Reflections

Just a quick post today, as there are still lots of posts to catch up with, including the posts from our visit to my parents back in November! However, i though that i would post this up today, as we have been having a lot of windy weather recently. In amongst all this wind there have been a few quite days and as a result the loch has looked stunning, with almost glass like surface. Here are a few pictures i took the other day.

Hope you enjoyed them.

Winter weather

Were nearly at the Christmas Holidays again and we have been having some proper wintery weather up her lately. Its all disappeared now, which is a shame, would have been nice to have a proper white Christmas for once. Anyway, I though I would share a few picture that I took over the snowy period.

The Loch

The Broch

Our road

Down the Loch, can you see where the Loch is frozen?

Another view down the Loch

The main road

Stone circles and manmade caves

A little while ago, we took a short break south, down to the lakes, mostly due to the wife having a conference she had to attend. While we were there we went for a little walk near Penrith with the kids to go and see Long Meg and her Daughters. 

The stone circles

The day was spent while the bairns were at the grandparents up the road, so it was just me and the wife, a rare experience. The stone circle was beautify, sitting up on top of the hill, although the fact that it was dissected by a road and also in the middle of a cow field did make it an experience. Dodging cows and cars while trying to take pictures does make tings more interesting! Ok, so the cars were crawling along, but still!

While we were out and about we also took a trip down to Lacy's Caves and walked along the railway line. 

View along the river

View out one of the "door"

The caves were also fun and the history is mental! some bloke decides to dig some caves to entertain friends, oh and just to top it off, why not employ a hermit to live there? For the engineer in me, looking at the tool marks in the walls was fascinating. Now, the rock isn't the hardest to mine, being sandstone, but it must still have taken quite a while to dig it all out by hand. For the added bonus, the walk along the old railway/tram line is well worth it. There are numerous old structures that are good to explore, and plenty of railway paraphernalia dotted around, from old sleepers to sidings and what looked like a coaling station. For the railway enthusiast in me, it made the day even better. 

If your ever in the area, I'd recommend taking a trip to both.

oh and I will leave you with this;

A little bit of graffiti at the caves, Banksy wanna be?

Birthdays the adventurous way

Well, we have finished this years rounds of child birthdays, well, our child birthdays anyway, there are sure to be lots of other child birthdays to come! While the young ladies birthday was a fairly routine affair, hired a hall, invited a few people, played some games. Its quite good as the hall that we generally hire is also the location for one of the toddler groups I attend and as such you can use the toys. So toddler parties are nice and easy, generally its friendsnand family as well, so not loads of kids running riot. This year though, the little man was to old for toddler toys, which left us with the question of what to do.

In some respects, the little man solved this for us by having a definite idea of what he wanted, one that was actually achievable! The problem was, it was outside, in feb, in Scotland. Outside in feb, in Scotland really means only one thing, it means your getting wet. Lucky, where we live, people are pretty use to that fact, so we cracked on with the plan, headed up to the woodland of choice for the little man, donned out wet weather gear and got on with it. As predicted, two things happened; one, it rained and two, the kids barely noticed, us parents on the other hand, grumbled in the background.

However, as much fun as the kids were having, there is only so much that they will put up with, so we didn't spend too long it there. My lovely wife had put a lot of effort in to a treasure hunt for the kids, so we did that as planned, although slightly shortened to avoid the windy bit out of the trees at the start. Personally I love treasure hunts, they can be great fun, I've fond memories of various treasure hunts as a child, one we did as a family in the car around the country lanes of Kent. I even remember the car, a white ford escort, L reg I believe. I also remember it squeaked a lot, somewhere down the back seats and despite several trips to the garage, they never found the route of the problem. Anyway, I digress, treasure hunts. The one funny bit was the fact thatthe kids went barreling off in to the woods at the mention of a treasure hunt and one of the teams found one of the treasure chests, it could have been a bit of a disaster, as it makes the hunt a bit pointless when you know the final destination, but as it turned out it was the wrong chest and they ended up at the other one! Oh, and the minion blind bags went down well at the end (picked up for the barfing price of 6p each! Good old wifey)

After the adventure around the woods, we retired to a local hall, it was our alternative/backup plan if it was really bad, for food, drink and cake. It got a little crazy at times, a bunch of kids with far to much energy! The wife tried to run a few games, but they didn't go down across the board, some kids ( the little man included) were more interested I charging around everywhere! Oh well, as long as their enjoying themselves!

The cake was made by the wife, and was another brilliant success, it may not be as polished as some peoples, but the little man loved it and that's all that matters!

So all in all, another successful party I think, now I just have to think of what I'm going to do for the wife's!

Christmas travel.

So, living on an island strikes again and all carefully laid plans are obliterated in a blink of an eye. Ok, bit dramatic, it was more of a text and an internet search, but you get the picture. The plan for a nice little family Christmas on the Friday, before flying down to the inlaws turned in to a mad panic night of packing and a frantic dash around the house in the morning tiding and sorting. All because mother nature decided to throw this at us;

Yep, nice and windy. There are many superpowers in the world that you wouldn't want to mess with, but there's only one that you CAN'T mess with and that's mother nature.

