The short version:-

I’ve sort of broke my foot.

sergiok @ Flickr

The long version:-

On friday night I stood on one of the kids wooden building blocks. I didn’t think much of it at the time as I basically went straight to bed afterwards but when I woke up the next morning it was a wee bit nippy. As the day wore on it gradually got sorer and sorer and about the only time I wasn’t in pain was when I was lying/sitting down or when I was standing still. Any movement in the food just caused me to wince in pain and hobble about. I thought it was a sprain or bruised tendon or something so I wasn’t that worried by it.

By the time Saturday night came along I managed to hobble from the carpark right outside Tesco at Silverburn to Wagamama but I could feel something grinding inside my foot. It wasn’t sore as such but it is the strangest feeling. Imagine two slightly deflated balloons or two blocks of polystyrene rubbing together. That’s the feeling inside my foot. It’s weird. I basically decided that unless it was greatly improved on Sunday morning I was going to head to the hospital to get it checked out. I managed to get Vonnie’s anniversary present before I couldn’t walk anymore which was a bonus but I must have spent about three and a half hours in A&E getting my foot seen to. I felt a bit of a fraud as the boy in front of me came in with a broken ankle and the girl behind me with a broken leg. The fact I could hobble from the exam room to the X-Ray room had me convinced there was nothing wrong. Vonnie turned up not long after I’d been X-Rayed and it turns out I’ve got a stress fracture of my fourth metatarsal or something like that. I’ve to go to see an orthopaedic doctor at 8.30am.

Considering I’m watching the Superbowl at the moment and it’s after midnight already I’m going to be in hell when I wake up.

Tags: broken, foot, health, xray

I’m a little late in day for this what with it being nearly the end of January. My excuse is that before the new year my camera died and the new one only turned up a few days before the bells rang. I didn’t have the time or the patience at that point to think about where I wanted to go with it this year never mind learn a new camera. So hear goes nothing.

Blatently nicked from Mostly Lisa

1. I will learn how to use my camera.

I never got my head around the 300D so I figure now that I’ve actually got a *new* camera rather than a very well used second hand I should actually learn how to use it. I should probably find the manual if I’m going to do that though…

2. I will not use the Auto setting on my camera.

It’s something I never used on the 300D. I don’t know why but I started with Aperture Priorty mode I never really moved it out of there. I never had the manual for the 300D so never worked out what most of the buttons did so I only ever tweaked the ISO, aperture and shutter speed. I know that’s the big three but that’s as far as I went. With the 500D it’s far easier to change the other settings and it scared me enough on occasion when I had to get a photo just right to throw it on to auto and hope for the best. I need to stop that.

3. I will not use on-camera flash

I hate how photos using the on-camera flash coome out. The only time I ever use it I’m either bouncing it of a bit of white card to get a little more light on the subject or when I forget my wife had used it on auto right before I pick it up.

I got my 50mm f1.8 so that I wouldn’t need to use the flash as much until such times as I can afford a decent flash unit. It’s working out quite well

4. I will not be hindered by the gear I do not have.

I’m fed up moaning that my tele is very soft at the extremes or that my kit lens is a plastic piece of crap. They all take great photos if used right. I could really do with a decent set of lamps for my light tent thingie though.

5. I will shoot in RAW

The processing speed of the 300D meant that it took an absolute age to take photos in RAW. If I was taking shots of the kids I’ll always fire a burst off and use whatever ones are in focus and look good. I felt with RAW I’d get maybe 3-4 photos in the same time I’d get 8-9 on jpeg format. The 500D is much faster though. I actually feel that it deals with them faster than the 300D dealt with jpegs. From now on when I’m taking photos that matter rather than whimsical family shots in the park I’ll start using Raw.

6. I will learn how to process my shots

I can use Lightroom and I can use Photoshop. I just don’t have the time to sit through 120 photos and working on each one individually. I need to learn ways of speeding up my work flow and actually doing more than messing with the contrast and saturation without devoting an entire afternoon to Photoshopping one photo.

7. I will share my photos with others on the web

Most of my photos end up as friends only on Flickr. I’m working on getting the balls to widen that net for the decent shots.

8. I will accept critiques of my work.

To be honest 7, 8 and 10 all roll into one for me. I joined the DPS forums a while ago but over time stopped visiting and being part of the community. Part of that community gives critiques of work if you want it. Although I’ve started going back there and sharing some of my shots I’m not asked for advice or thoughts on any of my work. That’s going to change.

