Future Arimaa grand masters at practice, this Sunday morning boardgaming session.
Tag: children
Go back to bed!
Things my children have gotten out of bed to say to me tonight:
- I don’t want to go to school tomorrow
- I can’t find [name of toy]
- I want [name of toy I lent to my sibling] back
- if I’m ill, I don’t have to go to school tomorrow, right?
- I can’t sleep
- I might be ill: I don’t think I should go to school tomorrow
- I want a hot water bottle
- I’m too hot
- I’ve lost my hot water bottle
- I spilt my water1
- I went to the toilet because I thought I was going to throw up but I didn’t but I think I’m too ill to go to school tomorrow
- my book is wet
- I forgot to brush my teeth
- I don’t like these pyjamas
- I still can’t sleep
Footnotes
1 it later turned out to have been spilled on an electrical extension socket! 😱
Note #24906
As the kids grow older… someday our final soft play session – something we used to do all the time, and now do only rarely – will be in the past.
But for now, at least, it remains a chaotic way to tire them out on a morning!
Dan Q found GCAA274 Garrigues #23 – El Vilosell
This checkin to GCAA274 Garrigues #23 - El Vilosell reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
The geokids and I are staying nearby and came out for a walk this morning to discover this under-appreciated cache. What an amazing location and such a great view! We searched many “obvious” locations without luck, then translated some logs to get a clue. We should have checked the attributes! A little danger later and the cache was in hand. SL, TFTC/GPC! FP awarded – thanks so much for bringing us here. Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!
PortAventura
Note #24831
Melià Barcelona Sky
Note #24818
Double Sausages
Note #24813
Bad Names for Servers
Six or seven years ago our eldest child, then a preschooler, drew me a picture of the Internet1. I framed it and I keep it on the landing outside my bedroom – y’know, in case I get lost on the Internet and need a map:

I found myself reminded of this piece of childhood art when she once again helped me with a network map, this weekend.
As I kick off my Automattic sabbatical I’m aiming to spend some of this and next month building a new server architecture for Three Rings. To share my plans, this weekend, I’d been drawing network diagrams showing my fellow volunteers what I was planning to implement. Later, our eldest swooped in and decided to “enhance” the picture with faces and names for each server:

I noted that she named the read-replica database server Demmy2, after our dog.

It’s a cute name for a server, but I don’t think I’m going to follow it. The last thing I want is for her to overhear me complaining about some possible future server problem and misinterpret what I’m saying. “Demmy is a bit slow; can you give her a kick,” could easily cause distress, not to mention “Demmy’s dying; can we spin up a replacement?”
I’ll stick to more-conventional server names for this new cluster, I think.
Note #24701
Note #24625
This morning’s actual breakfast order from the 7-year-old: “A sesame seed bagel with honey, unless there aren’t any sesame seed bagels, in which case a plain bagel with honey on one half and jam on the other half, unless there aren’t any plain bagels, in which case a cinnamon and raisin bagel with JimJams on one half and Biscoff on the other half.”
Some day, this boy will make a great LISP programmer. 😂
Note #24382
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a parent look as awkward as the one whose kid, in a combined toilets/changing room, just pointed at me, saying: “Daddy, look! Look! That man’s using his willy to pee-pee in the standing-up toilet!” 🤣
Science Weekend
This weekend was full of science.
Research

This started on Saturday with a trip to the Harwell Campus, whose first open day in eight years provided a rare opportunity for us to get up close with cutting edge science (plus some very kid-friendly and accessible displays) as well as visit the synchrotron at Diamond Light Source.

The whole thing’s highly-recommended if you’re able to get to one of their open days in the future, give it a look. I was particularly pleased to see how enthused about science it made the kids, and what clever questions they asked.
For example: the 7-year-old spent a long time cracking a variety of ciphers in the computing tent (and even spotted a flaw in one of the challenge questions that the exhibitors then had to hand-correct on all their handouts!); the 10-year-old enjoyed quizzing a researcher who’d been using x-ray crystallography of proteins.
Medicine
And then on Sunday I finally got a long-overdue visit to my nearest spirometry specialist for a suite of experiments to try to work out what exactly is wrong with my lungs, which continue to be a minor medical mystery.

It was… surprisingly knackering. Though perhaps that’s mostly because once I was full of drugs I felt briefly superpowered and went running around the grounds of the wonderfully-named Brill Hill Windmill with the dog until was panting in pretty much the way that I might normally have been, absent an unusually-high dose of medication.

For amusement purposes alone, I’d be more-likely to recommend the first day’s science activities than the second, but I can’t deny that it’s cool to collect a load of data about your own body and how it works in a monitorable, replicable way. And maybe, just maybe, start to get to the bottom of why my breathing’s getting so much worse these last few years!