Crepuscular

Mellifluous

My boy is just becoming old enough to to repeat things randomly, so the wife and I are trying to curb any errant rude words – never really realised how much we swore before!

A couple of years ago some friends were driving with their three-year-old daughter in the back. When they hit traffic she piped up with “I don’t f____ng believe this”!

I take my son (18 months) to daycare on the bike on the way to work. His daycare has recently relocated so now we take a different route which involves a steep downhill (tarmac) section. Entirely unprompted he now sticks his arms out to the sides and goes “WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE” all the way down :D

I nearly fell off laughing the first time, now I just want to join in, reminds me of running round pretending to be an aeroplane as a kid.

Yeah, I was looking at the tilting seats. They look ideal for if the child is sleeping on a longer trip, but I’ll be mostly doing 10-minute trips with him wide awake, and tilted back doesn’t seem ideal if he’s not sleeping. Given that it’s such a short trip I could just go with the bag-in-face method but I’d rather he grows up enjoying being on a bike…

I’ve been looking for ways of mounting a bag up front but I need something that will remain fairly… voluminous? I.e. not cinched down with straps etc, as I carry a shirt which is collapsed/loosely folded into the pannier at present to prevent creasing. Front-mounted set-ups like the Freeload seem to be geared towards tourers where the bag will be compressed down, and I can’t find a ‘normal’ front rack that will fit to mtb suspension forks.

We did the same about a year ago with our then-6-month-old. Arriving in Manchester Airport, cold, chucking it down with rain, smokers huddled outside the doors with the wind blowing in filling the place with smoke… welcome home :(

But then it was onto the train and off to show his nibs off to the family, and drink lots of proper beer (homebrewer here too, but the range of bottles of proper beer available at the supermarket was truly staggering, and at the same cost per litre as swappa crates of Waikato/Lion Red etc. here… almost made me want to move back! Then I just resolved to get better at brewing :D )

Anyway, the main point of this post was to say that if you haven’t already booked seats with bassinets on the plane, ring the travel agent tomorrow and do it. Extra leg room for you and even though our lanky little monster was almost too long for it, it was fantastic to be able to just put him down for a few hours. There were a number of people on our flight who had to take it in turns holding the baby the entire flight, didn’t look like fun.

Also, you can sign up at the NASA website[/url] and they’ll email you about a day in advance whenever the ISS will be visible from your location.

We used to use a double air mattress, but found that when one person rolls over without ridiculous amounts of care, the other one gets ‘trampolined’ a bit – neither of us are fatties, it’s just the poor design of the mattresses. So we got two singles and put them side by side with a double fitted sheet over them – much improved. But I still find them to be cold – even if my upper side is toasty under the duvet (proper namby-pamby glampers, us!) the side against the mattress was always cold.

So now the mrs has her single air mattress, while I use her Exped down-filled 3/4 length mattress over a foam mat. Toasty as. So I guess I’d recommend a couple of Expeds rather than a double airbed, although they aren’t cheap. Budget option would be to get about three cheap foam mats stacked on top of each other. Warmth and comfort, and if you’re camping out of the car the space shouldn’t be a problem (fold them in half and pack them flat on the boot floor for best packing/space efficiency.

As someone mentioned above, even if you are not sure what to do/what you can do from an emotional point of view, or if he’s not being receptive at the moment (which would be understandable), there are many practical things you can do. Things like preparing a load of healthy meals, ready portioned (for both him and the 2-yr-old), and taking them round and filling his freezer. If you can organise a rota with just two or three other friends or relatives it’d be minimal burden on you and a massive time and effort saver for your mate.

Also, doing his food shopping, going round to look after the kids so he can have some time to himself – busy himself doing things around the house, or have time to think/sleep/watch TV uninterrupted.

Misery – hard to pick whether the book or film is best, both are excellent.

My wee lad has been having great fun today on his trike, so I got out his balance bike to measure him up. He’s still a bit short for it, his feet are a couple of inches off the ground with the saddle at its lowest setting (I bought it early as I spotted one at a bargain price… and ’cause I can’t wait until he starts riding).

So after he went to bed this evening I popped out to the garage to see what bits of scrap wood I had lying around…

The two pencil lines show the 5cm or so the saddle needs to be dropped.
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20130330_165110[/url] by W Hyde[/url], on Flickr

Seat post sketched out.
[/url]
20130330_165621[/url] by W Hyde[/url], on Flickr

Saddle traced from the original.
[/url]
20130330_194340[/url] by W Hyde[/url], on Flickr

No pics of the intermediate stages, but a few minutes with a jig saw and sander produced this, in the vice ready to round off the edges with the router.
[/url]
20130330_211118[/url] by W Hyde[/url], on Flickr

