I’d rather be…

How is this for a pic? That sky. That sea.

image

Taken this weekend on the beach at Struisbaai and I’d much rather be having another carefree day there than a stressful one here in the lab right now.

Tonight brings the school Nativity play. Scoop is a donkey and she’s hugely excited. Hopefully, there wont be anyone using their tablet to record the proceedings this time around, so I might actually get to see her.

Portable North Pole is back

Portable North Pole is back. But don’t worry, this has nothing to do with magnets and compasses, so your GPS isn’t going to struggle and the sun is still going to set off Camps Bay for convenient sundowners behind the palm trees photo opportunities from Café Caprice.

Cape Agulhas will still be at the bottom of Africa.

No, Portable North Pole is a very nifty little site where you can quickly and easily make a personalised video for your kids (or, I guess, your adults should you happen to have any) which is purportedly sent from Santa Claus himself. And, having seen the reactions from my kids last year, I can safely say that it works. Really well.

You don’t have to share anything too revealing about your offspring. They’re not looking for telephone numbers, school pick up times or inside leg measurements here. Just a first name, an age, a couple of photos and what country they live in. If you’re still feeling a bit paranoid, do a mock up and see how innocuous it really is.

Best of all, it’s free for the basic video, although there are some pay options for stickers, books, certificates and letters. I’ve not used them, but they start at $2.99, including a charity donation to a children’s hospital.

Here’s the link – go and have some fun and please share this post with any parents, so they can go and have some fun too.

Zoom

My connection woes continue. No WWW. No phone.

Thank goodness for my tablet’s 3G connection, to which I’m currently tethered. (Not literally.)

I’m still feeling horribly out of touch though, so I thought I’d chuck in a quota photo while my plate is incubating in the lab.

Yes, rather overexposed, but I still love the colours and the concentration on my boy’s face.

This was taken at Bugz Family Playpark in Joostenbergvlakte last month on, as the exposure suggests, a very bright and sunny day.
I’d thoroughly recommend the place if you have kids below the age of about 8 or 9. Great fun.

You can see more photos from that day (and indeed that month) here.

Treehouse

It’s been a very busy weekend. I’ve been doing some rudimentary calculations and it seems that I could have watched about 19 hours of live football over the two days. However, by some unfortunate twist(s) of fate, all I managed to see was the last 15 minutes of Liverpool v Newcastle, including another dodgy red card.

So busy, yes, but that’s not to say that it wasn’t fun. Birthday parties, braais, sleepovers and the highlight for us, the unveiling of an early Christmas present for the kids – a treehouse.

Here they are, on it as soon as they were allowed this morning (we like to consider our neighbours, see?).

This picture makes it look like our back garden is a forest, which obviously, it’s not. It’s a garden. But the treehouse is – rightly – a huge hit. It’s close enough to be safe, hidden enough to be “secret” and features a cleverly designed rope web which acts as a comfy seat for relaxing with a book and which has already seen extensive action. Already, it has been a castle, a fire engine and a streetlight fixing crane. Not bad for its first 24 hours.

In addition, because of this recent installation, I have been constantly humming a song featuring the word “treehouse” by these guys and I will be sharing that at some point in the near future.