Baby's first hat
Yesterday I met up with two of my good friends from university, John and Claire. They had been down in Brighton for the wedding of John's sister so it seemed an ideal oppurtunity to catch up with. Not to mention it being a great chance to scare Liz with some more of my friends (I've so far escaped meeting too many of hers!).
They even brought the baby their first ever hat and socks:
Thank you. :-)
Dance Entertainer!
I had my first commercial (well, paid and for the entertainment of others) dancing experience yesterday. Once we got started and my nerves subsided (actually quite quickly) it was fantastic fun and a great afternoon.
Thanks to some encouragement from a good friend (Rachel) I started salsa dancing at a club in Redhill (Mondays, 8pm - 10pm in O'Neils) in January 2005. Since then I've peaked at three salsa classes in a week! I am now just back to the Monday night classes for salsa, but have added the occasional jive (modern/ceroc/leroc and 1940s) class as well.
Intermittently, since around November 2005 I have been doing 1940s jive (apparently known by lots of names including Jitterbug and East Coast Swing).
The event on Saturday was a staff party day for a large company. Over 3,000 guests were expected to be attending. The entire event had a 1950s theme, complete with custom built 50s diner, old cars driving around and of course a group of 50s jivers! We were only one of many, many entertainments taking place but for the afternoon we had our own little stage (actually a very nice wooden floor with a good spring to it), DJ and a reasonable audience!
The entire event was in Osterley Park and hence outdoors. The weather wasn't perfect for over three hours of dancing, being rather warm and sunny, but thankfully the weather didn't include any rain at least.
There were 16 of us who were dancing and during our 3.5 hour period we put on several demo dances and lessons of both jive and strolls. A surprisingly large number of people actually joined in - easily more than 30 at times.
It was really a very pleasant day. I hope the audience enjoyed it as much! :-)
This is Liz 1
A few friends and family (who I clearly don't talk to often enough) have recently asked me who Liz is. Not that a photo can really introduce someone, but as a start here is a snap of Liz and myself taken in April.
We're expecting! 2
I'm delighted (well, actually alternating between incredibly excited and amazingly scared) to announce that Liz and I are expecting our first baby, around 19th January 2007!
We went to our 12 week scan yesterday morning...
Our baby is all there, a good size (almost unbelievably small at about 6.7cm long) and apparently likes wriggling a lot. :-)
We've kept this fairly quiet for the last couple of months, until we reached this first milestone of reassurance. Now we're here, we're slowly telling the world!
Shuttle wing video
An amazing video from the wing of the shuttle, from launch to space to sea.
Buddy Brilliant
Having seen the excellent Buddy musical at the Brighton Theatre Royal on Saturday evening, I would heartily recomend it to anyone near any of the performances on the rest of the tour.
"The Big Bopper" from the show also has a blog:
What he's said about Brighton:
http://bigbopper.iblog.com/post/4590/32132 http://bigbopper.iblog.com/post/4590/32764
The theatre had a surprising number of spare seats, even a few in the stalls. There were plenty of people standing and dancing by the end though, filling all the ailses I could see.
Certainly fantastic entertainment.
Trapped in Jars
Having had my own "interesting" experiences with both Java dependency tracking/hunting, jar explosions and XML (Swing in my case) debugging nightmares, I found this article a good read...