The finished article… almost. Some minor burn marks where I paused with the router while I moved round the workpiece. They’ll probably sand off but I’m thinking of painting the saddle red to match the grips and spokes anyway :-)
[/url]
20130330_213549[/url] by W Hyde[/url], on Flickr

The end product:
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20130330_213531[/url] by W Hyde[/url], on Flickr

Now I just have to wait until the morning to check if I made it at the right height! In my haste I may have guestimated a bit, but adjusting should be a case of drilling a couple of new holes in the seat post. It’s a mere trifle compared to some of the stuff on this thread but I’m quietly chuffed with myself 8)

The wife and I had this one paying as we walked back down the aisle after getting married:
Vic & Bob covering I’m a Believer

This is a current one that I quite like:
Metallica covering When a Blind Man Cries

But this is probably my favourite cover ever:
The Gypsy Kings covering Hotel California

Edited as I am apparently too retarded to be able to post up videos…

Bump,

I’m down in Tauranga, generally avoid Jaffa-ville if I can, but if you have a car and a bike then Woodhill is less than an hour north of Akl and has everything from XC to gnar. You can probably hire a decent bike from a LBS, ask on vorb.org.nz, some locals will be able to give you better advice than me.

And yes, you will need to scrub your bike to within an inch of its life to get past airport security.

The ridges on the two sections of roof are not parallel… :twisted: I only point this out as a way of assuaging my intense jealousy towards you for having the skill to knock this together in what seems like a matter of days. It’d take me months to build something like this, except it’d be much shonkier when finished.

When our son was only a few days old and still in hospital (took a week for mum to be discharged) I was across the hall cleaning the bottles and feeding bits’n’pieces when I heard all manner of wailing and general commotion coming from our room. I turned to see my mother-in-law exiting the room in tears, hysterical, and nurses rushing in to investigate the commotion.

Turns out junior had had an explosive episode, it was like a chicken korma grenade had been released in there! My wife was desperately struggling not to laugh so as not to tear her stitches out…

On another occasion I noticed that he had filled his nappy with #2 so started changing him pronto, as it was very full and quite runny. Got him cleaned up, raised him by his ankles to get his bum off the mat so I could slide a fresh nappy underneath, only for him to start a second huge runny poo. Luckily it wasn’t explosive and the clean nappy caught it all, but I’ll never be able to look at those chocolate fountains you get at weddings in quite the same way…

Is this for on the move or at home? If at home you could connect to a shared folder on your PC via wifi for storage. Not much help if you want to take your data with you though…

Thanks for the replies guys.

Mike – the TV does have an ethernet port but it will still only offer the same internet functions as the wi-fi dongle. No web or file browsing, unfortunately.

I think I’m leaning towards the android box, as it eliminates the need for long runs of wires between the PC and the TV. No doubt my infant son would find a way to damage them somehow! Having a slimline PC running next to the TV sounds ideal, but the costs are probably prohibitive based on the amount we’ll use it. And I can get ES File Explorer or similar on android to browse/view files on the desktop over the house wi-fi, plus a browser app for web-based video streaming.

Right, I think I’ve talked myself into a solution. Cheers all.

Another vote for Carl Hiaasen here. More whimisical black comedies (if that’s not an oxymoron) based around crime, rather than gritty crime fiction. Very well written and very funny though.

Also try the Jack Caffery series by Mo Hayder.

I still mostly listen to the same stuff as I listened to when I was young. First albums I ever bought were Metallica’s black album and Aerosmith’s Pump, still listen to both regularly.

I have just (last night in fact) dug out my old Wildhearts albums, and they are as awesome as they used to be.

The mountain buggy caught my eye…( I like the name mountain in the title)..it felt really flimsy.

We have a Mountain Buggy Urban Jungle, it’s definitely rugged. It’s handled all manner of off-road paths, beaches etc. without issue. Not sure if you can double up, but I’m sure google will tell you. And they don’t fold up small.

+1 for Caffrey’s. Used to love it, then in the early 2000’s they started marketing it as ‘new, improved taste’ Caffrey’s, which was only half right :(

You can get a headrest for the Yepp I think, have a google.

this is awesome! I was waiting for my kid to get a bit older (he’s 9 months old) before getting a weeride but having seen bobablong’s picture I’m going to get one. he’s big for his age (98th %ile) so is sturdy enough to cope – I reckon he’ll love it too.
now… I guess I need a dedicated bike to put the seat on? so new bike time?

My son was ‘riding’ to daycare from 8 months, and loves riding off-road (started at 14 months).

Just a quick suggestion before you spring for a wee-ride… I have both a wee-ride and a Yepp Mini, and find the Yepp much better. It probably depends to a certain extent on your frame geometry and how long your legs are, but I found the wee-ride sits lower and further back than the Yepp, so interferes with knee clearance more. Also, when I fitted the Wee-ride I discovered that my frame and/or seat post flexes quite a lot, so the rigid bar of the Wee-ride affected the handling as it stiffened the whole set-up, and there was much annoying creaking from the joint in the Wee-ride bar.

