Those twinges! :) IT'S A GIRL! Emilia Louise Freeman, born 5th September 2000, 6lbs 7ozs.

I'm too busy to blog right now and for a week or two all I'll doing is stuff like - Baby cried last night, was fed. Baby cried in the morning, needed a cuddle. Baby did the sweetest little thing. Baby hiccupped.

I'll do a baby birth diary and record all the important stuff to be put here later, but don't expect an update for a week or two

Ginas had a few twinges of a contraction style (practice ones) but we suddenly panicked and realised how soon the baby might be coming. Today is the first time I've actually been nervous about it all.

Been rather busy lately, so haven't had much time to update the log. Will run down some of the things I've been doing.

1. Reading Festival

Went on Saturday only with Mark and Maggie. Gina, being preggers didn't feel it was apropriate for her to go. I had my mobile with me just in case something happened. Rained for most of the day, so we spent most of the time in the Evening Session tent. JJ72 were quite good but I have a feeling there are a One Song Band. "And you Will know Us By the Trail of Dead" had the best name of the festival, but were quite shite in musical terms. Later on, we saw The Autuers, sorry Black Box Recorder. BBR sound exactly like the Autuers did and are therefore very good indeed. Only difference is the female singer, instead of a female double bass player. Later on, we stepped outside (it had stopped raining) and saw Elastica and Gomez, who were okayly good in an average sort of way :) After some expensive shit food we saw the wonderfully eclectic and weird Beck before the main event, Pulp came on. We managed to get very close to the stage (using years of Festival going experience). Pulp have that certain something that makes them special. Something Gomez and Elastica will probably never have. And Jarvis talks to his audience. During the set, I phoned Gina and she heard "Somethings Changed" which was our first dance song. Aaaah :)

2. Afternoon with the neighbours.
Our next door neighbours invited us round for lunch and drinks, which was very nice. We met our new next-door-but-one people, who have an 18 month old boy called Oliver. He was very sweet (this is a very worrying statement). Drank far too much in the afternoon sun and got a bit sunburnt.

3. Baby news
No news is good news :)

4. Misc
Decoration and gardening continues apace. Got The Sims off Simon, but its a bit rubbish really. Keith says he is going to help me with Duex Ex. Aren't you Keith? :) No new bed yet.

Nothing much to report on at the moment (except me being pissed off at work). Gina packed her bags last night and I am busy putting together furniture for the nursery. We got a lovely pine chest of drawers and wardrobe. The only things we are missing are a car seat, which I'll hopefully get today, and the cot which we don't need straight away anyway.

So, now we enter the waiting zone, when we have done everything possible, and are waiting on the baby to decide that it wants to enter this world.

It *must* wait until September though (all to do with school years and stuff)

We spent £200 in Tesco's tonight.
And got the cutest nappies I have ever seen.

Does that last sentence scare you? It does me. :)

The gardeners survived and actually finished their job. We found a shed and a greenhouse at the bottom of the garden. Now the weeds and nettles have gone, the garden is twice as big. So, twice as much for me to do. Was this a good idea?

I except to be looking at lots of gardening web sites to go with the baby ones.

My wife has discovered the joys of on-line shopping. So far, Boots and Tesco have been the lucky recipients of my money :(

We have got in David Bellamy to sort out our jungle^H^H^H^H^H^H garden. Actually, a couple of blokes have come and done it today and apparently it looks nice.

On the down side, they found a wasps nest in amonst the nettles and one of the guys got stung - a lot. We should put a warning up after this, and the previous incident with the cable guy and the broken arm.

Last night was our final NCT class and the previous NCT group that Cathy lead, returned to tell some real horror stories about their children's births. 5 out of 8 had a Caesarean !

Everyone in the group exchanged email addresses so hopefully we will all keep in touch and find out what happens to everyone.

Brief review of a Busy weekend

Friday - worked from home, err put the kitchen back together and varnished the bathroom floor. Felt rather ill from the previous evening.

Saturday - went to Penny and John's wedding in Radley. Nice, very hot. Met some old friends from Uni, Alison and Lynn. Lynn and Andy brought there 11 week old baby which was very cute and nice and stuff. Had lots of food and drink.

Sunday - went to parents for my Mum's birthday. Had lots of food and drink.

Monday - our wedding anniversary. Went back to Cantley House and had a meal. They gave us a bottle of champagne and were very nice about it all. Had lots of food and drink.

Today - rather fat and hungover. too tired to blog nicely.

What a day. I installed IE 5.5 the other day on my laptop and noticed an occasional hang. Well, today the hang got less occasional and more regular; as in every time I opened IE. After several tries to remove 5.5 from my machine and go back to 5.1 (or what ever the last one was) I had to give up and spent the rest of the day re-installing NT. Then, I couldn't get the sound card to work, so had to start again. 4:30, got everything working. Now, I'm rather behind with my work. :(

A quiet weekend. Friends Lee and Tanya came over Saturday and we had a barbeque whilst dancing in and out of the thunder and lightning. Sunday was devoted to moving everything out of the kitchen so that we could have the new floor done. Monday, I travelled to a customer in Northampton and had a "great night in" with takeaway because we couldn't get to the oven to cook anything. The floor had been screed(sp?) and was still wet. The cats were not amused.

