I bought Georgina a copy of Fallout 3 this morning and then took the kids to The Engine House at the Severn Valley Railway this afternoon, whilst she played her game. We enjoyed ourselves as there were few people there, so I didn’t have to worry about how noisy the kids were :)
I ordered some DS cases from Game‘s website and they arrived yesterday. When we got one out, they were much to big and very generic, so they had to go back. Fortunately, Game have a sane returns policy, so I was able to take them back the branch in Birmingham and get a refund. Whilst I was there I checked out the cases they had in stock and found a much smaller one that was more suitable. It was even in the sale, so I saved money :)
This is a photo of the man who holds the Subway sign. He’s always on the phone!
Today both kids managed to be rude to their mother and I shouted. The day didn’t improve at work where I managed to be very unproductive all day and didn’t get half the stuff done that I wanted to. To cap it off, it rained all the time during my walk around Birmingham at lunchtime.
Hopefully tomorrow will go better.
As a result of the rain, today’s photo was taken indoors with my new flash and I quite like it, even if I did have to take 73 pictures to get this one!
I managed a brisk walk to the centre of Birmingham and back today at lunchtime. Whilst in town, I returned some clothes that I had bought Georgina. Turns out that I’m not that good at choosing clothes for her :)
I also discovered a statue of Nelson near the Bullring!
It snowed! Not a lot, but nice to see snow in January rather than April like last year. Today was a work day, so I was in Birmingham. We spent the day writing a client for a web service. The main thing we learnt is that “interoperable” doesn’t means “just works”.
It’s cold.
It’s very cold.
It’s so cold that the ice on the car didn’t melt all day.
We stayed in and took the Christmas decorations down.
The first half of today was taken up with the start of the “clearing out the garage” project. I did fairly well and removed a car’s worth of stuff to the tip. I also put 5 items up on Freecyle to give them new homes rather than put them in landfill. One of the items is Georgina’s old Biorb aquarium and we had a little confusion with the first person who wanted it as they only wanted the air pump for their current aquarium, but it’s the wrong type. Hopefully a few people will turn up tomorrow and collect.
In the afternoon, Scott and Megan visited us. The boys got over-excited as usual! Scott in particular was a champ this visit and played hide and seek with them for a good while. Jon and Ben also shown them their new DSs, played new board games and we also got out the marble run which was great fun. I took lots of photos with my new flash too :)
Today was the first day back at work and we all worked from home. Of course, as a result, we couldn’t access our job control system which is served from the office as the ADSL router at the office crashed. Nevertheless, a fair amount of work was done, even if it wasn’t the most productive of days.
We’ve had a relaxing day at home as it’s so cold that we wimped out of going to the zoo. Instead we went out for a meal at the Three Pears and it was excellent. I do like how well they treat children there and the food is good too.
In the afternoon we played on the Wii and Jon and Ben have been enjoying their new DSs too. I also managed to get up the Christmas photos.
To finish off the year, I thought a quick summary was in order.
We started the year with a trip to the zoo. I attempted to get a photo of a waterfall with that blurry water you see the good photographers do.
The highlight of February was talking at the UK PHP Conference in London.
A quiet month with most weekends doing something with the family. We went for a walk by the river Severn one weekend. There are many swans.
April saw a very nice PHPWM meet-up at a pub that served pies as well as pints. It also snowed.
May is the month of birthdays in our household as both the boys and myself celebrate. It also marks the start of the camping season for us.
After May, June was a quiet month. Prince Charles took a ride on the Severn Valley Railway though, which I enjoyed photographing.
July saw sports day for our eldest son and a week’s holiday camping in Norfolk towards the end of the month. I believe that that week in July was the only hot week we had all year.
We went away for our second week’s camping and visited Legoland. The kids loved it.
A busy month with our youngest starting school. Also, I went to ZendCon!
We started the move to Birmingham for the company with two members of staff there. The Wispa also returned to the shops.
The highlight of November was speaking at the inaugural PHPNW conference.
The last month of the year saw both kids in school plays and most importantly, my book about Zend Framework was published!
Here’s to 2009!