On the other hand, the Wee-ride attaches to the frame, while the Yepp attaches to the steerer tube so moves with the bars, which affects the handling in a different way altogether… doesn’t take long to get used to, mind, but still worth bearing in mind.

If you can, try to find someone locally who can loan you a wee-ride to check the knee clearance before you buy. Although that goes for any seat I guess, what works for one person won’t suit the next.

#1 – My mum emailed me the other week to say that she’d opened a parcel, assuming it was for her from me, but on examining the contents it became apparent that it wasn’t for her (small parcels inside, and cards addressed to other people). She checked the address: to ‘Mrs Mum’ at her address, except the postcode was one letter out. There was a return address on it though, and by a bizarre coincidence it was the same town that I live in, in New Zealand. So she emailed me the name and address, I managed to track down the guy’s phone number (even though the surname on the sender’s details had been spelt wrong! the wonders of the internet :) ) and told him his parcel had ended up at the wrong address in the UK, asked what was the proper address and said my mum would post it on.

Turns out it was for his mum, who lives three doors down the road from my folks… weird that of all the possible people it could have been delivered to it went to someone whose son lives in the same town on the other side of the world (in fact we work about three blocks from each other). Turns out his wife had sent it and he had no idea why she had mis-spelt her own surname or put the wrong house number.

#2 – On my ‘sandwich year’ at uni I lived in Toulouse, working at Airbus. One of my mates down their was also on sandwich year, teaching Air France pilots to speak English. Prior to uni she had spent a year backpacking round Asia, including spending six months in Nepal in a very remote village, teaching English. Three years later, she’s in Toulouse, and a group of us are in our local bar one evening, enjoying a few Kronenbourgs and cacahuètes when some random bloke sidles up and says hello to her. Turns out he was one of her best pupils in that Nepali village, who had got a scholarship to go to uni in Europe and had ended up at the University of Toulouse, which was just around the corner from our local bar. Freaky McDeaky!

Congrats! Our wee fella is 15 months now, it seems like only yesterday that he was a helpless pink blob… (he’s now a monster who is eating us out of house and home and has just discovered how to answer back!) Enjoy every minute, you won’t believe how fast the next few days/weeks/months are going to disappear!

The best, and most accurate, description of having kids I’ve ever heard is simply ‘Relentless’!

The Mona Lisa. It’s chuffin’ tiny! It’s a dark, gloomy picture kept in a dark, gloomy room, and if you want to see it up close you have to slowly elbow your way through a crowd of sweaty tourists (yeah, yeah, I know, I am the problem). Rubbish.

I’ve been dropping my son off at daycare on the way to work using a Yepp Mini since he was 8 months. He loves it. Since he turned 14 months or so we have been doing intermediate trails at the Redwoods (Rotorua, NZ), which he also loves.

I tried a Weeride Kangaroo and liked the fact that it attaches to the frame and not the handlebars, but found it sat too low and got in the way of my knees. The Yepp has an aheadset adaptor which can mount it on the steerer tube above the stem, giving loads of leg room underneath, even for a lanky get like me.

The only problem is that he is rapidly approaching the 15kg weight limit and will soon have to go on a rear-mounted seat, although iirc most front seats have a similar weight limit.

Black Swan. Thought it’d be worth putting up with a chick flick to earn some brownie points, but was thoroughly amazed. I’m an emotional retard and am almost never moved by films, but that is one powerful film. I couldn’t even say what emotion it elicited, it was just powerful.

We had the 2006 2.0 Legacy estate for a couple of years. Great fun to drive, permanent AWD meant it was great on gravel, snow or ice, but fuel economy wasn’t too flash. We sold it in the end as it was a bit under-powered (not noticeable with driver or driver +1, but very noticeable when loaded up with kit & bikes on the back). Also, ground clearance was bobbins unladen and got worse when full. Those two issues aside, it was a lovely car.

I’d go for an Outback estate instead, with a bigger engine than the 2.0.

Edit: test-drive the Legacy 2.5 with a few mates in the back, see how it performs under load… and double-check the ground clearance!

neninja – Member
Last weekend our 2 boys stayed the night with my parents.

The next morning my mum told me about a conversation she’d had with Ben (7).

Ben – Granny is cock a rude word
Mum – Not really it’s just a silly word. It means a boy chicken.
Ben – Why would someone call other drivers a boy chicken?

Busted

This reminds me of a story from a mate…

Him and his wife packed their daughter – aged about four – into the car, they were running a bit late for wherever they were going, but it was somewhere the daughter was keen to go. Few minutes later they hit congestion, and came to a halt at the back of a long queue. The daughter threw her hands in the air in an exasperated gesture and said “I don’t f****** believe this”

It then got a bit awkward for my mate!

