Originally published at The Apochrypha. Please leave any comments there.

I’m starting to get pissed off with my keyboards getting destroyed by juice getting spilled on them. It’s not just keyboards though 2 out of my last 3 phones we’re killed that way as well. In order for me to type anything I need to load up a bookmarked page and copy and paste the letters one at a time to where I need them. Hawd the bus. Is there not a virtual keyboard as part of Windows disability software…hmmm.

In other news Kirsty and Mo got me this teeshirt for my birthday.

I’ll be wearing that one to work tomorrow then
Thanks guys

This lack of sleep thing is really starting to wear me down. Erica’s just got over her illnesses so her sleeping patterns starting to return but she’s currently at the stage where she’s sleeping almost all the way through the night so when I get up at 4.30-5am with her I don’t get back to sleep. It catches up with you eventually.

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Originally published at The Apochrypha. Please leave any comments there.

So I started my new job on Monday. All those times I’ve joked about having nothing to do sometimes have came back to bite me in the ass. I don’t think I’ve had two seconds to think never mind do anything else.

So far its been good but the payroll systems are confusing me the more I learn about them. It was fine until I started learning about tax and NI as well as paying organising the payment of the monthly tax and NI payover. My brain hurts just thinking about the money we spend!

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Originally published at The Apochrypha. Please leave any comments there.

We were in our neighbors house after their daughters birthday party and when it came time for teh babies to go to bed I took them next door and got them settled. The house was freezing and I sat and watched the season finale of Torchwood. I remember seeing the end of it the next thing I remember is waking up curled up on the living room floor with my jacket on by about half past nine. I think I went straight to bed after that. Erica still hadn’t settled by then I do remember that as shes coughing and coughing but unable to clear the flem every time

Back to Torchwood though. It was good, don’t get me wrong, but there were so many small things that just didn’t fit with the scale of the episode. Half of Cardiff blew up and the cops went around doors telling everyone it would be alright. And it worked. WTF? I could write something more convincing and I can’t write to save myself!

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Originally published at The Apochrypha. Please leave any comments there.

I know you guys don’t really want to read about my chicken fancying or my instructions on how to make a pair of boxer shorts out of 6 Tesco carrier bags so I’m putting them on another blog. If your unlucky I might post every so often about them on here though. :p

photo credit: mucow

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Most of you will read Vonnie’s blog but I’ll put a quick update on here for those that don’t.

Erica’s not been well for going on 2 months now. She keeps picking bugs from whatever nursery she’s been at or just at random and never quite getting rid of them. Because of the problems she has with her tummy shes on medication to stop her being sick but despite all that these last week or two it’s not been working. We phoned NHS 24 as I mentioned here and we had been to the doctors the week before. Nothing was changing.

On Monday Vonnie received a phonecall from the nursery to say that Erica had conjunctivitis and could she come and get her.Despite car troubles she made it back to EK to pick her up only for Erica to be sick all overthe Arnold Clark repair office and then blow out two nappies in the space of 10 minutes. Straight to the doctors with her to see the health visitor and then a doctor before being sent straight to Wishaw Hospital. We eventually seen a doctor at around 10pm but we didn’t make it home until midnight thanks to having to wait and see if Erica would keep the medicine and milk we gave her down.

The list of illnesses she had was pretty long if we didn’t include the latest problems. Conjunctivitis , ear infection, sinus infection, upper respiratory infection and a urine infection amongst others. The docs also thought it may have been all this that was causing the tummy upsets as it might have made her lactose intolorent but we wouldn’t know until the test results came back. Turns out she also has the Rotovirus thats been kicking about and shes basically on water until it clears

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Originally published at The Apochrypha. Please leave any comments there.

Happy birthday to me

Happy birthday to me
Happy birthday dear Bob
Happy birthday to me!

Hip Hip Hooray!
*blows rasberry*

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Originally published at The Apochrypha. Please leave any comments there.

I just don’t know what to do with myself…*whistles bad tune*

I’ve had plenty of time to sit on my PC and update my blogs over teh weekend but the only real time I sat in front of PC was last night when I finished off a load of work that needed done for the relaunch today.

We went for dinner at a friends house on Saturday night for their birthday but with 5 kids running around it was slightly hectic. Vonnie went off to Eileens birthday party after that and left me to watch the kids as they slept. I woke up with my face in my keyboard at about 10pm so I went straight to bed. I still have no idea what time I actually fell asleep at.

