Archive for the 'Congratulations!' Category

Fiddler’s elbow

Posted by on March 24th 2009 in Astrostuff, Congratulations!, Health, or lack thereof

Just because I was named after a famous violinist shouldn't mean that my life has to be up and down like the proverbial fiddler's elbow, but just lately that's the way it's been.

I'm now about to start week two of a bitch of a cold, which I caught after a pleasant evening of beers with Nick and Steve. Personally, I blame the guest brew. Other may well be more specific and blame the quantity of the guest brew, but I couldn't possibly comment. Either way, it's having a prolonged effect. I've missed so many things over the last fortnight that I'm considering rebooting the calendar and starting again at Jan 1st, and giving it another shot.

The first "miss" was Titan's transit of Saturn on the 12th, which couldn't be seen directly here but which I was going to watch from an antipodean site via the web. Titan transits like this don't happen very often, as they only occur when Saturn's equatorial plane is roughly in line with the Earth, and it'll be ages before I get another chance. If you're interested, there's a pic and a cool movie of the Feb 24th transit over at http://heritage.stsci.edu/2009/12/index.html, reproduced here (with permission):

After four days of living under a duvet, I managed to crawl out to attend a family get-together on Sunday to celebrate the 80th birthday of my mother-in-law, but the day after that was spent undercover again.

On Tuesday I had no choice, as I had to spend most of the day at the local A&E due to "unusual circumstances". Wednesday was pretty much the same.

Thursday and Friday were more duvet-days, which meant that I missed my chance to don the "Father Jack" costume at what turned out to be an excellent fancy-dress birthday party for a good friend, but there was no way that I was going to miss Saturday's pool-party celebrations for our Annabelle's 10th birthday:

 

 

Mother's Day was spent at home feeling rough, which meant that Chris was a bit short-changed when it came to celebrating her day, and I didn't get over to see my mum either, so I've a lot of grovelling and catching-up to do this week.  😐

Anyway, I'm on the mend now. Even the boiler-fixing man says that I'm on the up, and he should know - he's been here three times during the last few weeks wrestling with (and losing to) our unruly Halstead Quattro, which has decided to play up now that it's a teenager.

Let's hope that tomorrow's better, and that the boiler gets fixed soon thereafter.

Of course, all this means that dates for our annual wildie, originally scheduled for sometime during the next two weeks, have had to be reconsidered.

I'm off to do some more coughing. Bye for now. :sad:

What’s in a name?

Posted by on March 19th 2009 in Congratulations!

News just in from the Manning household is that John and Steph now have a beautiful baby girl named Sierra Jane. Well done, folks!

It's interesting to note that outdoors folk still name their kids after places that they hold dear. Ian and A Pennington have their Skye Farsai, we have our Elanor Skye and Annabelle Shannon, no doubt there are many more proudly-named geo-kids out there. Long may the trend continue, I say.

Luckily, my parents weren't as outdoorsy as most, otherwise I'd probably have been called "Osmington Mills", which sounds quite posh but wouldn't have fit with my working-class background.

Centurion

Posted by on November 5th 2008 in Congratulations!, Just for fun
Tags: ,

Congratulations go to Scott, our most regular provider of (often-irregular) comments.

Not content with consistently topping the leaderboard, last night he upped his tally to the 100 mark, thus earning himself this special mention.

I've not got a picture of him, so I dredged the interweb and came up with this alternative that I thought would be suitable. Just look at this bloke, all dressed up in his outdoors gear, standing there in such splendid isolation...

Image by Luc Viatour, reproduced under the terms and conditions stated here.

25 years ago today…

Posted by on June 29th 2008 in Congratulations!
Tags:

... only two really important things happened...

The Black Adder, Episode 3 of Series 1 (The Archbishop), was first broadcast, and;

A Welshman, Luke Talion, was born:

 

Who would have guessed that he would grow up into this handsome fella?:

 

The whole family would like to wish you a happy 25th birthday, Luke.

Your sisters send their love and can't wait for you to get in touch again.

Wherever you are and whatever you're doing, we'll always be here for you.

You know where we are if you need us.

Love from Mum, Stef, Ella and Anna.

Not quite “Debbie does Dallas”

Posted by on May 22nd 2008 in Congratulations!

More like "Darren and Dawn do Scotland"!

My congratulations go out to this pair of hardy souls who have just completed the 2008 TGO Challenge (if you're a Trial (stet) reader, that's a cross-Scotland walk).

Well done, you two, and everybody else who had a crack at it this year 😎