When me and the mrs bought our first house we had a bit of work to do digging out the massively over-grown rockery in the front garden. There were some rocks but mostly it had been built up with lumps of broken concrete that sort of resembled rocks. Having done three-quarters of the garden we had about 2 tons of it sitting on the drive. Would have cost loads to hire a skip, so I put it on ebay and even stated that I suspected most of it was concrete. Started at 1p or something, whatever the lowest starting bid is, as I just wanted someone to take it away so I didn’t have to hire that skip.

Went for £50 in the end. We were on holiday when the auction ended, but I emailed the winner and told him it was in a pile on the drive and to help himself. He rang as he was collecting, saying he’d noticed that the last quarter of the garden hadn’t been dug out yet, but looked to have more stone/concrete, could he have that too? I said yes and so he finished digging the garden for us while we were away and carted off all the rubble. And we were £50 up – bargain!

I just had a dose of food poisoning or some virus with similar symptoms, lost 6kg in a day and a half. That’s about 5% bodyweight per day! I figure it’s mostly fluid, as chojin said. The weight’s going back on slowly as I recover.

Return to Oz:

Reading/Counting Fail

I ended up with carbonating drops which have the sugar in for the bottle conditioning. Except I only added 1 instead of 2. At least it wont explode. Find out results in 4 days but have I screwed it?

If you’re doing a lager you may find it’s not as fizzy as commercial stuff, but should be perfectly drinkable anyway. For most ales one carbonation drop per 750ml bottle will be fine (probably better than two drops IMO, but depends on personal taste and all that).

I must have watched this several hundred times as a kid.

Probably. In a different situation with a similar end result, we’ve agreed a fair price for a house we want to buy, but will consider accepting an under-the-odds price (and less than we paid for it) for our current place, because we really want the new place. If we get it, we plan on staying there for many years, which plays a big part in the equation.

When I was a student sharing a house with a couple of mates, we decided one bonfire night – after a few beverages – to set fire to the old couch which was decorating the back garden. It started off ok, but wasn’t the roaring blaze we’d anticipated, even with the addition of a few bits of wood that were lying about.

So one friend went to his car and got the emergency petrol from his boot (his fuel gauge didn’t work so he kept some spare in case he ran out). We all (sensibly, somehow) chickened out of pouring it on straight from the red plastic can, so he decided to fill a coffee mug and throw/flick it onto the fire using that.

What followed was less ‘throw’ and more ‘pour’. The flames raced up the column of petrol between the couch and the mug, and lit the petrol still in the mug (most of the mug full). My mate stared at the mug, going ‘AAAAAAAARGH’. He then looked at us, and said ‘AAAAARGH’, we responded in a not dissimilar fashion, then he decided to get rid of the mug, which by now had a six-foot column of flame coming out of the top. This time, however, he managed to perfect the flick/throw which had previously eluded him. Straight at the house. Half of the side of the (rented) house was suddenly on fire… luckily it burned off within a few seconds, but for a second there we were wondering how we were going to explain this to the landlord…

I had a bell but found that vibrations from riding made it constantly give out a morse-code-style ringing noise. Faint but infinitely irritating. An Air Zound is what you’re after.

Carl Hiaasen – he’s written a series of books which are all one-offs, but are all set in the same area (Florida) and feature many of the same characters, often the main character in one will feature as a very minor character in another, so when you read a few you recognise the events of another book going on in the background.

They’re all crime/investigative type thrillers, although perhaps ‘thriller’ isn’t the right word, very much filled with cynical black humour though. The general background for the books is corrupt politicians/businessmen/rednecks causing environmental damage, and someone out to stop them.

Very, very funny books with a crime theme, highly recommended.

Some lego off the mother-in-law, a periodic table calendar off my son (7 weeks old, may have help from his mum), vouchers for the local home-brew shop, and a full kegging system for my brews… totally stoked :)

In the last week have watched:

Four Lions – odd, dark, tragic but funny.
Due Date – run-of-the-mill comedy gumf in the line of The Hangover but without the OTT shock factor. Forgettable, switch-your-brain-off comedy, good for a laugh.
The Adjustment Bureau – Inception lite. Interesting concept though, worth a watch.
Buried – excellent film, massive step up by Ryan Reynolds. Can’t say too much about why it was so good without giving away plot spoilers, but an excellent film.
Black Swan – Got this as the sixth in a 6 for $16 deal at the local DVD shop as a token chick flick for the wife, having got the four films above and one other I can’t even remember, such was its impact on me. Anyway, WOW! Totally blown away by this, it’s a seriously powerful film. Best I’ve seen in ages, really really dark but enthralling. Never would have thought I’d like it but this is the first film in years that has emotionally moved me. Highly recommended.