Yesterday we watched a lot of Jericho so Vonnie is now almost up to speed with the episodes I’ve watched although the last few I can’t remember due to watching them in 5 minute sections whilst feeding the babies their breakfast at 5am.

Today I’m just meh.

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Due to a bad run of weather at the tail end of last week we unfortunately didn’t manage to get the chicken run built but we did manage to finish off sealing/painting the coop before the birds turned up. Our garden is fully enclosed so finishing the run wasn’t that important but it does need finished before my wife returns to work this week so you can guess what my plans are for this evening!

On Saturday we drove out to a local village to meet someone that my wife had met on the Practical Poultry forums. After having a look around his garden and his setup I think my wife was insanely jealous but we came away with our two birds as well as a good few eggs for our incubator. Since then I have been trying to fit in building the run with the help of #2 and trying to fit in some quality time with the rest of the family.

Since the day we moved in to our house we have neglected the garden. Apart from starting off the compost heap and cutting the hedges our work on the garden has been limited to trying to kill off the weeds on the patio and digging up the trees that ran along one wall of the garden. We had not managed to get rid of the cut up trees and bushes though and they’ve been kept since last year in the corner that we want to build the chicken run in.

So far I’ve managed to get a basic frame up which will let us get the wire mesh on tonight after a little bit of strengthening and once we’ve sourced the roofing we’ll get that on at a later date.

I’m not a carpenter as this picture will testify but hopefully it will do the job until we want to improve/update the run in a few years time.

So far from this project we’ve had questions from the kids on genetics, carpentry and sex. I think we’ve managed to answer everything we’ve been asked but some of the questions completely threw me at first! How do you sex baby chicks? How are eggs made? Why do only some of them hatch? Why is that bit of the run bent? I think we’ve came to understand that #1 knows everything there is to know about (as far as a 6 year old knows) about where eggs come from now and what makes a boy chicken and what makes a girl chicken. I’ve also came to understand that #2 isn’t as destructive as we think he is. I’ve never met a child that has the same effect on a room as a hurricane will have on campsite but in the hours that he was helping me his destructive streak turned into creative building session. When I hammered in the nails he spent the next 5 minutes hammering non-existent nails into the wood and checking that it was sturdy. You might think that it was just a son copying his father but he then spent the next 15 minutes building up the track for a wee plastic toy town we keep in our shed. He never does that. He usually plays with the cars and throws everything about instead.

Originally published at The Apochrypha. Please leave any comments there.

We phoned them over 3 hours ago about Erica. Shes been ill all week and every time we take her to the out of hours doc at the hospital with the same thing they tell us to keep an eye on her and just feed her water/juice for a few days until food/milk will stay down. Thats been a week now shes been like this and they still haven’t phoned back.

I appreciate it Easter Sunday but thats just taking the piss!

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Originally published at The Apochrypha. Please leave any comments there.

I want to say I don’t know whats up with me but I do.

These last two months have been hell in a basket. Every morning, and I do mean every morning, the babies have been up at some point between 04.30 and 06.00 every morning. It wasn’t so bad in the dead of winter because from 05.00 onwards it was still dark outside so I could get the babies back to sleep for a bit and if I was lucky get another hour myself. These days though once they are up they are up and I haven’t a hope in hell of getting back to sleep. It’s gotten to the stage that if I’m not in bed and asleep by 21.30 my vision goes and I’m a mess. In these last two months I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been awake after 10pm.

I was out on Thursday night for a works night out, all paid for, at the Casino in Glasgow. I hate those places with a passion but it was a free meal so I went along. The starter was served at 20.30 and I was falling asleep in my main course.

Last night once we had managed to get the kids asleep before we turned in Vonnie kindly put some toys that Nairn loves on his bed in the hope that he’d wake up and play quietly with them as he sometimes does. No such luck. At 05.34 he woke up and promptly started singing loud enough to wake me up. If it’s loud enough to wake me up it sure as hell will wake Erica up which it did. It was almost broad daylight outside so I didn’t have a hope in hell! When I told Nairn to go back to sleep as I gave Erica a bottle downstairs he would climb back in bed and curl up only to jump out of bed the moment I disappeared. when I went back upstairs each time you could hear him scurry back into bed and pretend to sleep before I reached his door.

Not amused.

In other news we got these yesterday from one Dave Brown’s old work colleague. Meet Bunty and Mac.

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