mjg59 | Reading

I have the following baby-related things for sale, all currently located at my home in Cambridge. I'm happy to deliver within a few miles of home, and willing to come to some arrangement for family/friends living further afield. If I don't sell things in the next week or so I shall brave eBay (and its weird policies on second-hand cloth nappies).

Changing table: Kub Eco Changer, White. Bought last June from John Lewis for £75 and still in very good condition. We are replacing it with a cot-top changer for space reasons. JL don't seem to do it any more, but it is available at other suppliers.
Asking £50.

Double breast-pump: Avent Isis iQ Duo pump: double pump, comes with carry/storage bag, 2 chill bags & 6 freezer packs. Costs about £260 new, I bought it second-hand on ebay for about £150. Since then it's been used daily for about 8 months with C, and ~~as little as I could get away with~~ two or three times a week for about 6 months with N. Everything still works well, but N is eating enough solids that I don't need to pump milk for him to cover my half-day absences, and so I won't.
Asking £100

Single manual breast-pump: Avent Isis, like this one, but I don't have the model number to be sure they are the same. Bought new for C, used only occasionally. Probably cost about £20 new.
Asking £10

Bottle/pump steriliser: Avent Express electric steam steriliser. Does not seem to be available any more - big enough to sterilise all pump parts and 2-3 bottles, or just 6-7 bottles. Takes about 10 minutes to sterilise. Probably cost about £50 new.
Asking £20.

Cloth nappies: Sized approx 0-6 months, they've had about 12 months total use, seem to be in good condition still.
18 Tots Bots Fluffle nappies, size 1, cost £8.75 new, no longer on sale. They are white, fluffy, and dry quickly when hung up.
Asking £75 for all 18.
4 Motherease Airflow wraps, size Medium, cost £8 each new.
Asking £15 for all four.

rmc28

Now that Charles can reliably read and write, we decided it was time to get him an email account, and as part of this project, Tony sorted the family out with new email hosting and a domain name cb4.eu (this has the advantage being less confusing to people than dotat.at when spoken).

So I am now slowly rationalising my various email addresses accumulated over the years and moving everything over to using rmcf@cb4.eu. My personal mail has been slightly randomly distributed between my work-provided email and Gmail, and while I still have access to both of those for the foreseeable, the family-mail project is as good a trigger as any to get independent of both and aim for a bit of consistency.

Speaking of Google, now that I'm phasing out my use of Gmail, and I'm using Feedly for RSS-reading, my remaining big dependence on them is for calendaring. Does anyone have recommendations for a replacement?

rmc28

I got a new watch today. I haven't had a working watch since December: I had one dead-battery rotary, and one working-but-back-falling off digital. I finally got enough grip to remember to take them both with me on an errand into town on Wednesday, and confirmed that it would basically cost as much to repair either of them as it would to get a new one.

Since December, I have found it really frustrating not being able to flick a quick glance at my wrist to tell the time, but having to drag out my phone from a pocket or bag. The ridiculous relief when I got my new! shiny! watch! on my wrist today was overwhelming - five months' pent-up frustration I think.

Anyway, I vented a bit of my excitement on twitter, and my friend asked for a "bad internet photo of it on your wrist" so I obliged, and decided it would do as a new icon too.

Today has also featured a family expedition into town:

Watching The Gruffalo's Child at Cambridge Arts Theatre.
Buying an Angry Birds hat on impulse for Charles
Lunch at Pizza Express for the four of us. We got two children's meals and Nico ate between a quarter and a third of his and then requested a feed.
Shopping for new shoes and new non-school clothes for Charles.
Shopping for shallow plates for Nicholas to eat from, as he'd done well with the shallow bowl in the restaurant.

Nico helpfully slept through all of the shopping in my sling, and woke up only when I sat down at home again. Since then he has been toddling industriously around the house, amicably torturing the cat (who is too old or too tolerant to run away) and repeatedly stealing my phone and/or the tv remote control. He's definitely a toddler now, not a baby.

Some phone-photos from today behind the cut:

( Grainy cuteness! )

reddragdiva

Still not really Internetted, but we have severe delays obtaining our phone line (the account in the previous tenant's name is apparently still active, so Zen can't just grab it; agent is on the case) so arkady has paid a swingeing sum for a month's BT wifi. Which injects fucking ads in your HTTP stream. (Here's to HTTPS Everywhere.) I'll see if this works for working from home, which would make half-term somewhat less completely insane.

