I thought I’d pop out for a bite to eat and go to the movies to see a movie that she wouldn’t.

As I’m 2/3 of the way through reading The Bourne Identity I thought I’d go and see that. The only show today was 21:10 so at 21:00 I settled myself down in the theater and waited to be entertained…….

? I was surprised to have a child on each side of me! We are talking about 10-12 year olds here. I can’t remember going to see a movie that started after 9 at that age! Luckily they behaved for the 2 and a bit hours during the movie…….

? The good thing about the movie is seeing it hasn’t ruined the book at all.  I know that I’m only 2/3 through the book but if the rest of the it is as totally different as the movie then I won’t have even ruined the ending! lol!

Anyway it’s 00:30 and I have more slides to scan………..

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It’s Thursday night and the first of four without Vic and Fidget 🙁

They’ve joined Fi and Claire on a girlie shopping trip to the King of Prussia Mall in Philadelphia.  Vic was the only one that took a suitcase I think, the other two are buying luggage out there to transport their purchases A seven hour flight for a shopping trip – it reminds me of the time that my friend Sanjay and I went to Hong Kong to buy whatever took our fancy – the things we do huh ?

Vic took this trip due to me starting my new job. We were going to go on holiday in September but I couldn’t really take time off as soon as I’d started.  She gets a trip and I get a EF100mm f/2.8 Macro USM Lens – I’m not sure who wins……….

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A week since my last update and only a couple of things to report

The most important is the fact that one of my work colleagues was caught up in the nightclub bombing in Bali. We spoke to him this morning when he arrived back in the UK and he doesn?t sound so good. From the sketchy information we can get it seems he was in or very close to the bar that was hit.  He is deaf in one ear from the explosion (not sure if it is temporary or not) and is pretty shook up. Supposedly he was moving bodies straight after – maybe to help survivors, I’m not sure.

It’s quite strange – I feel this a lot more than September 11th but I’m not sure why though.  I went to Kuta beach about 5 years ago and am pretty sure that I drank in that bar – that can’t be it though because I had been to the WTC only two years ago and my memories of that are a lot fresher.  Maybe it’s because so many antipodeans were involved?  I’m not sure, I’ll have to give it some more thought………

Back to happy things though!

Vic and I had a great weekend On Saturday we went and visited our friends Martin and Helen up in Royal Leamington Spa.  They had a wee girl Meggy quite a while back so it was nice to see how she had grown since Xmas (a lot!) We spent the afternoon with them and then went out for dinner in the middle of town. One very large curry later we staggered back to our hotel and lay on the bed for a while feeling slightly ill

Sunday morning we were up early and off to Warwick Castle for opening time at 10:00.  This is a lovely castle and seems handle visitors well (we got to try on very heavy medieval helmets ) They started building it in the late 11th century and it has grown in size and complexity since then. The weather was very overcast so it wasn’t shown in it’s best light but it was impressive none the less and from there a quick 15 minute drive found in Shakespeare’s birthplace Stratford-on-Avon. This really is a lovely town (even in the rain :() with narrow streets flanked by very old and very wonky buildings. We saw a toy shop that was built in 1493! and took the requisite photo of the actual building that old Billy was born in.  Vic even reckons that she managed to get a shot with no Japanese tourists in!

On to baby things and he/she is being very active at the moment.  So much so that we have started calling him/her “fidget” The good thing with this is that I can talk about Fidget without giving the sex of the baby away

Click on the link for the highlight of my weekend………..

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