We had a guest in House Freeman last night. When Gina was in Japan, she stayed a night in a home stay. The host was a teacher called Satomi. Recently she emailed us saying she will be in England for a few weeks and we invited her to stay with us so we could return the complement.

Satomi must be one of the most polite people I have met. Everything we did for her received a thank you in reply and she offered to help in any way she could. It was a shame that we only got one evening with her, as there wasn’t too much time to talk with her about her thoughts on England and her other travels. I also wish I could have asked her more about Japan.

Our garden, especially the apple trees enthralled her. In Japan there simply isn’t the room for such expensive grassland. Our garden is quite large (100 feet), but there are plenty that are bigger. In a poignant moment, Concorde glided in and out the clouds over our heads (as it does every day around 7pm). Satomi hadn’t seen the plane before, and it just took our thoughts to France and the sad event on Tuesday.

Gina cooked a lovely meal for us and we showed Satomi our wedding video and photos. Well, Gina did, I hid around the corner in embarrassment. :) She was heading off to Wimbledon today as she is a big tennis fan.

I, meanwhile, have The Burning to look forward to.

All the links are now underlined so they can be seen in Netscape. Although now I've noticed the boxes look at little odd. Hey ho.

You may notice the links are working if you use Internet Explorer. If you are using Netscape, then the links work but you will not know what are links and what are not unless you pass your mouse over them. It turns out that a:hover is a valid CSS style thingy (note the technical terms there). This is obviously not such a good state of affairs and I’ll try to address this over the course of the weekend.

We had a death in the family yesterday. Our pet rat, Angelica, died after a short illness. About a month ago, she had a lump removed from her leg, and at the time we preyed it wasn’t cancerous. Unfortunately, it appears to have been cancer after all. She hadn’t really recovered from the operation on her leg, and had lost her previous zest for life. On Monday, she lost the movement of her back legs and we took her to the vets Tuesday morning. We decided that it was cruel to let her continue to suffer. We bought a new plant and buried her underneath it in our back garden.

Forget everything you have ever heard about rats, Angelica was the nicest, loveliest creature I’ve ever known. I’m a little cut up just writing this actually.

In a weekend of non-excitement I partially tiled the bathroom floor. Which wasn't nice.

Oops, missed a day or two with the blog (not that anyone would notice) as I’ve been rather busy at work.

Wednesday night was GURPS night and we had a really good session. You can find out about our campaign when I’ve created the website for it (mental note: add this to my to do list). This week we introduced a new member, Alistair, who is an old friend of mine from Oracle. He got stuck right in and counteracted our natural cautious attitudes and kicked some ass as I might think they say in America if I believed in the clichéd stereotype.

Yesterday, Gina went to London to see the Japanese ambassador. This is part of her role with Pacific Venture. Gina’s grandfather was a prisoner of war in Japan (well, Singapore actually). Pacific Venture is an organisation that sends grandchildren of the prisoners of war over to Japan to help bring the two cultures closer together.

Gina met the ambassador (and held her tongue on the Ferrero Roshe front). Upon finding that she came from Reading, he inquired whether the students in the Japanese college in Reading were behaving themselves. She said that in the main they were but that she had seen them skateboarding where they shouldn’t. She avoiding said she had seen a number of them being arrested outside the college (for reasons unknown) as this might have caused a diplomatic incident and the withdrawal of Tony Blair from the G8 summit and the collapse of world politics that might end in World War III.

Gina, myself and the bump were at NCT (National Childbirth Trust) classes last night. This week the concentration was on the effect that a child would have on your life. Each couple were handed a pair of cards that had opposing views of a "situation". Our was where to go at Christmas, my grandparents or hers. I had to point out that this was a problem we have without having a child and the best bet is to hide under the sofa until New Year.

We do now have a added incentive of presents for the baby so at a push we could do both in one day (Reading -> Aylesbury -> East Grinstead -> Reading; no problem) and grapping the gifts and running.

We also had a practical test. Mine was fitting a car seat into the car. I failed in the usual manner, i.e. I blamed my tools. The seat was a £20 job from Argos. How can I be expected to work with such dross :). Seriously, not all car seats fit all cars and it is best to check this before you buy.

It is amazing to think that within Gina there is a brand new person waiting to get out. The nature of reproduction is quite remarkable. Last night, I held my ear to Gina’s bump and could hear a tiny heartbeat. Gina was quite disappointed that she couldn’t do the same, although she thought that she could feel something. A week ago, whilst we were swimming, the baby moved position within the womb, getting itself into position. We were quite worried that it was facing the wrong way; not in breach position, but facing in the same direction as Gina. In the water, it moved so that its spine was facing outwards. What was astonishing was that you could see the spine through Gina’s costume and skin, like a shark fin. Shortly afterwards, it settled down into its new position and resumed kicking. Sometimes when I hold my hand in the right place, I can feel a foot. Sometimes, a hand pokes out and a feel like I’m already holding hands with my baby.