Moving stuff to the new house is a quart in a pint pot problem. We still have a Mac G4 with 22" Apple Cinema Display (ADC, so useless without this or similar Mac) to give away, or it goes to THE DUMP! Three Ikea GORM wooden shelves at old house for first taker. The older teen has two boxes and two bags of stuff to move, still waiting on the address it's to go to. I suspect a lot of stuff we did move is actually going to get chucked.

Freda likes the new house even if it's a lot smaller. It's also stupendously well-located for all sorts of things Freda does (school, Rainbows, church, friends). She also has a plasma lamp for a bedside lamp and nightlight.

My back hates me so much. Lots of codeine and a bottle of wine helps. Best thing for cleaning is some stuff my (old) landlord actually recommended, from the 99p shop: a mould removing bleach that contains caustic soda. Definitely the most noxious household spray I've ever met.

rmc28

Or, how pregnancy made me so much more pro-choice

( Read more... )

reddragdiva

Can anyone get to E17 over the next few days (Friday, Saturday, Sunday) and help us with cleaning our old house? LOVE YOU LONG TIME.

We got the keys OK. Survived the day of box lugging with only a slightly screaming in agony back and one waffer-thin car crash. Here's to hire companies who rush to take care of all the details for you; I should only have to pay the £250 excess. Happy customer of Enterprise here, highly recommending them. (Pro tip: Always book online — if they don't have the size you booked in stock, you get a free upgrade.)

Internet will be patchy indeed. arkady and I have phones. Monday I'm back in the office. The phone line account for the previous tenant is apparently still active, so Zen can't just grab it; waiting for the real estate to ask the landlord to ask BT about that, tralala.

Also can't work out how to switch on the hot water. There's an immersion heater (= horribly expensive storage heater powered by electricity rather than gas), but there's also a gas boiler which has no power.

reddragdiva

And the XFree86 Memorial Award for Community Management goes to ... GNOME, attempting to shake off those last straggling users, who are just a pack of trolls after all.

Moving house is made of cock and bureaucracy. Without the cock. One week till we have to be out of here and gone, and I hope to finally collect the damn keys tomorrow, at which point I hire a van and move as much as possible, getting the professionals in to handle the piano and whatever else is left. At which point we polish this place to perfection.

Apart from the delays, arkady has largely been ill the last couple of weeks, with a cold and a secondary infection. Recovering a bit now.

The older teen's room is finally being cleansed. Freda has adopted her sister's old netbook with a 19" monitor hooked to it and is delighting in having something faster to play her Flash games on than the ancient Mac G4, which is being adopted by hooverpig. The lounge is a sea of boxes.

I am exhausted. I want a magical teleport to this time next week when everything will be JUST FINE AND ALL DONE.

rmc28

Last Thursday we had local elections, and the weather was so nice, I managed to get sunburned after spending most of the day outside delivering, telling & knocking up. Such a contrast to last year, where I shivered in multiple layers and had changed clothes three times by lunchtime.

I took Charles with me to vote on the way to school, and we met one of his friends and her mother doing the same thing. I cast a proxy vote for the first time, which meant they sent me round once with my friend's ballot paper, and once with my own.

I paced myself fairly well with the day's campaigning but by the time I picked up the children from nursery and kidsclub and got them home, I was worn out and unable to face speaking to strangers, even by phone knock-up. So I got the children fed with Jonny's help, and put them to bed, and dozed with them for a bit before my father rang to catch up and make arrangements for the weekend.

(For those that are interested in the election results, Phil Rodgers again has good coverage on his blog, with a quick results-in-Cambridge post and a much more detailed follow-up.)

I had a quiet day at home on Friday, before we travelled to the west country to see my father for the long weekend. We used the Travelodge in Swindon as a base, and took the bus to Cirencester on Saturday, and to Avebury on Sunday. The weather was lovely on both days, and I realised at the end of our time at Avebury that I had sunburned again and more thoroughly. Everyone else was fine: the baby had sunscreen & the others are either more sunproof or better at staying covered and in the shade.

The bonus extra of our little trip was a couple of hours in the pub with my dad's wife and her children on Sunday evening. It has literally been years since we got to spend time together with them all and it was a real pleasure to do so.

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Matthew Garrett

About Matthew

Power management, mobile and firmware developer on Linux. Security developer at Nebula. Ex-biologist. @mjg59 on Twitter. Content here should not be interpreted as the opinion of my employer.

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Matthew Garrett

Reading

Friendbay

Change of address

Watching

Moving update.

Pregnancy and consent

The fun is in full progress.

Moving house is made of cock and bureaucracy.

Sunburn

Profile

About Matthew

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