Mike's musings

A morning at the beach

A day to be a parent. We were up fairly early, and decided to go to Old Felixstowe harbour while it was still warm but not hot. We got there for about 0900, I changed straight into my wetsuit (shorty, rather than the full length one), and we put Jo into her rashy (sp?). The water was lovely and warm, and Jo went all the way in with me, then went and paddled lots. I caught a little crab which was nibbling my toes, and Jo had that on her hand for a bit, which she thought was fun. There were some dogs for her to talk to, including a lovely 18 week old Newfy puppy, who was lovely and reminded me of Suzy.

I spent quite a lot of time just chilling in the sea - though I didn't dar go far out, as the current was desparately strong. It was another lovely day being a dad with the best baby in the world. Afterwards we went shopping and Jo said that she needed a wee, so I took her to the baby changing/disabled loo. There was no potty, so I held her on the loo, and, lo and behold, she did a wee! What a star. In the car back, she even said "big girl" when we talked about it. It really means that if we're out and about, we now have options, even without a potty.

In the afternoon, we got Jo's paddling pool out and put her slide next to it, with the end of it in the pool. Wheeeee - splash! Wheeeee - splash! I went a couple of doors down and invited them round to play. Half an hour later, Jason brought Ruby (23 months) and George (11 months) over to play. George is just chilled-out baby number 1, though Ruby took a bit of time to start playing. Jo's got sharing issues - she's at that stage - but she gets it some of the time. To be honest, she's as likely to shout "no, no!" at Willem, the cat, as at another child, and sometimes she just goes and offers things to other children (rarely the cat).

I wrote a while ago about the fact that my lovely new monitor had problems, in that I was unable to run it at 1600x1200. I worked out that the graphics card was overheating, and I thought that I was going to need to buy a new graphics card. I did a bit of a search on the web, and managed to find a cooler designed for my current card (nVidia FX 5200) for around 25 quid (inc. VAT, P&P, etc.): much better. In the end, it was the fact that it worked fine to start with, and then had problems, that was the give-away. I opened up the case, opened it, and the heatsink was very, very hot. Seemed pretty obvious, then.

apology

Thanks to Tosha for pointing out that what I'd written made no sense. For some reason, two paragraphs got concatenated. Now it hopefully makes more sense than it did. Whoops.