9. I will set goals and be proactive about my photography career

I’m not looking at photography as a future job. It’s a hobby that will hopefully help me with my job but it won’t actually be my job. I have standards to keep to in the coming months and I need to get my finger out to attain them. It’s been a good while since I used my camera for anything more that photographing the kids so that is my first one. Getting the skills I already have back into shape and honing the skills that I will need the most over the coming months.

10. I will connect with other photographers

Going back to the previous answers. The DPS forums are a good start for me and I know of a few local photographers that are always up for helping out with technical questions. These will be the base from which I learn from and all that flowery nonsense. We’ll build from the once I’m more comfortable with my camera and skills.

So that’s that. It’s not a tough list but one that is going to mean a lot of work none the less. Time to get my finger out!

Tags: camera, Digital Photography School, DPS, Photography

The postman knows us very well. There isn’t a week goes by where we don’t get a package of some sorts. It’s got to the stage where he knows we’ll be about so holds on to packages for use if he misses us while we’re on the nursery/food/chicken feed run and swings by later to pass them in. Every single package is for Vonnie. The stuff inside might be for the kids but it’s always addressed to Vonnie. Then last week a box arrived addressed to myself…

Turn back time to just over a month ago. I’m sitting at my desk at work trying desperately to do as little as possible whilst still looking busy (for all prospective employers out there…read back through my journal as there is a reason for it ;)) I stumbled upon a competition being run by the Scottish Book Trust. All you had to do was complete the titles of a few books and give their authors and you could win a few books. Easy. So over lunch I completed my entry and then completely forgot all about it. That was until the other week when I received an email saying I’d won the competition. With it being kids books it was a nice win but my limit of good luck never stretched to more than a few quids worth of prizes.

Now we’ve had a few freebies from them in the past. One of the things they do is to reach out to every child in Scotland and at various times of their give them a bundle of books to help encourage the love of reading. So needless to say with having four kids we’ve seen our fair share of Bookstart books come through the door.

What arrived was a little more than a few free books however.

Rory and his Magic Castle by Andrew Wolffe
Yo-Ho-Ho A-Pirating We’ll Go by Kaye Umansky
Stella to Earth by Simon Puttock
Mungo and the Picture Book Pirates by Timothy Knapman
Captain Flinn and the Pirate Dinosaurs by Giles Andreae
The Octonauts & the Sea of Shade by Meomi
Chick by Ed Vere
Paddington : King of the Castle by Michael Bond
Love From Louisa by Simon Puttock
Call Me Gorgeous by Giles Milton
I Love Holidays by Anna Walker
Red Rockets and Rainbow Jelly by Sue Heap and Nick Sharratt
Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy by Lynley Dodd
The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle

To buy all that in the shops your looking at around £60 and Nairn’s already demanding to have the dinosaur pirates one read to him at night. We already own a copy of The Very Hungry Caterpiller just like every household with children in the UK but I think we’re on to our 5th copy and that is on it’s last legs. My favourite off them all must be Chick though. With us keeping chickens it’s a great wee book for the kids but Nairn was the only one of the younger kids to go through the hatching of our chicks and be able to remember it. If we don’t hatch this year then it will be perfect for the girls to get a better look at how our chickens live.

So needless to say I’m very pleased with the prize and so are the kids. Now all I need to do is buy them another bookshelf to fit their new books on!

So hows things with us other than winning books? We’re getting there. Greer is loaded with the cold and seems to be teething so we’ve been up a fair bit of the last two nights. Vonnie says my eyes look like pinholes which is a nice look. With Nairn we’ve got the whole speech therapy thing going on as well as trying to work out whether it’s in his best interest to go to school a year early or not as well as working out just what school we should be sending to him. Erica’s speech is confusing me. She still has her own wee language almost as her pronunciations aren’t great but in the last few days her fluency has shot through the roof. Findlay? He’s in his own wee work with his laptop these days. If he’s not playing on Club Penguin he’s round at his friends houses.

Today all the kids are at nursery so although I had plans to use that fact to get started on decorating the girls room it’s looking like a quiet day with tea and a sofa to snooze on. This isn’t a bad thing.