The spacing of the pages is sorted but the links refuse to cooperate.
Must be something to do with the style sheet. It's not Blogger as it fails without the blogger template present.

I've just uploaded the design I did over the weekend, and there are a few problems.
Firstly, the links do not display correctly (the should have underline and overline when you hover over them). Secondly, Blogger doesn't seem to like the tabular structure I have, and there are no gaps where there should be gaps, and large gaps where there shouldn't be. Aaarrggh.

Went to see Chicken Run last night. Well worth it IMHO. In some respects better than the Wallace and Gromitt films, it is an intelligently humourous animation. Whilst it contains more than enough fast paced action and brilliant slap stick to keep children and adults happy, there are plenty of knowing “Simpson-style” dialogues. Under pinning the whole story is an evocative sub-text that works on many levels from animal cruelty to the implications of lying.

We visited the hospital this morning to see the rooms where our child will be born. I'd been told some grim stories about the place; one of our friends used to work their, Tonya Curtis. In actual fact, it was much better than we had imagined, and left us rather reassured. We can book a private room for £75 (with onsuite), but the main ward didn't seem too bad. Of course, there was no one in there at the time (don't know why) and we were told it can get quite busy.

We were also shown a day old baby (6 pounds something and born at 10.01pm last night; whilst I was watching Inspector Morse; imagine) which was extremely cute. Christ, what am I turning into?

btw, Tonya (and her husband Jonathan) are touring the world. We receive emails from the regularly, their last port of call was Alaska. My colour? Green.

Today I was actually quite productive. I mowed the lawn, fixed some electrics, went shopping and did lots of other boring stuff. Then, I went browsing. Much more fun.

Web wise, two things I must do, is design a simple site layout and choose a web hosting service. One thing I'd like is to be able to use java (jsp's preferably) and a database. Trouble is these don't come cheap. Cheapest I've found is $15, but that didn't allow SMTP traffic. Any tips?

I have set up Site Meter on this site, so I'll see if anyone ever visits the page. Or am I alone in the netverse?

One of our cats was sick all over the carpet last night, and I mean all over. It is amazing how much stuff can come out of one small animal. We don't know how the culprit was, but our investigations will be full and conprehensive. :) It was a night for cat weirdness actually, because Giggsy[1] caught her very first mouse last night. She is seven years old and has never even looked at a mouse in the past. There she was, at 4 in the morning, playing with it like she was Ryan Giggs on acid, going past a static Arsenal defence about 50 times.

[1] Yes, I know.

I got precisely nothing done last night, except for watching some TV that I had recorded the previous night. Apart from that I sorted through a huge pile of "stuff" on my desk, and sorted them into a number of different piles. Not very useful.
I should create a web site with a thousand and one things to do instead of doing something useful.
Only I'd never get round to doing it, would I?

Right, back to work. Or rather, search for a better place to host this site, as, according to Aquarion, Yahoo own my very words. Can't imagine what they want to do with them.

The page looks like it can be read, which is good enough for now, I suppose. I've got Dreamweaver at home, so will fiddle with that when I have time.

Time? Interesting subject, time. I don't have a lot of time. Time passes very quickly. I don't get a lot done.
I seem to have a lot of things to do, though :) Currently, I am :-

- Decorating the nursery for the baby (due 9th Sept; I'll keep you posted on this)
- Reading The Redemption of Althalus by David Eddings. (this is taking longer that I thought because it is rather disappointing)
- Writing a couple of fanfics for alt.fan.eddings.creative to keep Danae and Gilmae off my back :)
- Writing a Doctor Who novella for the Seasons of Mist project.
- Learning tons of stuff at work.
- Getting fit (the lack of progress on this is astounding)
- Preparing to have a baby (not me but my wif)
- Cleaning my shoes (outstanding since a bought them a year ago)
- Writing various computer programs to help organise my life. (can't even do this)
- Playing various computer games I've bought (I'm better at doing this as you might think)
- Contributing to a number of newsgroups and mailing lists (not too bad at this either)
- Socialising (excellent on this one. keep up the good work here!)

not much then. If you have too much to do, tell me at pfreeman@bigfoot.com

Oh yes, go to Aquarionics now. This was the guy who pointed me to Blogger in the first place.

I'm fiddling with the template to see what happens. Might get something that only looks really bad instead of extremely bad.

Hello,
This is my first blog. Please let me explain what I'm doing on Geocities. My first website, Worldsphere, was very much in development when I first found Blogger. I wanted to use blogger but found that it didn't like the ftp transfer and I couldn't use it. I registered a new site Dellah.com but can't use a web hosting service until NTL get their arses in gear and provide the free ISP service they said they would in April. I am using geocites until NTL sort their lives out.