Anyway, after an early morning phone call (0830) and a couple of hours of running around like headless chickens, we were all at the terminal, checked in by half eleven, ready for our half 12 flight. At 1315 we finally loaded on to the plane and after sitting in various locations around the airport, we took off at 1450. So just over an hour and a half sitting on a plane before the hour and a half flight! And then we had the 2 hour car journey from the airport to the inlaws! The kids were great though! We had a few tears when we thought we were heading back to the terminal, but we did a quick 180 back to the end of the run way and shot off in to the sky, a rather wobbly take off but the pilot was grabbing a drop in the wind (below 35 knots) to get us off! It wasn't quite the start to the holiday I was hoping for, but we made it, tired but in one piece.

All this has messed with the plans, as we had to abandon the Christmas at home, we'll have to do that when we get back. So that will be nice for the kids, as they will still get all their Christmas' just in a different order. It also means that all of the present to each other are at home, so nothing to give the wife on Christmas day itself, not even a card, as that's at home too!

Hopefully the journey back will be plain sailing compare to getting down and we'll all be able to enjoy the our last Christmas celebrations of the year.

Being a stay at home dad

I was at a friends wedding the other day, a thoroughly enjoyable affair and far to long in the making, 9 years to be precise.

As with these types of occasions, you end up talking to lots of people from all sorts of backgrounds and places. Our table, for example, had my wife and I, two friends from Boston, USA, a couple from Wales and another from Australia. There was a mix of ages too, with one couple being grandparents, one being parents to older children who had left home and a couple who had young twins (our American friends), so quite a mix on our table.

Now, our friends knew what I did and think its good, they even have a Manny, aka a male nanny, that looks after their twins. But the other older couples were surprised about it. There was lots of talk about changing times and "back in our day" lines, but generally they were positive about it. I think they weren't so positive to the fact that my wife said that she didn't think things would work the other way around and that she wouldn't want to be a stay at home mum.

But why? I know history would tell us that its tube women that raise the children, but these days, in our times of sexual equality and all the nonsense thatgoes with it, why shouldn't a man raise children. What is it that my wife can do that I can't? Or vice versa? Personally I think personality counts for more, ability is always going to be important but if you don't have the tempetment and personality for it,it will never work.

My wife is great with the kids, better than I am in some respects, but she's a go gutter type. She's driven to succeed, always pushing herself and her boundaries, something I don't think the routine of children would satisfy. Me, I'm happy plodding, I like the routine, knowing that each Monday I'll be doing x, and Tuesday y. Every week is the same, except school holidays, and that suits me, everyday is different for the wife and that suits her.

So, how to change perceptions and ideas? I doubt we ever will, at least not in my life time, as few want to. Plus were going against generations of nature. Did you know that one of the highest levels of divorce in the UK is amongst families with stay at home fathers? (That's percentage wise amongst total families with stay at home fathers) And most are iniated by the wives? Yet when things are the other way around the percentages are no different from average?

Personally I don't care for stereo types and averages, it works for us and that's what matters.

Mother Nature at her best

These pictures are from a few weeks ago, when I was down at the in-laws. There is a walk near by that runs along an old rail track and includes a few of the old bridges and tunnels and leads to the Costa I was relaxing in in the previous post.

It's a nice little walk away from everything or rather it was until the flooding and storms that happened over the winter! Now it's not quite so picturesque, although it still has a strange beauty to it, not to mention some pretty aweinspiring sights.

Above and below are two picture of one of the bridges that once stood on the track, the other bridge is further along and is blocked off as you have to either cross an unsafe bridge or pass through an unsafe tunnel, both of which I don't really fancy doing. Ten years ago I would have given it a second thought and I would no doubt have some pretty cool pictures to show for it, but today I'm not nearly as brave or reckless, plus I'd have to explain it all to the wife and that wouldn't be fun. Anyway, as you can see the bridge is totalled and they weren't some flimsy things either but proper Victorian heavy engineered jobs from when the railway line was first laid.

It would have taken a high amount of force to move the bridge like that and the other bridge was removed entirely from its abutment. Yes, there was a lot of debris in the water, including a couple of caravans from one of the holiday parks! And further along just out of view from where these pictures were taken there was a land slide of significant size.

These are fence posts, believe it or not. You can see about the top 6 inches on some of  them but the several feet of fence underneath has disappeared. The grey area in the picture has all been filled in with debris from the flooding and is only a small part of what can be seen.

There is also a road that runs higher up the hill, which now shows some classic signs of land slip, I really should have taken some pictures as they were amazing to see. It reminded me so much of my school days and the crappy examples they always use to show, maybe next time I'm there I'll take some pictures and send them in to my old school teachers.

You have to admire mother nature though, sure she causes all sorts of problems for us, floods, snow storms, strong winds, the list is endless but there is very little else out there with such brute force and mastery of all it touches.