Tags: books, competiton, kids, Scottish Books Trust

Just realised I haven’t blogged about my jaunt up Ben Lomond last year. Well I did but a couple of short paragraphs doesn’t really cover it. It was a crazy day after all.

It started with the seven of us planning the trip and gradually realising the weather was going to possibly scupper all our plans. Alex ended up pulling out due to a case of the lurgy and one of Willie’s mates gave up as well. In all honesty we possibly should have as well with hind sight.

I guess the first sign that the day wasn’t going to go we the way we planned appeared when we started driving up the east bank of Loch Lomond. Forget the rain we encountered on the way up there. It was definitely the fallen trees on the road that gave the biggest hint.

The rain held off as we got our gear together but thanks to a few errors in the layout of the roads and land *cough* I couldn’t read my map */cough* it took us five minutes which included a walk up a forest road that went nowhere near the summit before we realised we had to head back to the car park to find the real path.

The initial going was good. The weather was a bit crap though. One minute it rained the next it stopped but the wind just didn’t let up. We would get completely soaked by the rain and then by the time it stopped and started again we would have been blown dry. As we started to reach about a third of the way up we really started to struggle with the wind. It gets a little steep at this point and as the hillside is completely exposed once you get pass the tree line at the beginning it started to take it’s toll. Mark decided he just couldn’t go any further. I don’t know if it was the wind or just his body telling him that despite the energy drinks he was stupid to go any further but he was the first to head back and with hindsight I think that’s when we all should have turned back.

The wind didn’t let up at all throughout the climb and in fact just got worse. I read the weather reports when we got back and for most of the climb the wind was gusting at up to 50 miles per hour. Dave and Stoo were determined to at least make it to the half way point which to there credit they did. There is a well about halfway up on the map which they made it passed before they turned back. I don’t know why but I stood for a few minutes shouting to Dave to make sure he knew what to do if something was to happen to them on the way down. I guess it was because although we all had radios with us the mobile phone reception up there is sporadic at best and almost all the survival and first aid gear was either in my own bag or Willie’s ruck sack.

So we pressed on. At times the wind would just hit us constantly for a few minutes and we’d just stand there leaning into it hoping for it to let up long enough for us to walk another couple of hundred yards before the next gust. It was round about this point that we started to meet a few other climbers as they caught up with us. We’d only seen one other person on the hill up until then and he had shot ahead with his dog and you could see his outline as he made a break for the summit. They all seemed nuts if truth be told. We stopped for a quick rest just as it starts to get really steep and rocky just before you turn back around and start the last leg up to the summit. Willie stopped for a breather and I carried on to see how far I could get before I stopped for a bite to eat to let him catch up.

That’s when I bumped into they guy with the dog again. He was on his way back down after reaching the summit and said it was insane up there. As I found out later it was gusting at up to 90 miles an hour up there. He waited until the wind died down before running between rocks and then holding on until the wind died down again. He almost lost his dog three times thanks to the wind apparently. I pushed on and got to within what I thought at the time was about 400 yards from the summit but after looking again at the map it was probably twice that I turned back. It was just stupid to carry on. I took my last picture looking out over the lochs behind the mountain and the camera’s battery died. It’s was definitely a sign.

It turned out Willie had actually decided just to wait where he had stopped hoping that I’d turn back as well. I eventually made it back down to him and just like when I climbed Ben Nevis there was a spring in my step on the way back down. Where we struggled to walk up the damn hill we were almost running down the thing. The worst bit was still to come however.

When we reached the bottom we found out that the hotel was without power. A tree had been blown over and took out both the power and phone lines. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem except all the way back down the hill all we could think about was a nice warm meal and a pint of beer. The kitchen was shut and the beer pumps wouldn’t work without power. We were stuck with warm bottled beer or cans of soft drinks and a scone.

We will be back to do it again when the weather gets better and there are plans afoot to hit The Cobbler in March in preparation. Fingers crossed the weather works out for us next time!

Tags: Ben Lomond, Dave Hogg, hills, Mark, outdoors, rain, Scotland, Stoo, walking, weather, Willie, wind

Today marks another step on the long road towards being our own bosses. The first lease application was sent off today.

