A convict in Banbury: July 2006

Some new firsts for Lucas

Over the past few weeks Lucas has
1) Rolled over by himself
2) Touched his hands together and begun playing with his fingers
3) Christened the carpet.

The last point was rather amazing. In the split second between taking him off his change mat (located on the bathroom floor) and putting him in the baby bath, he managed a precision poo strike that struck the only open piece of carpet.

Another reason to question the logic of putting carpet in bathrooms.

Anyway, here is a picture that for some ridiculous reason, Blogspot likes to rotate at 90 degrees. Any HTML gurus wasnt to suggest the problem?

Plasmo - the photo is in standard 'landscape' orientation. I resize the photos using a quick batch operation in Photoshop (hooray for well designed software that took me five minutes of reading the manual to create a very effective automated task.)

The source code for this image is (taking away some of the <> tags) is :

a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3697/3359/1600/IMG_0252.jpg" img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3697/3359/320/IMG_0252.jpg" border="0" alt="" /

Somewhere, surely all I have to write is 'rotate:90;' or something similar? So far my HTML skills comprise fiddling with the margins and fixing the image width using width:AAApx;

Thanks in advance HTML gurus :)

More baby photos

Office summer party

Slightly different to your average office party. The theme this year was 'It's Showtime'... ie a big circus.

Animals included racoons, wallabies, camels... and ferrets!

Yes, for some bizarre reason, the English seem to enjoy ferret racing.

Atttack of the killer bees

They have big and furry bumble bees over here in England, and while they may look cute and fuzzy, I swear that they have an evil glint in their eye.

They have taken refuge in the lavender outside our front door, so everytime we step outside we run the gauntlet of death.

Those eyes are watching me... I swear!

My drive to work

These are a few shots along taken along my regular route to work.

This is the A361 Banbury - Chipping Norton Road, heading south, in the middle of South Newington.

Like many Villages in the region, South Newington lies in a valley. When leaving the village, you start to climb through some 4th/5th gear sweepers.

Soon you reach the turn off for the B4220 to Enstone.

Then you descend into another small valley, lined with lush greenery. Just before you get to the turn off for Great Tew, you pass throw a nice series of linked 4th and 3rd gear corners.

The B4022 continues to rise and fall across the rolling hills.

Eventually you reach the junction of the B4030 Bicester-Enstone Road.

Try not to run into any of the trucks on this road, you never know what they might be carrying ;)

Visitors from London

An old university friend of Natasha's, who has been living in London for the past five or so years, came up to Oxfordshire to see the sights and sounds...

...ie rolling green hills and quaint English pubs, with ducks!

BTW - I also added more pictures to the Blenheim Palace post.

Thank god for BBC Radio One

I thought Radio One would be a bit cheesy, but its quite a good radio station, with mix of oldies (ie 2000-onwards) with the latest English releases. It's also my only option in the car, as the cassette player the car came with has eaten the only tape Natasha shipped over over from Australia.. d'oh.

So until I either
a) Take apart the cassette player and rescue the tape
b) Install a cheap CD player

I'm stuck with the radio.

BTW I'm finding it quite difficult to get the layout satisfactory, that is why I'm taking ages to post photos. The standard templates supplied are fairly boring and drab. I need to start learning HTML so I can get everything to my satisfaction.

Anyway, here is another baby picture.

If you know the HTML commands to rotate this image (because stupid Blogspot produces it sideways) drop me a line.

Miscellaneous Baby Pictures

I realise that for some people I no longer exist anymore, except to provide photos and news of our small baby.

Here you go you ungrateful sods. These pictures were taken a few weekends ago during a recent 'heatwave', i.e. any day over 30 degrees (although Natasha maintains that it actually applies to days over 28).

Blenheim Palace

Blenheim Palace is arguably England's grandest palace. You can find out more about it at http://www.blenheimpalace.com/

Luckily for us, Blenheim Palace is a short 20-30 minute drive from Banbury. We took the A361 via Bloxham and South Newington, turned onto the B4022 to Enstone via Great Tew (a very pretty Saxon village) and continued onto the A44 to Woodstock.

Because of the 'heatwave conditions' that day (i.e. over 30 degrees) there were few people out and about, so we were able to escape all of the queues and have ourselves a delightful family afternoon.

British Grand Prix

One of the perks of the job was that I got to attend the Friday practice session of the British Grand Prix at Silverstone on the 9th of June. I was lucky enough to get grandstand seats as well as a special car pass, which means that I didn't have to queue up for miles to get into the main car park via the A43 (Silverstone is notorious for its access problems).

Anyway, here are a few pics. This is from our Granstand at Beckett's.