Garrulous Geek

Finally... I've managed to get at the draft post I prepared, writing about Beth's birthday... Here you go:

It was baby Beth's first birthday last month. It was good fun. We opened presents:

She got some Duplo, a cuddly rabbit, a sandpit, a little toy thing to play with in the bath, some money... and other bits and bobs.

We went and fed the ducks and geese at the nature reserve in the morning, which was fun, except the geese were proper fierce and kept pecking and nipping us. I had to put Beth on my shoulders to stop them eating her little toes, mischievous beasties that they are.

In the afternoon we went into Manchester and went on the big ferris wheel thing that they have there at the moment. It was a bit scary as it goes up really high, not that it phased Beth in the least! Here's some photos:

After we'd been on the big wheel we went to Cafe Rouge for supper. We had a good time and enjoyed the meal. Beth had a pretty good time too. Here she is eating:

Alison had made a carrot cake so we took a slice along with a candle and had that at the restaurant too. Here's some pictures, including a group picture as taken by the very helpful waiter:

So, Beth had a good birthday. Hurray!

I've cut my dosage of painkillers by half. The pain I'm feeling gives me a good idea of why they gave me a high dosage to begin with. The warning of "severe pain" was not unwarranted. I'm trying to put up with a bit of pain, as the codeine I've been taking was thoroughly doping me, and I wasn't much good for anything. So, it's a balance of pain and coherence at the moment. It's not very much fun, but there you go. I'd rather suffer a bit than be completely and utterly dazed.

I've not been up to much really, as one might expect. I've been sleeping a lot, even during the day which is very unusual for me. It's not been terribly satisfying sleep though. I can't eat much either, so that's quite rubbish. It's pretty much soup or soup, though Alison did make a very nice vegetable curry yesterday that I was able to eat.

I'm supposed to be going to London on training next week, assuming I'm well enough. I'll have to see how I'm doing on Sunday I guess.

As I have mentioned several times before, I have had a little cyst in my mouth for a while. Well, not strictly in my mouth - technically it was between the palates at the roof of my mouth and the ceiling of bone above them.

The cyst has now been removed. I spent six hours in hospital yesterday, two of them under general anaesthetic, and probably about half an hour or so with doctors cutting my mouth open. I now have a somewhat noticeably larger mouth, which makes sense as they said from the x-rays a while ago that the cyst was probably about the size of a 10p piece in diameter. I also have a whole bunch of stitches in my mouth, which I can best describe as starting midway to the back of my palate, then being "braided" through my palate, then coming through my gums above my teeth and being tied off in front of my teeth. Weird.

I came home about two 'o' clock yesterday and have been pretty much just resting since then. I'm off work until Thursday, so that's OK. I can't eat anything too hot or too cold, or even anything too solid at the moment. Alison has made a big pot of chicken noodle soup and we've got plenty of Weeatbix and the like in as well, so I should get by. I've been feeling pretty tired, which is probably the anaesthetic wearing off, and may also be due to the antibiotics and strong painkillers I've got to take. Still, it's not nearly as bad as when I had my wisdom teeth out, so that's a mercy.

Right. Lunch awaits, so I shall be off. Just letting you all know it went OK. Bye for now.

Well, I was going to write about Beth's birthday, but the draft of that entry is on my laptop at work, so it'll have to wait till Thursday when I'm next in the office. Still, this entry is tangentially birthday related, so that'll have to do for now.

Beth was given some Duplo Lego for her birthday, so I've been playing with that with her. Well, I say playing... what happens is that I build things and she demolishes them, usually before i'm even done building them. Still, it's good fun, and I'm sure she'll get the hang of the building side of things in due course.

It has, as it goes, reminded me how much I used to enjoy my Lego. So, last weekend when I was at my parents, I headed up into their loft to fetch down some of my old Technic Lego. I have spent the past few evenings, with Alison's help, building this beauty:

Serendipity is even better than I thought... I looked back through some old entries and found it had managed to pull in my photos from the old Wordpress directories. Pretty soon I'll be able to strip out everything but the Wordpress media directories and the old RSS scripts (although even they are now directed to the new Serendipity ones) and just leave the skeleton directory structure for the purposes of calling those old files. I've also got a boatload of plugins installed which - when I get the hang of them - will add at least 10% awesome and about 13% cool to this blog, so that's nice too.

Just the colour scheme/theme to think about.

I'll blog tomorrow and finally tell you about Beth's birthday... nearly a month late. Rubbish.

Well, that was certainly easier than expected. Getting all my old Wordpress stuff into Serendipity turned out to be a doddle as the functionality is built right in. Excellent. So, the updated to-do list now runs:

1) Theme/style/layout
2) Plugins
3) Import photos etc from old Wordpress directories.

If you can see this, then I've managed to hack together a new blog.

Well, I say hack... All I've done is rip the old Wordpress installation out by the roots and put it in a corner to keep it out of trouble, and put a new installation of Serendipity in its place.

Hopefully, this will be better than Wordpress.

Things to do:

1) Import all my old stuff from Wordpress
2) Get some theming going on. Note - this means graphic design, at which I suck. Hmm. Do I get my purply theme up again? Or try something different?
3) Get some plugins installed so that Serendipity works the way I want it to.
4) Get a redirect going on my old RSS feed to pick up the RSS feed that Serendipity will be creating.

These tasks run roughly from hard to easy, so expect me to get the RSS thing done in a matter of minutes, and not import my old stuff or change the site layout for weeks to come.

Still, it's good to be back.