I’d like to say it was a joint effort but Vonnie did all the hard work and I signed at the crosses and took it to the Post Office to be sent off on it’s way. So where does that leave us now? Well it still has to be accepted so we’ve got that uncertainty to deal with but we’re moving on regardless. A few pieces of furniture and bit’s and bob’s for the shop have already started being delivered. In most cases it would be silly to get things like furniture bought and delivered before we have premises but in this case they fold flat and to behonest without knowing when we’ll get a place and a move in date and being on a strict budget we have to take advantage of the sales when they are on.

Things are starting to move

Tags: business, lease

The past few days have been hellishly hard work. At the beginning of the week Vonnie went to see the doctor who told her among other things she had a viral ear infection which was causing her headaches and sore throats. On Wednesday night Vonnie had trouble breathing and collapsed meaning she ended up with the paramedics out and a trip to A&E in the back of an ambulance. It turns out she has a really bad case of tonsillitis and has been put on a pile of drugs to get her better.

This morning we woke up and for the first time in about a week Vonnie actually felt positive about the day and was able to get up and not be in that much pain. Our respective parents were popping in to see the kids so we planned a relatively quiet day once we’d tidied the living room up a bit. Then the parents arrived and our son turned from a happy wee boy into this.

He’s excitable. He’s noisey. He won’t do a damn thing he’s told. And that’s before he even gets anywhere near the sweets. Even when he’s not fighting for his grandparents attention he is loud without an off switch. He talks to himself or when he’s alone he’ll just whitter random noises but there certainly isn’t an off switch. He becomes that hard work that Vonnie was completely and utterly shattered by the time our parents left to go home and it’s been a constant battle with him for the rest of the evening.

His speech therapy assessment went really well. Apparently problem cases are flagged if they have something like more than three percent of their normal chat being effected by stutters, stammers or repetition. I think Nairn comes in at just over two percent so they don’t see it as a major problem but he’s to go back in five months for a check. He’s got so many things going on that check of boxes for autism, ADHD and dyslexia that I don’t know if it’s just my parental desire for there to be nothing wrong that makes me think it’s just a kid thing. From getting my own ‘diagnosis’ with regards to dyslexia last year I know that if any of them do turn out to be a problem for him none of them are severe enough to really cause him much bother but it would allow us to target those problems to help him and ourselves.

I guess time will tell.

Tags: ADHD, autism, dyslexia, Nairn, tonsilitis, Vonnie

It’s bad when you single out just one of your kids for any sort of praise without giving something to the others as well. The thing is that Greer is such a fantastically good natured baby that it’s impossible not to. Every day we’re grateful for having her. I said at the time that she completes the family and she does.

She wakes in the morning with a smile on her face. She’ll laugh and giggle to herself all day. She always has a smile for everyone and unless she’s completely beat will almost never cry never mind scream the house down. She eats whatever we give her and loves her brothers and sister.

We’re heading for a big fall. We already know the middle two are going to be a handful when they hit their teenage years but we just know that there’s no way our luck can continue all through Greer’s childhood. She’s going to be one evil teenager!

Tags: Greer

I’ve spent countless hours hunting for a bit of blogging software that could pull photos from my Flickr account and put them into a page that looks good. Most of the software I’ve tried in the past has meant re-uploading the photos again to my own server and having to code my own exif retreaver. This really annoyed me.

Recently though I found Flogr. It’s everything I ever wanted in photoblogging software. It even links in with Flickr’s commenting system to display those as well as the correct exif data, photo titles and descriptions. All I need to do is throw a photo in to a set put aside for my photoblog and it is automatically picked up by the software. I love it!

Just before Christmas my beloved 300D died. The autofocus sub assembly broke causing every photo I took to have the bottom two thirds blanked out. Thanks to Santa however a replacement was found in the shape of a 500D. It’s great but I’m having to relearn a lot of post processing work as I was used to the results that the 300D gave me straight from the camera. Photos are very soft and in dire need of sharpening and slight colour correction once they get thrown into Lightroom. The results are great however.

Still trying to work on the white balance settings on the 500D but it makes for some nice photos of the family.

The cats seemed to like the snow at first but Horatio seems to live on the top of the fence now.

Tags: camera, photoblog, photos

Everyone has been looking back over the last decade and wondering where it went or if they’ve learned anything from their experiences or even just looking back at times they enjoyed. I usually try and miss out that part of the start of a new decade. I can’t help but look back and see a completely different person than the one that stands before you now though.

Mr Magoo ICU @ Flickr

On the eve of 2000 we gathered together in a friends flat to see in the ‘millenium’. We’d went into Glasgow the year before and in all honesty that ended in a huge mess. It started with oak-aged tequila chasers for my beer and ended with being chucked out of the Lime Club because they didn’t want someone who was literally green around the gills wandering around the club like a time bomb. This time we tried to be a little bit more grown up. I was with my friends from work and out extended group of friends from Newton Mairns. Everyone bar four of us were there with girlfriends/boyfriends and so the single crowd spent most of the night in the kitchen trying to work out how to shotgun the mini kegs of beer Paul and Furry had brought along. We toasted the bells and then found a way to get really really drunk. The next five years was spent in much the same manner.

During the last 10 years I’ve made many good friends and enjoyed a social life that if you were to ask my in 2000 would I ever have I would have laughed. It got to the stage where I could head into Glasgow by myself on a Friday or Saturday night and be guaranteed to find a bunch of friends already out and about and have a great night. But I’ve changed. I don’t need that social side anymore. It’s the same with the drinking that goes along with it.

Five years ago I wore long shorts or combat trousers with my wallet chains hanging down and band teeshirts in every colour and genre. These days your lucky to see me with a classic band tee on and far more likely to see me wearing a ‘dad’ jumper. I feel like Jeremy Clarkson with my selection of jeans but I’m happier than ever. I don’t know whether thats all down to my family, my wife or my life in general but it’s true. I certainly never seen myself where I am now when I was looking ahead that hogmany in 1999. I certainly envisaged far more jetpacks and rocket cars at any rate.

Every so often I bump into some of the folk from that night 10 years ago and they look like they’ve grown older. They aren’t old by any means but you can tell they’ve lived through these last ten years. When I look at myself in the mirror, if you forgive the beard, I still see that 23 year old staring back. It sometimes shocks me to see folk I’ve known years ago only to see again. I bumped into my friend from primary school the other night at the local shops and since I last seen him we’ve lived horrendously different lives. He’s had problems with drink for years and actually looks about 60 years old and has lost most of his teeth. I’m really glad my life has turned out the way it has and I’m ecstatic that I still feel so young but when I bumped into him all I could think about was how I could never be in his shoes and that troubles me. Not that I’d want to live his life and his troubles but that I think that if I had to deal with everything he has then my body and brain just wouldn’t function. They’d shut up shop in protest at having to deal with everything. The one thing I don’t think I have is resilience. Not emotionally anyway.

It’s something I’m going to have to learn fast though.

Tags: aging, life, millenium, reflection

For the last three or four years we have been aiming high with our lives and getting nowhere with it. Neither my wife nor I are or were doing the work that we want to be doing. We aren’t living where we want to be living. We aren’t existing as we want to exist.

It’s easy to say we are fed up working for ‘the man’. We want to do work that we’ll love. We want to live in a place where we can open the back door and let the kids run wild in acres of land without worrying about them. We want that hippy ideal of being happy and making the world a better place for us being there. We’ve looked into emigrating and into moving into the countryside.  It’s why I wanted to go to the Agricultural College. Vonnie worked hard when she was at Who Cares Scotland and had the chance to apply for a fantastic post up in Inverness which would have meant moving the entire family up there. We barely took a second to think it over before jumping at the chance.

toucanmacaw @ Flickr

We keep our own chickens to not only give us eggs for our occasional fry ups and cakes but to teach our kids about the cycle of life. We try to grow our own vegetables because we’re very concious about the impact carbon emissions have on the planet. We stand up for the causes we believe in and try to help others understand why we believe in what we do.

But we are struggling to get to where we want to be.

We’ve been trying to get our ’shop’ set up for more than a year now. By we I of course mean Vonnie by the way. The thing is in order for me to get behind all this I had to take that step of redundancy. I need to believe that we can do this but i needed to take that jump. You cannot gain anything without there being the chance of losing something. It’s a mind set change. We’ve played about with this for years but now it’s time to get stuck in and get us to where we want to be.

I’ve got a lot to get my head round and learn in a short period of time. First off tomorrow is to find a good driving instructor that can give me some intensive lessons. Then it’s coffee with a friend and hopefully getting some work done around the house to make working form home until the premises are signed for a lot easier.

Tags: devotion, hippy, imigration, redundancy, shop